Writing of Death Ethics and Politics of the Death Fast in Turkey Özge

Writing of Death Ethics and Politics of the Death Fast in Turkey Özge Nadide Serin Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2013 Özge Nadide Serin All Rights Reserved Abstract Writing of Death: Ethics and Politics of the Death Fast in Turkey Özge Nadide Serin This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the seven-year-long mass hunger strike undertaken by prisoners affiliated with outlawed Marxist-Leninist organizations in Turkey to protest their transfer from traditional ward-type facilities to new cellular institutions modeled after maximum security prisons, and it scrutinizes as well as radicalizes the ontological and political structure of hunger striking to construe otherwise the contestatory relationship between the individual right to death and political sovereignty by insisting on the irreducible excess of death over the totalizing closure of the performative acts of political foundation. Anchored in participant observation and in-depth interviews with surviving hunger strikers, ex-political prisoners, their families, medical and forensic doctors, and enriched by the textual and visual analysis of prison memoirs, diaries, correspondence, testaments, and last speeches, the dissertation focuses on the ambiguity of the very right to die—an ambiguity that has been ignored by performance theories of sovereignty—in order to figure death at one and the same time as both radical possibility and impossibility. Accounting for the extraordinarily long duration of the prison movement (7 years) and self-starvation period before death (up to 558 days) by examining its temporal and organizational logics, the dissertation argues that hunger striking draws an enormous political power from keeping the possibility of death in suspense unlike the power of negation which dissipates itself irreversibly in a paroxysmal moment of actual death. In distinguishing the anticipatory relation to death on the hunger strike from its counterparts in suicide attacks and self-immolations, the dissertation seeks to reveal an inescapable anachrony between two deaths—the passage of time that separates and draws together death as possibility from death as an anonymous event which comes either too early or late. It claims that it is precisely in this interim state between two deaths that death withdraws from the realm of possibility only to fold in on life, creating a reserve in both senses of the term, one where state power and political organizations vie with each other for hegemony over the ideological representations of life and death. The dissertation narrates how the hyper-rationalized political instrumentation of the suspended state between life and death produces its own everyday socialities by organizing the affective relations of hunger strikers to the futurity of death, to their individual bodies, and others on the hunger strike in a destructive rivalry with the contradictory discourses and practices of state officials, families, doctors and mass media. It argues that “death” thereby yields itself to a movement of self-differentiation and proliferation, oscillating uncontrollably between sacrificial sublation and waste. The result is a growing division within the prison movement which propels it towards its eventual dissolution, leaving in its ruins a crippled political subject without futurity. The dissertation figures the surviving fasters afflicted with the Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome, a severe type of amnesia characterized by the inability to retain memories after an indefinite lapse of time, as an allegory for the ruination of the power to die in the performance of death itself. As such, it seeks to bring about a transformation in the very language of sacrificial politics by interrupting the economy of appropriation which functions in view of a future community founded upon the continuity of deaths towards an ever-receding presence. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ii Dedication vii Preface viii Introduction 1 Chapter I 14 Temporalities of Dying Chapter II 52 The Political Machinery of Death Fasting Chapter III 72 Labor of Living, Invisibility of Dying Chapter IV 139 Burning: The Temptation of Death Chapter V 179 Feda: The Sacrificial Knot Chapter VI 235 The Sovereign Lapse Conclusion 284 Who or What Survives? Bibliography 297 i Acknowledgements This dissertation has taken many years to finish, and there are many people, teachers, friends, colleagues, family, and others, to whom it owes an enormous debt. I am profoundly grateful for the patience and generous response of my committee members. They have provided crucial intellectual and moral support throughout my time at Columbia. Rosalind Morris’s prodigious intelligence, gift for language, and pedagogical style leave me speechless. I cannot address her thought with any adequacy precisely because it is the proper name of an event which addresses me from some other place and time. I have still to learn from Marilyn Ivy’s humbling fidelity to the letter of texts which has turned reading into an unrecognizable experience for me. To her also I owe much of what I know about psychoanalysis. John Pemberton transformed the class into a space where complex thoughts reverberated in the unforeseen movement of his almost-whispered words. I am truly astounded by his eye and ear for the profundity of the infinitesimal. Without their encouragement and faith the dissertation would doubtless have assumed a different and more limited form. I also thank my committee for introducing me to the work of James Siegel which occasioned an important new departure in my thinking. That I was drawn to address his work, discretely, in the dissertation is an indication of his distant influence over me and I thank him here for the singular rigor of his response to the dissertation. I am also grateful to Yael Navaro-Yashin for her comments and suggestions on the dissertation which ii helped give the project a new impetus in the process of deciding how to transform it into a book. Erkan Saka, though he insisted on the hardships and risks of the project during my preparatory efforts, was unfailingly present throughout my fieldwork. He introduced me to Yıldız Uygun at Özgür Üniversite, and she has carried the project forward with uncommon responsiveness and assistance. She also got me acquainted with Refik Ünal, and my relation to the Death Fast was profoundly influenced by my friendship with him. Dilek Çolak answered to an unpredictable email and has ever since shared her sister Lale Çolak with me. Lale Çolak, in her very absence, played a significant if anonymous part in an another important friendship, that of Filiz Gülkokuer. Their testimony of Lale resounds as a silent murmur through much of the dissertation. I encountered Erdinç Yücel in the summer of 2007 and his powerful account of his experiences, literary endeavors, questions, and objections left a deep imprint on everything that I wrote subsequently. Indeed, it was with Yıldız, together with Refik, Erdinç, Dilek, Filiz and anonymous others, that this dissertation, though it must now be signed by my own proper name, was written in me, and I would like to thank them all for lending an indulgent ear to a stranger’s disquisitions on the Death Fast. I would also like to thank here Semiha Kırkoç, Selvi Gülmez, and Sakine Sürücü at TUYAB (Union for the Relatives of Detainees) and Münevver Köz, Naime Kara, Mehmet Güvel, and Ahmet Kulaksız at TAYAD (Solidarity Association for the Families of Detainees and Convicts). I have tested their patience more than once and they have responded with rare generosity. iii I am equally indebted to the lawyers Ercan Kanar, Ahmet Tamer, Mihriban Kırdök, and Sevim Akat for patiently answering my questions concerning the judicial system in Turkey. I would also like to thank the doctors Şükran İrençin, Servet Çolak, Alper Tecer, and Erdoğan Özkalıpçı at the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, doctors Osman Öztürk, Nevin Küçükçallı at the Turkish Medical Association, doctors Hakan Gürvit, Şebnem Korur Fincancı, and Emel Göker at Istanbul University Çapa Hospital, doctors Hulki Forta and Nevin Sütlaç at Şişli Etfal Training and Research Hospital. They have taken the time to answer my questions despite their perpetually busy schedules. I am grateful to Columbia University for the provision of funds that enabled me to carry out my fieldwork research. I wish in addition to acknowledge financial assistance from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Middle East Institute at Columbia University for the writing of the dissertation. I must also thank the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics at Columbia University for the granting of office space, summer research funding, and stimulating exchanges. I would also like to express my long-term indebtedness to the community of questioning at Columbia, and in particular Shahla Talebi, Ka-Ming Wu, Dermott Ryan, Suran Pillay, Anush Kapadia, Ruchi Chaturvedi, Mireille Abelin, Fadi Bardawil, Onur Özgöde, Farzaneh Hemmasi, and Murat Güney. I am also pleased to have this occasion to express my gratitude for the gracious hospitality of Hoon Song and Jean Langford at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. I came to know them at the final stages of the writing of this dissertation and their own intellectual powers endowed the dissertation with a new, much-needed creative force. iv Preliminary arguments of the dissertation were presented at Boğaziçi University and Institut français d’études anatoliennes in Istanbul. I thank the organizers of those events for inviting me to talk as well as the participants for their comments. Particular thanks are due to Zafer Toprak, Ayfer Bartu, Nükhet Sirman, Meltem Ahıska, Arzu Öztürkmen, Biray Kolluoğlu, Asım Karaömerlioğlu, Cengiz Kırlı, Ali Sipahi, and Noémi Levy. For their assistance and support at different stages in the writing of this dissertation, I should like to record here my particular thanks to Funda Soysal, Aykan Erdemir, Ayhan Yalçınkaya, Gültekin Yıldız, Aytekin Yılmaz, Edip Gölbaşı, Müslüm Yücel, Ali Murat Irat, and Murat Altun.

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