Neo-Despotism as Anti-Despotism

I treat despotism as a virtual concept. Thus it is necessary to expose its actualizations even when it appears as its opposite, refusing to recognize itself as despotism. I define despotism initially as arbitrary rule, in terms of a monstrous transgression of the law. But since the monster is grounded in its very formlessness, it cannot be demonstrated. However, one can always try to de-monstrate it through disagreements. In doing this, I deal with despotism not as a solipsistic undertaking but as part of a constellation that always already contains two other elements: economy and voluntary servitude. I give three different – ancient, early modern and late modern – accounts of this nexus, demonstrating how despotism continuously takes on new appearances. I conclude, in a counter-classical prism, how the classical nexus has evolved in modernity while the focus gradually shifted towards another triangulation: neo-despotism, use and dissent

The Despotic Imperative:From Hiero to The Circle

The article thematizes the actuality of despotism through a double reading of Xenophon’s Hiero and Dave Eggers’s The Circle. A key text on despotism, Hiero is interesting to reconsider in a contemporary context because of its explicit focus on the economic element in the nexus of despotism, economy and voluntary servitude. Discussion this, the article turns to The Circle, a dystopic novel from 2013, which elaborates on how the attempt at creating a transparent society results in the perversion of democracy to the point where a despotism fuelled by economization and voluntary servitude becomes immediately evident. Notwithstanding the significant differences between the two understandings of despotism that proliferate in Hiero and The Circle, their shared focus on the nexus of despotism, economy and voluntary servitude testifies to an interesting case of convergence in divergence. Offering an account of this continuity, the article reflects upon the nexus of despotism, economy and voluntary servitude itself, arguing, to end with, that it should be re-thought in a new way today. The concept of use is suggested as a key concept in this context

'Life is a state of Mind' - Fiction, Society and Trump

The article undertakes an allegorical double reading of Being There and Trump as instances of what we call socio-fiction. Crucially in this respect, reality and fiction are not two opposed realms. The two realms always interact in subtle ways, which is why cinema can be a resource for diagnostic social analysis. We first articulate a general commentary on the relationship between cinema and society, introducing the concept of ‘socio-fiction’. Secondly, we analyse Peter Sellers’ Being There, an interesting film focused on the relationship between reality and fiction. In this analysis, we elaborate on different ways of approaching fiction in a sociological prism. And finally, we discuss Trump as a fallout effect of Being There. After all, a film is not just an image of a reality, a shadow or appearance of a social fact; sometimes the reality itself seems to have become an appearance of an appearance, a shadow of a shadow

From Melling’s Harem to Eviner’s Harem:displacement as parrhesia

Antoine-Ignace Melling's engraving Inside the Harem of the Sultan (c 1810) depicts women's everyday life and their relationships, rituals and spatial practices in the Ottoman harem. Two centuries later, İnci Eviner, one of the leading contemporary artists internationally acclaimed for her solo and group exhibitions as well as for her contribution to numerous biennials, animates the same anonymous women in her video Harem (2009) by displacing the spatio-temporal nexus of Melling's work and exposes, in the manner of a visual parrhesia, the desires, the revolting gestures and the violence inherent in the harem. To discuss the nature of this displacement, we open with a few initial remarks on Melling's Harem. Then we focus on Eviner's Harem, elaborating on the forms of subjectivity and spatiality it evokes. In this discussion we pay special attention to the role of becoming, sacrifice, resurrection and the virtual in Eviner's work. The power relation specific to the harem, that of between the despot and the female slave, plays a pivotal role in this context. To end with, we turn to another significant work by Eviner, The Parliament, which, rather unexpectedly, relates the subjective and spatial nexus of the Oriental harem to Western politics

Arendt's political theology:from political religion to profanation

The article elaborates on Arendt’s take on the religious and the political and on how they interact and merge in modernity, especially in totalitarianism. We start with framing the three different understandings of religion in Arendt: first, a classic understanding of religion, which is foreign to the logic of the political; second, a secularized political religion; and third, a weak messianism. Both the classic understanding of religion and the political religion deny human freedom in Arendt’s sense. Her transcendent alternative to them both is the notion of the democratic political community: the Republic. Then we turn to Arendt’s political theology, illuminating why interrogating Nazism is central to examine the relationship between politics and religion in modernity. This is followed by a discussion of Nazism as a type of political religion. We focus here on totalitarianism, both as an idea and actual institution. We conclude with an assessment of the role of profanation in Arendt’s work and its significance vis-à-vis the contemporary ‘return of religion’ as well as totalitarian tendencies which call for new forms of voluntary servitude

The Collector's World

The article discusses the figure of the collector. We start with positioning the collector in relation to a lack, emphasizing that collecting is not about aesthetic beauty, pleasure or even perfectness, but primarily about filling a gap. The collection itself is merely a by-product of the desire to collect. Discussing how this desire is socially mediated, we move on to contextualizing the collector in relation to the distinction between the useful and the useless. We stress, in this context, that collecting is an inoperative praxis. This is followed by a discussion of the collector’s psychopathology in terms of affects and interpassivity. Finally, we turn to the history of the collector and to collecting as a field in sociological terms, and end with articulating a typology of the collector

The war against terror, neo-medievalism, and the Egyptian Revolution

The key image of thought in the war against terror is 'clash', of civilizations and of religions. Islamic fundamentalism becomes, in this context, a synonym for chiliastic fanaticism. To problematize this framework, the article contrasts the contemporary katechontic take on the apocalypse, which legitimizes the war on terror, with Taubes's revolutionary eschatology, which seeks a total deligitimization of power. Locating Islamic fundamentalism in relation to the apocalyptic tradition in this way provides an alternative to the standard critiques of Islamic terrorism. Initially I frame the discussion of the apocalyptic within the dialectic between two forms of nihilism, radical and passive nihilism, linking them to terrorism and post-politics. Then I move towards the discussion of contemporary politics and re-visit the idea of communism in the context of the recent Egyptian Revolution. The pivot around which this double move is undertaken and the terms of the discussion are changed is the concept of event