Reincorporative trajectories: The threshold as emblem in Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness and Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories of a City

Abstract

This article approaches the problematic of liminality and liminal states in postcolonialist critique through Alain Badiou’s recent excursus on the “emblem” and its attendant logic of emblemization. The article creates an analogy between the postcolonialist conceptualization of the liminal and Badiou’s argument that the “democratic namesake” is becoming emblemized today within the global circuit of an affluent few as a figurative proxy, co-opted and artificially instituted as the condition of “everyone” – what Badiou terms the tout le monde. The article goes on to suggest that the conceptualization as well as the terminology of the liminal have experienced similar processes of emblemization when deployed in postcolonialist debates, often coming to function as rhetorical proxies for the representation of those conditions of emergency, contingency and subalternity that, when debated or “democratized” under the sign of the liminal, come to be channelled through a recognizable and palatable rhetoric that renders them sensible for the consumption of liberal metropolitan readerships. As it interrogates this dynamic, the article reads the life-narratives of Orhan Pamuk and Amos Oz to suggest that the discursive thresholds of postcoloniality continue to evince today the dwellings of a “memorial-historical dialectic” – a consciousness that cannot cease to process the “unrequitability” of overwhelming historical events, one that is itself the product, the cultural figuration and the lasting consequence of devastating acts of domination.

Keywords:

• emblemization
• liminality
• hüzün
• discursive threshold
• memorial-historical dialectic

Notes

1. I first presented this article as a paper at the ‘Under Construction – Gateways and Walls’ EACLALS (European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies) Triennial Conference held at Bogazici University, Istanbul, in April 2011.

2. Iain Chambers (2008), in his incisive Mediterranean Crossings, discusses what he terms “the archive of the abject”.

3. Badiou emphatically argues that “What defines the homo democraticus trained into this anarchy is that he or she as subject reflects the substitutability of everything for everything else” (2009, 11), hence the necessary “interexchangeability” of his object, as observed by Badiou (11).

4. A simple electronic search for the entry “liminal*” in the Modern Language Association’s MLA International Bibliography will return thousands of hits, many of them subscribing to the broad rubric of postcolonial scholarship.

5. In this regard, Raka Shome and Radha S. Hedge (2002, 249) make a strong argument on postcolonial scholarship and its position vis-à-vis the structures of conservatism.