Blog post

Alain Badiou and Belén Fernández on Turkish Resistance

Jisu Kim19 June 2013

Today, on a blog run by Kyrenia-based academic Cengiz Erdem, Alain Badiou weighed in on the uprising currently ongoing in Turkey. Calling the moment a "rebirth of History," his insight is also an open letter asking the Turkish youth to expand their movement as to incorporate the broad popular masses. In order to create true innovational change, Badiou asserts there are certain requirements:

They must create the means of living with the broad popular masses, of sharing the thoughts and practical innovations of the new politics with them. They must give up the temptation to adopt, for their own benefit, the "Western" concept of democracy, meaning: the simple, self-serving desire for a middle class to exist in Turkey as an electoral and falsely democratic client of an oligarphic power integrated into the world market of capital and commodities. ...Without it, the admirable current revolt will end in a subtler and more dangerous form of subservience: the kind we are familiar with in our old capitalist countries.

Journalist and author of The Imperial Messenger Belén Fernández provided a dispatch from Turkey in Jacobin, recounting her recent experiences in Istanbul, where riot police engaged in full violent force against the protestors. In the whirldwind of rhetoric and analysis currently surrounding the situation, Fernandez points out that the heart of the matter "can be understood without the invocation of previously-labeled phenomena: they are, quite simply, an assertion of humanity in the face of inhumanity".

Visit Erdem's blog and Jacobin to read the articles in full.