Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic

Explores the formation of a modern Arab identity through the conceptions of politics, morality and language in Arab thought
It is the first psychoanalytic reading of Ahmad Faris Shidyaq’s Leg Over Leg (1855), one of the foundational texts of modern Arabic literature
The book investigates the modern love for Arabic through the psychoanalytic understanding of the subject of the unconscious, one that is divided by language, desire, and enjoyment
The book is the first engagement with the failures of interpellation into liberalism in the late nineteenth century Arabic speaking world
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.

In analysing the abstractness of national belonging as belonging to the language, author Nadia