Letter from Cyprus: Geopolitics, Intimacy, and the Public Sphere in the Age of Monsters

In February and March, the island of Cyprus, otherwise white, dry, and bushy, tucked in the corner of the eastern Mediterranean, becomes green. The unexpected torrential rains beat down on the sandy and rocky soil and force out a stubborn, almost indecent yellow and green, the colour of something insisting on being alive against all odds. The orange trees bloom and the smell is pervasive, it follows you in the car, into the house, like it has nowhere else to go. With one side in the EU, it is geographically in the middle of perpetual conflict. With empty mosques and their minarets obstructed by unfinished cement buildings just left there to gape and make statements, and orthodox churches right next to Dubai-style hotels and ancient archaeological sites, it is, for an academic, a quite peculiar place to inhabit. Currently, besides the locals, it hosts Russians, Ukrainians, Germans, Israelis, Syrians, Filipinos, Brits, the odd American and Italian, and whoever landed here by accident or just to work at a hotel for a summer and never left, all brought together by the promise of low taxes and easy citizenship. It feels like no man’s land and yet it has a name, a long history, a language, a flag, and its unmistakably Cypriot inhabitants. Unlike Sicily or the Greek islands, it does not have idyllic waterfront villages with locals dozing off under the Mediterranean sun or playing backgammon. No majestic baroque or picturesque Santorini architecture. The villages are tucked in the mountains and only accessible by cars via endless winding roads. 

Stoicism and the goddess of love, Aphrodite, were born here. The early Christian fathers anchored here, some passing through on their way west, some, like Lazarus, staying and being buried here; the Venetians left fortresses and city walls; the Ottomans left mosques and the unmistakable architecture of those low houses with the upper floor protruding over a narrow base (çıkma) just like the ones on the Balkans; the Brits left pubs, driving on the left, and military bases, not even a railroad. The sky is very blue. And so is the sea. Chameleonic, the inhabitants and their dwellings have blended into the landscape, inconspicuous, as if there were nobody here. The whispery Greek language under the influence of Ottoman Turkish has become rough here, like the island’s rocks, like the stark landscape. Everything is inward looking, shielded, out of sight. “If something happens,” a Cypriot colleague—a mathematician—says after the drone strike on the British base some forty minutes away from my apartment, “I’ll just go up to the mountains and take shelter there.”

Colonised mentality, they call it. Self-protection. Wars all around, Beirut a twenty-minute flight, the plane does not even reach cruising altitude, Tel Aviv barely an hour, Turkey a stone’s throw away, you can see how close it is from the plane, and then for an hour and a half just water until the Greek islands begin to appear, Crete in the distance, Rhodes closest, Athens eventually. Alexandria feels as far as Berlin although geographically a close neighbour.

I came here out of something between ideology and longing. Yale, Chicago, Stanford, Bonn, libraries with every book in the world, a comfortable salary, the frictionless infrastructure of American research universities and the comfort of mainland European life. I left it to come back to the Mediterranean, the wider region I call home, out of a stubborn conviction that thought should happen where it is needed, that brain drain is its own form of surrender. I knew the challenges but forgot how they felt on one’s own skin. What I did not expect was the particular texture of the difficulty: not poverty of resources but poverty of atmosphere, not absence of books but absence of the conditions in which books become necessary. It felt empty. The locals hospitable but mistrusting. The streets dominated by Russian, English, German, and Hebrew. No luxury, no lush waterfronts or fishermen with arms wide open towards the sea. The capital is in the middle of the island.

Survival strategy because, all around, monstrosity reigns.

I was reading the new article of my Beirut colleague, Nadia Bou Ali, when I wrote to her the line that had stopped me right in the beginning: “there is no interest in understanding the colonized or even claiming that they require enlightenment. It is rather very simple today: there is only elimination, all the hubris of co-existence, or tolerance, of the laws of conversion have fallen.”[1] I wrote back: “the age of bullies.” She responded: “the age of monsters.” That is how this piece was born. 

The move Nadia names is not new in its violence but in its explicitness. Previous regimes of domination dressed themselves in a language of civilization, progress, enlightenment—a condescension, yes, but a condescension that still required the other to exist as a subject to be improved, converted, educated. The colonized was a problem to be solved that involved a degree of investment. Now that pretence has been dropped. There is no discourse of improvement, no civilizing mission, not even a hypocritical acknowledgment of shared humanity. “There is only elimination.” What passes for political life today—at the level of nation states, of wars, but also of institutions, of workplaces, of intimate life—operates by the same logic: enter, take what is useful, discard the remains. This is not cruelty in the old sense, which still implied a relationship, a sadism that needed its object. This is something colder, indifferent. “Clean it out,” and turn it into a Riviera, elimination as hygiene and real-estate logic. Secretaries of defence dismantle any leftover ceremony in public: armies fight and win wars, they don’t democratize, develop, or civilize. A broom, not a mission. No ceremony, only the logic of clearing. In private life the same grammar holds sway: ghosting, or, when words are offered, something surgical. The broom sweeps, the door shuts. The other is left in a void. A planetary household management. The monstrous migrating from the geopolitical to the personal (or vice versa?), and in both registers it wears the same face: not rage, not ideology, not even hatred, but the simple, totalizing absence of interest in the other as such. 

How to read, write, teach in such circumstances? “You need a long time of peace and no worries to do poetry and philosophy. We haven’t had that,” another Cypriot friend, a fashion designer from Limassol, says. “My grandmother hid refugees and had to leave her house for a tent, while in the US men and women were marching for the sexual revolution.”

This is not a story about victimhood but about bare facts. The challenges are inconspicuous but enormous when one tries to set up a life of the mind here. Aristotle thought one needs freedom from necessity. Woolf thought one needed a room and five hundred pounds. They were both right, and both already obsolete. We have defeated material scarcity as a civilizational problem in this part of the world, we have the technology to feed, house, and connect everyone, and yet the life of the mind is more arrested now than when people wrote by candlelight and died at forty. The obstruction is no longer material. It is atmospheric. One does not need a full-blown war to arrest creative and contemplative activities. One drone attack, one missile in a neighbouring country is enough to halt to retreat into survival mode. Then the moment there’s respite the hotels start mushrooming up and then—the time of a cocktail on the beach—another threat causes retreat again. A life in hiding and there’s no relief in sight because the monstrosity is growing, it is taking on impersonal, abstract forms that cannot be pinned down in the quotidian nor in public discourse. “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear,” Gramsci famously wrote.[2] Nations, presidents, prime ministers, armies, weapons, technology—all visible and nameable. But naming and seeing have lost their purchase. Naming and seeing are no longer acts of denunciation and demands for accountability. They are just physical, biological processes, like breathing and blinking. The breath comes and goes. The eye opens and shuts. And after the breath and the blink, it’s the same. Because words have lost their purchase, they are no longer attached to acts, to meaning, to contracts, to accountability. They are just vibrations of the vocal cords encountering air and of the mouth giving that air a certain shape. Or they are symbols on a screen somewhere, gathering there, like pebbles on a beach. Naming and seeing like breathing and blinking. The basic social contract of the word and the witness are empty. 

We watch the spectacle of bombed neighbourhoods, we talk about it, and it is as if nothing had happened, no real event that demands attention, care, and change.

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That’s where the monstrous comes in. The Latin monstrum—from monere, to warn—was once a sign, a portent, something that appeared at the edge of the known world to signal rupture in the order of things. The monster had a message. It demanded interpretation. Even Frankenstein’s creature demanded interpretation—he spoke, suffered, indicted his maker. Even Gaga’s monsters were allegories of the excluded, metaphors for what society refused to see. But today the monstrous has shed all that. It does not appear at the threshold to warn us. It carries no meaning. It speaks no language of grievance or portent. It is not the creature that arrives from outside to disturb a coherent world. It is the world: speechless, naked, without portent or promise. 

Where to from here?

Kostas Axelos, the Greek-French philosopher, wrote of the “plan” and the “planetary age” as the closure of the errant, open world, a world no longer wandering toward meaning but administered, gridded, foreclosed: “Everything is meant to happen according to plan in order to achieve a gradation that is total and world-historical. […] Do we err, are we errant, or have we gone astray? […] The age before which and in which we stand (i.e., staggering and roaming), the present course of worldly time that has already dawned (although it has not yet truly begun), is planetary: planning and planing [AI1] all that exists, placing it on the faceplate according to plan, consummating a total plan.”[3] The plan does not announce itself, it does not arrive as catastrophe. It is simply the slow sealing of all exits and mysteries, the progressive elimination of the spaces in which something unplanned, something genuinely other, could take place. Under the plan, all relations become instrumental and all encounters transactional. “The world has become a fabricated world.”[4] Enter, take, eliminate. This is manifest not only in geopolitical events but in the very texture of daily interactions: the colleague who evokes community while practicing extraction; the friend who is present in their own crisis and absent in yours; the lover who uses trust as license and disappears when accountability is demanded. And the discovery arrives not as rupture but as a quiet, administrative fact. The logic is identical across all these registers. There is no malice. That is precisely what makes it monstrous. Malice would require recognition. This is just the plan, executing itself.

What form of banality of evil is this? Not the banality of bureaucrats and unthought that Arendt described. That banality still implied a system with a legible logic, functionaries who could at least in principle be held accountable to the rules they followed. This is different. This is Simone Weil’s void, malheur, affliction, the absence of attention. Not suffering, which still implies a witness. Malheur is what happens when no one looks, in the intimacy of the domestic, hidden in the plain sight of spectacle. Not cruelty, but erasure. “There is only elimination.” Not persecution but disappearance into irrelevance. To have to hide in plain sight. The monstrous void. Real lives, real soil, homes, bodies. All of it in a void. Like watching the great library of Alexandria burn before one’s eyes and there is no word for water.

The great library of Alexandria today is Nadia’s line: “all the hubris of co-existence, or tolerance, of the laws of conversion have fallen.” The library burns because those who could speak, who have language, the theory, the platform, have quietly accepted the scission between their public politics and private practice. The total separation between the political commitments of leftists, Marxists, progressives and the lives they actually live—where the monstrous reigns unchallenged and unremarked—is defended in the name of personal space, individual choice, the right to change one’s mind. The political and the personal have been so thoroughly decoupled that one can march in protest in the afternoon and enact domination by evening. Within the household and its arrangements, the woman below sustains the philosopher above, without any felt contradiction or shame. This is not an accusation. It is the description of a successful operation: the plan works by making its logic feel like freedom. 

The twentieth century briefly attempted something extraordinary, to make the private realm (the family, relationships) into a polis, a space of equality, speech, and action, rather than the despotic institution Arendt had described when tracing the ancient Greek divide between household (private realm of despotic rule) and city (public realm of freedom). We almost succeeded. But the public realm of speech and action collapsed (and, with it, the brief experiment of the private as polis) and what replaced it was what Arendt called the social realm: the nation, the economy, the government, an extended metaphor of the household wearing the mask of the political.[5] Social media belongs here too. It looks public, but it is privately owned infrastructure, not an arena freely constituted by a plurality of equals. Visibility replaces presence, engagement replaces action, and speech is just autocomplete.

In the twenty-first century the household is becoming despotic again. So is the social. On the right, a certain coherence prevails: those who propagate anti-abortion and despotic rule marry women who give birth to child after child and stay at home, while the figure of the “trad-wife” now circulates publicly as a lifestyle—turning the household itself into a professional and even lucrative performance. On the left, those who speak the language of emancipation and solidarity construct their private lives on the same hierarchies they denounce in public. Comrades in the square, tyrants on the sofa. Minority discourse and struggles, women’s liberation, the working class coming to consciousness—all co-opted by the monstrous void. In the service of the monstrous void. How do you fight something that by definition isn’t there?

Arendt’s speech and action are no longer valid. The monstrous has deprived them of content and purchase. Speech requires a listener who acknowledges the speech act. Action requires a world that registers the action, that can be changed by it. Both require the existence of a shared reality in which meaning can take hold. The plan has liquidated that reality. Not through censorship or repression—those would still be forms of engagement—but through the far more effective instrument of indifference. To speak into a void is not to speak. To act in a world that does not register action is pantomime. We are left with gestures that feel like politics and sound like thought but have nowhere to land, change nothing, demand nothing.

Where to from here? 

Perhaps the answer has something to do with where we are. Cyprus, inconspicuous, inward looking, tucked into its rocky landscape, shielded from view—what looked like a symptom of colonial damage might also be something else. A shell is not only absence. It is a shield. The mountains that my colleague reaches for in crisis are the same mountains where, out of sight, something else might be possible. Resistance does not ask permission as a structural necessity because visibility under the plan is already co-optation. It cannot coincide with an approved public space. Many movements today act as if protest required permission or public tolerance. The paradox is that historically movements such as the partisan resistance operated clandestinely, and perhaps precisely for that reason were effective. We still need spaces for dissent and action, but not necessarily public ones recognized by and coinciding with the social realm. Is that possible today? Conspiratorial, breathing together in hidden places, in the woods like my Yugoslav partisan ancestors, in the underground, in the parallel structures, the backrooms: this is where thought, speech, and action survive when the “planning and planing world” has no room for it. Grief storms the streets. Resistance goes to the mountains. The inconspicuous is not only the defeated. It is also the insurgent.

This year, a group of my students formed a philosophy club in a small Cypriot town better known for its ancient mosaics and beach resorts than for its philosophical ambitions. They come from Lebanon, Cyprus, Jordan, Russia, Bulgaria, Qatar, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Malawi. They meet to ask the big questions, the ones that trouble sleep. It is, in this modest way, a form of praxis: thought that does not know yet what it is for. “It is only from the negative that a world otherwise may erupt into existence.”[6] I am writing this in the open, which means I am already partly inside the plan. But the orange trees bloom outside. The green and yellow colour the stubborn rocks. Something, against all odds, is insisting on being alive.

Paphos, 8 March 2026

Ana Ilievska was born in the former Yugoslavia. She is an Assistant Professor of Global Liberal Arts at the American University of Beirut–Mediterraneo (Paphos, Cyprus). Her research focuses on thought, literature, and concepts of technology from Southern Europe and the Mediterranean. You can find her writing at https://thinkaboutnoise.wordpress.com/.