“They attacked my veiled sister because of her headscarf,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said innumerable times with reference to the so-called Kabataş attack during the Gezi Park protests of 2013. Erdoğan to this day politically mobilizes a disproven incident in which approximately a hundred shirtless male protestors with bandanas over their heads allegedly harassed a woman with a six-month-old baby. Erdoğan’s sensational account of female victimization startlingly echoes Halide Edip Adıvar’s 1926 novella Vurun Kahpeye (Strike the Whore). Set in a small Anatolian village during the War of Turkish Independence, this work recounts the lynching of Aliye, a recently-appointed teacher working undercover for the nationalist struggle. Incensed by the town’s imam, who slanders her as a whore, the villagers publically beat Aliye to death. The parallelism between these two scenes vividly captures the literary lineages of political rhetoric in Turkey today. What we note here, I argue, is the rhetorical deployment of a narrative of victimhood belonging to the aesthetics of melodrama. Identifying melodrama as a transmedial affective mode of address, I assess its political transvaluation by explicating the instrumentality of narratives of victimhood with an emphasis on Erdoğan’s continuous adaptation of sensational imagery and narrative details from Vurun Kahpeye. I propose Vurun Kahpeye – through an examination of the impact of its successive cinematic adaptations in 1949, 1964, and 1973 – as a seminal text in the melodramatic formation of the modern Turkish subject as one organized around affects. As a pedagogical melodrama for a literate bourgeois audience, Vurun Kahpeye prescriptively pits the good, secular moderns against the evil, backward populace through the mutilated female body. If the literary domain is a key agent through which the public affectively experiences the modernizing project of the Republic in its third year, Erdoğan adopts the same narrative structure to evoke sympathy and outrage through its melodramatic identification of victims and perpetrators eighty-seven years later. Inverting the political ideologies of the villain and the hero, Erdoğan now promotes the pious subject who is brutally targeted by the hysterically secularist moderns as a victim of the Republic of Turkey. Erdoğan’s subversive deployment of Vurun Kahpeye allows us to reconsider the temporality of melodrama in relation to politics. Melodramatic aesthetics precedes, reframes, and puts into place a politics to come around victimhood, one at which the traditionally opposed camps of secularism and Islamism intersect.

Whether for his allegedly neutral movies during the Iran-Iraq war or for his Koker trilogy made in the aftermath of an earthquake in Northern Iran, Abbas Kiarostami has been lambasted for being apolitical more than any other major Iranian directors. In my paper, I aim to read his politics outside the framework of the epistemic binaries which tend to cast the political in terms of agency or passivity, whereby any attempts to read a political subject in its absolute alterity falls short insofar as it assumes a far from peculiar mode of operation that reduces the subject’s status to hardly anything more than that of a sheer response to the hegemonic Other. I draw upon Deleuze’s thinking of positive difference to argue for an alternative political in Kiarostami’s cinema which is irreducible to content, and which is not predicated upon the presumption of political agency through resistance. Interpreting political in terms of agency, I posit, is ipso facto representational and is thus not only attached to the Western metaphysics of representation and the concomitant binaries thereof, but is also transcendental. On the contrary, utilizing Deleuze’s notion of haecceity as it pertains to Kiarostami, I take affective temporality as definitive of the political in its positive difference and in its radical alterity. Kiarostami’s political in my account not only remains unreadable and nonrepresentational, but is the very asignificance and the very conception of temporality as Event. In his movies, and in particular in his "Through the Olive Trees," the Moment assumes, in his fundamental re-orientation of temporality, the infinite possibility of a radical renewal, relentlessly welcoming the arrival of the unexpected. I treat the re-launching of radically new temporalities, especially those marked by a constitutive repetition, which characterize his Koker trilogy, as a response to a historically severe depression which has deprived time of its horizontality, leaving its subjects with no recourse to the past nor any projectable future. The political, in that case, will be misconstrued with exclusive regard to the content of artifacts and should rather be conceived as the very Event which resumes the possibility of action by temporalizing itself in a peculiar manner. Outside any representational language and therefore a-signifiying, Kiarostami’s politics takes place not in terms of action or passivity, but through immanent affects and intensities, readable in its radical alterity only as non-representational aesthetics.

In the course of this talk, I argue that Paradise Now undoes normative constructions of sovereignty, politics and ethics in order to present the neocolonial reality of Palestinian life under occupation. As theorists such as Achille Mbembe and Esmail Nashif have shown, Palestine constitutes a political state of exception in which the “generalized instrumentation of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” predominates over the struggle for political autonomy through reason and representation. Mbembe and Nashif leave us with the question of how to rethink political life. Paradise Now recognizes this necropolitical stake and expresses it through the underpinnings of the filmic medium. Film is thought of, often, as an inherently generative and “lively” medium. According to Vivian Sobchack, for instance, film models a triumph over death (or a Hegelian “becoming subject”) by converting a cobbled-together group of still frames into a smooth and inviting future-oriented temporality. Yet film always has the capacity to revert back to the photograph, and it is in this capacity — as Paradise Now recognizes — that film has can affectively index (if not represent) necropolitics. With the help of Frantz Fanon and Roland Barthes, I suggest that the ontology of the photograph carries a construction of the subject, and a configuration of ethics, in Paradise Now that parallel the necropolitics of Zionist occupation. And I hope to prove, moreover, that the purchase of this ontology for the reconstruction of ethics and sociality is other than “progressive” (in the normative liberal-democratic sense). Rather than a film about the struggle for autonomy, reason and ethical reciprocity, Paradise Now is about the binding force of death, and the affective “shock” through which it saturates the field of visual relations in Israel/Palestine. Ultimately, I mean to suggest that Abu-Assad’s film repels the depth-hermeneutics of close reading in order to demand a more radical approach to “the conflict” than is customarily offered.

This paper explores the contentious debates on aesthetics and politics that took place during the turbulent years of the Turkish 1960s. At the same time that Turkey was experiencing unprecedented politicization, massive student strikes, and workers’ revolts, groups of intellectuals and poets on the Left were engaged in a series of internecine polemics over the shape of Turkish poetry. On one side was İkinci Yeni, or the ‘Second New.’ Typically associated with the poets Edip Cansever, Turgut Uyar, Cemal Süreya, İlhan Berk, and Ece Ayhan, İkinci Yeni revolutionized Turkish literature in the 1950s with its ludic, erotic, and formally complex poetry. On the other side of this battle stood young, Left-wing poets such as Ataol Behramoğlu, Sennur Sezer, Metin Demirtaş, Süreyya Berfe, and Hasan Hüseyin. Associated with various socialist organizations and Leftist magazines of the period, these poets espoused a more realistic, unequivocally engagée, poetic idiom. In a series of written campaigns, these militant poets critiqued the “obscure, formalist understanding of art” that marked İkinci Yeni poetry. They accused their counterparts of turning their backs on the language and values of the people, of being incomprehensible, and of serving as tools of US imperialism. In terms reminiscent of György Lukács’ rejoinders to Theodor Adorno during the Expressionism Debate of the 1930s, Turkish Leftist poets declared war on what they saw as reactionary, elitist, and formalist literature. My paper unpacks the stakes of these debates both in the context of the Turkish 1960s and in the longue durée of Turkish nationalist interventions in culture. In advocating for poetic realism and direct political engagement, the ‘60s socialist poets were laying claim to a poetic lineage beginning with the communist poet Nâzım Hikmet in the 1920s and continuing through the socialist-realist poetry of the 1940s. Despite facing severe state repression for their political views, these Leftist poets internalized the state’s aesthetic mandates on clarity, accessibility, and direct representation. İkinci Yeni, on the other hand, represented a veritable return of the repressed: with its unclear/illegible language, its cosmopolitan posture, its attention to erotic and unconscious experience, and its obsession with religious/linguistic/sexual minorities, it represented everything that Turkish nationalist—including many Turkish Leftists—opposed. After analyzing the divergent visions of Leftist politics represented by these two poetic currents, I gesture toward the widespread use of İkinci Yeni poetry during the Gezi Park protests of 2013 as a metric of recent transformations on the Turkish Left.