Gazing at monsters: aesthetics, politics, and the national distribution of the sensible

ABSTRACT

The Humanity Monument, a gigantic monument in Kars, a northeastern border city of Turkey, was intended to be visible from the Armenian side of the border and supposed to send messages of peace, apology, and reconciliation, implicitly alluding to the Armenian genocide of 1915. It depicted two halves of a human, or two humans, looking at each other in the eye. However, the then prime minister Erdoğan called it a “monster” in a public speech, leading to the monument’s demolition. He then suggested that his comments were just aesthetic judgments free of political convictions, echoing the familiar paradigm of “aestheticizing politics”: covering over or obscuring a political motive (“the ideological”) through the aesthetic. Although a useful understanding, this reduces both aesthetics and politics to ideology and establishes a binary between the sober critic and the a(n)esthetized masses. Instead, drawing upon Rancière’s notion of the aesthetic as what disturbs “the distribution of the sensible,” that is, the partition of roles, territories, parts, and visibilities, this essay reads the story of the monument as a disturbance of the national distribution of the sensible, pointing to the ways it embodies and reveals the monstrosity of the modern state founded upon the event of genocide and further complicates the distinctions between critic and masses, self and other, and gaze and object that the aesthetic ordering of the nation-state relies on.

KEYWORDS:

• Aesthetics and politics
• nation-state
• monsters
• gaze
• the humanity monument
• the Armenian genocide

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze into thee.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

I am not so sure Petrosian killed himself.

—Nâzım Hikmet, Life’s Good, Brother

Introduction

The Humanity Monument (İnsanlık Anıtı) was a nearly completed gigantic (approximately 100 feet high) monument in Kars, Turkey. It was a figurative work that consisted of two concrete human figures or two halves of a human. A hand of one of the figures reaches to hold the other’s hand, and they face each other as if they were looking at each other in the eye (Figure 1). At the time, the reaching hand was the only missing part to be installed to bring the monument to completion (Figure 2). Designed by the Turkish sculptor Mehmet Aksoy and authorized by the then mayor of Kars, the monument was located outside the city on top of a hill, intended to be seen from neighboring Armenia, and supposed to send messages of friendship, peace, and reconciliation to the Armenians across the border, implicitly acknowledging “the Armenian genocide” of 1915 (Ahıska 2011, 19–20).¹ It was only implicit because neither the sculptor nor the authorities commissioned the monument never mentioned the genocide, as it is still a taboo subject in Turkey. And there was no involvement on the Armenian side. In a sense, the monument was presented to them as a fait accompli. Moreover, it was part of the mayor’s grand project for the promotion of the city to attract tourists to the city, which included art galleries, conference centers, a theater, and a five-star hotel (Osterholt and Elke 2013, 3).

Figure 1. Humanity Monument, 2011. Photo credit: Georgios Giannapoulos.

Figure 2. Photo Credit: Zeren Göktan.

In addition to this neoliberal restructuring of the city, the monument project was also part of the post-Cold War “after evil” discourse, a human rights discourse, as Robert Meister suggests, that locates genocides, ethnic cleansings, and other violent acts in the past and assumes that they have no effect on and relation to the present. Even though this discourse enables a certain critique of violence, it imagines the present as a period after evil, uncontaminated with the evil deeds of the past, and it brings the evil to a closure, remembering it for what it was through gestures of apology and recognition (Meister 2010). It was not, therefore, surprising that Erdoğan and his government, elected in 2002 with “great expectations” of a wide variety of political actors to overcome, to make past the decades-long Kemalist, militarist, secularist hold over society, deployed such a discourse to underline the pastness of violence and its disconnectedness and irrelevance to the present.² Looking back from today, from the present overly authoritarian, nationalist security regime of Erdoğan in Turkey—the sad end of a Bildungsroman where great expectations eventually turn into a walk around ruins—even the presence of such a discourse might seem inconceivable. Yet in his so-called “liberal” period, the beginning and end of which is highly debated,³ he was acknowledging, and sometimes vaguely apologizing for, the past wrongs and injustices against “minorities” in the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey to the extent that they belong to the past, with no connection whatsoever to the present, to himself, to his government.⁴ The Humanity Monument was a product of this era or at least conceived in its spirit.⁵

Still, despite its one-sided and patronizing message of peace and a project designed for the touristic promotion of Kars, the monument’s vague gesture toward the memory of the genocide was sufficient to draw Erdoğan’s dislike. In January 2011, when the monument was still in the making, Erdoğan described it as ucube (monster or freak) and demanded its demolition in a public speech he delivered in the city. He was in the city for the commemoration of the soldiers who died in the Sarıkamış Battle. The battle between the Ottoman and Russian empires took place toward the end of World War I and resulted in major casualties for the Ottoman army as part of the Caucasus campaign. Due to a mistaken military strategy, around 25,000 Ottoman soldiers froze to death in the mountains near Kars before encountering Russian forces. Enver Pasha, who planned the strategy for the battle, and the Young Turk government blamed the loss on the Ottoman Armenians’ cooperation with the Russians. Thus, this became a prelude to the Armenian genocide that began to unfold the following year. Erdoğan’s comments were then seemingly conditioned by the occasion of his speech and his strategy to consolidate nationalist votes in the upcoming elections.

Shortly after his comments, the city council decided to remove the monument, bringing about a substantial public debate. The issue was approached from many perspectives but primarily in terms of freedom of speech and public art and whether the monument, as a work of art, is really monstrous. This framing of the issue seems to have been dictated by Erdoğan’s defense that his comments were “just” aesthetic judgments (Ahıska 2011, 19–20).⁶ After a rather quick demolition of the monument, the sculptor filed a libel suit against Erdoğan. Here are some excerpts from the defense Erdoğan’s lawyer presented during the trial:

through his domestic and foreign visits in both his previous position as a mayor and his current position, he must have closely observed various works of art and architecture, including sculpted figures, which indeed must have aroused his admiration.

His comments on this sculpture only pertained to the site and the inappropriateness of this site. Politicians and artists should be open to criticism… The litigant can lay claims to his work of art, but he cannot impose his aesthetic taste on society. Undoubtedly, my client not only possesses the taste and opinion for making an aesthetic judgment on a work of art but also has the competence and maturity for analyzing the site of the work under consideration and the social fabric of that site.

Since liking or not liking an artwork, finding it aesthetically pleasing or not, requires a subjective evaluation, it is only natural that each member of society interprets that work of art differently. Therefore, advancing the claim that everyone must share the opinion of the person creating the work of art conflicts with the realities of life and is against the plurality of value judgments (Saymaz 2015, translation mine).⁷

The lawyer’s remarks’ overarching idea is that Erdoğan’s comments are aesthetic judgments, so they are neither politically motivated nor derogatory. It seems that this defense specifically underlines three points: first, Erdoğan’s cultivated sensibility for making aesthetic judgments; second, aesthetic judgments are personal opinions guaranteed and protected by freedom of speech; and third, Erdoğan’s comments only pertain to the inappropriateness of the site.

To start with the last one, it seems that what is meant by the inappropriateness of the site is that the monument cannot stand with other cultural/historical icons of the city and cast a shadow on them. In this context, Erdoğan reportedly said, “we will not let this monster cast a shadow on our history” (Ahıska 2011, 41).⁸ More specifically, he thought the building of “this weird thing” next to the tomb of Abu al-Hassan al-Kharaqani, a prominent Sufi figure and master of Islam, could not be tolerated (Adanalı 2013, 4). What primarily interests me here, however, is the first two points because they portray Erdoğan as a “man of taste,” a disinterested spectator making an aesthetic judgment about a particular work of art. This judgment is subjective, allegedly recognizing that aesthetic judgments on a work of art may vary from person to person. Yet it is also noted that this capacity and acculturation necessary for making aesthetic judgments are acquired through a certain aesthetic education, the universal condition of possibility for forming subjective aesthetic judgments and having a taste. Based on this portrayal, the lawyer seems to have attempted to cut off the otherwise ineradicable link between Erdoğan’s “purely” aesthetic judgments and the politics behind the monument’s demolition.

This is almost a paradigmatic expression of what is widely termed “aestheticizing politics” and “ideology of the aesthetic,” usually subjected to a critique that takes many shapes in different uses. Some of these critics take the aesthetic as that which obscures “the ideological” and “politics,” which are often used interchangeably; for some, the aesthetic is that which hides “the evil,” “the real,” and “the material” by confining our vision to a world of “appearances,” “ideals,” “aesthetic pleasures”; for others, the aesthetic is that which distracts our attention from real (social) problems; sometimes it is also that which provides a protective shield, an anodyne, against the over-stimuli of the dizzying social order, that is, capitalism.

In what follows, I begin with examples of the different forms this critique of (the ideology of) the aesthetic takes and identify two main problems with them. First, in most cases, it reduces politics and aesthetics to ideology. Second, it (re-)produces certain binaries, specifically the binary between the critic and the numbed masses. Then, I briefly turn to Rancière and his notion of “the distribution of the sensible” for an alternative understanding of the aesthetic. After this, I return to the discussion of the aesthetics and politics of the Humanity Monument in the context of the Armenian genocide and the negationist/denialist rhetoric in Turkey. I try to show that “the monster” Erdoğan saw in the monument is the monstrosity of the nation-state, which haunts him and his taste, and precisely for this reason, he wants to hide it from sight. I discuss how this unexpected monster, beyond the sculptor’s intentions and the mayor’s neoliberal project for the city, disturbing the national distribution of the sensible, unsettles many categories—such as self and other, gaze and object, us and them—which perpetuate the genocidal logic of the nation-state that assumes two homogenous groups of people: “the Turk” and “the Armenian” fighting over the name of “the genocide” and waiting for “the truth” to emerge from the archives and history. I argue that the monument and its absence, regardless of what it is intended for, pops up as an “aesthetic” monster that disturbs the national distribution of the sensible. It appears as a third term that calls into question a series of bifurcating and binary logics that the aesthetic/archive ordering of the nation-state is built upon.

The ideology of/as the aesthetic

The critics of the ideology of the aesthetic usually take their cues from Walter Benjamin’s (in)famous formulation at the end of his “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: fascism aestheticizes politics while communism responds by politicizing art (Benjamin 1968b, 242). This sentence is quite enigmatic on its own. One wonders, for instance, whether these are perfectly symmetrical alternatives. Is there a difference between fascist aestheticization and communist politicization? Does the art/the aesthetic wither away in both cases by being used as a means—of concealing in the former and convincing in the latter? Should both be criticized and condemned equally? Susan Buck-Morss, one of the critics of the aesthetic ideology, implies that there is no symmetry between the two in Benjamin and suggests that by the notion of politicized art, “Benjamin means more than merely to make culture a vehicle for Communist propaganda” (Buck-Morss 1992, 4–5). Yet she does not go on to say what that more is. In her essay, Buck-Morss, pointing to the etymological connection of aesthetics to sense perception, suggests that what Benjamin means by aesthetics here is, in fact, “anesthetics” or “anesthetization” as what numbs people and turns them into senseless masses conditioned to protect themselves against the overstimulation of capitalist alienation. This is, according to Buck-Morss’s genealogy, the shape aesthetics has taken in capitalist modernity, losing its original connections to feeling, sensing, and suffering.

The notion of aesthetics made its appearance in eighteenth-century Europe. It came to define a particular sort of experience, a process of cultural acquisition, a form of inquiry, and a set of objects that make possible and are made possible by a particular subject known as the universal subject of bourgeois ideology (Agamben 1999, 13; Redfield 1996, vii). This subject, through aesthetic education, is capable of making disinterested judgments, but at the same time, “the judging subject becomes exemplary-capable, in its formality, of representing universal humanity” (Redfield 1996, ix). Remember how Erdoğan is portrayed as a man making a subjective and disinterested judgment on a particular work of art and how he is said to have acquired an education, culture, and taste that are universal conditions of possibility for being able to make such a judgment. Though subjective, one needs to go through an acculturation to be able to judge a work of art in a disinterested manner. That is why the lawyer’s defense wants to prove that Erdoğan has had this aesthetic education (even if this apparently contradicts the often anti-intellectual and anti-Western rhetoric Erdoğan employs in domestic politics). Aesthetic education is, in a sense, a universal history of “man,” but it is a very specific history of a social group that inherited this culture and taste and claimed it for themselves. This is how “the sheerly empirical qualities of being European, white, middle class, male, and so on become either tacitly or overtly essentialized as privileged sites in the unfolding of an irreversible aesthetic history” (Redfield 1996, ix).

This aesthetic discourse has come to subtend many notions through which “the West” defines and differentiates itself, such as the nation-state, historical progress and development, race, canon, the public sphere, civil society, and the modern university. The exemplary citizen-subject of the modern Western nation-state is ideally equipped with a capacity to form disinterested aesthetic opinions autonomously and express them freely in public. Yet, at the same time, the aesthetic shapes the internal nightmare (or perhaps simultaneously the apex) of this culture and its ideal subject, that is, fascist aestheticization, as Benjamin influentially pointed out. Thus, as Marc Redfield points out, “the necessary task facing any genuine critique of aesthetics is that of engaging both the abyssal difference and the complex proximities between the humanist tradition and … the decisive turns of an ideology that transforms the representative subject of aesthetics into the exemplarity of a master race, and the humanistic, deferred promise of Schiller’s Aesthetic State into the violent immediacy of a destiny” (Redfield 1996, ix). The twentieth-century and contemporary critics of aesthetic ideology have taken this task seriously and paid due attention to the thin line between fascist aestheticization and humanist aesthetic education or between the aesthetic as the ideological and the aesthetic as a possibility. I now want to provide a few examples of this critique to show both varieties and commonalities among them.

Susan Sontag, for example, discusses the ways in which aestheticization is manifest in Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 film Triumph des Willens and the following discussions about it. Even though it is a propaganda film of the Nazi party and Hitler, recorded during the Nuremberg rally in 1934 and “produced by the order of the Führer,” either it is judged in terms of its “aesthetic” qualities or, since Riefenstahl later came to be thought of as a prominent film director, it has been treated as a “mistake” in her career and filmography. Sontag describes these as attempts “to filter out the noxious political ideology of her films, leaving only their ‘aesthetic’ merits” (Sontag 2009, 95). She argues that this is how the aestheticization of politics works: a fascist director and her aesthetics followers demand that her works be judged in terms of their beauty or aesthetic quality and form that transcend the ordinary facts of life, such as that the Führer ordered the film for purposes of propaganda and therefore the political/ideological nature of the work. Here, Sontag connects this to the transcending sublimity of fascist aesthetics. She argues that the sublime form makes one speechless and thoughtless: one is just amazed and fascinated by the sublime quality of the work. This is what the aesthetic experience is for: ecstasy. One cannot help but surrender oneself to the enthralling work; it brings about and exalts mindlessness, excluding all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic. Then, Sontag suggests, it is not a coincidence that “the principal accusation against the Jews within Nazi Germany was that they were urban, intellectual, bearers of a destructive corrupting ‘critical spirit’” (Sontag 2009, 88–89). Fascism wants to eliminate this spirit through a “vertigo before power,” a fascination in which one cannot reflect on things but is moved because, as Kant suggests, “the sublime moves” (Kant 2004, 47). Therefore, for Sontag, aestheticization makes one unable to see and think beyond the fascinating sublime. It takes one away from reality and makes one unable to see the fascism work and the director behind it. She has two lines of criticism here. First, she criticizes the aestheticization of Riefenstahl’s career by the culture/art industry that is seemingly convinced that what is important is the form, not the content, of the work or that one should not judge and condemn an artist’s oeuvre based on a single work, a “mistake.” A second and related critique Sontag advances is that fascism operates on the sublimity of the form that renders the content insignificant and that already alienated masses submit to this sublime form without regard for the content.

Elaine Scarry describes the kind of critique Sontag presents here as a “critique of the beauty,” which broadly captures the essence of critique of the aesthetic as ideology in general. She suggests that according to this critique, “beauty, by preoccupying our attention, distracts attention from wrong social arrangements. It makes us inattentive, and therefore eventually indifferent, to the project of bringing about arrangements that are just” (Scarry 1999, 58). In her ethnographic study on everyday violence, hunger, and normalization of child death in northeastern Brazil, Nancy Scheper-Hughes employs this critique against symbolic and interpretative anthropologists whom she accuses of aestheticizing hunger:

Among social and symbolic anthropologists, owing to the influence of French and British versions of structuralism, food, food taboos, and hunger tend to be understood as symbolic categories used in organizing social relations, ordering experience, or expressing or mediating the contradictions. In this interpretative tradition food is less good to eat than it is “good to think”; it is a language rich in symbolic content. Food (as well as hunger) serves as a medium for complicated social transactions, as individuals and social groups use food to control others, establish and maintain sexual relations, avoid or initiate conflict, or express some aspect of cultural identity … In these symbolic studies hunger was sanitized and aestheticized. It was also denied. (Scheper-Hughes 1992, 131–132, italics added)

Assuming that symbols are devoid of materiality, Scheper-Hughes suggests that the symbolic study of hunger is the same as denying its materiality as a concrete social and political issue, making it seem bearable or more acceptable by distracting our attention away from it. Aestheticizing hunger, in these terms, is to make it seem good (or less bad than it really is), to conceal its material urgency behind appearances and symbols. Putting something onto the aesthetic/symbolic terrain is a way of hiding its wrongs; it is a work of trivializing and obscuring. In the book, Scheper-Hughes accuses symbolic anthropologists, and what she calls “postmodernists” in general, of obscuring the material by playing with symbolic meanings of hunger, thus distracting the attention away from its material, social, and political basis.

In all these critiques, the aesthetic acts as ideology. Or, as Terry Eagleton, another critic of the ideology of the aesthetic, puts it, “the aesthetic, one might argue, is in this sense the very paradigm of the ideological” (Eagleton 1990, 93–94). It conceals the evil, obscures the material, or distracts our attention away from the real issues. It makes individuals insensitive to the political evil and, turning them into “masses,” leads them to submit to fascism. That is why Benjamin opposes aestheticization to politicizing art because the latter seems to recognize that the aesthetic is interested and political. Aestheticization, however, relies on the premise that aesthetics is disinterested and has nothing to do with politics—the very ground on which ideology builds itself. “For the peculiarity of ideological propositions might be summarized by claiming, with some exaggeration, that there is in fact no such thing as an ideological proposition,” says Eagleton (1990, 94). Eagleton acknowledges that the aesthetic is a contradictory discourse. On the one hand, it is a tool for “the middle class’s struggle for political hegemony. The construction of the modern notion of the aesthetic artefact is thus inseparable from the construction of the dominant ideological forms of modern class-society.” On the other hand, it “provides an unusually powerful challenge and alternative to these dominant ideological forms, and is in this sense an eminently contradictory phenomenon” (Eagleton 1990, 3). Despite this “dialectical nuance” Eagleton wants to add, throughout the book he overwhelmingly discusses the aesthetic in terms of its ideological function in the modern Western (mostly German) thought. Perhaps that is why, a little later, he notes that “the book could be accused at times of straying into a species of ‘left-functionalism’ which reduces the internal complexity of the aesthetic to a set of ideological functions” (Eagleton 1990, 4).

All these different conceptions/critiques of the aesthetic ideology,⁹ in fact, predominantly reduce the aesthetic to an ideological function in the dominant order, and they all operate on binaries such as form/content, symbol/material, hidden/visible, submission/reason, and appearance/reality. This assumes a distinction between the sober critique and the anesthetized, numbed masses. Here, I do not mean to deny the historical contemporaneity of the aesthetic with the emergence of the bourgeois ideology and its incorporation in fascist politics, but I want to place due emphasis on the disruptive force of the aesthetic and how it can unsettle the nation-state that relies upon an aesthetic ordering and an aesthetic education of its citizen-subjects, which I think has been mostly overlooked or underdeveloped in critiques of the ideology of the aesthetic. Yet recently, this task has been undertaken by Jacques Rancière, who criticizes these formulations of the aesthetic as ideology. “From Rancière’s perspective,” Davide Panagia explains, “such formulations inevitably rely on an antecedent inequality between those who know the truth of an image and those who passively absorb its transmission … each of these formulations is founded upon the Platonic assumption that images are collusive because they limit freedom, and the knowledge of the master critic is necessary to escape their stultification” (Panagia 2010, 96). I now want to briefly turn to Rancière’s notion of the aesthetic for an alternative understanding.

Rancière, the aesthetic, and the distribution of the sensible

Rancière notes that his notion of the aesthetic has nothing to do with Benjaminian aestheticization of politics “specific to the ‘age of masses’” (Rancière 2004, 13) because what Rancière means by politics is not a struggle for power. It is rather a work of shaping what is seen and what can be said, who can see and speak, properties and proprieties of spaces and time. It is “a world of competing worlds” (Rancière 2011, 7). The aesthetic practices, as Rancière understands them, are political in this sense because they intervene in the distribution of what is perceivable to whom, who can see and say what, and what can be done when; that is, in what he terms “the distribution of the sensible” (partage du sensible). Rancière describes the notion as what determines the perceptual conditions for a political community. These perceptual conditions delimit who can see what, who is visible, what is perceptible from what position, who can have a share in what kinds of activities, and what can be said in a collectivity. For instance, workers are supposed not to have time to write poems; aesthetics/art is supposed to remain a separate field, discipline, and realm from politics; there is no place for poets in Plato’s ideal city; the monument that is supposedly visible from the Armenian side must be removed. These are all examples of the distribution of the sensible, a “system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it” (Rancière 2004, 12).

The aesthetic is a reconfiguration of the perceptible world; it intervenes in the given order of the visible, sayable, and perceivable. It disrupts the dividing lines between realms, positions, fields, and territories whose separateness is taken for granted. It shuffles, confuses, and perhaps re-distributes the distribution of what is permissible to say, show, and see. For instance, the borders of nation-states are usually taken for granted; what is inside and outside are clearly demarcated, and what is allowed to be visible inside and what can be seen from are determined and circulated widely. The aesthetic is capable of introducing “lines of fracture and disincorporation into imaginary and collective bodies … uncertain communities that contribute to the formation of enunciative collectivities that call into question the distribution of roles, territories, and languages” (Rancière 2004, 39–40). Reconfiguring the perceivable, the aesthetic is capable of challenging all kinds of self-evident divisive and distributive lines and borders. In this “aesthetic” spirit, unlike critics of the aesthetic ideology, Rancière is highly critical of reducing aesthetics (and politics) to the ideological and refuses the separation between the critic who see “the real” and the numbed masses deluded by the aesthetic ideology. I deploy Rancière’s account to read the aesthetics of the Humanity Monument as a disruption of the national distribution of the sensible. By disrupting the distribution of the sensible, it not only disrupts the lines determining what is visible and sayable within the nation-state but also the taken-for-granted “aesthetic” and “political” distinctions between gaze/spectator and object, looking and acting, self and other, the Armenian and the Turk—the distinctions, as I try to show, that perpetuate the logic of the nation-state and its genocidal organization. Before turning to this discussion, a brief background on the Armenian genocide will be in order.

The Armenian genocide

The events known as the Armenian genocide were the systematic massacre and expulsion of a vast population of Ottoman Armenians, carried out in the course of the “falling” Ottoman Empire’s giving way to the Turkish nation-state at the end of World War I. While trying to ethnically Turkify the Ottoman territories, the Ottoman political elites at the time were pursuing an active politics of reclaiming and reinvigorating their place among imperial powers. The Young Turk government, also known as the Committee of Union and Progress, having already lost considerable territory in the Balkans and the Caucasus (including Kars to the Russians) at the end of the nineteenth century, was pursuing multiple and contradicting projects to put an end to the “decay” of the empire, including attempts at removing and erasing non-Muslim communities, especially those who may have laid competing nationalist claims to parts of the Ottoman territories. These attempts had already been going on since the late nineteenth century with the Hamidian massacres of the mid-1890s and those of Adana in 1909. Yet they reached their apex with World War I in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, which resulted in the stripping of the Ottoman Empire of almost all territories in Europe and a major defeat in the Sarıkamış Battle in the winter of 1914–1915. At the same time, the resistance activities of different Armenian groups turned them into “internal threats” within the body of “the sick man of Europe.” In a sense, the Armenians, as a significant cause of the man’s sickness, were turned into a target of hatred, humiliation, and, eventually, large-scale and planned slaughters, deportation, and dispossession between 1915 and 1917. This was in line with the Young Turk government’s population engineering projects that aimed to protect the remaining Ottoman territories by Turkifying the population. Note that during this process, Islam became a qualifier of ethnic difference; that is, it turned from a broad imperial division between Muslims and non-Muslims to a way of ethnic differentiation where most of the Muslims were incorporated/assimilated as Turks while most of the non-Muslims were rendered threats to this emerging Turkish body politic, which sicken the body from within. This understanding was instrumental to the monsterization of Armenians and their exclusion to heal/purify the body.

This is, however, not the whole story. “The Armenian genocide” is primarily a historiographical object, a “war” on naming. The French Orientalist Ernest Renan, in his 1882 lecture “What is a Nation?,” remarks that “[f]orgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality” (Renan 1990, 11), meaning that a well-established science of history and a well-protected archive—because the archive is the condition of possibility for history as science and discipline—are detrimental to the nation-state. He associates the discipline of history and its object, the archive, with memory and remembering. The nation-state, however, is founded upon forgetting and historical error. Therefore, the nation-state should not invest in the progress of historical studies. Note that Renan’s tone in the lecture is advising; he advises nation-states and informs their making. Only a paragraph later, he advises, mentors, and foretells the making of the Turkish nation-state:

The Turkish policy of separating nationalities according to their religion has had much graver consequences, for it brought about the downfall of the east. If you take a city such as Salonika or Smyrna, you will find there five or six communities each of which has its own memories and which almost nothing in common. Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things. (Renan 1990, 11)

Renan was among the most-read contemporary French intellectuals in the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman thinkers and writers translated, summarized, and criticized his work.¹⁰ In congruence with Renan’s advice, the Turkish nation-state, following the failure of what is known as the Ottoman millet system, where the central division was between Muslims and non-Muslims, is founded upon the Armenian genocide and its forgetting. It still refuses to “name” the events as genocide.¹¹

The Armenian genocide is a war waged on name. All contemporary discussions, in one way or another, are trapped in the question of whether it is really, historically, empirically a genocide, whether the Armenian genocide is a fact, and whether it should be named as such. It is the name through which two groups of people, as if they were two homogenous and unified groups, are pitted against each other based on history and the archive. “The Armenian” looks for the absolute evidence of the genocidal, barbaric essence of “the Turk” in the archive, while the latter looks for a wartime conflict, a suppression of a rebellion, and even a genocide directed at himself. Unlike what Renan believes, both of these two distinct groups have complete trust in history and the archive; they both believe that history and the archive will eventually show the righteousness of their claims. Concerning the Armenian claims, Erdoğan recently suggested that “our archives are fully open to those whose aim is to find the truth” (2019).

The final truth expected to emerge from the archives and history, however, is always deferred. The archive in question is the archive of the nation-state. Contra Renan, the nation-state invests in the archive and fully trusts its truth. In fact, the archive, the nation-state, and the genocide, historically and analytically, are inseparable. The archive of the nation-state contains no trace of the genocide. Put differently, the genocide is (also) an erasure of the archive. The truth is also deferred because the absolute document of the genocide never comes out of the archive. This is not only because it is the archive ordered by the nation-state but also because there is no such document. Any document found in the archive can be interpreted and narrated as evidence of the genocide and its non-existence at the same (Deringil 2002). And the testimonies are not enough to prove the act of genocide because the definition of genocide requires documents that clearly show intention, planning, and execution. But genocide, by definition, is the erasure of intention, as Marc Nichanian brilliantly shows (Nichanian 2009).¹² (And whenever the historiographic truth is deferred, the law is enforced: the law that bans calling it genocide, the law that recognizes it genocide, and the law that prohibits not calling it genocide). Thus, framing the genocide solely as a matter of historical verifiability, “leaving it to historians,” might reproduce the genocidal logic of the nation-state and misses other ways of disturbing or simply opening up the archive of the nation-state, as a distribution of the sensible, that determines the sayable and the visible, the rememberable and the forgettable, and the thinkable and the perceptible. It misses the possibilities of monsters that reveal that the only way to remember is not through the archive and history but perhaps by transgressing their limits and redistributing the national archives that continue reproducing the unquestioned homogeneity of two distinct nations.

The genocide constructs the binary between Turkey/forgetting/absence and Armenia/remembering/presence as two homogenous entities opposed to each other. The monster problematizes this separation. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, in his essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” notes that “[b]ecause of its ontological liminality, the monster notoriously appears at times of crisis as a kind of third term that problematizes the clash of extremes” (Cohen 1996, 6) and “it breaks apart bifurcating, “either/or” syllogistic logic with a kind of reasoning closer to “and/or” (Cohen 1996, 7). The bifurcation between Turkey and Armenia as two clashing extremes repeats itself through the national distribution of the sensible, the aesthetic ordering of the nation-state, or the archive. The monument appears as a potential erasure of this difference. “The political-cultural monster, the embodiment of radical difference, paradoxically threatens to erase difference in the world of its creators” (Cohen 1996, 11–12). The monument reminds the historical monsterization of Armenians in the foundation of the Turkish nation-state and, at the same time, threatens to erase the absolute difference between the Turk and the Armenian cut apart by the genocidal logic that underlies all nation-states, thereby threatening their mythic homogeneity and unity. “Because it is a body across which difference has been repeatedly written, the monster … seeks out its author to demand its raison d’etre—and to bear witness to the fact that it could have been Otherwise” (Cohen 1996, 12).

Monster and/as the nation-state

The destruction of the Humanity Monument is no doubt an act of repression of memory. The monument remembers and reminds. It casts a shadow on “our history,” not as the perfect evidence of the fact of genocide found in the archive but as a monster that puzzles the national archive of the visible, the sayable, and the rememberable. The demolition of the monster is an expression of a desire not to be seen, to go unnoticed, and not to see. It aims to eliminate the gaze that the Turkish imagination feels on itself. It is to act as if there were no genocide in the founding act. A nation-state is the making of a self, or, in Matthew Arnold’s famous words, “our best self,” out of an imagined past and repressed memory of an event (Arnold 2006, 71). (And this is the self “aesthetic education,” or Erdoğan’s aesthetic education, seeks to develop in “us”). It produces the bifurcation between “us” and “them” out of genocide, out of the question of verifiability of the genocide as a fact. How “we” conceive “our” past shapes who “we” are and vice versa. “we” conceive our past genocideless; it is taken out of the memory web that builds “us,” which is built in the very making of “us.” The memory of the genocide is out. It is outside the borders. It is across the border. It turns out to be the gaze across the border. It is the gaze right across the border, which “we” hope is not looking toward “us.” “we” should not be seen because the gaze leads to reconstitution of self by reminding “us” of what is not rememberable and what is not sayable. “we” cannot be exposed. “They” should not see “us.” This is how visibilities are distributed. Yet this is not only a distribution of who can see what but also making and separation of two homogenous entities, “the Armenian” and “the Turk,” the gaze and the object, the absolute victim and the absolute perpetrator. This bifurcates two homogenous and unified experiences into organic totalities that are opposed to one another or, more accurately, are defined by their opposition to one another. One is founded upon the absence and forgetting of the genocide, while the other exists through its presence and remembering.

Erdoğan used the word “ucube” to describe the monument. It is commonly translated as “monster” or “freak” and one of many words in Turkish that derive from the Arabic root of ˁcb: acîbe, acayip (or acaib), acep, acaba, taaccüp. They all refer to things, situations, and feelings that are very strange, bewildering, terrifying, miraculous, wicked, deformed, extremely ugly, etc. To prove that ucube is not a derogatory but an aesthetic remark, the lawyer, citing the dictionary of the Turkish Language Association, propounded that ucube, in Erdoğan’s terms, means “very strange, bizarre thing” (Saymaz 2015). It is disturbing and monstrous to him. It is a bizarre and alien thing but, at the same time, a thing that one cannot take one’s eyes away. The term implies another antiquated phrase in Turkish: garibe-i hilkat (or hilkat garibesi) or acîbe-i hilkat, meaning a monstrous, bizarre, freakish creature by birth/nature. All these relative terms were widely used in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to describe people who have inborn bodily “defects,” “anomalies,” or “deformations,” such as conjoined twins, dwarves, and hermaphrodites. Although the term was widely used before, this period is of pivotal significance because monsters, in the colonial civilizing/humanizing projects accompanied by the making of nation-states, were one of the things against and through which the human and the nation-state—and the nation-state is often conceptualized in an analogy with the human person/body—were defined. The monster in Western languages, also prevalently deployed in nineteenth-century Europe, referred to these bodies with allusion to birth/natural defect, and it derives from the Latin monere, “to warn,” and monstrare, “demonstrate”; so, it is “that which reveals” and “that which warns” (Cohen 1996, 4). In this sense, the monster perhaps reveals and warns that genocide is in the nature of the nation-state. And in the way that Erdoğan used it, the monument as a monster reminds “us” of “our” birth defect; it is a monster by birth because the Armenian genocide is the founding act of the Turkish (and the Armenian) national imagination. Put differently, its absence is the absence of the monstrosity of the nation-state that monsterized and disposed of Armenians. This is precisely why the Armenian gaze cannot be allowed to turn toward the monument because it embodies the monstrosity of the nation-state, which cannot be seen, looked at, or remembered.

If there is something to look at, if “we” give “them” a point to fix their gaze on, this might lead to a de-composition of who “we” are. The gaze qualifies “us,” the object. That is why the monster should be demolished; it should be out of sight because it remembers, reminds “us” of the unpleasant memory of a national birth defect, and embodies “us.” It gives the Armenians across the border a point to see in “us,” and this materializes the otherwise immaterial (or invisible) nation-state because there is, in fact, no nation to see. The nation reproduces itself through, for example, the circulation of newspapers across the country and through the flow of homogenous national time, as Benedict Anderson famously suggested. The monster embodying the nation gives “them” something concrete to look at: the monster as the nation, the monster through which the nation, and its genocidal nature, is brought into being as concrete as stone. Then, Erdoğan is correct to judge the monument as a monster, hence the necessity of its destruction. The founding moment repeats itself: Armenians were monsters, hence the necessity of their destruction. The monument, in this sense, exposes the nation-state and its distribution of the sensible. Therefore, it unsettles delimitations of what is visible, sayable, and rememberable. The monster also negates the discourse from which it emerged by not letting the link between the past and the present be cut off, by rejecting the pastness of genocide, thereby unsettling the genocide-free self-legitimation of the present.

The gaze and the object

The aesthetics of the monster disturbs the national distribution of the sensible. The Turkish nation-state is imagined as opaque as possible so that it cannot be seen from across the border. Opening the nation-state to the gaze across the border, the monster challenges the distribution—what is seeable, what should not be seen, who must see what or whom and where, what is perceivable from which position, what is sayable, what is rememberable—which has been determined (or distributed) in the founding act of the genocide. Rancière suggests that this kind of aesthetic intervention in the distribution may contribute to forming political subjects and a collective that is not “an organism or a communal body” as the nation is imagined to be (Rancière 2004, 40). It opens up possibilities for the disunification of the nation as an inviolable organic body and for bringing the supposed other, “them,” in. (Another etymological connection is the Arabo-Turkish word garip/garib, which implies being a foreigner, outsider, or stranger. The monster in this sense brings the outsider in). As Cohen puts it, “the monster is an incorporation of the Outside, the Beyond—of all those loci that are rhetorically placed as distant and distinct but originate Within” (Cohen 1996, 7).

It is in this sense that the aesthetics of the monument creates an overarching possibility: the possibility of breaking down the binary between the spectator and the object/actor, the beholder and the beheld, the gaze and the object—a series of distinctions and schisms that emerged correlative to the formation of the nation-states, our best selves cultivated through “aesthetic” education. The state becomes an organic whole through an aesthetic creation of its citizen-subjects who feel and share the same national story, the story that shapes the national distribution of the sensible, which determines the “good taste” of national subjects who (must) know what they can (and cannot) sense or what should (and should not) be sensed. Erdoğan, portrayed as a man of good taste, expresses this distribution. The importance of breaking down these binaries, then, lies in the fact that they are conditions of possibility for the distribution of the sensible itself. The possibility opens up, as Rancière points out, “when we dismiss the opposition between looking and acting and understand that the distribution of the visible itself is part of the configuration of domination and subjection … when we realize that looking is also an action that confirms or modifies that distribution, and that ‘interpreting the world’ is already a means of transforming it, of reconfiguring it” (2009, 13). The aesthetic intervention of the monster challenges not only the national distribution of the visible but also the very conditions that made this distribution possible.

Made of large concretes put on top of each other and depicting two humans, or two halves of a human, looking at each other in the eye, the monster makes it possible to transgress the distinction between the Armenian gaze and the Turkish object/subject. Requiring a violation of the border right at the border, which is the ultimate limit of imagination, the monster attempts to go beyond the binary logic and invites both sides to look at each other closely and to see the self in the other and vice versa. It turns out to be a possibility, at the borders of the possible, that the Armenian and the Turk can directly look at each other without one being the gaze or the monitoring gaze and the other the object of the gaze because the Armenian, the victim, indefinitely judges and keeps an eye on the Turk, the perpetrator. The separation is always kept intact. It is thus an invitation to go beyond the limits of the two clearly distinct nation-states and establish another form of relationship by violating the very distinction between spectator and actor, “us” and “them,” by letting the actor be the spectator and vice versa. That is why it becomes the monstrous possibility that profoundly disturbs the national distribution of the sensible founded upon the separation between the gaze and the object.

It is a possibility that calls for a reconstitution of the sensible in a way that one can be seen without being objectified and one can see without objectifying, where one can be both actor and spectator.¹³ This requires one to look at the other in the eye, see oneself in and through that eye, and reconstitute oneself in that eye until perhaps one understands that the “I” is in the eyes of others, that the other is in the eyes of the “I,” and eventually that the “I” is the other, the monster, the inhuman. It is a dissolution of all identity, all difference, not through genocide but through a re-wiring of the senses in a way that goes beyond the genocidal essence of the nation-state and yet without losing sight of the genocide that persists. This is not a mere call for empathy, which presupposes two distinct sides in a hierarchical relationship, nor is it a vague gesture of peace, which is one-sidedly ready to cut off the past from the present. What is under consideration here is the ongoing monstrosity of our present that a figure of humanity cannot remedy simply because it is this figure itself that keeps producing monsters.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have tried to read the aesthetic intervention of the Humanity Monument as a disruption of the national distribution of the sensible. I have argued that Erdoğan’s description of the monument as a monster and his defense of this as a mere aesthetic judgment can be seen as an indication of the monument’s monstrous aesthetic that intervenes in the distribution that determines what is visible, what is sayable, who is permitted to see what, what can be remembered, and who can be where and when. Refusing the prevalent accounts reducing the aesthetic to the ideological, I have sought the possibilities the aesthetic might open up through Rancière’s understandings of the aesthetic and the distribution of the sensible. This understanding refuses a whole lot of binaries such as critic/masses, real/illusory, material/symbolic, gaze/object, spectator/actor, interpretation/change, Armenian/Turk, victim/perpetrator. I have tried to show that these binaries, historically functioning together, most of the time reproduce the genocidal logic of the nation-state, and the monument, emerging as an unexpected monster, hints at possibilities of radically going beyond them. Even though we always wait for “the truth” to emerge from the archive and history to finally resolve the crises around the Armenian genocide as a problem of the past, namely, its total remembrance or forgetting, the monster shows up to disrupt the archive of the nation-state that indefinitely keeps distributing roles, visibilities, and territories among two distinct homogenous entities. Showing that remembering does not need to come from the archive and history, the monster embodies and exposes the monstrosity of the nation-state, thereby becoming its monstrous nightmare.

Although I might seem to give too much credit to the monument, there is something in monsters that challenges the rationale that constructed them. The vague gesture of peace the monument was intended to convey is reversed by its monstrosity, which reveals the everydayness of genocide within the nation-state against its attempts to leave it in the past, forget, or deny by deploying history and the archive, which are historically foundational to the nation-state and its distribution of the sensible. Revealing this distribution opens up an archive of the nation-state, which is not the archive of its past but the one that announces the limits of the visible, thinkable, rememberable, and sayable—the borders and boundaries that have founded and guided it ever since. Then, perhaps we can distort Renan’s oft-cited mantra “a nation’s existence … is a daily plebiscite” (Renan 1990, 19): a nation is a daily genocide. The nation-state, by including and excluding, humanizing and monsterizing, keeping the distribution of the sensible intact, necessarily purifies itself every day; it is bounded by the anxious necessity of finding enemies, intruders, and monsters so that it can defend itself in the figure of the human. The monster arrives to interrupt this daily genocide. It unsettles the border that is natural to one and misdrawn to another, the border that separates forgetting and remembering, absence and presence, object and gaze, and monster and human. Now, a catastrophe is piling up from the cut stones of the monster, wreckage upon wreckage, a catastrophe that the figure of humanity (and its national history) cannot remedy. The monster reveals the (im)possibility of such a figure by warning us of its unacknowledged and catastrophic building on the monstrous and the inhuman, that is, its own monstrosity.

Acknowledgments

This paper first emerged in Meltem Ahıska’s experimental seminar on aesthetics and politics in the Spring of 2020. I am grateful to her for comments and encouragement. Carla Freccero patiently read and commented on multiple versions of it. Naz Oktay provided feedback and encouragement many times. Ecem Sarıçayır saved me from some errors about the material details of the monument and directed me to relevant sources. Pablo Escudero, Justine Parkin, and Shaun Terry read and thought about the paper with me. I presented versions of the paper at the Medusa Graduate Conference at the University of Toronto and the Cultural Studies Association Conference at Columbia College Chicago in 2022. Thanks to the panel participants for their comments and questions. Thanks also to anonymous reviewers for their generous comments and criticisms.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Both the former mayor Naif Alibeyoğlu and the sculptor Mehmet Aksoy underlined the fact that the monument was specifically designed to be seen from the Armenian side of the border. When Alibeyoğlu commissioned the monument, he was still mayor of the city elected in 2004 as a member of the ruling party AKP. Due to what seems to be an intra-party conflict, in the 2009 elections, he competed as a candidate of the main oppositional party CHP and lost to the AKP candidate. So, the monument was already authorized and in progress at the time of elections (Ahıska 2011, 19–20).

2. This also resonates with another aim of the monument, and a rather more explicit one, which was to reduce the present geopolitical tensions in the region between Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Reminding this aspect of the monument, Egemen Özbek points out that both the sculptor and the mayor have a vague attitude toward the past and simply imagined the monument “as a future-facing symbol of peace, moving away from any historical specificity as to the Turkish-Armenian conflict.” He also notes that the blanket category of “humanity” obscures the difference in responsibility for the genocide and that the monument would have been built in conversation with Armenians were it a “genuine attempt at reconciliation” (Özbek 2018, 2, 4). Without setting aside these problems with the monument, I am more interested in the ways in which the monument as a monster disturbed Erdoğan’s “taste.”

3. When Erdoğan turned authoritarian is a big question for political scientists. They cite different “events” as possible thresholds such as the 2007 general election, the 2010 constitutional referendum, the violent suppression of the 2013 Gezi Park protests, the 2016 coup d’état attempt, among others. Some object that he was always authoritarian but waiting to definitively consolidate his power first to disclose his “true face”

4. It is this past against which Erdoğan positioned himself and his party. He often claimed to introduce a radical break with “the past” as a whole, by which he “vaguely” points to a variety of things such as excessive military power, violence and discrimination against minority groups, economic crises and poverty, secularist imposition, and so on.

5. As I noted, most of the gestures toward “the Armenian genocide” are vague and implicit in Turkey on both societal and state levels. For instance, in 2014, Erdoğan issued a statement of condolence for the Armenians murdered in 1915 but still failed to recognize the events as “genocide” or “massacre” (Tambar 2017, 763). This is because “the Armenian genocide” is a debate on “name.” All discussions, in one way or another, are trapped in the question of whether it is “really,” “historically,” or “empirically” a genocide or not, whether “we” should call it a genocide or not, and whether it should be named as genocide or not. The definitive authority of archives and history shapes all these discussions, and the law is enforced whenever this authority falls short: the law that bans calling it genocide, the law that recognizes it as genocide, and the law that bans not calling it genocide. That is partly why I am not interested in this essay in how genuine, vague, or implicit intentions behind the monument were. Framing the discussion as a matter of historical facticity and how genuinely one recognizes, or “names,” this fact reproduces the genocidal logic of the nation-state, as Marc Nichanian pointed out (Nichanian 2009).

6. Even the sculptor himself, hijacked by the discussions of the beauty and appropriateness of his work, suggested that one cannot judge the monument’s aesthetic value and its relation to the surrounding cultural artifacts because it was not even completed yet. As problematic as he is, he also likened the demolition of the monument to Taliban’s destruction of cultural heritages (Özbek 2018, 1).

7. The court came to a decision in 2015 and sentenced Erdoğan to pay 10,000 Turkish liras for defamation. Beyond this case, the sculptor Mehmet Aksoy is seemingly known for political controversies around his works. Previously, his statue called “In Fairyland” was removed from a public park in Ankara by the mayor of city Melih Gökçek (a controversial AKP mayor ruled between 1994 and 2017) for allegedly depicting a scene of orgasm. The sculptor took the case to court and won. The statue was put back in its place.

8. Kars is a small, snowy city with a history dating back to ancient times. It is a passage point where Russian, Armenian, and Turkish heritages, among others, interact, compete, and transform one another. The city is inhabited by plenty of historic artifacts: the Castle of Kars; the Cathedral of Kars (the Holy Apostles Church or more recently Kümbet Mosque), an iconic domed structure dating back to the tenth century, which was transformed into a Russian Orthodox cathedral, an Armenian cathedral, and a mosque several times as the city changed hands throughout history; and the Stone Bridge (Taşköprü) over Kars river partly remaining from the sixteenth-century Ottomans; and the tomb of Abu al-Hassan al-Kharaqani. Seemingly Erdoğan aesthetically did not find appropriate a “monster” standing alongside and casting a shadow on the last one.

9. The term “aesthetic ideology” is associated with Paul de Man’s late essays on aesthetics, Kant, Schiller, and Kleist, brought together in The Aesthetic Ideology (1996). According to his understanding, aesthetic ideology is what reduces cognition to phenomenality, the sensuous to the conceptual, the perceptible to the intelligible. And, as other critics of aesthetic ideology points out, he seems to think that this serves to fascism and the fascist understanding of state as an organic unity that erases the distance between the state and the people for immediacy, totality, unity of experience, and the immediate and poetic presence of the people in the state and the state in the people. Against this, insisting on the apartness of the literary and the aesthetic, de Man suggests that literature, or the rhetorical form of language, is able to identify and resist the closure between the cognitive and the phenomenal, that is, the aesthetic ideology (De Man 1986, 9–12). Literary critic Jonathan Culler argues that De Man’s late interest in formulating a critique of the aesthetic ideology could be seen as a critique of his earlier wartime journalistic writings that contain traces of anti-Semitism and an aesthetic idealization of the German nation, which were informed by such an ideology (Culler 1989). De Man’s understanding of the “fascist state,” for me, is the core of the nation-state and its aesthetic ordering as a unified, organic, and homogenous totality. That is to say, I do not make an active distinction between a fascist state and a (“normal”) nation-state. The former is inherent in the latter. And, unlike de Man and other critics of aesthetic ideology, I discuss that the aesthetic ordering of the state can be unsettled by the aesthetic as the redistribution or conflation of senses and not by doing away with the aesthetic.

10. For example, an influential Young Ottoman and intellectual who later come to be known as “the poet of the nation,” Namık Kemal, wrote a critique of Renan’s 1883 lecture “L’Islamisme et la science,” which suggests that the religion of Islam is an impediment to scientific progress. Namık Kemal wrote a response in the same year, although published later, and he argued that Islam is quite compatible with science rather than an obstacle to it.

11. The spectrum of denialist discourse is wide in Turkey. One claim is that it was in fact Armenians who slaughtered Turks. Another one, or a version of this, is that it was a two-sided wartime conflict where both sides killed each other. These are usually accompanied by a claim that estimations concerning numbers of deaths are either exaggerated or fake. There was not so much death, so it cannot be called genocide. This relies on the conviction that the genocide talk is designed to harm and disintegrate the Turkish nation and its borders, to claim lands and money from Turkey, and to dishonor the Turkish people. Another, a rather “refined” version, is that “what happened” is dictated by history. In an era of emerging nation-states, what happened (i.e. homogenization of the designated territory by excluding and dispossessing “minorities”) was what had to happen. “We” had to keep up with history, as “We” were trying to catch up with European civilization, as “We” were following Renan’s advice. This “historicist” position implicitly acknowledges the genocide without naming it as such. In his theses on history, Benjamin sees such historicist arguments as faulty and corrupting. Concerned with their Marxist version, he says, “Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion that it was moving with the current. It regarded technological developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was moving” (Benjamin 1968a, 258).

12. Nichanian suggests that the archive and nation-state do not contradict each other. The nation-state is not afraid of the archival truth because the making of the archive is, in fact, correlative to the making of the nation-state. Pointing to the ways in which discussing the genocide solely as a matter of historical facticity reproduces what he terms “the genocidal will,” which Nichanian argues erases the very factuality of the fact.

13. In his essay investigating the conceptions of aesthetic ideology, Martin Jay argues that the aesthetic should not be too readily disregarded as ideological. A curious move Jay makes is that he finds Arendt’s account of aesthetics—which he sees as a possibility, an alternative—faulty for “failing to resolve the implicit tension between her stress on the virtues of action, on the one hand, and her praise of the spectatorial role of judging, on the other” (Jay 1993, 82). It seems to me that Arendt’s theory is a call for politicizing aesthetics rather than aestheticizing politics because she literally politicizes Kant’s aesthetics (Critique of Judgment), which is the place she locates his political philosophy, unlike the usual Kantian accounts which identify his political philosophy in the categorical imperative or his other “political” writings like Perpetual Peace. More importantly, Arendt appears to intentionally abstain from choosing between actor and spectator, from suggesting whether one should be actor or spectator. For Arendt, this would prevent the spectator from acting and the actor from judging by assigning them to their proper spaces. The political possibility opens up when acting and looking come together or are conflated. That is why she sees a political possibility in Kant’s aesthetics, because it cannot be subsumed under some pre-given universals like actor and spectator, it is a continuous exchange and entanglement: a constant disrupting of the distribution of the sensible, exemplified in Arendt’s very act of disrupting the given space of Kant’s political theory.