What was Foucault’s main concern? Why did he deal so much with power? Did he try to provide a definition of power or to explain the nature of power?
I think, Foucault never began his inquiry with the question concerning what the power is. Rather, he preferred to begin with the questions of “how” and “what happens” namely: How is power exercised? and What happens when individuals exert power over others? He did this, in order to let us take a critical distance towards the very existence or the metaphysics or the ontology of power. In the text ‘Power and Subject’ he writes that, “to begin the analysis with a ‘how’ is to introduce the suspicion that power as such does not exist.” Only such a critical approach can make visible how and through which mechanisms power operates, without reconstituting power as a metaphysical and essential category. Foucault’s concern, and also what is revolutionary in his inquiry, is the making visible of power relations. This approach lets how individuals are produced as subjects within power relations become visible as well. Therefore, Foucault’s analysis, which reaches towards the very roots of power relations, can let us face the contingency of claims about objectivity and rationality of truth regimes; of normalizing discourses and of mechanisms which are producing the self. Such an inquiry allows us to take a critical position against effects of power linked with knowledge. Thus, it is this inquiry which provides us the means to struggle against the privileged and uncontrolled knowledge of expertise and against any forms of subjection.
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The Destruction and Reconstruction of Hope

In order to watch a video about this event on youtube please click the link below
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y0TWmPj_UI

On November 9, 2005, a stranger approached the ‘Umut’ (which means ‘Hope’) Bookstore in Semdinli, a small town in southeastern Turkey populated mostly by Kurds. He took out two grenades from his pockets, threw them on the floor and fled. Seconds later, the little shop exploded. Seferi Yilmaz, the shop’s owner, -a former Kurdish rebel and political prisoner-, and the apparent target of the attack, saw the stranger and the bombs before the explosion and run after the suspect as the explosion took the life of his neighbor Mehmet Zahir Korkmaz. Following the bombing of the bookstore, townspeople, alerted by Seferi Yilmaz, witnessed that the suspect got into a car which was escaping from the place of incident. People ran after it and caught the car with the perpetrators in it. The suspect got frightened, opened the back of the car, took out a gun, and shouted: “I am a security personal, don’t touch me!” (Report of the Turkish Parliament’s Human Rights Commission on Semdinli Incident - Statements of the witnesses 2005 : 5)
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Introduction
What is the actual relation between Orientalism and the people who live in the lands which are designated as the ‘Orient’? How do people who are the targets of Orientalism perceive, negotiate, manage and respond to the Orientalist discourse? How is the West imagined by these people? In what ways does this imagination of the West affect the formation of their subjectivities? In other words, what are the ways in which the distinction or the border between the images of the West and the East are produced and managed as power-knowledge, which subjects the subjectivities? These are the questions that this paper tries to investigate.
It is Edward Said, who argues in his groundbreaking work Orientalism that “the Orient is neither an inert fact of nature nor essentially an idea” (Said 2003: 5). On the contrary, Orientalism creates the European identity as against all ‘those’ non-Europeans, by drawing a strict boundary between East and West. In response to this Orientalism, at the end of his book Said advocates putting aside the Orientalist creation of the East-West distinction in order to put an end to the essentialist antagonism between East and the West. However, despite his crucial contribution to the elaboration of the problem, Gil Eyal argues, Said doesn’t consider any hybrid entity between the East and the West and thereby ignores the fact that Orientalism is also a project of producing and managing boundaries and hybrids, namely the people in-between (Eyal 2006: 6-7). In Eyal’s words, Said’s “approach ignores the reality of the boundary itself. It basically requires us to think the boundary as a nonentity, a ‘fine line’ without any width to it…” (Eyal 2006: 7). In this sense, one has to reconsider the crucial role of the production and management of the hybrids and boundaries in the production of identities.
Maybe Said’s neglect of a discussion concerning the Ottoman Empire and contemporary Turkey–the country which is often defined as ‘a bridge’ between the East and the West, considered as neither developed nor underdeveloped, and regarded neither a ‘true’ colonizer nor a ‘true’ colony–depends also on the fact that he ignores the reality of boundaries and hybrids.
Regarding this gap in post-colonial theory, it would be complementary to trace the roots of the Occidentalist discourse in the Turkish context, which implies knowledge about the image or the fantasy of the West as both an idealized and a frustrated figure. The contemporary Turkish identity appears as the ‘effect’ of the Occidentalist discourse. In this sense, Occidentalism is the constant creation and management of the border between the East and the West and the mechanism of the reproduction and purification of the hybrid entities which emerge as the effects of this border regime. Whereas one can not separate knowledge and power, Occidentalist discourse, which produces a regime of truth regarding the images of the West, also marks a regime of power. The Occidentalist discourse began to be institutionalized as the motive of modernization since the Tanzimat reforms in Ottoman Empire in late 19th century and became the dominant discourse in the formation of the Turkish Republic and the new Turkish national identity. In this historical framework the hegemonic interventions of the Turkish state, bureaucrats, intellectuals, academicians, journalists and various groups of experts, through the boundary management of dividing spheres, regions, and people along the axis of East and West, becomes possible and justifiable with a constant reference to an imagined West as an ideal model. Therefore, throughout this paper I will to try to investigate the ways in which Occidentalism is exercised, institutionalized and diffused as one of the dominant discourses of the Turkish modernization.
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