Para-politics, or Ambiguous (Mutashabih) Politics

I was invited as a speaker to the meeting of the XI. Philosophy Days organized by Mersin University's Faculty of Science and Letters. Since it is the 11th, a tradition has formed, and every year these days are lived through debates around a single topic. At the event, which had extremely lively and engaged participation from students and teachers, this year's topic is "justice."

Today and tomorrow, at the Istanbul Congress Center, the SETA Foundation and the Prime Ministry's Public Diplomacy Coordination Office are also holding an international-level meeting, again on justice, which will last two days. Each of the participants is of the kind to awaken a distinct excitement in a person.

As I said before, the developmentalist dimension of the "Justice" and "Development" Party is dominant beyond dispute. On the subject of justice, its performance so far (at the level of democratization and social justice) is good enough to break all the records in the history of politics, but it does not seem to have created sufficient awareness on this. That is why I think it is very important for the concept of justice to become more of a subject of discussion and conversation.

Leaving my assessments of this meeting for later, I would like to quote a passage from one of my books as a contribution to the recent debates on Islamism and politics:

"One form of the suspension or denial of politics gives rise to a style that S. Zizek calls para-politics, and that is close to what I have elsewhere called ambiguous politics. Para-politics denotes the attempt to depoliticize politics. Here conflict or contention is accepted as a moment of politics, but this conflict or contention is reformulated as a competition among recognized parties or representatives, in a representative space, for the seizure of executive power. Of course there are a number of different types of para-politics. According to Zizek, "the essential break is between the classical and the modern Hobbesian formulation of politics, which focuses on the problem of the social contract. Habermasian or Rawlsian morality probably constitute the latest examples of this attitude: the attempt to de-antagonize the conflictual nature of politics by formulating the rules to be followed in such a way that arduous legal proceedings do not turn into a real politics"."

Once you think of politics only as a level at which the people are represented, and once you hand over this work of representation, with all its responsibilities and consequences, to certain people as the profession of a narrow cadre, all your conceptions of politics change in parallel with this thought. In this conception politics is only a profession carried out by certain people. It is a sin that must not be passed on to everyone. The customs in the manner of its practice always turn it into an activity prone to corruption and therefore constantly damaging to its respectability. As long as it is like this, it becomes a base business from which people who have self-respect, or who are respected, are expected to keep away. It is because it is like this that the boundary persistently set up or sought to be preserved between sacred values and politics is accepted as if it were something entirely natural. Meanwhile, a cutthroat struggle is waged among those who actually practice this profession. No moral limit is recognized in this struggle. Political conflict can gradually turn into a quarrel, a hostility, even at times an annihilating war, in which every kind of tactic or trick is considered normal...

While all this goes on in actual politics, Turkish political thought has no reparative response to these moves that extinguish the political. On the contrary, we see that a discourse is persistently fed that negates politics, pushes it outside of life, and serves its being perceived as a professional job engaged in by certain people. In this context, looking at the discourse of religion being used as a tool of politics and at the reactions to it can be illustrative. We can also mention the threat to the legitimacy of politics directly posed by an invention such as cultural Islam, produced against political Islam, which passes through no mental or volitional mediation and was developed to point to folk religiosity. The blow the political has taken from para-political conceptions undoubtedly gives rise to an important political tradesmanship, and this tradesmanship runs the stalls it sets up solely through the exclusion of others as a source of bread.

The approach that demonizes politics and identifies it with Satan, even though the Turkish-Islamist tradition is steeped in politics to the very end, can also be considered one of the greatest reasons for the failure of a strong philosophy of politics to emerge. While the ambiguous form of the para-politics peculiar to this segment goes hand in hand with every kind of intervention concerning the political field, another dimension of the problem emerges: if the political is not being deliberately denied, there is the defect of an absence of strong self-reflection about the nature of the political. Politics is done, but without knowing that it is politics. In this case, it is imagined that the work carried out in the representative political system in the name of the whole society sufficiently fulfills the political, and moreover this is vehemently opposed."

By stretching the limits a little, at this point a line of criticism can be developed that extends to the condition of people not being aware of the ideologies under whose influence they stand in the field of science, in the field of history, even in the field of art, that is, to a lack of reflexivity (contemplation). The situation of the chronicler who does not know that the history he writes is in any case driven by a political demand is a typical example. It is just how a typology of the historian looks who thinks that an entirely objective form of historiography is possible and that he collects both the data he brings as history from the past to the present and all the data he records for tomorrow's historians without being under any influence, solely for the sake of the objectivity of the science of history.

At the parapsychological level, the historian attempts to hide the most legitimate historical ties that drive him to make history. When this hiding, this attempt at suppression, takes place through a messianic hypocrisy, it accompanies, with an ambiguous politics, a much more repressive and much more covert power, with unclear rules, scattered and arbitrary roles, and a gloomy atmosphere to breathe.