Christoph Herzog

Enlightenment and the Kemalist Republic: A Predicament

The notion of enlightenment plays a crucial but increasingly contested role in the political intellectual discourse in the Republic of Turkey. The paper aims at reconstructing important elements of this discourse in the example of several representative texts and intends to demonstrate that the concept of enlightenment in Turkey while serving as the key element for modernity as defined in Kemalism continues to signify the Western ‘Other’, thus inherently diminishing the credibility of the argument by creating an orientalised and subaltern version of Turkeys ‘own’ history and tradition. The paper also tentatively investigates a ‘de-orientalising’ proposal of the historical process that may have caused the ‘forgetting’ of autochthonous traditions of enlightenment and the assimilation to the European strand.