Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic

Download or read book Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic written by Bou Ali Nadia Bou Ali and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-14 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic reorients the debates around Arabic and global modernity in relation to psychoanalysis, capitalism and universality. The study offers the first psychoanalytic reading of 19th-century works written during the nahda movement by Ahmad Faris Shidyaq (1805-87) and Butrus al-Bustani (1819-83), showing how a curious relationship was forged between language and politics - one driven by both a desire for, and anxiety about, modernity.a In analysing the abstractness of national belonging as belonging to the language, author Nadia Bou Ali considers why modern Arabic grammarians fell in love with language again and explores how language became ideated as a 'mirror of the nation'. Bou Ali argues that the problems of language speak for the subject of the unconscious, divided bya language, desire and enjoyment.a