ABSTRACT
The chapter argues that there is a connection between perceptions of language (in Arabic, lugha) as an object-cause of desire and source of jouissance in the work of certain nahda intellectuals and the genre of the nude that emerges in the region in the early twentieth century. This path begins with the exaltation of feminine subjectivity as the only modern subjectivity—“how I wish to be a Woman,” as Ahmad Faris Shidyaq exclaimed—and leads to its self-impoverishment in the new cultural category of beaux-arts, the Nude. The exaltation of feminine subjectivity that had emerged from a crisis of patriarchy led to a fateful impoverishment of this very subjectivity and reduced the feminine to an abstract potentiality, delimited by a historicity that is confined to the biological limits of the body, or to the individual human organism floating naked in the chroma of skin color. The body becomes affect in nude painting—and not in Shidyaq’s earlier writings-and this becoming cannot be divorced from the core processes of sexuation and identification.
