Nadia Bou Ali

Hegel is infamous for maintaining that what is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational. This is perhaps his most notorious and oft-criticized statement. But what Hegel means by actuality is not what is current or 'present-at-hand', to use Heideggerian terminology. Against the commonsensical, positivistic conception of actuality as contemporaneity, that which is directly experienced or consciously apprehended, Hegel distinguishes what is actual from what is simply present. He defines actuality as "the unity of essence and concrete existence" (Hegel 2010, p. 465). But this unity is constituted by "the continual activity of conceptual determination." 1 Actuality as unity of essence and existence manifests the activity of the absolute: not thought thinking itself, but rather, in Sebastian Rödl's felicitous rendering, thinking thinking thinking (2020). The unity of this activity is nothing

Why did modern Arabic grammarians fall in love with language again? Rather than raise the philological question of origins, the love of language poses a philosophical question: why is there language rather than nothing? Language does not provide a resolute sense of home; rather it is a love-object that allows the rejection of tradition. This love arises at the moment when the Arab world is integrated into the capitalist world market and traditional symbolic functions collapse, calling into question the relation between words and things. The problems of language speak for a subject of the unconscious, divided by language, desire, and enjoyment.

320 unconvinced that bracketing off the lyric as a limited, contested, even self-consuming modern artifact was the best approach to this style of poetry, or to larger questions of genre. The epistemic break the editors insisted upon seemed too sharp, and I am not sure the mutual incompatibility of preand post-Enlightenment definitions of the lyric can be maintained. Jonathan Culler’s essay, “Lyric, History, and Genre” (2009), also included in the Reader, gives us a way out of the impasse. While conceding the limitations of established ideas about genre, Culler argues for continuing to use generic categories as a period-spanning tool—a bridge, rather than a border:

The article discusses Lebanese Marxist philosopher Mahdi Amel’s formulation of the concept of “colonial mode of production” as a differential mode from capitalism that is linked to it through “structural causality.” Amel theorized the colonial mode of production as a singular mode that was seen to be specific to some social formations like Lebanon, Algeria, and Egypt. The article draws out the Althusserian influences in Amel’s theoretical work and explains the contours of his main argument to show how the colonial mode of production was employed as a critique of national liberation movements in the 1970s. In his theoretical works, Amel also provides a substantive critique of structuralism by arguing for a notion of political practice as the determinant of social struggle in the last instance.

The chapter explores the relationship between culturalism and liberalism in modern Arabic. It argues that internal contradictions from within Arabic thought haunt the attempt to define the Arabs as an organicist community. These contradictions within particular identity are expressed in the pervasive anxiety about habits and language. Anxiety emerges when there is a crisis in imaginary identification, it is generated as a remainder of acknowledging the self in a specular image: the mirror of language, the Arab’s moustache. It emerges from a process of misrecognition, when uncanny elements within identity itself become overwhelming. Rather than read the discourse on habits as a desire for Western modernity the chapter argues against a non-dialectical pitting of culture (Arab, non-West) against liberalism (West), which forecloses the real loss that is generated from this modern antinomy: the retreat and scarcity of politics in both liberalism and culturalism.

The dissertation examines the foundations of modern Arab national thought in nineteenth-century works of Butrus al Bustani (1819-1883) and Ahmad Faris al Shidyaq (1804-1887) in which occurred an intersection of language-making practices and a national pedagogic project. It interrogates the centrality of language for Arab identity formation by deconstructing the metaphor "language is the mirror of the nation," an overarching slogan of the nineteenth century, as well as engaging with twentieth-century discussions of the Arab nation and its Nahda. The study seeks to challenge the conventional historiography of Arab thought by proposing a re-theorisation of the Arab Nahda as an Enlightenment-Modernity construct that constitutes the problematic of the Arab nation. The study investigates through literature and literary tropes the makings and interstices of the historical Arab Nation: the topography of its making. It covers a series of primary understudied sources: Bustani's ...

Shidyaq wrote in an era when capitalism had already made its way into the Ottoman Empire. Scribal work was already an inheritance to be refused, the discourse of the master was in recession and the crumbling  symbolic order presented itself at every corner: in the home, where cultural practices of generosity impoverished his family; and most importantly in the traditional schools (kuttab), where learning grammar washarder than ‘scratching your own balls’.Rejecting the impotent work of scribes and grammarians, Shidyaq invoked metaphors of ejaculation to describe his version of linguisteriks. The writing of his pen is described as a ‘cut’ (shiq al-qalam): an incision into the symbolic sphere, from which a sense of pleasure is derived,2 yet one that does not satisfy. Instead of the rampant seraglio, the paradise of pure enjoyment, the liberalising sphere of empire is experienced as a zone of impotence, a place in which pleasure can no longer be derived from coitus, if it ever has been.

The introduction situates the study of the modern love of Arabic in the context of modernity. It particularly engages with Mustapha Safouan’s analysis of the relationship to authority in the modern Arab world. The introduction asks how does ‘voluntary servitude’ translate to a problem of signification in and of language?

The chapter discusses Butrus al-Bustani’s Nafır Surriya (The Clarion of Syria) pamphlets and his translation of DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Throughout these pamphlets, and using Crusoe’s story as an allegory for civil society in a post-war temporality, Bustani formulated a form of liberal nationalism in defence of  the ‘true religion’ (diyana haqiqiya), Protestant in spirit and corresponding with a political economic logic that ties it to the history of capitalism. This wedding of religion and political economy is most strikingly evident in the way the concepts of guilt and debt were used to separate out a universalistic conception of religion from sectarian political identities. The political theology that underlies Bustani’s liberal logic, and which is the focus of the analysis throughout this chapter, raises the question of the nature of the rule of law in relation to violence; in other words, it exposes the fine line between law-making violence and law-preserving violence. Furtherm...

This chapter substantiates the book’s psychoanalytic approach to modern Arabic thought. It argues that the framework of theoretical psychoanalysis is an alternative to post-colonial, post-structuralist, and deconstructionist approaches. The chapter discusses the psychoanalytic topology of the symbolic, imaginary, and Real and its relevance to the study of literary sources. It then explicates how fantasy produces and canalizes desire in the context of symbolic crisis in modernity. The chapter addresses the anxieties around language and culture in modern Arabic sources as anxieties underlined by the modern contestation between reason and the unconscious. Diagnosing this contestation between reason and irrationality is crucial for overcoming the antinomy of culturalism/ liberalism that over-determines the study of modern Arabic sources. Anxieties over habits and culture expose early on the limits of liberal tolerance and force us to consider how the compulsion for freedom in modernity ...

Why did modern Arabic grammarians fall in love with language again? Rather than raise the philological question of origins, the love of language poses a philosophical question: why is there language rather than nothing? Language does not provide a resolute sense of home; rather it is a love-object that allows the rejection of tradition. This love arises at the moment when the Arab world is integrated into the capitalist world market and traditional symbolic functions collapse, calling into question the relation between words and things. The problems of language speak for a subject of the unconscious, divided by language, desire, and enjoyment.

The modern impasse hails for the Arabic reading subject a crisis in symbolic identification: there is a retreat of the discourse of the master, a crisis in the symbolic and the relationship between language and law comes to fore. The nineteenth century in particular is marked by the emergence of a neurotic subject (Bustani) obsessed with questions of origins (original sin, origins of language, origins of society and habit, origins of culture) and a hysteric subject (Shidyaq) that asks: what do you want of me? The problem of origins does not cease to repeat itself in the corpus of texts from the time, it takes the shape of a compulsive reposing of the questions of beginnings and ends: where does taste come from (inclination, disposition, acquired)? What is the origin of sociality? How does habit originate? What is the origin of language? How to write a history of culture? When and how does culture originate? How does one become a woman?

The chapter argues that the work on lugha in the late nineteenth-century was driven by the need to hold laghuw at bay. Lugha in its etymology carries the meaning of laghuw: incoherent speech, babble and error.6 In Bustānī’s nineteenth-century Arabic dictionary, it also has the meaning of annulment, erasure and deletion. To be in a state of laghuw is ‘to drink endlessly without being able to quench thirst’.7  In other words, lugha oscillates between pleasure and beyond pleasure, an identifiable object of desire that it constantly addresses and makes present through speech. This would mean that lalangue would represent an adequate translation of lugha – not language as a medium for communication, but the language of the unconscious, in which there is no simple transformation of words into images (or signifier into signified). The chapter analyzes Shidyaq’s linguisteriks through a Lacanian understanding of signification which departs from both socio-linguistics and structural linguis...

Mahdi Amel (1936–87) was a prominent Arab Marxist thinker and Lebanese Communist Party member. This collection brings for the first time to an English audience lengthy excerpts from six major works by Mahdi Amel. These include the two founding texts on colonialism and underdevelopment in which Amel began to grapple with the question of dependency, his treatise on sectarianism and the state, his critique of Edward Said’s analysis of Marx, his exposure of emerging Islamised bourgeois trends of thought as part of a broader critique of everyday thought, and his reflection on cultural heritage as perceived by Arab bourgeoisie. Amel’s writings serve as a reminder of the need to renew Marxist thought based on the concrete and particular social realities like colonialism.

This article discusses Nahda intellectual Buṭrus al-Bustānī’s public and pedagogic writings. It focuses on the nationalist pamphlets, theNafīr Sūrriya, written in the wake of the first sectarian–civil war, and his translation of Defoe'sRobinson Crusoe, both published in Beirut in 1860. I analyze Bustānī’s politico-theological and economic thought by looking at the nexus of debt, guilt, love, and mercy that he draws out in theNafīr. The article argues that Bustānī’s nation is inaugurated into a “guilt-history” and eternally faced with the task of confronting the mercy of debt and the un-requitable debt of mercy. Nationality in this specific sociohistorical context became a form of artifice that in a postlapsarian age requires religion, labor, and exchange to survive as a social contract. The “civil war” exemplified a return to a state of nature that could only be amended by a return to the laws of nature and the seeking of refuge under the name of one God and one religion,diyāna....

El-Ariss, Tarek. 2013. Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political. New York: Fordham University Press. $20 sc. 248 pp.One might initially perceive Tarek El-Ariss's Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political to be the latest theoretical foray into the current upturn in scholarly interest in literature of the nineteenth-century Arab Renaissance (ahiahdah aharabiyah). After all, its opening chapters, arguably the most original and scholarly contribution of the book, offer a complex reading of al-Shaykh Rifa'a Rafi' al- Tahtawi's Takhlis ahbriz (translated as An Imam in Paris), the firsthand account of the Shaykh's five-year sojourn in Paris starting in 1826, along with an unpacking of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq's masterful and complex AlSaq'ala alSaq (Leg over Leg) and his understudied Kashf aPmukhabba' (Revealing the Elidden), both themselves versions of Arab travel literature in nineteenth-century Europe. Yet Trials of Arab Modernity is not really about ahiahdah itself. It is an epidemiology of modernity in the Arab world. More specifically, it is a symptomatological study that "reframes Arab modernity (hadatha) as a somatic condition, which takes shape through accidents and events (ahdath) emerging in and between Europe and the Arab world, the literary text and political discourse" (3). El-Ariss's methodology, then, is not through periodization but through approaching the Arabic text, mostly novelesque writing between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, as a "site of trial" and staging, where new meaning, anxieties, complicities, and contestations synchronically are performed.Complicating what Walter Benjamin described and what Adonis in the 1980s termed sadmat aPhadathah (the shock of modernity), El-Ariss contributes to the larger au courant intellectual project of "provincializing Europe," by decentering "the West from its central position in the cultural and literary comparative axis" (12-13). In al- Tahtawi's travel account Takhlis aPibriz-which only recently has attracted critical close readings despite its canonical stature-El-Ariss maps a series of vertiginous "events" that exemplify instances of anxiety and which express themselves in somatic effects. The most noteworthy of these is al- Tahtawi's disorientation and virtual fainting in his first experience in a French cafe. AhTahtawi, the author states, stages through literary fantasy a reworking and, I might add, mastery of the threats and disorientations with which the Shaykh is confronted during his journey and sojourn to Europe. With these "moments of rupture and collapse," El-Ariss asserts that new relations of power unfold between Arab and European, East and West, "tradition" and modernity (50).El-Ariss continues to chart how the "body of the Arab traveler is staged as a site" of cultural conflict and epistemological rupture by arguing that "al-Shidyaq stages his physical collapse due to bad food as a symptom" of a civilizational, discursive, and, indeed, political battle between European and Arab cultures (55-56). El- Ariss cleverly casts al-Shidyaq's vomiting of English food not only as a rejection but also as a performative engagement with civilizational discourses that pose English culture as superior to Arab culture. Lest we consider vomiting scones and pork as the only form of al-Shidyaq's cultural resistance, El- Ariss rightfully shows how the now legendary figure, himself a merciless self-critic of Arab society and culture, dismantles the binaries that structure modernity and exposes "the coercive violence of civilization itself." In doing so, he "creates the possibility of trial and experimentation" through literary production as "a dynamic mawrid (source) of Arab modernity" (73).Chapter 4 argues that the somatic affects of modernity and "colonial trauma could only be staged and embodied in texts," poignantly and complexly narrated in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North (90). …

The translation into Arabic of Robinson Crusoe by Butrus al-Bustāni, a leading figure of al-Nahḍa al- c Arabiyya – commonly referred to as the Arab Awakening – opens up the question of incommensurable and indeterminate relations between an original text and its errancy, the fraught desires of communication and the dismal relationship between language and history, as well as between language and nation.

The article discusses Lebanese Marxist philosopher Mahdi Amel's formulation of the concept of "colonial mode of production" as a differential mode from capitalism that is linked to it through "structural causality." Amel theorized the colonial mode of production as a singular mode that was seen to be specific to some social formations like Lebanon, Algeria, and Egypt. The article draws out the Althusserian in

This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel. — Horace Walpole Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age can be viewed as a culmination of the feverish explosion of what has been called " Nahda studies " in the past decades. The compulsion to re-enact the Nahda is declared in fidelity to Albert Hourani's legacy for the intellectual history of the Arabic speaking world. However, the editors, Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss, in their distinctly postcolonial theoretical framing of the book, depart radically from the tradition of intellectual history Hourani worked within. In this regard, the volume can be seen to pay homage to Hourani by bidding him farewell. Although presented as the proceedings of a conference held at Princeton University in Hourani's honor (October 2012), the plan for an intellectual history of Arabic thought proposed by the editors is tethered to their framing in the introduction, which will be the main object of scrutiny here. Due to its significance, this review will focus primarily on the problematics posed by the editors' theoretical framing of the intellectual history of the Nahda, and only secondarily on the individual contributions included in the volume. For it is in the introduction that the editors lay down a framework for rethinking Arabic intellectual history through positing the Nahda as a global concept (37). In their introduction, Weiss and Hanssen lead the reader down a winding path upon which the historical and the logical are intertwined in a thorny thicket of references:

This article discusses Nahda intellectual But. rus al-Bust¯ an¯ ı's public and pedagogic writings. It focuses on the nationalist pamphlets, the Naf¯ ır S¯ urriya, written in the wake of the first sectarian–civil war, and his translation of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, both published in Beirut in 1860. I analyze Bust¯ an¯ ı's politico-theological and economic thought by looking at the nexus of debt, guilt, love, and mercy that he draws out in the Naf¯ ır. The article argues that Bust¯ an¯ ı's nation is inaugurated into a " guilt-history " and eternally faced with the task of confronting the mercy of debt and the un-requitable debt of mercy. Nationality in this specific sociohistorical context became a form of artifice that in a postlapsarian age requires religion, labor, and exchange to survive as a social contract. The " civil war " exemplified a return to a state of nature that could only be amended by a return to the laws of nature and the seeking of refuge under the name of one God and one religion, diy¯ ana. The social contract, articulated in these terms, could only be sealed through the recognition of natural laws as the foundation provided by God himself, while politics remained concealed under the folds of political theology.

During the outbreak of violence and civil war in 1860 Mount Lebanon, Burus al-Bustānī (1819–1883) in a series of political pamphlets entitled Nafīr Sūriyya painted an image of an imaginary nation that was meant to be the cure for this social crisis. He also translated the story of Robinson Crusoe during these times and proposed it as an allegory for the instruction of society. This article analyzes Bustānī's allegorical use of Robinson Crusoe for a war-torn society. It explores the implications of translation as an epistemological stance in the time of modernity. By Iooking at the two sources, Nafir and Crusoe, we come to understand how the logic of 19th-century liberal political economy works to naturalize sectarianism and depoliticize it through the discourses of pluralism and co-existence that are articulated in Bustānī's formulation of ‘love’ as a binding force for the nation. The article explores the formation of a ‘national fantasy’ as a response to crisis in affectual terms. Moreover, it shows how Bustānī's invocation of the trope of human rights, uqūq al-insāniyya, overlaps with a utopian view of justice that is knowingly anachronistic.

While Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault are both enormously influential theorists within the humanities, their work has inspired divergent and often explicitly antagonistic theoretical agendas. What is at stake in each thinker’s work pertains to the core questions and critiques of Enlightenment and Modernity. Both Lacan and Foucault challenge the Kantian compact between reason, autonomy, and freedom, but they do so in very different ways and with very different consequences for our understanding of universalism, law, reason, habits, and the passions. The aim of this conference is to try to clarify the nature of this divergence as well as the stakes of this antagonism. It will do so by focusing on three fundamental topics of disagreement that divide Lacan from Foucault: the nature of the subject; the status of the universal; and the function of politics

The paper discuses Lacan’s later text Lituraterre in relation to Seminar 23 and the formulation of the sinthome. Literature uses up the leftovers of society and becomes a piece of trash by making the name survive forever: Joyce “slips from a letter to a litter, from a lettre to a piece of trash” and his text “reads itself because one can sense the presence of the jouissance of he who wrote it.” Psychoanalysis in its understanding of waste and surplus as jouissance carries the key to save literature from its own endless repetition of symptomatic compensations for the lack of knowledge. Writing reconfigures every time the incommensurability between knowledge and truth. However, this endless cycle of repetition must be replaced by an acknowledgement of ignorance. Ultimately, the sinthome that succeeds in setting a limit is not tragic but exposes the "holed" nature of the symbolic.

The article reviews the recently published volume, Arab Marxism and National Liberation: Selected Writings of Mahdi Amel, edited by Hicham Safieddine, translated by Angela Giordano. The focus of the review is to argue that Amel’s Marxian analysis is reducible neither to the project of National Liberation, nor to theories of uneven development, but has to be considered in relation to the influences of 20th century French epistemology and structuralism. Amel’s work opens up major conceptual problems that are crucial to contemporary Marxism such as: the relation between idealism and materialism, and structuralism and dialectics. Most importantly, Amel did not simply prioritize anti-colonialism over anti-capitalism, rather he aimed to provide a systematic theory for the analysis of colonization from within the mechanisms of capitalist domination.