Zeynep Direk

Perhaps, as modern ideas have taught us, not a single discourse is void of rhetoric and even on the basis of the deepest, the most intertwined discourses the inevitable presence of metaphors is encountered. Although it is possible that philosophical discourse may avoid becoming some sort of pedagogy, psychagogy, demagogy; politics essentially compound of nothing but those components. The aim of pedagogical, psychagogical, demagogical discourses is to betray the child, the soul, the akin, their own people, by positioning themselves against them as a knower to reveal a truth they are assumably unaware, and ultimately to stimulate them to protect certain localities of power. Communicating an established ‘reality,’ which is no way accurate and whose proof is incomplete, the objective of the opinion leadership which attempts to obtain the approval of its peoples’ free will is to demolish the freedom of those being asked for approval and to use them as a means. Rhetoric, in this sense, is not a threshold experience of reason, which desires to utter reality and which experiences its own limits, but is a hidden violence.

Political pedagogy and psychagogy attempts to affect a reason judged as ‘unequipped.’ Perhaps fear ranks first among the emotions which reinforce the limits of the existence of a living being, which changes the meaning of its biological and social situation, and its relation with time, space and other living beings, and which reveals immediately a new order concerning priorities. In fear, the world either becomes an area where I back myself in a corner or expand my space, by counterattacking. In either case, the world would not be a place where I abide freely. The thought, finding itself shackled to this emotion, faces two options: First, it will yield to fear. It will calculate in order to escape from or to struggle against what it is afraid of. Secondly, it will take its time, and will question with a calm and distant attitude the meaning of its fear, how the object of this emotion is established, and the intentionality secretly functioning in it. The difference between these two attitudes is the difference between acting desperately and returning to oneself reflectively. Political action should be a thinking of calculation whereas choices made rashly are nothing but reactions excluding reflection and questioning. Political rhetoric, while creating a sense of fear, attempts to remove the possibility of reflection and critique, and tries not to give us time to think. There is no time; action is immediate; there is no chance for reconsidering the meaning in the central void of the agora of contemplating. Being, which is afraid of losing its Dasein or the pleasure it obtains from the way it exists, may be as reasonable as somebody from whom one may expect only to act desperately. Therefore, being becomes a predictable constituent, which may easily be manipulated by the political initiative which benefits rhetoric. Fear, as an affection orienting towards political action, is a mood which narrows a person’s possibilities, one’s capacity to discover those possibilities, and it does not permit freedom to go beyond a field struggle. A being, determined by its fears cannot react against the realities and needs, if they do not appear through opposition. A being tends not to think about the common source which is found on the basis of the opposition where the thought is located and which source reveals the opponents. This common source is the oblivion of the politics as a struggle for freedom. It is possible to read this oblivion as conservatism. The aforementioned struggle is not a field struggle, but one concerning freedom as the production of meaning and names. This production when it sets free from monotonousness, but becomes a renewing repetition transcends being conservative. Being, desiring the freedom in the source of the meaning, and desiring to rejoin it, continues to question the laws and interventions which make being cease remembering. Not reasonable and obedient, being resists one’s individuality with its language and its whole existence.

Cruelty even whence becoming direct violence does not yield rhetoric, since it believes that it needs to justify itself. According to the rhetoric of cruelty, victims are those who are responsible for cruelty; they are morally responsible for the violence triggered by the cruel; in fact the cruel is innocent and injured, there is not an alternative way but the one he has preferred. This reversal, which represents the cruel as injured, unveils the fact that cruelty solely consists of intolerance for the freedom of the other. Violence against women is brought about by the fact that instead of every kind of oppression the freedom of women cannot be annihilated completely, that a free psychical being still endures and continues to think behind a body and a silent face, even though having erased themselves as far as possible. The reason of the violence against women is the resistance of the face against entire partriarchy. Second pages of newspapers call a murder caused by the intolerance of a man concerning the freedom of a woman ‘androphonomania.’ For it is preferred that people perceive these incidents not as a political question, but as a personal collapse of reason, as a personal temptation. When a child fears adults, a woman fears a man, a people fears its state, this emotion is created not only through physical, but also through rhetoric violence.

What does it mean to have a reason and to experience a life of consciousness? It means to have an opinion, a worldview, and to begin to speak with an ‘I believe that…’ If these conditions do not exist, we cannot talk about the existence of feminism. All kinds of political organizations are posterior to it, and in principle they are based on it. Otherwise, there remains nothing, but a military structure. That the consciousness makes a pause in life for itself, that it postpones its immediate reaction by distancing itself from life becomes harder where reflection and critical thinking are inhibited and where univocal participation is prevalent. Fear captures human beings, paralyzes reason and reduces it to the stance of reviewing hastily the options concerning remaining naked in one’s Being. There is only one way that reason becomes what it essentially is: in a peace environment, through exercise and education. Reason can only nurtured critically from outside in an environment of dialogue where it does not introvert, where it makes a critique of its own essences and its own ethics. Fear removes the distances between me and the other, and brings about participation, a stupid denial of violence. This participation engenders a mass which attacks desperately, without ever having deliberated upon its suspicion.

Rhetoric can instrumentalize reason, by tempting it, not that there is an opposition between reason and emotion, but through their unceasing collaboration. Fear is an emotion by which human beings are inclined to be seized from childhood, since it is always possible that a human being, alive, mortal and possessing a body may lose his/her life. In our childhood we sense an intense fear concerning its existence, and we need abundant trust, since our capabilities concerning self-protection are utmost limited. We fear that we may be hurt physically by darkness, by monsters which may come out of nothingness and may ruin us or by those whom we trust, by unknown creatures, by strangers. We fear for our own life. Rhetoric triggers these dreams, these hallucinations of our childhood. We obey authority because of the threat of annihilation or of being annihilated, we revoke our demands concerning freedom, we are compelled to comply with the wishes of those who would protect us. Peoples who experience the fear of existence come under the domination of authoritarian polities; these fears prepare a people for the arrival of authoritarian polities.

Nationalism perceives the race or the nation as the fundamental actor of history. The utmost fundamental emotion of this philosophy of history is ‘the fear of the other.’ This other is the one that is a stranger to the relevant nation or race. The universality of nationalism does not take a form but expansion through conquest and domination of others. History has always been represented as a scene of nations, desiring to ruin each other where the one who could struggle best against the inner extensions of external enemies survives. The one who could not possess the unity of a nation, who could not have a national identity, would be wiped away from this scene. When everything becomes legitimate for surviving and for not becoming a ransom, morality becomes secondary. The fact that today fear becomes the determining emotion of politics is not essentially unique to a specific geography. For example, it could only be possible that Iraq was invaded after the attacks to New York in 2001 and thanks to the aura of fear against Muslims by American people. We saw that in the midst of Europe, in Bosnia, how Serbian nationalism and the fear of Muslims evolved towards massacre or even holocaust. Even Australia is living a limitless fear, despite the fact that there has not been a terrorist attack recently. We may suggest that politics in entire West is made through an aura of fear. On the one hand, globalizing capitalist investment suffers from economic nationalism and xenophobia in nation-states. On the other hand, xenophobia provides a ground for imperialism. When we look at Turkey, we encounter an intense anti-Semitism and enmity against Armenians and Kurds, which are obviously fostered and provoked. When the rhetoric of fear, providing a ground for nationalism, triggered the slaughter of Christian missionaries, its motivation was ‘only one of us will survive, either we or them’ affectation. This atrocity is created through rhetoric, relies on a so-called heroism of an internality inhibited by fear and is a result of the fact that a reason, whose childhood hallucinations are triggered, introvert towards itself instead of speaking and that the reason cannot tolerate the freedom of another anymore.

The ground of our internality is memory. Once we were passive beings, as passive as incapable to burden, thereafter thanks to our memory we burden maybe the undergone and veiled within the legacy collected by our experience, which had happened to us as a destiny. We say ‘Once, when I was little, I was orphaned.’ We say, ‘Once, we established Republics in 1923.’ We say, ‘Once we had Greek, Armenian neighbors.’ This language of the memory does not coincide with the sentences of the official fiction of history made learn by heart. On the contrary, what is circulated in the fiction of memory is the utterance of oneself through the language of internality, after having hearkened the other. When establishing history committees which study nothing but facts and documents and not hearkening the voices of individual internalities, we do not make a study concerning memory, which in fact is what we need. Hence, a lot of issues called ‘historical issues’ are specifically psychic issues and are related to letting internalities speak. The relations with our neighbors with whom we shared the same place for centuries are not a subject matter for historical research yet. When we permit ourselves to express bitter and sweet memories, suppressed memories of shame and horror, and how they affect us now and here, we begin to touch. My neighbor is not an Armenian, Kurd, Turk, Jew, Sunnite or Alevi, but someone who has a name in the first place. The properties the person shares with the people one belongs cannot be more important than this proper name. This name possesses gradually a meaning where it opens a horizon for me, and makes me perceive the world from a completely new angle. What otherizes or reduces the person to an ethnic or religious identity is that my relation to this person is intermediated through the rhetoric of fear on the historical horizon of nationalism. Thanks to this rhetoric, this person and I give up being neighbors, sharing the same place, looking face to face and begin to appear under the disguise of identities such as ‘us’ or ‘them,’ suddenly we become beings who lost the possibility of a humane relationship. Through heroic stories transmitted by nationalism so that we may have confidence in ‘us,’ we feel a fragile existence in need of protection. When internality is filled with this fear, a republic becomes a republic of fear. Under these circumstances, protecting the republic requires to be always vigilant, further be on alert, to know the underlying ethnic or religious origin of the neighbor. Fear, whence make me forget that the name of my neighbor is for addressing this person, may submit my soul to practice violence. The acts of atrocity, which follow violence, and consist solely of creating imagined enemies out of a people and of cleaning them away, may be called ‘heroism.’ The speech and cohabitation, which make morality possible, ends when a person comes to believe that one’s concern for one’s own existence justifies every kind of violence. This regime of justification is called ‘nationalism.’

According to phenomenologists, the structure of fear as an emotion may be determined as fear of anything in the world existing presently or which will exist in future. This threatens the existence or happiness of the one afraid. Human beings fear because they are beings, who care and feel anxious for their own existence. Well, if we think about women, this definition becomes seriously insufficient. Being procreative and creative, they possess a spiritual body, which may quickly transcend the anxiety for themselves. They feel anxiety for the flesh they create and which is created, they feel anxiety for life. This anxiety has such a temporality that the anxiety of the pro/creator for her being does not come to an end, although the created beings already stand on their feet and have begun to live, having declared their independence. The offspring, whoever one is, has completely different opportunities as an other. Concern of death is a concern of her offspring’s death in the first place. In the ambiguous temporality after her death, it is the anxiety for her offspring. In the first place, the relation of women to fear and anxiety is different from the relation of men who are solely anxious for their own life. Pro/creator has transcended living solely for her own being or happiness; she is doomed to remain in being for the one/those she created. She is bound to existence, in a sense she is deprived of her right to die. Even when she is incapable of anything, she carries the burden of the whole world in her helplessness, one might say. She stands on the world as an absolute mainstay. She fears for herself as well because in truth she fears for another. The creativity of woman in this sense is not included in history, since this creativity possesses a meaning, a secret which the history cannot conceive. Women whose creativity has not appeared through procreation share this culture of womanhood as well. They participate in it as aunts, sisters, elderly sisters, nurses, neighbors or friends. Since not a single child is raised solely by one woman, women are collectively creative, children are shared, and they are common under this culture. In a dead time, being ignored by history, to be creative in body and in internality may provide us an opportunity for a historical or completely new view. This anxiety for the death of the other, which opens the internality to an endless anticipation and intuition, is different from the fear on behalf of one’s own being. The latter ossifies and freezes the internality, paralyzes speech and makes impossible to step towards the future. Political fear -for example fears in our agenda such as ‘the threat against the continuity of national unity’ or ‘impending threat against laicism’- brings about the removal of our existence as a psychical being, includes us in a mass participation. However progressive in disguise, it suspends the creativity of internality and makes advance impossible. Now looks are turned towards past, the reflex of protecting the present, the available, is strengthened; henceforth the speech is a mere repetition of the same sentences, while the existence becomes conservative. When our fears, being triggered through rhetoric, begin to be dominated, it is assured that we now become an ‘anonymous us.’ Fear amalgamates women one by one within history which erases and forgets about their creativity, and submits them to a politics which remove the difference of their self. In this feeling of participation no one has a unique destiny. That the participation interrupts means that ego, independent from a historical mission or identity, reveals itself as the source of a will.

What makes us individual is our sensing in the first place; political fear serves to blockade senses, to suspend ambiguities and relativity for an indefinite time. This kind of rhetoric is a technique concerning the destruction of plurality, functioning by removing one’s particularity, difference and absolute independence, and thus absorbing the person into the totality. Political fear is the emotion devastating plurality and it points out a mood within the speech, as the condition of democracy, is suspended, silenced, and submitted to oppressions, and within struggle for freedom fades away. It hinders the search for truth in relation to the other. The truth of the other can only be reached by establishing a relation based on speech and by desiring to learn from the other. For example, the fear of disintegration engenders ossification in an identity which is afraid of becoming open to the other. Approaching people with political symbols, and that these symbols suppress the desire for speech bring about that those persons may remain veiled behind those symbols. When we conceive somebody through a symbol, it is we who unveil the person. Her appearance will always be found superficial and ambiguous, and the underlying principle of such appearance will be sought elsewhere. On the contrary, when we establish a relation based on speech, it is the person who reveals oneself. The person is not a phenomenon anymore, since one has liberated oneself from being solely a reality without a reality. Whence women get rid of symbols attributing a reality to them which in fact is not a reality, they begin to express themselves through their internalities and creativities. In this sense, we cannot search truth either in the world of phenomena or in patriarchal monotheist theology. The external relation which may be established with the internality of woman requires a relation with externality void of rhetoric.

Another antecedent of fear, which deprives soul from a democratic experience, where one encounters other, and which assumes racist, nationalist, tribalist, xenophobic, aggressive heroisms, is the assumption that the essence of human being lies in history. However, the essence of human beings lies maybe in the discontinuity of their internality, in their private temporality together with their beginnings and their ends which is not valued by history at all, and in their attempt as human individuals to transcend their historical fears. Death in history points towards nothing but a small chronological point, but our internalities are full of ghosts, we live together with those ghosts haunting us; and some of us struggle them, some of us pacify. To confuse the order of the internality with the order of history and to determine a people’s internality through the historical fears of existence is the primary trick of political rhetoric, psychagogy, and pedagogy. We are a body of peoples who have mingled together in our internalities, who share these internalities, and who have understood each other, and indeed we are not a bulk of junks. As long as this heterogeneous society who has its own traumas searches the meaning of its name within the domain of fear, it will loosen its atrocity instead of procreating its own civilization.

Even if there is a stream of history and a time of death for societies, when we learn to be a distinct ‘ego’ apart from participation, to cope with the fears of existence in its own internality, to talk to others, to minorities and to learn from them instead of attacking them, we will live together as uttering beings who utter without totalizing. The child of a neighbor called Biricik is now here, and mine is growing at her house. The neighborhood of women and children illuminates how peoples dwell together.

From Amargi-Issue 5