Loving Sovereignty: Political Mysticism, Şeyh Galib, and Giorgio Agamben
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Loving Sovereignty: Political Mysticism, Şeyh Galib, and Giorgio Agamben Arif Camoglu Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 58, Number 1, 2021, pp. 1-22 (Article) Published by Penn State University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/781861 [ Access provided at 16 Feb 2021 14:11 GMT from Northwestern University Library ] loving sovereignty: political mysticism, şeyh galİ b, and giorgio agamben Arif Camoglu abstract Centering on the poetry of Şeyh Galib (1757–1799), this article considers Ottoman imperial sovereignty in tandem with the discourse of mysticism that underpinned it. A key rhetorical device that enables the abstraction of the politics of empire in this discourse is the metaphor of the beloved sov- ereign. In the mystical writing of Galib, this metaphor gives a spiritual edge to the authority of the sultan and expands the reach of his power beyond its physical limits. The metaphor of the beloved sovereign neutralizes sover- eignty as it turns submission into an act of love, a voluntary abandonment of political agency. To elucidate this obscured dimension of power in Galib’s mysticism, I draw on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “potentiality.” Proposing that one must pay heed to potentiality in order to dig into “the ontological root of every political power,” Agamben considers “love” the proper medium of a potential resistance to sovereignty. Galib’s poetry, on the other hand, illuminates that which is not addressed in this analogy: love can occasion a commitment to sovereignty that forces itself upon the subject as an “onto- logical” condition, in the way Agamben terms it. I suggest that the metaphor of the beloved sovereign in Galib’s poetry cautions against the sovereign’s own “potential” to claim vulnerability and exploit love to consolidate its power. keywords: Sovereignty, mysticism, Ottoman literature, political ontology, love doi: 10.5325/complitstudies.58.1.0001 comparative literature studies, vol. 58, no. 1, 2021. Copyright © 2021. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1 CLS 58.1_01_Camoglu.indd Page 1 15/01/21 12:42 pm 2 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES Introduction: The Beloved Sovereign Emrine dil-bestedir her dilber-i fettan senin Şehr-i hüsnün şehriyarısın bugün ferman senin Devreder vefk-ı muradınca bütün devran senin Şehr-i hüsnün şehriyarısın bugün ferman senin1 (All cunning beloveds are lovingly at your service You are the sultan of the city of beauty, yours is the edict The whole world rotates according to your wishes You are the sultan of the city of beauty, yours is the edict)2 The quatrain above derives from a “şarkı”3 (song) written by the prominent Ottoman poet, Şeyh Galib, who served as the sheik of Galata Mevlevi Lodge in Istanbul.4 His involvement in the Mevlevi order, which gave special prominence to the spiritual teachings of the thirteenth-century poet Rumi, was a lifetime labor for Galib. As Victoria Rowe Holbrook notes, “he had been steeped in its [mevlevi] literature and life-style from childhood” and “was appointed central director of this office by Sultan Selim III in 1794.”5 Thus a concurrently literary and institutional prac- tice for him, mysticism grounded Galib’s poetics, presenting itself in this şarkı through the trope of the spiritually binding love. As Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı highlight, this spiritual form of love— prevalent in the centuries-old Ottoman tradition of mystical writing— communicates a “desire for return to the primal unity of all existence” which “is not accessible to humans except via the bridge of metaphoric (mecazi) love.”6 According with this description, Galib’s poem depicts love not as an emotional state of the individual, but an all-encompassing form of intimacy, inclusive of “bütün devran” (the whole world). Such expansion of the power of love becomes delineated in the next quatrain of the poem, Gel keremkarım dil-i uşşakı mahzun eyleme Gonca-veş perverdegan-ı vaslı dil-hun eyleme Fürkat adet olmasın kan eyle kanun eyleme Şehr-i hüsnün şehriyarısın bugün ferman senin (220) (Come, the forgiving one, do not upset the hearts of lovers Do not wound the heart of these decent ones who seek the rose that is the unity of yours Let not separation be a custom, do not make it a law, be generous You are the sultan of the city of beauty, yours is the edict) CLS 58.1_01_Camoglu.indd Page 2 15/01/21 12:42 pm CLS 58.1_01_Camoglu.indd Page 3 15/01/21 12:42 pm LOVING SOVEREIGNTY 3 The repeating line of the poem, “You are the sultan of the city of beauty, yours is the edict,” where the languages of empire and love distinctly overlap, establishes that the beloved has the ultimate authority as the owner of the “ferman” [imperial edict]. There is virtually no limit to the influence of the beloved, which extends itself beyond the zone of personal privacy, toward “the hearts of lovers.” The bond between the beloved and the lover moves through “the metaphoric love” to a bigger world where sovereignty charms the subject thoroughly, making social existence unthinkable without sub- mission to power. It is such a thinning of the line between life and politics, according to Agamben, that constitutes sovereignty. “Sovereignty,” as he notes, “borders . on the sphere of life and becomes indistinguishable from it.”7 This intrusion of politics into life translates sovereignty into an ontological problem since it actively works to deactivate the imagination of a politics-free existence. To imagine the possibility of resisting sovereignty, for Agamben, entails a consideration of what he calls de potentia absoluta [absolute potentiality], a mode of being that “exceeds will” and “destroys all possibility of constructing a relation between being able and willing.”8 Agamben sees it as essential to embrace the “ontological primacy of love as access to truth” to activate counter-hegemonic potentiality, asserting that for “human beings,” “to fall properly in love with the improper” is a proof of being “capable of their own incapacity.”9 Love, he reiterates, is an ontological attempt at staying beyond the grasp of the sovereign, which is achieved only when “love is that of which we are not masters, that which we never reach but which is always happening to us.”10 Agamben derives inspiration from mysticism when he ponders as to how love enters the realm of ontology and politics. He recruits insight from “the great Andalusian Sufi Ibn Arabi,” whose mystical teachings concerning “pure Being” illustrate the “passage of creation from potentiality to actuality.”11 Similarly, “in Ottoman times,” Holbrook writes, “the ontology was associated with Ibn Arabi and his Turkish school and sometimes referred to by the term vahdet-i vücut (‘the unity of being’).”12 Accordingly, the “ontology of the unity of being” informed by Sufi philosophy turns out to be a common denominator for Agamben and Galib.13 However, their engagements with mysticism lead to starkly contrasting considerations of love and sovereignty. As my discussion will show, Agamben’s thinking encounters its limits and challenges in Galib’s poetry. His ontological conceptualization of love is revealed to be investing in a pregiven mode of resistance without reckoning with the sovereign’s own potential to posit itself as a powerless being, and use love to secure power in and through an ideological valorization of surrender CLS 58.1_01_Camoglu.indd Page 2 15/01/21 12:42 pm CLS 58.1_01_Camoglu.indd Page 3 15/01/21 12:42 pm 4 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES to “the improper.” In contrast, I suggest, the spiritualization of power through the metaphor of the beloved sultan in Galib’s verse illuminates how love can occasion a stubborn commitment to sovereignty that forces itself upon the subject as an ontological inevitability. Cancelling the literal distinction between the beloved and the sultan, Galib’s above-cited şarkı illustrates this argument vividly. Although repeat- edly addressed and summoned, the beloved does not make a physical appear- ance in Galib’s lines. Indeed, in the entire poem, the metaphor “şehriyar” [ruler, sultan] is the only word that designates the beloved. This metaphor renders love and submission indistinguishable, carrying the sovereign over from one line to the next, from one realm to the other. Concurrently, the subject multiplies in the poem with the plural “uşşak” [lovers] instead of the singular “aşık” [lover], getting immersed in the sameness that is demanded by the love for the sovereign. It is this love of the sovereign, a spiritually shared love that unites all in its rule. As uşşak, “kanun” [law, decree] and “adet” [custom, norm] get entwined in the mystical impulse to merge with existence, it becomes difficult to determine whether the metaphorical love of the sovereign is spiritual or totalitarian. Indeed, Galib’s complex fusion of the language of mysticism with imperial vocabulary hints at an overlap between the two possibilities. The collapse of meaning triggered by the metaphor of the beloved sultan mystifies sovereignty, redefining the condition of being attached to power as an act of love in a wider sphere. Andrews and Kalpaklı examine the metaphor of the beloved sovereign rigorously in their study of the early modern and late renaissance literary preoccupation with the theme of love and its entanglements with power. While their main objective is to map out the social and political web of love in Ottoman texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or in their words, from “the age of beloveds,” Andrews and Kalpaklı emphasize the fact that the experience and language of love were molded in tandem with a politics of sovereignty in both European and non-European literary imaginations.14 “It does not seem surprising to us,” they write, “that love and especially the idea of an overwhelming, self-sacrificing love, should rise to special prominence in the context of absolute monarchs who wielded tremendous worldly power and were associated in the minds of many with eschatological and even incarnationist notions.”15 Andrews and Kalpaklı’s observations resonate with what Turkish author and critic Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar claimed in a similarly comparative (if less benign) spirit decades earlier.