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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
I didn't want to write another book to show how lawless counterterror operations are. They are very lawless. They are racialized. They are parts of also a bigger colonial power structures. But that is for me only the beginning.
Nadia Abu El-Haj:The way in which you look at decolonizing the self and how it's tethered to some revolutionary spirit, even if that vision of emancipation is autonomy, I think is an important thing to keep in mind.
William Mazzarella:On the one hand, without desire, there is no energy for liberation. But then on the other hand, if desire is fundamentally recalcitrant, then how can it in any sense be reliably mobilized for a liberatory project at a collective level?
Serra Hakyemez:Hi all, my name is Serra Hakyemez. I'm an anthropologist teaching at the University of Minnesota in Twin Cities. And I'm the author of the book Kurdish Decolonization in Times of Counterterrorism. Today I'm joined by Nadia Abu Al Hajj and William Mazzarella to discuss my book, and before turning it over to Nadia and William, I want to give a brief description of the book. Deadly Refusals is an ethnography of the decolonization struggle of Kurds in Turkish counterterror courts and high security prisons.
Serra Hakyemez:The Kurdish liberation movement started off in the 70s to fight for an independent communist Kurdistan, in the Kurds' ancestral lands spreading across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The movement shifted its political demand from independence to political autonomy in the 2000s. What will remain of this autonomy project is yet to be seen at the current political conjuncture, where Israeli fascists are reigniting the past futures of independent Kurdistan, Turkish fascists are moving towards the cultural recognition of Kurds, and actually fascists in The U. S. Are offering arms to Kurds in return for fighting against Iran.
Serra Hakyemez:While the Kurds struggle has gained visibility through such cunning games of recognition played by regional colonial and western imperial powers, this book turns to the subterranean dimension of this movement, namely the field of desire. This field, whose rapturation is discussed in the book in relation to Turkish courts and prisons, is especially important because it has the potential to destabilize such recognition politics. If Turkish counterterror operations condemn Kurds to what Fanon calls the zone of non being by charging them with terrorism and locking them up in high security prisons, this book argues that Kurdish decolonization does not stop in these spaces of confinement, but rather descends to the psychic register where decolonization amounts to liberating oneself from the hold of those in power through the subjectification, collective acts of refusal. Now I want to turn it over to Nadia and William. Thank you a lot for joining me today.
Nadia Abu El-Haj:Hi. So, of all, thank you so much for having me. It's an amazing book. It's a brilliant book, and I learned a lot from it. So I guess I'm going to engage it in relation to some concerns or things I've been thinking about a lot from work on Palestine and Israel, which I do, unlike you, much more from the perspective of the colonizer, but the richness of this text lies exactly in your digging into this other domain of reality.
Nadia Abu El-Haj:I guess I want to start with thinking about your turn to the concepts of refusal and the de decolonial. Clearly as concepts, they are increasingly taken up in anthropology and in fields beyond indigenous studies more generally, where those twin concepts have been most, I would say, thoroughly developed. And I actually wanted to get you to sort of articulate and discuss that turn perhaps in relation to this argument that David Scott makes that you cite and quote on page 15, and I thought maybe I should just read it. Okay. So this is a quote from Scott.
Nadia Abu El-Haj:What if the present's demands on the past has altered in part because it is no longer clear what its relation to the future might be? In other words, what if the imagined futures that had given point and direction to the intervention in the present and the rehistoricization of the past suddenly evaporated as a possible horizon of hope and longing, unquote. So as you then write, Scott identifies the postcolonial present with widespread skepticism of the promise of nationalist and socialist revolutions or liberation. The story of anti colonial revolutions is for Scott an exhausted one that cannot answer the social and political problems of the post colonial encounter present. And then you go on and say that on the one hand, the history of PKK's anti colonial war confirms some of Scott's arguments, right?
Nadia Abu El-Haj:That national liberation in the form of independence might not respond to the current problem space of stateless nations, but you say this is neither the story of emancipation nor decolonization is exhausted. So I wanted to get you to talk about that. And I thought that I could frame it a little bit in terms of thinking about Palestine, which is I've often agreed with Scott that these theoretical quapolitical frames emerge in Palestine post Oslo, and I think that that happens because of the failure of the possibility of both a nation state, but also some sense that the possibility of revolution, that is an armed struggle that leads to independence, has passed. But in Palestine, this discussion of refusal and the decolonial tends to be much more in an intellectual space and often in intellectuals trained in the West. As we know, there is revolutionary violence that is ongoing in the Palestinian struggle.
Nadia Abu El-Haj:And I think what's really interesting in your account is that these are forms of politics that you really see emerging on the ground, right? So I guess I wanted you to think about that, but think about it in, but also to articulate it in how you understand the relation between refusal and decolonization on the one hand and prior sort of concepts of the, prior frames of the anti colonial and revolution that were the political frames of earlier times and the ways in which this is both born of, but departs from those earlier frames, which were clearly political movements, right? Not just theories.
Serra Hakyemez:Thank you for this question about the distinction between refusal and revolution, and also speak about it in relation to the present that gives rise to future imaginations. My work draws on certain literature on wolf refusal and the colonial politics, like the works of, for example, I mean, works in Indigenous Studies, especially O'Dore Simpson, has been influential on my thinking, but also the works of the works in black studies on refusal has also been influential. Yet, the refusal, the politics of refusal that I talk about, is quite different from those that are discussed in North America in relation to both indigenous studies and Black studies. And the way I see the Kurdish liberation movement differing from indigenous studies and black studies, and the struggles happening there is that there is no ground on which these acts of refusal are rooted, in the sense that there is no nested sovereignty granted to curs based on which they are performing their acts of refusal. And also, they are not actually, churning into an essentialist reading of their being, such as, I.
Serra Hakyemez:E, the flesh or the body, is the ground to pursue an act of refusal. And if I take this act of refusal within the space in which it emerges, I think it is important to recognize that decolonization happening at the level of the subject, and also at the register of politics and psychic structures of power, that form of decolonization has been happening in tandem with the anti colonial armed revolution. More precisely, I focused on the writings of the imprisoned leader of the Kurdish liberation movement, Abdullah Jalan. And his writings in the 1990s included texts which which asks, how should one live? Another text called The Cursed Love, and all these texts are discussing the subject's relation to those in power, so the psychic attachments of the curse to the Kurdish state to the Turkish state authorities, the unconscious desires to be recognized by the Turk as a legitimate subject.
Serra Hakyemez:And he says that any anticolonial struggle, but more precisely, the Kurdish anticolonial struggle should start, with questioning one's attachment to those in power and one's desire to be recognized by to be recognized by those who denies one's existence. So for him, and I think for matter, for Frans Fanon too, decolonization of subjectivity is not separate from an armed anticolonial movement. And for me, is the psychoanalytical practitioner, and Fanon, the revolutionary, are connected to each other because this movement for liberation is a movement that involves both the decolonization of one's mind and an anti colonial fight for liberation. And when you look at the history of the Kurdish liberation movement, you see that the 1990s was the time when the armed movement was able to mobilize people en masse in the streets of Kurdish cities, and at the same time the 1990s was the time when Kurdish guerrilla fighters and Kurdish political prisoners were engaging in this intense discussion about how they could detach their strong attachments to the colonized. So I don't see these two as separate from each other.
Serra Hakyemez:Actually, they are, in the Kurdish liberation movement, inextricable from each other. And one more thing I want to add is that of course the movement itself has gone through significant transformation. And like the transformation of the political scene in Palestine, the political scene in Kurdistan shows us that in terms of geopolitics, an independent nation state is a dream that keeps haunting Kurds, but it is a dream that to be impossible to achieve given the regional actors that are actually occupying Kurdistan. So, described that in 2005, there was this transformation from demanding and fighting for an independent Kurdistan to actually involving indirect action to create an autonomous region. And we can talk more about whether or not even if an autonomy is a utopia that is not achievable in this current moment, but I want to acknowledge that, yes, the fight for an independent socialist Kurdistan was abandoned in 2005 and replaced by this new dream of autonomy.
Nadia Abu El-Haj:I think that's really important because I think often it's, you know, David Scott's problem space as he would call it is very specific. And I've often thought if you think from The Middle East, isn't a complete abandonment of the possibility of revolution, right? Whether the Arab Spring, the Syria, right? I mean, may have devolved into terrible things, but there still is a sort of commitment to revolution as a possibility. And I think the way in which you look at the inside and outside of that, and here looking at the sort of self, you know, decolonizing the self and how it's tethered to some revolutionary spirit, even if that vision of emancipation is autonomy, I think it's an important thing to keep in mind because it's very central in the region, that kind of revolutionary potential.
Serra Hakyemez:And also, we see revolutionary situations emerging. That is creating their own revolutionary subjects. So, as you said, the Arab Spring, the Rojava Revolution that are that are creating a situation mish in which the subject, that I would call revolutionary subject emerges. And I'm sure I will be criticized for this, but I think autonomy as an idea can also be a revolutionary idea, in the sense that, yes, you're no longer demanding a separate nation state, and you're disarming all these nation states from attacking you on the grounds that you're fighting for a nation state. And at the same time, you're imagining autonomy as a form of direct action through which you're creating self governance units.
Serra Hakyemez:And the utopia is that these self governance units will gradually make the state as a political form obsolete. And that is the that is the utopic vision, and that is the vision that is at the same time revolutionary. Whether or not it is if it is applicable to The Middle East or the entire world is another discussion. But I think what a revolutionary what makes a revolutionary woman revolutionary is to make people dream another form of politics, another form of political being. And autonomy for cures did it, at least from 2005 to 2015.
Serra Hakyemez:Thank you. Thanks.
William Mazzarella:Yeah. Hi, Sarah. Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me in this conversation. And first of all, congratulations on the book.
William Mazzarella:It's really a powerful intervention. It's bracing, it's moving. And I'd like to invite you into a conversation alongside what Nadia is engaging you on, that is going to be coloured by my own investment, I guess, in questions of the psychic grounds of social and political life, where psychoanalysis is one of the approaches that helps us make sense of that. Right? So I think you do a really lovely job in the book of explaining why thinking with psychoanalysis is productive, and you make a strong case against the way in which people tend in a very superficial, and I would say kind of knee jerk way, to reject psychoanalytic thinking.
William Mazzarella:So I'd really invite anyone out there who has doubts about the relevance or force of a psychoanalytic framework to take a careful and close look at your book. I do have some specific questions to dig down on in terms of how you're using psychoanalysis, and we can get to that later. But first, I just wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about how psychoanalysis moved into the frame for you. How, if I could put it like this, psychoanalysis addressed you and addressed this particular project. Now there is a conceptual framing that comes up, as you were just mentioning in your conversation with Nadia, in Uchalan's writing that connects you to psychoanalytic ideas.
William Mazzarella:But my sense is that your commitment to psychoanalysis is more than intellectual, more than conceptual, and that there is in a way a kind of affective or psychic ground that draws you into this kind of thinking. And so perhaps were there particular moments, there particular encounters along the way of doing this work that helped you frame things this way?
Serra Hakyemez:I loved how you framed it, how psychoanalysis addressed me. I must say that psychoanalytic theory came into this work after I conducted the research, after when I started writing about this research. And it came to me retrospectively, because the research started with a different question. I mean, I was heavily invested in understanding and in exposing the injustice that countercure operations were producing through criminalizing the righteous demands of Kurds for self determination. But then, after I conducted interviews with former political prisoners, after I observed counter terror trials of so many Kurdish political prisoners, and after I read so many prison memoirs of the members of the Kurdish liberation movement, I realized that the lawlessness created by counterterror operations was the beginning of the story, and it should not be the end of the story.
Serra Hakyemez:Meaning, I didn't want to write another book to show how lawless counterterror operations are. They are very lawless. They are racialized. They are a part of also bigger colonial power structures. But that is for me only the beginning.
Serra Hakyemez:And when you started as the beginning of the story, other questions come to mind. Like if counterterror operations are so lawless, then how come this lawless operation failed to crush the the Kurdish desires for freedom? And I think I mean this is not a rhetorical question. Then I think one has to deal with this unruly playing field of desire. And when you engage, when you take that field very seriously, then you start seeing that both the Turkish counterterror state and the Kurdish liberation movement, they are interlocked in intervening in this field of desire.
Serra Hakyemez:If one and here in the book I define desire as that which exceeds what is demanded in language. Or in other words, when you subtract what is needed from what is demanded, what remains is that desire. So, if you work within that structure of need, demand, and desire, then you see the entire counterterror operation and the act of refusal in a different light. To be more precise, one sees that in courtrooms, both judges and prosecutors turn into pervert psychoanalysts who want to understand the hidden desire in the stated demands. In maximum security prisons, you see another perverted figure who wants to deprive political prisoners from all their needs, so that they will not dare to desire anything.
Serra Hakyemez:So this is the part about the Turkish counter terror state. And the part about the Kurdish liberation movement is that if there is all these interventions happening from the side of the colonizers to contain and crush freedom desires. Then the book doesn't argue that then one just refuses to be a part of it. There is a Turkish counter terrorist state that are intervening in the field of desire, And the book also shows that the Kurdish liberation movement itself is involved in this field of desire. And their involvement is quite different, in the sense that the movement keeps asking political prisoners to face what is lacking in themselves.
Serra Hakyemez:They keep asking for reflecting on what is lacking in their commitment to the decolonization struggle. They keep asking for facing what is lacking in the image that they see of themselves. So, on one part, there is this authority, the counter terrorist state, that is trying to crush the desire, and on the other part, there is this movement that tries to give birth to new desires for freedom. And the book tries to articulate both of them through the lens of psychoanalysis.
William Mazzarella:Thanks, Sarah. Maybe I can just ask a follow-up question. I wanted to pick up on this phrase you just used in the course of your answer when you talked about the unruly playing field of desire. I think that was a really nice way to put it, because I think part of the strength of the psychoanalytic framing is that it allows you to pay attention both to the opportunities that open up around drives, desires, fantasies, and how people and movements, on the other hand can get symptomatically stuck. Right?
William Mazzarella:So desire, as you note, may open onto freedom, but it's also what attaches us to the relations that oppress us. Right? And so some of my very favourite parts of the book are where you write very movingly about revolutionary love. And you note that the word, and I'm going to mispronounce this, 'Heval', can mean comrade, friend or lover. And you show how there can be this tension between the quote unquote 'true love' of the kind of revolutionary fidelity that's approved by the liberation movement or desired by the liberation movement, and the more personal longings that perforate, amplify, but also trouble this revolutionary love.
William Mazzarella:And so in some ways it seems like, you know, the unruly playing field of desire precisely, right? We're dealing with a kind of tension or a paradox. Because on the one hand, without desire, we could say without eros, there is no energy for liberation. But then on the other hand, if desire is, let's say, fundamentally recalcitrant, then how can it in any sense be reliably mobilised for a liberatory project at a collective level? So it's both powerful and potentially destabilising at the very root, as it were.
William Mazzarella:And you make a claim, I think, near the beginning of the book or a kind of, in a way, a sort of moment, a sort of manifesto moment where you say, and this is on page six, if anyone wants to read along who's listening: If psychoanalysis examines the structure of individual desire that is produced by, but exceeds the symbolic order, then in this book I bring out the radical potential of this desire when it is collectivised to achieve liberation. But I think in some ways, like your own analysis shows that this is not necessarily a smooth passage, right? That there's always this ambiguity, Right? Where desire can attach us precisely to the obstacle to liberation just as much or to something entirely incidental or trivial or personal or something that, like, doesn't line up in any kind of easy way with a revolutionary programme. So maybe you could say a little bit about that, kind of the ambiguity of this unruly playing field of desire on the ground, as it were.
Serra Hakyemez:That's such an important point. Maybe I can talk a little bit about this term 'hewal'. That can be a starting point to talk about both the inter subjective space within which relations emerge, and the comradely relations and friendly relations emerge between, political prisoners who survive the prison conditions and who also appear in encounter terror course to make defense statements or to withdraw their defense statements. And this term, haval, means both friend, comrade, and lover. And in chapter three, I I talk about this the principles of comradeship through which the subject, comrade, is created.
Serra Hakyemez:And one thing I really want to emphasize is that one does not just join a movement and then automatically becomes a comrade, there is a process in which one is objected to ideological training. One participates in the communal life of political prisoners, and then one participates in political in political meetings in prisons, through which the principles of comradeship gets inculcated in one's being. And these principles are one can consider quite harsh, in the sense that it requires from every individual to commit oneself fully and unconditionally to the idea of freedom. And whatever emerges, whatever comes between you and your commitment to the freedom, should be ignored until that freedom is achieved. That means constant deferral of the satisfaction of your ordinary pleasures.
Serra Hakyemez:In the sight of comradeship, what connects one to the other? One connects one political prisoner to another political prisoner, is this commitment to the sublimated object of desire that is the desire for decolonization. So self negation, self criticism, is a critical part of this comradeship. And as Jodine and others show, I mean, this this can be a factor that pushes every single comrade to fight for freedom, but at the same time, it can be a place of violence when people use this space to politicize their own political hatreds towards one one another or to use their personal love for one another, to protect one from the other. The space of comradeship is a fraud one.
Serra Hakyemez:And then I move to the another dimension of herbal, friendship, to talk about a different kind of relationality that also emerges within these spaces of confinement, where one creates a space for care, to care for one another. And I think in this space of friendship, there's something very particular about friendship that emerges in prison conditions, and that is, that has to do with incapacitation, deprivation, and torture that these political prisoners are subject subjected to in high security prisons. And the friendship that emerges in these spaces, I argue, is speaking to a space of loss. So a space of loss that is rooted in the violence of this prison space. So if a space of loss, can refer to the amputated limbs, the wounds that I mean, the wounds of torture, the loss of a friend, but it is a it is a space of loss through which one relates to one another.
Serra Hakyemez:And it's a space of intimacy that one cannot share with anyone else, but only with one's fellow political prisoners. So, I think of comradeship and friendship as two different dimensions of the same relationship of political prisoners. And comradeship is a kind of relation where one needs to see the lack in one in oneself. And friendship is a space when where one relates to one another through the through that which is lost in the fight for decolonization. But I think you're totally right to acknowledge that desire can be a key to open the door for freedom, but at the same time it is the key to all kinds of pleasures that revolutionary movements like the Kurdish liberation movement would say you have to stay away from it.
Serra Hakyemez:So, that's why there is this constant steering of the desire through the institutions of comradeship to sublimate ordinary pleasures into an object that will take you to the space of freedom.
William Mazzarella:Thank you.
Nadia Abu El-Haj:I can jump back here in a slightly different direction than William was speaking about, but really thinking about the psychoanalytic in relation to the question of refusal and decolonization of the subject. I also wanted to ask you to speak a little bit more about your turn to Fanon's notion of non being. I guess I wanted to ask you to talk about that in relation to, in particular the chapter, I think it's chapter two, which is on the refusal of language in the court, right? Refusal and defensive language, where you have these political prisoners in a Turkish counter terrorism court that refused to speak in Turkish. I guess I'll frame this comment with the following.
Nadia Abu El-Haj:What really struck me is I, and it may just be my reading of Fanon, but I think of his zone of non being as very different. And so I want think by de subject or somewhat different de subjectivization here, a word I can never pronounce. Non being for Fanon strikes me as very fundamentally constitutive of the colonial subject. And so you have all this thing about the tension and the violence and his explanation of criminality, which kind of explodes from within. In the courts with the collective refusal to speak Turkish, it strikes me as a performative de subjectivization.
Nadia Abu El-Haj:It's the performance of I'm making a decision here that I am not going to participate in this process. If I participate in some sense, I'm participating in a recognition process, right? I speak Turkish, you recognize me as a sort of subject of the court. I recognize the authority of the court, But I actually am not sure that it's de subjectivization in that sense of actually going into or inhabiting a zone of non being, as opposed to a performance of it, which is part of this sort of comradeship and friendship that is collective. So I guess I won't, I mean, I could be misreading Fanon, but I see that it is operating in slightly different ways.
Nadia Abu El-Haj:I wanted to think about non being and desubjectivization as it operates for you. It totally makes sense.
Serra Hakyemez:And let me explain how I read it. And so Fanon's Zone of Non Being, I think is a productive concept for me, to think about refusal in this way. The zone of non being is a zone where one is caught between symbolic and biological death. Symbolic death is death in the sense that your existence is not recognized in the symbolic order of language. And biological death in the sense that you're on the verge of death in this zone.
Serra Hakyemez:And you reduce I mean, for Fanon, this is a healthy space where you're reduced to nothingness. And I see an idea where why you're saying that cortone performances are different. But maybe and it can be a performance of non being. So maybe I can explain it with reference to a concrete figure like Kemal that I talk in this chapter. So Kemal, for the readers, is someone who was a stationery a small stationary owner who wanted to be a part of the Kurdish liberation movement.
Serra Hakyemez:Actually, he wanted to join the gay or lesbian, but he had a chronic illness, so he couldn't participate in the armed movement. And he participated in different protests, he believed he believed in decolonization, and he believed in the struggle for freedom, but we he was not an active fighter ever. Then, in 2009, he was, put in prison in the name of someone else, in the name of a revolutionary. And here, lawyer tries to explain to the judge that, hey, you you locked up someone else in the name of Yemen. This is not Yemen.
Serra Hakyemez:And Kemal's lawyer presented different evidence materials to show that the person who is in prison is not the person the prosecutor is looking for. And one thing Kemal could have done to get out of the stat block was to inform on Yaman. And I think I used Phanons, zone of done being, to explain the subject position that Kemal takes, because he preferred not to. I mean, in this in the space where no choice is a free choice, he chose not to inform on Yaman, and he chose to take the burden of staying in prison for however amount of time that Yaman would be punished for. And that means one that means that Kemal could have died in prison, given his chronic illness.
Serra Hakyemez:So, biological death was a death was a risk that he took. And he also decided not to have a place in the symbolic order. He decided not to be eligible to the court by explaining how innocent he is and who the real guilty person is, so he completely rejected the terms within which both the guilt and innocent is defined. And for me, it is a rejection of this symbolic order within which you're also condemned to symbolic death, you no longer have a place. And by doing so, I think he was showing us one of the contradictions that emerged in this zone of non being if you do not fight for the recognition of your being.
Serra Hakyemez:That is, he shows us that the entire court procedure where you have the right to defend yourself is a fiction, in the sense that your defense, the when you withdraw your defense, the court proceedings do not stop, and the court proceeds as if you're as if you're defending yourself. And the court without any the court the judge keeps reading the evidentiary materials and keeps noting down that the suspect decided not to speak, and finally the judge can give a final verdict on this person without even knowing who this person is. So to me, this withdrawal that Kemal performed ultimately showed us a contradiction within this system, within which defense is a complete fiction. But there are also other I mean, there are also other moments of refusal where one actually decides to kill himself in the extraordinary conditions of torture, not as a way of surrendering to torture, but in order to create a place of loss that will be that will be bristled with life. And I can talk more about it, but I'm thinking of the in chapter four, where I talk about Muslim Daz's death protest, where he kills himself for the life of revolution.
Serra Hakyemez:And I think that is also another instantiation of one's descent to the zone of nonbeing in order to fight for the emergence of another kind of being.
Nadia Abu El-Haj:Now I think that use of the zone of non being and its torquing of fun on is actually extremely interesting. So I don't mean the performative in a super super because right, the zone of non being is the condition of inhumanity of the black man. And what's happening here is in various different ways, whether it's kedem or the language refusal or later in the book, it's almost like I'm going to embrace my zone of non being. I'm going to, right? I'm going to embrace it as a way of asserting my humanity.
Nadia Abu El-Haj:So you say this is an unintelligible or unrecognized language, right? So in that sense, I think it's a turn of that concept where it becomes a kind of political, it becomes a political weapon in this war. And in that sense, it's a torquing of Fanon, but very powerfully actually.
Serra Hakyemez:Thank you. Thank you. That's a very nice way of re articulating it. Yep.
William Mazzarella:We're talking about a lot of different kinds of death here, actually. Physical death, biological death, symbolic death. I think there's a question to be asked here, which is maybe a continuation of Nadia's question about non being and desubjectification or subjectivization. I'm not sure. One of the two.
William Mazzarella:And it has to do with what the concept of death drive is doing in your book. I think about Freud's discussion of death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and there's a striking phrase that Freud has, and I'm probably going to mangle it a little bit, but the way I remember it is something like every organism wants to die in its own way. And I've always read that as being a statement about death drive as a kind of longing for a specific undoing. In other words, not just annihilation as such, but a kind of movement back through all the knots that have constituted us as subjects in a particular way. All the kind of traumatic moments that have, in a way, rigidified the carapace of our subjectivity.
William Mazzarella:And I think about someone like Marcuse, who picked up on the notion of death drive and turned it into a sort of political concept, really, in a different way maybe than the kind of Lacanian sense that you're using it in the book. But for Macuza, you know, the notion of death drive was ultimately hopeful because it implied a project of undoing capitalism, undoing bourgeois society, undoing patriarchy. Right? And by that, opening up a space for a different kind of society to emerge. And it seems to me that you're doing something a little bit different with death drive and the way that you're mobilizing it from a kind of more Lacanian place, but also maybe something that's kind of aligned with that.
William Mazzarella:And so I guess I would, you know, in the light of this conversation about desubjectification and refusal, I would invite you to think a little bit more about how death drive is working for you as a concept in a specific ethnographic setting. In other words, not just as a kind of general theoretical term or philosophical term, but what it is that it allows you to see about the undoing of a particular history or the attempted dissolution of a particular deadlock.
Serra Hakyemez:That's the zone of non being and the death drive are connected to each other in my articulation of what I call deadly refusals, because it is in this zone of not being where you stop fighting for the recognition of your being by those in power. It is in this zone where you also take the risk of your biological death. It is in this zone that you from which you re emerge through following your what what funnel what Lacan would call your death drive. And this death drive I mean, I'm using it not to just simply talk about biological death, but actually following your desire so steadfastly that and so determined in such a determined way that it can take you to death, but what comes out of your death is a surplus that those who come after you will attach themselves to. Or in in in the ethnographic in some of the ethnographic vignettes I use, I can turn to this individual whom I call Muratz.
Serra Hakyemez:Muratz also speaks from revolutionary subject position, and he is someone who was who spent half of his life in prison. By the time I talked to him, he was in his late 40s. And he spent around twenty years in prison, and the last time he was brought to the court to give his defense, he told the judge that he's fully committed to the liberation of curse, and he stands for all the activities he has undertaken, and then he quotes this famous poet, this famous Turkish poet, Nasim Hikmet, and he says, If I do not burn, if you do not burn, how will we find light in this darkness? So for him, burning yourself for the light that you believe in is necessary for you to come out of that zone of nonbeing. And I think that burning is a very poetic description of death drive.
Serra Hakyemez:And, I mean, I wanna just refer back to the epigraph that I have in the book to also invite readers to think about what's the death drive might be doing in the book. So in the epigraph, I cite John Kobchak, and John Kobchak says, Someone dies and leaves behind his place, which outlives him and is unfillable by anyone else. The social is conceived to consist not only of particular individuals and their relations to each other, but also as a relation to these unoccupiable places. The social is composed then, not just of those things that will pass, but also of relations to interplaces that will not. So I think as one follows headlessly one's drive, what emerges I mean, what one risks one takes the risk of death, but what comes after that is these unoccupiable places, these spaces of loss to which the revolutionary social is connected to, and there's a surplus life that comes of that place of death.
William Mazzarella:Yeah, thank you, that's really helpful. One of the things I keep coming back to is maybe something that was in the first question I asked you, which is that there is always this puzzle about how to reconcile. In other words, if we say that the project of, in a sense, both death, drive and revolution is to be steadfastly follow one's own desire, right? Then there's always a question of what does it mean to completely attune one's desire to a revolutionary project? Right?
William Mazzarella:Like, and how that what that takes, whether that's possible, etcetera. But when you just when you were just saying this thing, this this beautiful line, you know, if I do not burn, how will we find light? I might be misquoting it a little bit, but along those lines. I think the delicate point that you're conveying to us is that this is something other than what it might appear at first. It's not just the kind of conventional sacrificial heroism.
William Mazzarella:In other words, it's not just like, I will give myself up for the cause and, you know, I will burn brightly in that process. But the Kokiak quote that you gave us helped me to see that what's actually at issue there is, in this self combustion, as it were, a specific place is left behind. Right? A specific location, a specific gap that follows from this kind of self annihilation of the death drive, and that that opens up specific questions for the future and for what others will do in relation to this gap that continues to live on in the social space. So, yeah, I think it's easy to read a story like this as just, in a way, a kind of sacrificial story, and I think that's not maybe what you're trying to get across, or not particularly helpful.
Serra Hakyemez:Thank you for that clarification, because this book is replete with figures who sacrificed their lives, sacrificed their bodies, and there is a lot of sacrifice happening in the book. But I think the last part of the book, tries to get to this question about heroism. The book asks several questions, one of which is, What would it mean to not claim authorship for the sacrifice you commit? What if you make that sacrifice not to become a hero, not to become the author of that act, but still take the full responsibility for the act you carry out. So, how can we think about authorless sacrifice?
Serra Hakyemez:Meaning I mean, in the words of the Kurdish revolutionary woman who participated in this struggle, what if one accepts to remain no one while sacrificing everything one has? That's quite crucial in thinking about both the limits and possibilities of of the death drive, because I'm also talking about some other people who sacrificed their lives in twenty years in prison, lost limbs, and so many of those other lost opportunities. I talk about some I mean, there are some figures in the book who are very melancholic because they had fantasies within which they would become complete authors of the story, but then they got out of the prison and no one recognizes them. Worst, many people living comfortable, city lives would call them commissionaries, Stalinist dogmatic people. And then, when they face the image they have, when they face the image that these people have of them, they feel completely melancholic about their projects, and they ask the question, oh, wait, why did what happened to this being who sacrificed himself or this project, who is considered as just a dogmatic person?
Serra Hakyemez:So of course this kind of sacrificial logic creates some melancholic subjects. But there is also other subjects who are asking us this question, what if you engage in radical politics without the ambition of becoming someone? What if you ex what hap what kind of ethics emerges from that action if you take full responsibility for your action without gaining a symbolic recognition for it? And I think that is the that is such a both politically and ethically challenging position to have or to think about.
William Mazzarella:Thank you so much.
Nadia Abu El-Haj:Right. And to just comment on that, I mean, so that really comes out in your fifth and you write about the unassumed feminine position, right? And I think what's also so powerful there is that basically there were, it's almost like a palimpsest of refusals, right? This is a refusal from within. It's a refusal of a certain masculine that's patriarchal.
Nadia Abu El-Haj:So you have these different layerings of refusal. Some of which are the main ones of course are vis a vis the colonial state, but this becomes an internal kind of refusal. And it, yeah. And it made me think a bit about, you know, Assad's work on the whole question of the motives behind the suicide bomber. It's also a refusal in any way to think about motives in that individualized sense, which is the presumption of the law, which is the presumption of what makes quote unquote terrorism suspect, right?
Nadia Abu El-Haj:There's something here that one's always looking for in this individual in fact. So let's go to your last chapter on hope. Hope in hopeless times, which no doubt everyone or many, many people in the world can relate to, but God knows in The Middle East, for any of us who are in any way situated in the region, things seem almost unbearably hopeless in some ways. So there are all these really powerful scenes in this chapter. There are scenes of a future that might be otherwise.
Nadia Abu El-Haj:And, you know, one example of course is the son who loses his final appeal because he refuses to apologize, right? And take responsibility. And the family that walks away saying, well, in the future, there'll be, you know, he'll be released because of some amnesty. What's also evident in this chapter, and in some sense you just spoke about it in terms of sort of the melancholia of some of these ex prisoners, is that so many others in the Kurdish community have moved on, right? It's sort of they've moved on to living middle class lives, to living in the present rather than for some future that's different.
Nadia Abu El-Haj:As I was reading that chapter, a couple of things really struck me. One was the temporality of hope, which is almost like living in this condition of waiting and the ways in which in some ways it's an anticipatory temporality that mimics the paranoia of the state and the counter terrorist state. But the other thing that really struck me is it really reminded me, and we were talking about ethics, right? The ethics of being no one, right? It reminded me very much of this very powerful passage in Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem where she's discussing the argument of why didn't more people resist?
Nadia Abu El-Haj:And, you know, she quotes someone who says, well, we would have, nothing would have come of it. We would have just died or been killed rather. And she says at the end, basically makes a deontological statement that, but nothing that she basically says nothing is humanly useless. And what she argues is of course, the point of resistance was to keep alive the possibility for human life in this world, right? To keep alive so that postwar Germans would have had more people to look to, to think about that moment in their history, but also it just keeps open this possibility that human existence is possible.
Nadia Abu El-Haj:And it struck me that in some sense, the virtue of that hope is inherent. It's not contingent on whether that political otherwise actually emerges, but that it's important in its own right. And that importance sits in particular in relation to a community that in some ways people feel has abandoned the cause. So that's not really a question, it's a comment, but I think it's a very powerful thing to think about What is this hope about? It's about a certain kind of ethics of maintaining the possibility that the future could be otherwise and its value or virtue is not going to be judged by what actually happens in the future, but by its very existence as a way of being in the present.
Serra Hakyemez:What a wonderful, what a beautiful articulation. I think maintaining the possibility that future can be otherwise, sometimes it feels impossible to maintain that possibility. I mean I was finishing the book when in the wake of so many failures, including the failure of the movement itself in achieving autonomy. I was writing the book in the aftermath of the death of so many, who started an autonomy uprising that ended terribly. And what maintains that possibility is not sometimes the movement itself.
Serra Hakyemez:The movement itself also can fail on people, and the demands of the movement on the people can be so exhausting that one's body cannot carry that demand anymore, Like, for example, in the chapter where I talk about Tolhildan and Kalsim. Kalsim is someone who lost his limb in the fight, and finally, this he could no longer be a part of that fight, and he just remained to be a friend of Toltildan, the revolutionary. So the demands are sometimes too much. The demands, for revolution is too are too much. And sometimes the movement also fails on people by not giving an account of itself, by not accepting its own responsibility for the tragedy that befalls.
Serra Hakyemez:And I think in the last chapter, I go back to Walter Benjamin, to talk about images, images that cannot sit very easily within the signification system, so think about, oh this is the past, this is the present, and this will be the future, but rather images that create what Eric Santner calls a signifying stress, that can also give you a hope for a miracle. So, for example, a graffiti written on the wall on a wall in the Arbucket that says revolution will return. I mean, it's so displaced was so displaced when I saw it, because this wall was facing the part of the city where there was a big gentrification project. But it's the mark that is coming from a past that has not passed. So I think there are all these dialectical images, especially in a place that has seen so many layers of destruction, that is actually calling on the people, that is actually interpolating new subjects.
Serra Hakyemez:And sometimes these images are working against the movement itself. And, I feel like in this moment of genocidal violence, I mean, all these genocidal forces, assuming that they can destroy all the possibilities for an otherwise might be underestimating the power of dialectical images that can emerge from the site of destruction.
Nadia Abu El-Haj:Yeah. No. I think that that works so beautifully in the text, your use of Benjamin. And I on a sort of more mundane level rather than a theoretical one. Just also think I get asked so much recently, mostly by students when I give talks of, you know, what do we do when we're faced with obviously Gaza, this tragedy, and do you think, you know, basically what do I think is gonna happen?
Nadia Abu El-Haj:You know, I wish I knew, but, and my response is, I mean, it's that notion of, it almost doesn't matter what the future holds. One has no choice. You have to continue as if it's possible. Right? And that's what I think you hold out there that that's the only real choice, right?
Nadia Abu El-Haj:Ethically and politically is to continue as if, because otherwise, where are we? So I think that that ending sort of does that for me in a much more mundane way than your accompanies the more theoretical analysis that you do so nicely there.
Serra Hakyemez:Thank you.
William Mazzarella:And we're doing that in the context of, as you say, a past that has not passed. Right? So, you know, and that's an ambiguous thing. Like, on the one hand, it's a past that has not passed because we see the repetition of so much in some ways, like where we are now is an echo of where we were a hundred years ago, you know. So there's that sense in which there's a kind of terrible repetition, but also precisely in this way, that the unused materials of the past, right, can have the possibility to kind of flash up, as Benjamin would say, in a kind of, in a moment of recognizability suddenly, where something else becomes possible, a transformation.
William Mazzarella:So, yeah. Thank you.
Serra Hakyemez:Thank you. You for this beautiful conversation. Thank you for the book.
Nadia Abu El-Haj:It's a beautiful book, honestly. Yeah.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Kurdish Decolonization in Times of Counterterrorism by Sarah Hakimiz is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.