Performing Academia in Public Space in Turkey

Abstract

In ‘Performing Academia in Public Space in Turkey’, Özgül Akıncı writes about embodying a state of crisis in Turkey through contemplating on her own involvement in a series of, what she calls, public performances. When 1128 academics, researchers and doctoral students signed a petition in 2016, protesting the surge of violence and calling for peace, they were met with outstanding consequences. This paper reflects on some performative moments that occurred at the border zone of some sort, one is between the inside and outside of the prison, the other is between national borders. The act of solidarity among petitioners, which she reads as political performance, showed itself repeatedly on the margins of waiting, being marked as an insider or an outsider.

Notes

1 The Academics for Peace petition can be found at the official website

2 The ongoing witch-hunt now took a strange turn in the name of purging coup supporters from public services and bureaucracy. Any dissent is seen as treason.

3 Yet, it is important to note that there are signatories who, for various reasons, withdrew their signatures after the backlash.

4 Meral Camcı and others were released from the prison after thirty-seven days.

5 For information on an association that works for the rights of prisoners in Turkey, see see http://www.tcps.org.tr/

6 For Bataille, death reveals the human subject's animal side, which he refers to moreover as the subject's ‘natural being’. ‘For man to reveal himself in the end, he has to die, but he will have to do so while alive – by looking at himself ceasing to exist,’ he adds. In other words, the human subject has to be fully alive at the very moment of dying, to be aware of his or her death, to live with the impression of actually dying. Death itself must become awareness of the self at the very time that it does away with the conscious being. ‘In a sense, this is what happens (what at least is on the point of taking place, or what takes place in an elusive, fugitive manner), by means of a subterfuge in the sacrifice. In the sacrifice, the sacrificed identifies himself with the animal on the point of death. Thus he dies seeing himself die, and even, in some sense, through his own will, at one with the weapon of sacrifice. But this is play!’ And for Bataille, play is more or less the means by which the human subject ‘voluntarily tricks himself’ (Mbembe 2003: 38 cited in Bataille1970: 336).