The research for this book began, informally, on a late summer night in 2001, when I encountered the funeral march of a death faster in a shantytown of Istanbul, a death faster who had passed away only a few hours earlier and whose news had reached me through a strange series of inexplicable contingencies; a chance encounter, a spontaneous get-together, a birthday celebration, a phone call received by one of the people at that celebration from the acquaintance of an acquaintance, an announcement of the situation, a brief pause, an impulsive decision, a fast drive, and there I was, in the neighborhood where a growing crowd of people came together in front of the dimly lit patio of a shabby, unpainted house from which the lifeless body of a young woman would shortly be taken.
The silent grief of the crowd gathering before the “resistance house,” as its occupants named it, was interrupted by the greetings of newcomers, whispers among those organizing the funeral march, and the opening and closing of the front door, in the two small and simple rooms behind which several others on the fast unto death were awaiting their turns to die. The crowd got bigger as journalists, artists, writers, and university students trickled into the neighborhood. It was not long after my arrival that a few people brought out long sticks with edges wrapped in rags and turned them into torches with slowly growing flames. Their light soon fell upon the dead body of a woman held on a stretcher and carried on the shoulders of the crowd. She looked young, beautiful, and pale, emaciated and frail, as she lay amidst a sea of red carnations, with a red headband around her forehead. The crowd, with anger, hope, and sorrow almost tangible, held up a banner that celebrated her immortality and declared her a “revolutionary martyr.”
The sight of this march meandering in the neighborhood, the torches that broke apart the dark night sky, the slogans and hymns of the crowd, and the dead body of the death faster irretrievably etched that night in my memory and interpellated me to the work that today culminates in this book. Throughout that summer, I regularly visited the “resistance houses” in various shantytown neighborhoods, the few and fast disappearing enclaves of the extraparliamentary left in the city, in order to get to know these individuals and to understand why they were participants of a fast unto death. These early encounters left me thoroughly perplexed by what I observed and learned: how these individuals, with shrunken bodies and sullen faces, managed their own self-starvation, how they arrived at the edge of death and looked at it squarely, how they remained hopeful and resolute, unwavering in their commitment and certain of the imminent victory of their cause. With pronounced cheekbones and shiny eyes, they nurtured their convictions while they starved their bodies in a world that was oblivious to their story. I was fascinated and repelled at the same time, and felt both with such intensity that I could not but pursue this inquiry.
Most of those individuals I met that summer are long dead. They have become “martyrs” of the revolutionary community, immortalized by their sacrificial acts, especially for those who revere their memory and seek to follow in their footsteps. Many others that I met over the course of my official research period three years later, individuals who were participants in the death fast struggle but had quit or had been made to quit the fast, survive as veterans. Some of these individuals have suffered severe corporeal and emotional damages from long durations of starvation and, at times, its improper, nonconsensual, and highly controversial, medically administered termination. Others—fewer to be sure—remain committed to the revolutionary cause despite the damages, losses, and defeats they have individually and collectively suffered. Regardless of how one may evaluate their actions, their political cause and convictions, their tactics and strategies, the corporeal and self-destructive techniques of their struggle, all of which present immense theoretical and political problems that this book sets itself the goal to tackle, one cannot but be silenced and humbled before the depth of their dedication, their determination, strength, and courage as individuals. This book takes its inspiration from their commitment to live and their readiness to die for their convictions.
In a political present dominated by values of self-interest, instrumental calculation, well-being, and security, a present in which absolute dedication, heroism, and self-sacrifice have little currency, these individuals appear curiously archaic or dangerously prefigurative of a different politics. But the book’s purpose is neither to condemn nor to condone these individuals. The purpose of the book, rather, is to theorize their agency, its aspirations, contradictions, and implications by engaging with them critically. The book therefore takes inspiration from their example not necessarily as a model to be emulated or vilified but, rather, as suggestive of a possibility, an opening, an alternative path of envisioning politics beyond its present form, a politics animated by the desire for justice and insistent in its urgent call to bring it into being. The book is motivated to understand what is gripping in this form of radical politics, what are the subversive and emancipatory potentialities entailed by it, and what are its shortcomings, reversals, and failings.
This is why the greater part of the analysis in the book is based on ethnographic and archival research carried out in Turkey. The research brings together multiple accounts of the same series of events in the form of narrations and practices, explanations and justifications from a variety of actors involved in the death fast struggle in different capacities: former participants of the hunger strike and fast unto death, their families and relatives, human rights defenders, intellectuals, artists, doctors, lawyers, state officials, prominent politicians, and members of parliament. The contextual immersion, observation, and first-hand interactions with the participants of the death fast struggle grant us access to highly personal, differentiated, involved narratives, which complicate the conventional approach to human weapons that simply folds them into a fear-mongering discourse of national security and terrorism. Working through the voices of these actors and their supporters conveys the rich and paradoxical complexities of their situation and traces the trajectory of the death fast in a way that appreciates the internally fraught, multilayered, vivid, and distinctive features of the movement. But the voices of those at or near the helm of the state also show how the participants of the death fast struggle and their actions were perceived. Their presence in this book offers us access to the reception of the struggle from within dominant narratives of power, documenting how it was politically discussed and judged and how its goals, arguments, demands, and practices were interpreted as security threats and emplaced within a discourse on terror, bringing into light the articulation of the historical, structural, ideological, and pragmatic reasons for the choice of strategies that were deployed by the state to address the struggle. In short, the juxtaposition of these perspectives enables us to comprehend the complexities and stakes of the death fast struggle from opposing viewpoints. The resulting analysis troubles an easy judgment, I think, and thereby aspires to keep open a space in which critical theory can operate.
Approximately one hundred in-depth interviews constitute the main body of documentation from whose transcription and translation most of the direct quotations in this book are derived. These interviews were conducted in full confidentiality during June 2004–August 2005 in Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey. I have purposefully abstained from conducting interviews in prison or while an interviewee was on hunger strike. I have adopted the method of coding the interviews by the dates on which they were carried out in order to protect the identity of my interlocutors. For the same reason, I have not indicated their organizational or institutional affiliations or sympathies. Throughout this endeavor, I have attempted to reflect the voices of the participants of the death fast struggle and their supporters as well as their opponents and critics as truthfully as possible. Any factual errors, oversights, or gaps that may have been further exacerbated by the difficulty of accessing individuals and archives, inadvertent mistakes in transcription, and problems of translation, of course, remain mine alone.
This project was long in the making and it would not have possible to bring it to fruition if it were not for the generous support of several institutions. At its inception at Cornell University, the project received institutional and financial support that enabled the conducting of extended fieldwork and provided time for composition. The ethnographic component of this project was carried out with the support of the Luigi Einaudi Fellowship awarded by the Institute for European Studies at Cornell University. The Committee of Muslim Societies and the Graduate School at Cornell University provided travel funding which enabled further trips to the field and the presentation of the work to diverse audiences. The Mellon Fellowship allowed the writing up of the early incarnation of this project as a doctoral dissertation. The second home for this project was the New School. The project benefited from annual research funds that made possible recurrent trips to the field for followup interviews and further research. The research leave supported by the New School gave the necessary time to revise the manuscript for publication. Finally, Kadir Has University in Istanbul, Turkey provided collegial conditions of study that facilitated the final revisions.
My project benefited immeasurably from the support of outstanding teachers and mentors. Susan Buck-Morss and Nancy Fraser were the two exceptional women without whose inspiration, critique, guidance, and encouragement the project would have long been abandoned. Richard J. Bernstein and Richard F. Bensel were terrific mentors. Wendy Lochner benevolently took on the project as editor. Amy R. Allen graciously lent her support to the project at a very critical juncture. To all of them I am deeply indebted.
Every project has its own difficulties, but the amount of death and destruction that infused every detail of this one became a heavy burden for me to bear, emotionally and intellectually. Without the support and encouragement of teachers, colleagues, students, and friends, I would have not been able to carry this project through. At Cornell I was fortunate to learn from the scholarship of Isaac Kramnick, Jason Frank, Geoffrey C. W. Waite, Peter U. Hohendahl, Anna Marie Smith, Diane Rubenstein, Natalie Melas, Mary Katzenstein, and Barry Maxwell. I am also deeply grateful to the camaraderie and intellectual fellowship of Ute Tellmann, Leila M. Ibrahim, Katherine Gordy, Shannon Marriotti, Megan Thomas, and Israel Waismel-Manor, all of whom contributed to the early stages of this project. At Boğaziçi University I was fortunate to have been the student of Yeşim Arat and Taha Parla, who became crucial interlocutors for this project while I was conducting my fieldwork. At the New School I benefited from having brilliant interlocutors who were also my most challenging critics: Andreas Kalyvas, Victoria Hattam, Andrew Arato, Eli Zaretsky, Ross Poole, Dmitri Nikulin, Oz Frankel, Jeremy Varon, Orit Halpern, Cinzia Arruzza, Miriam Ticktin, Rafi Youatt, Paul Kottman, and Inessa Medzhibovskaya. I thank them all. My graduate students at the New School were crucial for the development of this project to its current form. I am grateful for their critical engagement, inspiration, and provocations. It is my pleasure to thank Pavlina Majorosova, Peter Galambos, Scott Ritner, and especially Jordanco Jovanovski for research assistance related to this project. My book greatly benefited from the discerning eye of Susan Pensak at Columbia University Press. I doubt that this project could have been completed if it were not for the friendship of Merve Mısırlı, Michael F. Gasper, Yektan Türkyılmaz, Meltem Sancar, Jonathan Phillips, and Seda Altuğ.
This work would not have been possible without the humbling generosity of all the research participants whose names I cannot recite for reasons of confidentiality. My debt to those remarkable individuals, who have opened their homes and hearts to me, shown me enormous hospitality, and entrusted me their memories, experiences, ideas, views, emotions, and dreams, is immense. During my fieldwork I benefited from the help of individuals and institutions, which offered documents, access to archives, contacts, and ideas. Special thanks to Oral Çalışlar and Yücel Sayman for granting me access to their private collections. I would like to mention the collaborative efforts of the following institutions: the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, Human Rights Association, Istanbul Bar Association, Contemporary Lawyers’ Association, and the Architects’ and Engineers’ Chambers Association of Turkey. Many other organizations, ranging from prisoner rights associations to independent law bureaus, from newspapers and journals to cultural centers, helped me locate materials difficult to find, individuals difficult to reach, stories difficult to forget. To all I extend my sincere thanks.
It is to my loved ones that I owe the most. They have supported me, unconditionally and in so many ways, throughout the vicissitudes of this project, as well as before and beyond. This book could not have been written without Mediha Sangar, who passed away in 1993, having taught me, long before I encountered Plato, that only an examined life is worth living and that death is not an end. It is my hope that my work lives up to her memory. Massimiliano Tomba brightened even my darkest days with his love. Without my siblings, Berna Bargu and Arda Dermanlı, my life would have been impoverished of joy. I dedicate this book, with love and respect, to my parents, Gülçin and Simav Bargu. I am forever grateful to them for all they have given me and for being my source of inspiration in the quest for dignity, equality, and justice.