‘Meine Hä / nde kennen die reaktionen de / ines Körpers die dich beweg / en machen’: The Disintegrated Body and Relationality in Özlem Özgül Dündar’s Poetry Collection Gedanken Zerren

Abstract

Özlem Özgül Dündar’s debut poetry collection gedanken zerren (2018) explores what it means to be an embodied subject. Although some of the poems express the violence of having one’s identity ascribed by others, many are also vignettes of seemingly banal interactions that constitute a pre-lingual interconnectedness beyond fixed identities. The poems’ innovative form and style equally encourage us to regard language not just as a carrier of meaning, but as a material force, or indeed body, that can generate affective responses in readers. gedanken zerren enables us to imagine different perspectives on the body, engendering an increased awareness of everyday gestures and bodily reactions that indicate our inherent interrelatedness to other bodies. This is not the sovereign subject or absolute individual who is master of their own destiny, but rather a relational self in a body over which they have no totalizing control or complete knowledge. The idea of the body conveyed by gedanken zerren can be theorized through the deconstructivist thinker Jean-Luc Nancy’s writing on the body, which illuminates how Dündar’s poetry shifts the idea of human subjectivity beyond the hierarchical dualisms that have traditionally defined it, be they gendered, racialized, or a question of subject-object, or mind-body.

Keywords:

• Özlem Özgül Dündar
• Jean-Luc Nancy
• Relationality
• Subjectivity
• Corporeality
• Poetry

Özlem Özgül Dündar (born in Solingen in 1983) is an emerging writer whose poetry, prose and plays are characterized by a subversive use of language that draws attention to itself and resists straight-forward interpretation. Her work to date has focused on themes of recognition and human connection, such as the harrowing play türken, feuer (2019), a fictionalized engagement with the 1993 Solingen arson attack that approaches far-right violence through the perspectives of four different mothers. Her award-winning debut poetry collection gedanken zerren (2018), under discussion here, explores what it means to be an embodied subject, confronting the reader with snapshots of interactions that foreground the inseparable nature of body and mind, and our inherent relationality.¹ The collection is divided into three cycles: the first, ‘wenn ich springe von einem zum anderen’, deals with the tension between the vulnerable disintegrated body, on the one hand, and the desire to bring coherence to it, on the other; the second, ‘wenn ich mich dir antaste’, can be read as unconventional love poems; and the third, ‘wenn ich n gehöre’, appears to relate to experiences in Turkey, family history and relatives’ expectations — although it is never explicitly mentioned, the ‘stadt zwi / schen kontinenten’ can be read as Istanbul.² Rather than discussing the poems in sequence, my analysis will group them thematically, first focusing on the deconstruction of ideas of bodily autonomy and the mind-body dualism, and then on how this paves the way for a relational understanding of the body. Although some of the poems express the violence of having one’s identity ascribed by others, many are also vignettes of seemingly banal interactions (small gestures, touches and glances) that constitute a pre-lingual interconnectedness beyond fixed identities. Finally, I will discuss how the poems encourage us to regard language not just as a carrier of meaning, but also as a material force that shapes how we (re)act in the world. Where linguistic communication fails in the poems, an embodied and affective form of communication takes its place, as bodies react automatically to exterior stimuli — if the ambiguous title, gedanken zerren, is read with ‘gedanken’ as the subject rather than the object of the verb, it expresses how thoughts and their linguistic expression can be understood as a material force (and hence also a body) that moves us, having a physical effect at times beyond our control.

With their emphasis on corporeality, and their innovative form and style, these poems enable us to imagine different perspectives on the body, engendering an increased awareness of everyday gestures and bodily reactions, and reframing how we view ourselves as embodied subjects in a world made up of other bodies. Here, bodies are simultaneously what separates us from and what joins us to the outside, allowing us to experience an intelligible world. This is not the sovereign subject or absolute individual who is master of their own destiny, but rather a relational self in a porous body, over which they have no totalizing control or complete knowledge. The idea of the body conveyed in gedanken zerren can be brought into productive dialogue with the deconstructivist thinker Jean-Luc Nancy’s writing on the body in order to understand how the collection shifts the idea of human subjectivity beyond the hierarchical dualisms that have traditionally defined it, be they gendered, racialized, or a question of subject-object, or mind-body.

Bodies in the Writing of Jean-Luc Nancy

Nancy devoted his philosophical career to critiquing the dualisms at the heart of Western thought, especially with regard to the sovereign subject. Whereas historical materialism, psychoanalysis and the idea of performativity have all undermined the notion of a rational, sovereign subject, as Nancy points out,

[i]n all these discourses a “subject-of-representation” is [still] at work: for example […] a subject-who-knows-what-is-happening-with-the-subject-of-representation, who knows how to represent it as the illusion of presence-to-self of a consciousness, or as the subject of a phantasm, and who thus knows how to represent himself, that is, to present to himself the truth about Descartes as a thinker of an illusory or phantasmic subject-of-representation […].³

Nancy’s observation highlights the difficulty of leaving the idea of the subject as master behind, which he seeks to achieve through a non-foundational understanding of the subject as relational, that is to say, this relational self is not a self-grounding subject that once grounded enters into relations with other subjects, but one that exists as and in relation to others. For Nancy, there is no stable position from outside these relations that would allow subjectivity to be fully understood and, in this regard, his writing on the body, most notably in Corpus (1992), is more an approximation of the embodied subject, rather than a coherent, definitive description. Nancy views the body not as a unified whole, but as a heterogenous ‘collection of pieces, bits, members, zones, states, [and] functions’.⁴ Although we have some degree of control over certain parts of our body, Nancy foregrounds other aspects (digestion, healing, cramps, illness) that happen without our volition and, sometimes, awareness, and this is especially so if we think of bodies on a molecular level.

According to Nancy, the challenge to mastery presented by the body generates anxiety for the Cartesian philosophical tradition that posits an autonomous and self-grounding subject as the foundation for all knowledge and experience. Our bodies resist ownership and highlight our inherent interrelatedness: they always already exist in relation to other bodies (human and otherwise) and respond to them in ways beyond our control. While we can control certain aspects of our behaviour, unintentional reactions such as blushes, goosebumps, gasps, and yawns occur whether we would like them to or not. Nancy prioritizes such reactions to foreground the body’s exteriority, contrasting it with the interiority and essentialism of the mind-body dualism:

We have to understand that outside all the gestures of valorization, hierarchization, and evaluation that have been attached, by a whole huge tradition, to the subordination of the body […], there is, in effect, in the body as such, as ‘self-sensing’, a structure of being set outside, such that we cannot speak of the body without speaking about it as an other, an other indefinitely other, indefinitely outside.⁵

For Nancy, contact between or the touching of bodies, even if it is the sensation of our own internal organs, is always a matter of exteriority and surfaces.⁶ This is part of Nancy’s attempt to emphasize the radical otherness of the body and move away from notions of interiority that reinforce the mind-body dualism, essentialist ideas of identity and the representational idea that the body is the external signifier of an internal signified.

The Cartesian dualism of mind and body has led to various hierarchies, as different categories of beings are more closely associated with either part of the binary. Within this framework, animals are, for instance, associated more with the body in contrast to Man, who, in Western modernity, is conceived of as a rational being and associated with the mind. Indeed, Descartes argued that animals are machine-like and not able to feel pain, which legitimized their exploitation.⁷ I use the word ‘Man’ here on purpose, as various feminist thinkers have explored how women have traditionally been more associated with the body and hence positioned as irrational. As Sarah E. Johnson explains: ‘As allegedly more subject to the body than men were, women possessed less reason and lacked control over their passions, determined in large part, of course, by the body’s humoral balance.’⁸

The mind-body dualism is also central to processes of racialization, as white⁹ Europeans have associated people of colour with the body and themselves with the rational mind. Aníbal Quijano asserts that

[w]ithout taking into account this new dualism, it is not possible to understand the Eurocentric elaboration of the ideas of “gender” and “race.” […] “Race”, for its part, is also a “natural” phenomenon, and some “races” are closer to “nature” than others and are therefore “inferior” to those which have managed to distance themselves as much as possible from the state of nature.¹⁰

Postcolonial theorist Stuart Hall compares race to a linguistic signifier, stating: ‘The body is a text. And we are all readers of it. And we go around, looking at this text, inspecting it like literary critics.’¹¹ Hall, influenced by Jacques Derrida, further argues that

signifiers gain their meaning, not because of what they contain in their essence, but in the shifting relations of difference, which they establish with other concepts and ideas in a signifying field. Their meaning, because it is relational, and not essential, can never be finally fixed, but is subject to the constant process of redefinition and appropriation.¹²

The idea of a body as text, or sign relies on notions of mastery. As Hall notes, race is not a question of biological and essentialist facts, but rather of power. For Nancy the lack of an external position from which to fully grasp the body and its relationality disrupt such dualist ideas of the signifying body, as the body in all its materiality, exteriority and otherness becomes the new focus.

The function of bodies as texts, the attribution of gendered and racialized meaning to bodies, is produced through language. As well as undermining the idea of the signifying body, Nancy equally disrupts the signifying function of language by viewing it too as a body. To emphasize its material effects in opposition to its signifying role he coined the term ‘exscription’:

[Exscription] detaches words from their senses, always again and again, abandoning them to their extension. A word, so long as it’s not absorbed without remainder into a sense, remains essentially extended between other words, stretching to touch them, through not merging with them: and that’s language as body.¹³

This materialist understanding of language also comes across in the collection gedanken zerren, where the poems ascribe words a physical form and weight, while also generating affective responses in readers through their experimental style and form.

Dündar shares Nancy’s focus on the unruly and disintegrated body. Just as the bodies depicted by Dündar are fragmented, so too is her experimental aesthetic, with its word-splitting governed by a strict poetic form, and its reduction of some words to letters — ‘und’ and ‘nicht’ are always rendered ‘u’ und ‘n’ respectively. The collection’s ambiguous, incomplete language leaves room for an understanding of the body that is ultimately not fully graspable. The poems of gedanken zerren are short and the characters remain only partially developed. Markers of identity (be they in terms of gender, race or ethnicity) are not always given, which means an image of the poetic persona slowly builds up through relations between the poems and ultimately remains incomplete, if indeed we are to view all the poems as concerning the same person. Dündar’s poetic persona is not operating from an omniscient standpoint. Instead, any sense of self is glimpsed in brief moments as poems begin in medias res and end abruptly. Similar to Nancy’s body, Dündar depicts the body, as an ‘event at the limit of sense, as an opening or spacing of discrete places’.¹⁴

Nancy’s call for a ‘pure literature of breaching bodies, accesses, excesses, orifices, pores and portals of all skins, scars, navels, blazon, pieces, and fields, body by body’¹⁵ is perhaps unachievable. Even though the dualism of the body as metaphor or symbol is rejected by Nancy, he hints at the special role of poetry in such a literature by referring to the tradition of the blazon in the above quotation, in which (usually a woman’s) physical attributes are described, often with metaphors provided for the various body parts. Dündar’s writing demonstrates that poetic language, including the blazon which she deploys herself in a pared back fashion, is particularly apt for the task of foregrounding the body’s unknowable materiality. Both the content of gedanken zerren and the collection’s experimental handling of language encourage the reader to rethink their position as subject from the perspective of our inherent interrelatedness which limits human sovereignty. While thematically the poems depict automatic reactions of the body, linguistically they seek to disrupt the readers’ automatic responses when it comes to interpreting them, opening up a space for the unexpected and the new. Dündar’s poetry thus denies the reader a position of mastery and control.

Towards a ‘pure literature of breaching bodies’ in gedanken zerren

The opening poem of the collection’s first cycle, ‘etwas das n ankommt’, presents the reader straight away with a body that refuses to submit to the poetic persona’s will: ‘die / hand macht etwas das n a / nkommt bei mir das n ist w / as ich bin das n macht was / ich will’ (p. 7). Although there is an ‘ich’ here, it experiences a sense of alienation, caused by the discrepancy between the actions of her body and her intentions, and also between the images and words that the poetic persona associates with her body and the lived reality: ‘u wenn ich beginne mich s / elbst zu suchen zwischen bi / ldern zwischen den worten z / wischen den sätzen die me / in mund spricht wenn ich su / che nach zeichen von mir se / lbst wenn ich mich selbst n finde’ (p. 7). The poetic persona searches for herself between words and images, suggesting a relational sense of identity in the manner described by Hall, with this betweenness intensified by the split words and enjambement. However, this search ultimately fails as the body resists having an identity ascribed to it.

The subsequent poem, ‘auf meine teile setze ich’, equally resonates with Nancy’s idea of a disintegrated body made up of non-totalizable heterogenous zones, which the concept of identity papers over and gives coherence to: ‘ich setze / die identität auf meine teile / die an mir wachsen dami / t ich n leer sein muss damit / man mich als wer erkennt al / s wer sieht als etwas mit e / twas drin und dran versteht’ (p. 8). The poem also raises the question of recognition and how an identity allows a person to be understood (either by themselves or by others) based on prior knowledge, rather than acknowledging a person’s singularity and ability to change. How others perceive the poetic persona is therefore linked to an oversimplifying, performative sense of identity that is a prerequisite for this recognition. The focus on interiority through references to emptiness and having ‘etwas drin’ exists in tension with the collection’s overwhelming focus on the exterior(ity) of the body.

The question of the search for self also arises in the poem ‘wenn dein blut fließt’: the poem is set in a domestic scene, in which a woman or young girl (perhaps the poetic persona) is preparing food with her mother. The poem employs the second person singular which could suggest a disassociation on the part of the poetic persona, either because she is remembering an event from her youth or because she does not see herself reflected in her mother’s expectations. This poem foregrounds the limiting nature of the signifying body through the alienating effect of her mother’s normative ideas about her daughter’s femininity: ‘u die mutter ihre bilder auf d / ich legt deinen rücken deine / haare deine brüste […] zwei h / ände auf zwei augen liegen u / ihre scham bedecken u die m / utter ihre bilder auf dich legt / u dein blut fließt wenn du sc / hneidest’ (p. 46). The dissociation of the poetic persona is hinted at in the splitting of ‘dich’ to reveal the word ‘ich’: ‘d / ich’. The reference to ‘scham’ shackles femininity to modesty, while also referring euphemistically to the vulva covered by pubic hair, thereby highlighting a dualist understanding of the body as a sign encoded with moral significance and gendered expectations. The title ‘wenn dein blut fließt’ refers to puberty, menstruation and fertility, all of which lead to a change in the symbolic meaning of women’s bodies. It can also be read as the poetic persona cutting herself as the knife slips, another example of the body not performing what is required of it that here shows the poetic persona’s irritation. This bloody accident equally echoes the violence of the mother’s prescriptive view of her daughter’s identity, which is both further conveyed by the words cut in two by the line breaks — a stylistic choice that also serves to disturb the words’ signifying power.

As Diane Perpich argues, even though women’s liberation has focused on bodily autonomy as a key site in the struggle for equal rights and self-determination, Nancy’s relational concept of the body is nevertheless useful for a feminist understanding of the body: ‘While [the notion of bodily integrity] serves as an ideal in the face of various levels of violence against women, it simultaneously reinforces fantasies of women that underwrite the violence it seeks to address and redress’.¹⁶ The poems of gedanken zerren intervene in such debates. The poetic persona’s vulnerability and her lack of control over her body have gendered associations, and the feminine is arguably positively revaluated here. Dündar’s conceptualization of the body is, however, not fixed in a hierarchical binary structure with a limiting, essential identity, but rather relational and hence ever-changing. The bodies in Dündar’s poems are, therefore, full of possibilities, depending on the other bodies with which they come into contact. By contrast, traditionally masculine ideas of autonomy and mastery (coded as masculine even though it is the mother performing this function in the above poem) emerge as ultimately impossible here and can only be approximated through coercion and violence.

In the poem ‘wenn die schläge mich treffen’, this vulnerability again appears to be a source of anxiety, signalled here through the body’s automatic response mechanism: ‘ich will schläge abwenden d / ie kommen von diesem blick / von dir zu mir schläge die in / den körper kommen um dort / die identität zu verrücken die / machen mich adrenalin aussc / hütten’ (p. 18). This poem was also published in the book Haymatlos (2018), a collection of poems on the topic of experiences of racism.¹⁷ This invites an interpretation of the poem as a response to the violence of racialized ascriptions, if not the physical violence provoked by racism.¹⁸ Both the mother’s gendered ideas about propriety and modesty in ‘wenn dein blut fließt’ and the racist language hinted at in the above poem execute different forms of violence. ‘Oppressive language’, as Judith Butler affirms, ‘is not a substitute for the experience of violence. It enacts its own kind of violence.’¹⁹ Such violence can only function via a symbolic, culturally coded understanding of the body defined by a sovereign subject — interpretations of the body that are, as mentioned above, informed by the binary logic of the mind-body dualism.

This lack of autonomy and control over the body is apparent in the poem ‘herrschen müssen’, but here with a more liberatory tone. In the poem, the poetic persona — perhaps through frustration, perhaps as a rejection of conventional notions of autonomy and agency — expresses a will to embrace the body’s unruliness, rather than strive for mastery and control: ‘der arm zuckt dreimal zuckt / der arm hin u her u ich will / n befehle geben müssen an t / eile von meinem körper ich / will n herrschen müssen über / alle organe die man mir gab’ (p. 12). However, whereas this poem perhaps implies a mere reversal in the hierarchy of the mind-body dualism, as the poetic persona expresses a desire to give herself over to the body, the poems ‘fluktuation’ (p. 9), ‘schwindsucht eregend’ (p. 27), ‘die zu sprechen vergessen wurden’ (p. 38) and the titular poem ‘gedanken zerren’ (p. 55) deconstruct the mind-body dualism through an imagined perspective that zooms in on the molecular level of the brain. ‘fluktuation’, for example, reads:

fluktuation der moleküle zw

ischen den grenzen das ist d

ie zelle die sich bewegt die

sich macht zu meinem geda

nken die sich hinbiegt die si

ch zieht u die fließt durchz

ogen von flüssigem […] (p. 9)

The poetic persona’s thoughts and the matter of their brain are inseparable here, and the electric impulses leaping between synapses are reflected in the way the reader must continuously form connections between the split words. The deconstruction of the Cartesian mind-body dualism in gedanken zerren and its repeated insistence on the material, non-signifying body serve to disrupt processes of gendering and racialization that, in the history of Western modernity, have provided the theoretical basis for coercion and violence, while also feeding into the violence of representation in general.

The above poems, particularly through their form as momentary snapshots, imply that bodily awareness comes about through the repeated sensing of an outside force. Paradoxically, this is so even when this sensing comes from within our own body. This bodily awareness is constituted on an ‘intersubjective’ level, as we do not exist as individual and isolated bodies that subsequently enter into relationships with other bodies, but are constructed by these very relationships. As we have seen in ‘wenn dein blut fließt’ and ‘wenn die schläge mich treffen’, in some of Dündar’s poems this relational understanding of the body appears to bring with it an increased vulnerability and sense of danger. Relationality need not, however, always be understood as threatening, as it is also the prerequisite for new possibilities of transformation, connection and intimacy. As Hall outlines, bodies are defined by a relational network of ascriptions, rather than essential identities, and it is ultimately relational ideas of the self that also disrupt such ascriptions by undermining the sovereign notion of the subject upon which they rest.

The relational nature of the body comes across strongly in the poem ‘sie verhalten sich’, in which a close relationship and sense of familiarity between two people is depicted:

wie sich deine hände beweg

en in ihrem gewöhnlichen a

bstand ihn halten in aller str

enge so könnte einer denken

dem du unbekannt bist wen

n deine hände sich verhalten

in abständen zu gegenstände

n in ihrer umgebung zu räum

en in denen sie sich bewegen

zu menschen denen sie bege

gnen u in abständen berühren

sie als wir den raum betreten

als mein rufen nach dir eine

neigung bekommt als ich die

wärme deiner hand an mein

er wange spüre u du bewegst

deine hände in neuen abstä

nden zu mir u wir betreten u

nbekannte räume in denen m

eine stimme in neigungen zu

dir läuft (p. 15)

Here, the focus on small gestures creates a sense of how bodies relate to one another and so create spaces with new possibilities — in Nancy’s words, how they ‘touch one another, they renew one another’s spacing forever, they displace themselves, they address themselves (to) one another’.²⁰ That all the collection’s poems lack a clear beginning or end and employ repetition as a poetic device also serves to reinforce the idea of a process of coming into shared presence: instead of a subject who enters into relationships with other subjects, there is a relational body that only ever gains self-awareness through contact with an other. The above poem emphasizes sensation and touch, both in the warmth of the hand and in the reaction to the poetic persona’s voice. The title of the second cycle, ‘wenn ich mich dir antaste’, also foregrounds touch and the idea that ‘[t]o sense, we have to sense ourselves sensing’²¹ through its pronouns ‘mich dir’. The poem ‘ich trage küsse’ from this cycle reworks the conventional imagery of clichéd love poetry and kitsch pop songs, rewriting them for a relational understanding of the body. The repetition of ‘u’ throughout this poem is reminiscent of the ‘oohs’ in sentimental love songs: ‘ich trage küsse mit u in mir / die ich an dich u in dich l / egen will […] u wann du d / ort sein wirst under ste / rnen die zu dieser welt zu d / ir u mir gehören die leucht / en damit menschen küsse un / ter ihnen tauschen an auf u / ineinander legen’ (p. 29). By switching between ‘an’ and ‘in’, the poem conveys an open sense of the body, of bodies as ‘only their touching each other, the touch of their breaking down, and into, each other’.²² The bodies of the lovers are open, rather than closed in on themselves. The prepositions ‘auf’ and ‘an’ convey touch and exteriority, but ‘in’ also signals a porous sense of self.

By zooming in on such gestures, a materialist idea of communication is conveyed that emphasizes interrelated forces, rather than signification. This can be understood as a shift in emphasis from ‘intentionality’ to ‘intensity’.²³ As Nancy states: ‘Bodies cross paths, rub up and press against one another, embrace or collide with one another: they send each other all these signals, so many signals, addresses, notices, which no defined sense can exhaust. Bodies produce a sense beyond sense.’²⁴ This is a form of communication that reaches beyond linguistic and cultural differences and serves to highlight the way in which our bodies cannot help but respond to other bodies.²⁵ There is a ‘neigung’ that hints at our fundamental interrelatedness. This sense of interrelatedness is also given voice in the tender poem ‘meine hände kennen’:

meine hände kennen die rea

ktionen deines körpers wenn

ich dir durch die haare stre

iche wenn ich dein gesicht a

btaste erst die brauen halb

mondförmig mit meinem ze

igefinger deine wangen deine

nasenspitze deinen mund u

dein kinn u wenn ich dir ent

lang der brust streiche u dein

köper zu zittern beginnt u

wenn ich deinen wirbel entl

ang laufe mit den spitzen me

iner finger vom hals bis zur

lendenkuhlung u zurück u di

ch kizeln mache meine hä

nde kennen die reaktionen de

ines körpers die dich beweg

en machen (p. 30)

Similar to the poetic technique of the blazon, the parts of the beloved’s face and body are markers for a journey that allows the reader to move with the poetic persona down the body. The familiarity of the body’s automatic reactions to the poetic persona’s touch creates a profound sense of intimacy alongside the loss of autonomy. Moreover, the knowledge that is situated in the self’s hands de-centres the body and calls the mind-body dualism into question. The obscure term ‘lendenkuhlung’ functions paradoxically here to simultaneously conceal and draw attention to the beloved’s genitalia. By concealing the gender of the beloved, the word ‘lendenkuhlung’, unlike the previously mentioned euphemism ‘scham’, also strips it of sex as the most conventional identity marker. In so doing the poet foregrounds the erotic encounter itself and how the bodies, experienced as a collection of surfaces and zones, relate to and provoke reactions from one another.

In this emotionally charged poem (and in many others), the stylistic features and word choices generate affective responses in the readers, depending on their own positionality, and this in turn raises questions about the materiality of language and about language as body. According to Nancy, the bodies that we exist in relation to are not necessarily human: ‘My body exists against the fabric of its clothing, the vapors of the air it breathes, the brightness of the lights or the brushing of shadows.’²⁶ Indeed, as other poems in Dündar’s cycle suggest, even when we fail to get our point across and language as signification founders, communication still takes place on a corporeal level, and this is language as a body, as material force. In one poem, words fill the space of a room (p. 16). In another words ‘stolpern’, suggesting miscommunication, but a wrinkled forehead signals to the poetic persona what her interlocutor is thinking (p. 17). The title of the poem ‘die worte senken den blick’ also conveys how language generates a physical response beyond linguistic understanding, and the poem further develops this idea: ‘deine worte dringen von dir / zu mir u hemmen verkram / pfen irritieren den blick […] der hinaufscha / uen n kann der n machen k / ann das gesicht die haut err / ötet das herz schlägt’ (p. 19). This is not an autonomous subject in control of their body, but rather one whose actions are constrained and whose physical responses are determined by its affective relation to another body.

Beyond the content of the poems, which still involves the function of language as signification, the language of Dündar’s poetry itself equally points towards an understanding of language as a material force that can have an affective dimension which resists straightforward meaning-making. The poem ‘brennen uns’ (the first of the second cycle), for instance, exemplifies how exscription as the non-signifying dimension of language works: ‘u die sonne macht uns bre / nnen als der sand knirscht z / wischen unseren zähnen’ (p. 25). The setting is a beach on a hot day and the poetic persona’s experience of the sand is emphasized as the reader expects sand between her ‘zehen’ rather than her ‘zähnen’. This creates a jarring, physical response in the reader, which highlights the affective corollary of the materiality of language. In her essay ‘Die Sätze sind holprig für deine Ohren: ich pflücke mir’, published in Die Zeit in 2018, Dündar explains her relationship with language and multilingualism in corporeal terms, emphasizing the embodied experience of linguistic production and the material aspect of language: ‘ich kaue und kaue die worte zusammen. ich zermalme sie und verdrehe und mahle sie […] und die worte meiner sprachen liegen aufgelöst in mir. und ihre teile schwimmen in meinem kopf.’²⁷ Here, languages are transformed through literary use and are able to express something new: ‘die fiktion ist der raum, ohne regeln von außen. die regeln, die ich kenne und die du kennst, lösen sich auf in diesem raum, und es gibt neue sprachen und neue wesen, die aus der fantasie entspringen und meins werden und deins werden’.²⁸

Throughout gedanken zerren, the form and style of the poems accentuate both the expectation to have a cohesive, unified, readable identity on the one hand, and the disintegrated reality on the other. The repetition of words and sounds is a poetic device that gives the poems an aural cohesiveness. The column form and blanket non-capitalization also lend the poems a sense of visual unity. Further to this, the lack of punctuation and use of the lower case throughout makes each poem a snapshot of a moment with no identifiable beginning or end. In a similar vein, Nancy justified the unusual structure of one of his own lectures on the body as follows: ‘I don’t want to produce the effect of a closed or finite thing, because when we talk about the body we talk about something entirely opposed to the closed and finite […]: the body is the open.’²⁹ The brief moments in these poems often focus on minute gestures or movements, they imply that bodies are ‘thrown, not “subjected”, but just as hard, intense, inevitable, and singular as a subject’,³⁰ that is to say, they still occupy their own space even if they are not individuals in an absolute sense. Dündar’s employment of poetic devices such as word-splitting, lack of punctuation and use of letters to replace words intensifies the fragmentary character of the texts and draws attention to the material quality of the signifier on the page. This technique mirrors the conceptual shift away from the autonomous subject in that the position of words and how they are split is (seemingly) governed by the strict form and not the author. Although Dündar is responsible for choosing the form of the poems, it suggests a desire to abdicate autonomy and control, as in the poem ‘herrschen müssen’. These stylistic features equally affect the autonomy of the reader, as these same aesthetic features make us unsure as to where to put emphasis, where new sentences begin, or if ‘u’ and ‘n’ will continue on the next line or if they stand in for ‘und’ and ‘nicht’. Paradoxically, the poems are unified in their shared incoherence. During readings of her work, Dündar emphasizes the breaks and abbreviations in her delivery, embracing the fragmentary style of her writing.³¹ Just as bodies are relational, the poems emerge through a combination of authorship and the active production of the reader, with the potential for various different possibilities in terms of how they are read, understood and experienced.

Conclusion

The poems of gedanken zerren depart from common ideas of poetry, based on the interiority of a ‘lyrisches Ich’. In gedanken zerren it is difficult to speak of a ‘lyrisches Ich’, since any coherent sense of self is radically destabilized through the materiality of the body and its inherent relationality. The bodies in this collection refuse to serve as symbols or to conform to expectations; they appear as relational and hence are open to new transformative possibilities outside of hierarchical binaries of gender and race. As Hall argues: ‘Once you enter the politics of the end of the biological definition of race you are plunged headlong into the only world we have. The maelstrom of a continuously contingent guaranteed political argument, debate, and practice.’³² This point is equally valid for other essentialist forms of identity, and so gedanken zerren can be regarded as opening up a political space beyond identity politics.

For Nancy the idea of absolute individuality leads to group identities that are also closed in on themselves and regarded as absolute. Such fusional communities have an inherent potential for violence, as their purity and homogeneity must be preserved: ‘Immanence, communal fusion, contains no other logic than that of the suicide of the community governed by it.’³³ Through a relational understanding of the body and of the self, atomization is overcome and other connections can flourish without the need for sameness. Dündar’s poems point towards the possibility of such connections even in the absence of a shared language, as the bodies in her collection communicate through touch and signals, such as a blush, or a wrinkled forehead. The imperative to move beyond essentialist conceptualizations of identity causes Nancy to ask with some urgency: ‘How, then, are we to touch upon the body, rather than signify or make it signify?’³⁴ Dündar does just that by depicting relational, disintegrated bodies and by creating a creative space where affective, embodied responses become possible for her readers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joseph Twist

Joseph Twist is Assistant Professor in German Studies at University College Dublin. His research concerns the ways in which literature can transform our understanding of religion, the subject, and community. He is the author of Mystical Islam and Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary German Literature: Openness to Alterity (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018).

Notes

1 gedanken zerren was awarded the Alfred Müller Felsenburg Prize. Dündar has also won the Kelag Prize at the 42nd ‘Tage der deutschsprachigen Literatur’ and a fellowship at the Casa Baldi in 2021, amongst other prizes.

2 Özlem Özgül Dündar, gedanken zerren (Nettetal: Elif, 2018), p. 43. Subsequent references are given in the body of the text.

3 Jean-Luc Nancy, Ego Sum: Corpus, Anima, Fabula, trans. by Marie-Eve Morin (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), p. 12.

4 Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. by Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 155.

5 Ibid., p. 135.

6 Ibid., p. 128.

7 For a summary of Descartes’s thinking in this regard, see Gary Hatfield, ‘Animals’, in The Cambridge Descartes Lexicon, ed. by Lawrence Nolan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 19–26.

8 Sarah E. Johnson, Staging Women and the Soul-Body Dynamic in Early Modern England (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), p. 12. Other feminist thinkers who share this line of thought include new materialists, such as Karen Barad and Clare Colebrook. For a summary of such arguments in the context of Resistance Studies, see Evelina Johansson Wilén and Carl Wilén, ‘Resistance, Materiality and the Spectre of Cartesianiam: A Contribution to the Critique of Feminist New Materialism’, Journal of Resistance Studies, 2.4 (2018), 54–83.

9 My decision to write white in italics here is informed by the editorial decision made in Mythen, Masken und Subjekte, ‘um den Konstruktcharakter markieren zu können und diese Kategorie ganz bewusst von der Bedeutungsebene des Schwarzen Widerstandspotentials, das von Schwarzen und People of Color dieser Kategorie eingeschrieben worden ist, abzugrenzen’. Maureen Maisha Eggers et al., ‘Konzeptionelle Überlegungen’, in Mythen, Masken und Subjekte: Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland, ed. by Maureen Maisha Eggers, Grada Kilomba, Peggy Piesche and Susan Arndt (Münster: Unrast, 2020), pp. 11–13 (p. 13).

10 Aníbal Quijano, ‘Questioning “Race”’, Socialism and Democracy, 21.1 (2007), 45–53 (p. 53).

11 Stuart Hall, ‘Race, the Floating Signifier, Featuring Stuart Hall: Transcript’, Media Education Foundation (1997), p. 15 <https://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Stuart-Hall-Race-the-Floating-Signifier-Transcript.pdf> [accessed 7 November 2023].

12 Ibid., p. 6.

13 Nancy, Corpus, p. 71.

14 Ian James, The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 131.

15 Nancy, Corpus, p. 55.

16 Diane Perpich, ‘Corpus Meum: Disintegrating Bodies and the Ideal of Integrity’, Hypatia, 20.3 (2005), 75–91 (p. 88).

17 Haymatlos, ed. by Tamer Düzyol and Taudy Pathmananthan (Münster: edition assemblage, 2020).

18 Anti-racism forms a central part of Dündar’s writing. As mentioned above, her play türken, feuer centres around the experiences of the night of neo-Nazi arson attack in Solingen (1993). Her essay ‘Mein Name ist Türke’ deals with the experience of participating in a counter-demonstration against Legida (the Leipzig branch of Pegida, Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes): Özlem Özgül Dündar, ‘Mein Name ist Türke,’ Cope, 2021 <https://www.cope-mag.com/texte/oezlem-oezguel-duendar/index.html> [accessed 7 November 2023].

19 Judith Buttler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 9.

20 Nancy, Corpus, p. 19.

21 Ibid., p. 131.

22 Ibid., p. 37.

23 Ibid., p. 134.

24 Ibid., p. 153.

25 Margaret Littler traces a similar prelingual form of communication in Şenocak’s writing: Margaret Littler, ‘Cultural Memory and Identity Formation in the Berlin Republic’, in Contemporary German Fiction: Writing in the Berlin Republic, ed. by Stuart Taberner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 177–95 (p. 180).

26 Nancy, Corpus, p. 153.

27 Özlem Özgül Dündar, ‘Die Sätze sind holprig für deine Ohren: ich pflücke mir’, Die Zeit, 8 August 2018 <https://www.zeit.de/kultur/literatur/2018-08/rassismus-literaturbetrieb-metwo-diskriminierung-autoren-integration/komplettansicht> [accessed 7 November 2023].

28 Ibid.

29 Nancy, Corpus, p. 122.

30 Ibid., p. 13.

31 Dündar gave a remote reading at UCD in 2020. For a recording of Dündar reading from gedanken zerren at another event, see ausland berlin, ‘Lyriklesung: Özlem Özgül Dündar — im Gespräch mit Christian Uetz | Stimmen:Lektüren #2’, YouTube, 12 January 2023 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwiwMTWeZe8> [accessed 7 November 2023].

32 Hall, ‘Race, the Floating Signifier, Featuring Stuart Hall’, p. 17.

33 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. by Peter Conner, trans. by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University and Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 12.

34 Nancy, Corpus, p. 9.