by Saul Newman

Max Stirner’s impact on contemporary political theory is often neglected. However in Stirner’s political thinking there can be found a surprising convergence with poststructuralist theory, particularly with regard to the function of power. Andrew Koch, for instance, sees Stirner as a thinker who transcends the Hegelian tradition he is usually placed in, arguing that his work is a precursor poststructuralist ideas about the foundations of knowledge and truth (Koch 1997). Koch argues that Stirner’s individualistic challenge to the philosophical bases of the State goes beyond the limits of traditional Western philosophy, presenting a challenge to its transcendentalist epistemology. In light of this connection established by Koch between Stirner and poststructuralist epistemology, I shall look at Stirner’s convergence with a certain poststructuralist thinker, Gilles Deleuze, on the question of the State and political power. There are many important parallels between these two thinkers, and they may be viewed, in different ways, as anti-State, anti-authoritarian philosophers. I want to show the way in which Stirner’s critique of the State anticipates Deleuze’s poststructuralist rejection of State thought, and more importantly, the ways in which their anti-essentialist, post-humanist anarchism transcends and, thus, reflects upon, the limits of classical anarchism. The paper looks at the links between human essence, desire and power that form the bases of State authority. So while Koch focuses on Stirner’s rejection of the epistemological foundations of the State, the emphasis of this paper is on Stirner’s radical ontology – his unmasking of the subtle connections between humanism, desire and power. I will also argue that this critique of humanist power that both Stirner and Deleuze are engaged in can provide us with contemporary strategies of resistance to State domination.
It must be understood, however, that while there are important similarities between Stirner and Deleuze, there are also many differences, and, in many ways, it may seem an unusual approach to bring these two thinkers together. For instance, Stirner was, along with Marx, one of the Young Hegelians, whose work emerged as a supremely individualistic critique of German Idealism, particularly of the Feuerbachian and Hegelian kind. Deleuze, on the other hand, was a twentieth century philosopher who, along with Foucault and Derrida, is regarded as one of the chief ‘poststructuralist’ thinkers. While Deleuze’s work can also be seen as an attack on Hegelianism, it follows different and more diverse paths, from politics and psychoanalysis, to literature and film theory. Stirner is not generally regarded as a ‘poststructuralist’, and, apart from Koch’s groundbreaking article (Koch 1997) and Derrida’s work on Marx (Derrida 1994), he has received virtually no attention in the light of contemporary theory. However, and this is perhaps the problem with labels like ‘poststructuralism’, there are several crucial planes of convergence between these two thinkers – particularly in their critique of political domination and authority - that one can tease out, and which would be denied if one stuck to such labels. It is precisely in this rejection of the tyranny of ‘labels’, essential identities, abstractions and ‘fixed ideas’ - this attack on authoritarian concepts which limit thought - that Stirner and Deleuze achieve some sort of common ground. This is not to ignore the differences between them, but on the contrary, to show how these differences to resonate together in unpredictable and contingent ways to form, in Deleuze’s words, ‘planes of consistency’ from which new political concepts can be formed.
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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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Introduction
As Judith Butler suggests, it is through repetition of norms that worlds materialize, and that ‘boundary, fixity and surface’ are produced. (Butler, 1993: 9) Throughout this essay I will try to search how this boundaries, fixities and surfaces are produced through the repetition of emotions, emotional discourses and practices. I will especially look at the production process, perception and politics of fear. As a fact I try to compare the discourses and practices of the American and Turkish governments against the so-called terrorist acts. Therefore, I want to show that the politics of fear is not unique to US. On the contrary the detention of civil rights in the advantage of the expansion of the governmental interventions to the citizen’s everyday life is a new global trend for most of the governments around the world. At that point, Turkey is not an exception. The discourse produced after the events in Şemdinli, Diyarbakır and Hakkari are the last instances of such a politics of fear. Nowadays the amendment to the Terrorism Act in Turkey, which is inspired very much by its counterparts in US and UK, is debated, discussed and criticized (look at http://www.tmykarsiti.org/) As we see, in our contemporary world the experiencing and processing of fear is diffused and repeated dramatically.
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Simon Tormey
April 2006

“To sleep perchance to dream, ay there’s the rub” (Hamlet)

I close my eyes and I dream of ‘revolution’. What do I see? The world turns black and white, though perhaps tinged with sepia. I see a white male, balding with a goatee beard haranguing an audience infused with enthusiasm for his message of class struggle, heroic deeds, new and optimistic visions of machines and men working in perfect harmony – a pain-free, alienation-free future. This world is an absolute or complete break from the present. It is a world where the pain and fear of our world, the hunger, the agony has disappeared. Those listening to the bald man try to imagine a world that is so radically different from the one they are in that when they think of how they are going to get there they describe this process as a ‘revolution’. Revolution is not reform – how could it be when what they want is so radically different to the world that exists? NO, it must be a revolution – a fast-spinning vortex of energy, desire, solidarity. They see some pain, but not as much as staying where they are. Some shots are fired, screams, guns, bombs, firing squads. The dream turns black.

I wake up. Did I dream all of this? Yes, I must have done. It must be a dream because it is no longer ‘real’ in some meaningful respect –or it must not be real in the part of the world I inhabit. In this world, my world, those things that we thought of as components of the revolutionary dream seem to have shrivelled to the point of irrelevance. Modernist dreams of impressive new world orders have died in my world, withered on the vine of disappointments, despondency, dictatorships. As Lyotard puts it, we are no longer ‘believers’ in revolution. We have become Pagans – we live for today, for the corporeal, the immediate, the sensual, the personal.

And yet (contra Lyotard) we are angry, and getting angrier – at war, at imperialism, at poverty, at environmental degradation, at waste, at oppression, at the abuse of our fellow men and women. History has not come to an end. We still care; but we do not care for ‘revolution’. ‘We scream’, as John Holloway aptly puts it, but where do the resources to turn the scream into the kind of action that will relieve our agony come from? How do we turn the scream into something that overturns that which makes us scream? This is the question of ‘revolution’ today.
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“The most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the present time and of what we are”
—Michel Foucault, in ‘Subject and Power’

Throughout this paper, I will try to discuss the political role of the contemporary anthropologist while questioning how she positions herself against present problems of contemporary world and how she distinguishes her position from other kinds of occupations. Briefly, this paper is about the question concerning the characteristic, the specificity and the peculiarity of contemporary anthropologist.
In her text ‘The Ethnographic Present’, Kristen Hastrup defines contemporary anthropology (quoting Scheper-Hughes) not only as a field of knowledge, but also as a field of action (Hastrup, 13). Thus, the anthropologist has to deal with the present, with a world in motion and with a continuous flux, which she both gives shape to and is shaped by. Thus, as Hastrup and Foucault imply, the search for the present is also the search for what we are as both anthropologists and human beings.
This inextricable relation between the world, the present and the anthropologist (the writer/the being) let us rethink the questions concerning representation, translation, objectivity, reflexivity and relativity in order to reconsider the role and the very existence of anthropologist as a witness, as an agent, as an activist, as a writer and so on.
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Murat Guney: Do you think, that the International Criminal Court (ICC) which is established by UN is a real win for humanity?

Noam Chomsky: It is a step forward, but a small one. As matters stand, it is highly unlikely that the rich and powerful will accept its authority for themselves or their clients and allies, whatever they may say. What small likelihood there was has been effectively undermined by the stance of the United States. Nevertheless, small steps can make some difference, and even help raise consciousness and concern in the countries powerful enough to resist international authority — in the long run, the prerequisite for some form of international justice.

Murat Guney: You know that US declared that his leaders and soldiers have to have immunity at this court, beause they protected “peace on the world” by fighting “terrorism”. Except the allied state England, neither an European government nor the public of the countries show a strong reaction against this ironic situation. According to you why are there no reaction against US politics?

Noam Chomsky: The US stand has elicited plenty of criticism in Europe, but European elites would be unable to do very much even if they were willing to confront the US. They are not, partly from fear, but primarily because of shared interests.
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