Bülent Diken

Becoming Abject - Rape as a Weapon of War

Organized rape has been an integral aspect of warfare for a long time even though classics on warfare have predominantly focused on theorizing ‘regular’ warfare, that is, the situations in which one army encounters another in a battle to conquer or defend a territory. Recently, however, much attention has been paid to asymmetric warfare and, accordingly, to phenomena such as guerrilla tactics, terrorism, hostage taking and a range of identity-related aspects of war such as religious fundamentalism, holy war, ethnic cleansing and war rape. In fact, war rape can be taken as a perfect example of an asymmetric strategy. In war rape the soldier attacks a civilian (not a fellow combatant) and a woman (not another male soldier), and does this only indirectly with the aim of holding or taking a territory. The primary target here is to inflict trauma and through this to destroy family ties and group solidarity within the enemy camp. This article understands war rape as a fundamental way of abandoning subjects: rape is the mark of sovereignty stamped directly on the body, that is, it is essentially a bio-political strategy using (or better, abusing) the distinction between the self and the body. Through an analysis of the way rape was carried out by the predominantly paramilitary Serbian forces on Bosnian soil, this article theorizes a two-fold practice of abjection: through war rape an abject is introduced within the woman’s body (sperm or forced pregnancy), transforming her into an abject-self rejected by the family, excluded by the community and quite often also the object of a self-hate, sometimes to the point of suicide. This understanding of war rape is developed in the article through a synthesis of the literature on abandonment (Agamben, Schmitt) and abjection (Bataille, Douglas, Kristeva) and concomitantly it is argued that the penetration of the woman’s body works as a metaphor for the penetration of enemy lines. In addition it is argued that this bio-political strategy, like other forms of sovereignty, operates through the creation of an ‘inclusive exclusion’. The woman and the community in question are inscribed within the enemy realm of power as those excluded.

Zones of Indistinction Security, Terror, and Bare Life

Since the late 1970s, the focus on the “urban question” has shifted from the question of social movements to the question of social control and violence, from political struggle to “postpolitical” risk management. In this context, the city is increasingly transformed into a “network city”: fragmented space held together by technologies of mobility and flexible forms of power. The transition from “disciplinary society” to “societies of control” is decisive. It is increasingly evident that post-politics, based on technologies of control, is not a peaceful social order and brings with it new forms of violence: terror. The article elaborates on the relationship between these three successive forms of power (discipline, control, and terror) by focusing on their common denominator, that is, the creation of spaces of “indistinction.” With Agamben, it is argued that the “camp,” the logic that combines discipline, control, and terror, is becoming the biopolitical paradigm of todays societies.

Sea, sun, sex and the discontents of pleasure

This article focuses on party tourism as a kind of hedonism enjoyed on a massive scale in which the citizen is transformed into a ‘party animal’, a reduction which is experienced as a liberation from the daily routine of the ‘city’ or civilization, and in which the pursuit of unlimited enjoyment creates an exceptional zone where the body as an object of desire and as abject become indistinguishable. In this process, sociality tends to be reformed in the image of a ‘mass’ rather than ‘society’ and transgression/enjoyment paradoxically becomes the law. The article elaborates on this paradoxical notion of ‘forced enjoyment’ by reading Kant and Sade together: Sade (re)formulates Kant’s categorical imperative by universalizing transgression while, on the other hand, Kant illuminates Sade by stressing that the universal maxim and the particular tendencies always conflict.

Enjoy Your Fight! - Fight Club as a Symptom of the Network Society

Focusing on the film Fight Club (Fincher 1999), the article deals with how microfascism persists in the network society in spite of its public denial. Considering microfascism as a line of flight with respect to the social bond, it asks what happens to the project of subversion when power itself goes nomadic and when the idea of transgression is solicited by the new “spirit of capitalism”. It is argued that every social order has an obscene supplement that serves as the positive condition of its possibility, and that increasing reflexivity today is accompanied by (re)emerging nonsymbolic forms of authority. In this context, the article deals with the question of violence and relates this to the problematics of critique, flight and act(ion) in contemporary societies.

Artworks’ Networks Field, System or Mediators?

Focusing on the connections between the artwork and its internal and external network, the article presents four different approaches to the sociology of art developed by Lyotard, Bourdieu, Luhmann, and Hennion and Latour. While Lyotard, from a phiosophical point of view, emphasizes the transcendence of the artwork in relation to its network, for Bourdieu the work of art is part of a network and the ‘social genesis’ grounds the artwork as an artwork. In contrast to Bourdieu, Luhmann conceives of art as an autopoietic system and the artwork as a communicative artefact. Yet, in this, the materiality of the artwork disappears in communication, which is why Hennion and Latour’s approach to the world of art as heterogeneous networks of human and non-human mediators is significant. ‘Thinking with’ these different approaches, the article produces three main results. First, Bourdieu’s and Luhmann’s otherwise very different sociologies significantly parallel each other regarding arts and modernity. Second, the question of the artwork radically unravels the difficult relationship between social theory and material objects. In this respect most contemporary social theories (e.g. Bourdieu’s and Luhmann’s) remain essentially modernist. Third, a focus on artworks demonstrates that the conceptual vocabulary of social theory and the sociology of art must be reconsidered. Furthermore, the article demonstrates the discovery of a ‘lucid illusio’ and specifies a Spinozist moment in Bourdieu’s social theory.

Fire as a metaphor of (im)mobility

Abstract The article deals with fire as a metaphor of radical socio‐political change, focusing on the paradoxical relationship between mobility and immobility. It opens with a topological discussion where fire signifies an instance of ‘absolute immobility’, or, politically speaking, the ‘emergency break’ of the empty, chronological time. There is, however, a pharmakon‐like, aporetic dimension to fire. The article articulates this dimension in the context of nihilism, linking this to the sociology of mobility.

Radical Critique as the Paradox of Post‐Political Society

Abstract This article focuses on the intimate relationship between two concepts, revolution and critique, arguing that the understanding of radical critique within social and aesthetic theory was directly inspired by the concept of revolution – revolution as a libertarian utopia that links critical thought with its epoch. However, despite its previous role as the most important concept of modern social life, politics and critical thought, in today’s post‐political society, in which radical social change is not imaginable, ‘revolution’ seems to have become an obsolete idea. Today the concept of critique seems to be locked into and de‐valued in a post‐political paradigm, which tends to collapse the virtual aspect of politics and critique into the actual. Against this background, the article takes issue with critique as a paradoxical concept, a virtual ‘problem’ that can be actualised in different conceptions or ‘solutions’ but can never be reduced to them, an event that cannot fully actualise itself in a final form.

The ghost of Auschwitz

The article deals with the “riddle” of testimony in the context of Auschwitz. Trying to move beyond the reliance on “experience” on the one hand and the danger of “trivializing” the Holocaust on the other, we focus on the intermediary space in between the two approaches to the Holocaust, and discuss the possibility of an ethics that takes point of departure in Muselmann’s naked body. In this context we read Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz and Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful together to render visible the (im)possibilities of representing the “unspeakable”. The Holocaust is that which resists archivation for it escapes both the appropriating memory and the willed forgetting. But then, how can we keep alive the aporia, the tension between speech and naked life, between the traumatized testimony and the appropriating forgetfulness, and thus “mediate” between the past and the present? How can one represent the impossibility of depicting horror? We argue that the Holocaust cannot be represented in its horror and all its essence for this essence precisely consists in making testimony impossible. The horror of the camp can be depicted only indirectly. “The spirit of Auschwitz” is thus neither incarnated in those who died of gassing nor in those who survived, but in the bond that exists between them. We are all descendants of Auschwitz, and we are all obliged to bear testimony.

The Hurt Locker: Cinematic Addiction, "Critique," and the War on Terror

The article approaches The Hurt Locker, an enthusiastically-received ‘critical’ film, as a symptom of today’s prevailing cultural and political codes. First we dwell on the homologies between the state of exception and the narrative logic of the film, including its reflection on the banalization of exception. This is followed by a parallel between the biopolitical optic of the film and today’s dominant ideology, which Badiou calls ‘democratic materialism’. We emphasize that, despite its critical credentials, The Hurt Locker is totally silent on the most crucial aspect of the war against terror, its de-politicizing effects. It is a depoliticized picture, in which the lack of antagonistic politics and subjectivities in today’s democratic materialist constellation is countered with the inherent excess of the system, the protagonist’s (self-)destructive passion for the Real. Following this discussion at the level of the narrative, we discuss the film in the context of what Deleuze conceptualized as ‘time-images’. Our point here is that with the The Hurt Locker we are within ‘the cinema of the seer’, within a nihilistic portrayal of nihilism from inside, on the basis of highly formalized time-images that do not become politicized. In other words, The Hurt Locker is trapped within what it describes.

The emancipated city:notes on Gezi revolts

The article deals with 2013 revolts in Turkey as an attempt at inventing a link between the particular and the universal. To start with, I briefly discuss the history of Turkish republicanism and the transformation of its relation to secularism, economy and the state. Then I turn to the political dimension of the revolts, focusing on the iconic figures of subjectivity that emerged during the events. In this respect, the practical and theoretical tension between mobility and immobility is emphasized, arguing that it is what constitutes the destabilizing aspect of the revolts in relation to both Islamic neo-liberalism and neo-liberal Islam. This is followed by a discussion of the reactionary views on the revolts combined with a critique of their political-theological leitmotivs. The pivot around which these moves are undertaken and the terms of the discussion are determined is the concept of event.