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Nadia Bou Ali's Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic plumbs the writings of two well-known late Ottoman intellectuals in what is today known as Lebanon: Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (1805-87) and Butrus al-Bustani (1819-83). Prolific writers, philologists, translators and editors, their combined ouevre includes French-to-Arabic and English-to-Arabic dictionaries, as well as encyclopaedias, literary fiction, newspapers and edited journals. They are considered principal actors in the nahda, or renaissance period, of the modern Arab world.
Bou Ali offers a well-considered literary analysis of a transnational, and indeed pre-national, moment of encounter, change, aspiration and bitter critique in the modern Middle East. Her subjects write on the eve of the Ottoman Empire's collapse and the rise of French and British colonialism in the Levant, their works indexing the changing socio-political and economic realities they face. More than simply the anxieties of Ottoman subjects on the verge of a European takeover, however, Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic illuminates the stakes which al-Shidyaq and al-Bustani attach to the written Arabic language under these conditions - and their anxieties about the same.
Language, Bou Ali establishes, was for these scholars the ‘hall of mirrors’ through which past, present and future reflections, refractions and projections of the Levant were funnelled: a medium of self-recognition, self-alienation and plenty of political anxieties. Indeed, as Bou Ali's monograph makes clear, the two authors saw the Arabic language as potent symbol, currency and cultural product in this dynamic landscape. Using the Lacanian mirror stage as an organizing concept, Bou Ali outlines how the challenge of identifying the self and the Other worries the language of the texts which two Arab intellectuals produce in a cosmopolitan region on the cusp of nationalism. While she convincingly argues for understanding their writing - indeed their politics - through this f