Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic

Nadia Bou Ali is Assistant Professor at the Civilization Studies Program at the American University of Beirut. She is co-editor of Lacan contra Foucault, subjectity, sex, and politics (Bloomsbury 2018) and her research interests revolve around modern Arabic intellectual history, critical theory and psychoanalysis.

This is by far the most sophisticated study of the making of the modern Arab subject. Focussing on the region's 19th Century 'awakening', Nadia Bou Ali shows that it was debates about the Arabic language, rather than geography, ethnicity or religion, which came to constitute the privileged site for the conceptualisation as well as problematisation of history, nation and selfhood in the Middle East.

• Introduction: The Mirror Of Language 　Chapter 1: Literature as a Ruthless Excavator of CultureFantasy: The Tain of ModernityThe Subject and Ideology: The Ego’s Hall of MirrorsWho is the Other of Liberalism?The Non-Liberal Freud　Chapter 2: Love of Lugha and LalangueLinguisteriksMedusa: The Image of UmmaEncyclopaedic Prolepsis and the Anxiety of KnowledgeMetathesis and Parapraxis: From Phoneme to Signifier　Chapter 3: Piercing The Bull’s Eye: The Sexual (Non-)RelationVoiding Verbiage: On Pleasure and PainUndercapitalized Parasites and Antediluvian CapitalFeminization Fantasies: Am I a Man or a Woman?Leg over Leg: The End of ProcreationThick-Turbaned Masters and Horned Women　Chapter 4: A Liberal Psycho-TheologyPostlapsarian NationalityDiyaNa and Dayn: True Religion and DebtThe Liberal Fantasy of a Puritan NationSentiments Of Exchange: Reciprocity and Guilt HistoryNecromancy and the Logic of Sacrifice　Conclusion: The Abstractions of Homo Economicus: Now A Stomach, Now an AnusA Trace of Nothing that Was There Before Anxiety and Habit