After
I penned an article titled “Butch Lesbians and HDPKK (HDP+PKK)”
about a year ago, a number of things followed. Those who called
themselves “leftist” went mad. The most pathetic person among
them- Ümit Kıvanç- said I was a pornomaniac. I responded to him
with an article exposing his ignorance and dirty mind and he
continued to watch porn instead of discussing with me. While Kıvanç
was watching porn, Žižek was informed about the issue and he jumped
into the situation quickly. What a jump! First, he responded to me
with an article titled “Butch Lesbians in Turkey” and then he put
this article into his new book “The Courage
of Hopelessness: Chronicles of a Year of Acting Dangerously”.
The
leftist-FETO affiliated groups like the Cumhuriyet
newspaper that appear with awkward headlines such as “A
psychoanalysis lesson to politics from Žižek”
immensely enjoyed Žižek’s teaching me my place. The remaining
“leftists” have been worried about the fact that a world-
renowned intellectual like Žižek responded to an idiot like me.
As
for the people of our Muslim neighbourhood: They continue to play
ostrich. They are in deep shame for I compared the HDPKK, whom they
curse, with butch lesbians. They can be in shame. They have every
right to feel so. The kids at our neighbourhood are not as shameless
as me. However, there is another issue: That they cannot even attest
to the fact that not even a single person from the well-rounded
leftist intelligentsia – who cast themselves as the property owners
of philosophy, sociology and psychoanalysis in this country and then
insult Muslims with a smile full of enjoyment that never went missing
from the faces of those notoriously “practical” bureuacrats at
the hospitals administered by Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in the 1990s as
they encountered patients who could not afford bribery – is capable
of responding to me and that they are in so much misery to complain
about me to their elder brother Žižek leaves me in utter despair.
Eventually,
I come to the conclusion that finding an intellectual, be it secular
or Muslim, who is smart and well-read is more difficult than
searching for a needle in Mars. I feel sad about this country. I feel
sad about the young people of our country who follow these
pseudo-intellectuals. And I feel like I will faint when I saw Žižek
about whom I wrote a PhD thesis is waving at me with a big asinine
grin from the bottom of the misery pit .
I
have always said it though: It is necessary to firmly distinguish Žižek’s political writings from his theoretical writings (and
speeches). This great theoretical mind goes nuts when it comes to
daily politics and current political communities. He turns into a
monkey who plays to the crowd and goes as far as jumping on them. At
the end of the story, he starts talking about organizations and communities he regards as an enemy, e.g. “radical
Islamists”, by repeating and affirming the most standard discourses
of racism he has been criticizing for years, without hesitation and
with much enthusiasm: “They envy our European life-style.” “They
want to destroy our life-style.”
I
have always known and voiced the gravity of the issue. Yet, even I
have not been able to foresee that this
“theoretically-genius-political-charlatan” could degrade himself
to such an extent. His articles which he penned as a “response”
to me are replete with rhetorical nonsense and factual inaccuracies
and it is another disaster that he is being turned into a monkey by
Turkey’s Kemalists look-alike leftists.
In
a country where the academics and students who have not read a single
of page of The Sublime Object of Ideology, For
They Know Not, The Ticklish Subject, The Parallax View, Less Than
Nothing and do not know the names of numerous
other sophisticated theoretical books pass judgements looking at
Žižek’s funny face and gestures (“Žižek and people of his
kind are just worthless! They are postmoderns! They talk nonsense”),
Žižek’s writing of nonsense articles do not serve any purpose
other than preserving the lasting of the prevailing academic
foolishness by strengthening the stupid opinions about his books. Now
those secular idiots who read Žižek’s article he wrote as a
respone to me are probably saying: “I told you he is worthless!
Look, he has even responded to the crazy guy named Suheyb.” The
Muslim idiots are probably saying the following: “This man is
idiot. He writes with no information about Turkey. The worse is that
when he writes about Turkey he choses the nonsense subjects like
lesbians. People like him are losers.”
It
is hard not to go nuts, isn’t it?
Well,
the way I have chosen not to go nuts is to write back. Let me start
from the very first article in which Žižek criticised me. But
before this, I have to remind you of my article that has raised hell:
According
to psychoanalysis every relationship is sexual. But this doesn’t
mean that every relation in everyday life smells of sexuality. On the
contrary, this means that in every relationship – whatever it is,
political, social or economic – agents occupy a sexual position
which is either the position of a man or that of a woman. Indeed,
even if the type of relationship is not a conventional one but the
one unusual for the majority of population, this rule is valid. It is
exactly for this reason that even in ‘queer’ relations – like
in heterosexual relations – there is a male (master, dominant) role
and a female (servant, submissive) role which is enacted. Otherwise
the relationship is an impossible one.
For
example, the lesbians: Fundamentally there are two types of lesbians:
butch (male role) and femme (female role). When we observe the butch
lesbians, it seems impossible to distinguish them from males. Their
body language (seating, walking, gestures, mimics, cloths, even their
tatoos) is macho. They look very brave and good. They are much more
aggressive and ‘if punch, knock down’ type of people than an
average man. If you engage in a fight with a butch you should
probably immediately run away. This macho ‘image’ is also enacted
in their relationship with their partners: they are very dominant and
they ask partners to behave towards them in a very submissive way. So
when you observe this type of relationship, you notice the same
phallic enjoyment as that of a man enjoying the submissiveness of his
partner.
But
in reality the situation is exactly the opposite one. Butch doesn’t
occupy a position of phallic manhood, for sure. The macho-male mask –
witnessing her symbolic castration – that she wears in everyday
life doesn’t serve her to derive from it any sort of phallic
enjoyment. It is rather the enjoyment of the Big Other which defines
her macho manhood. This is because a butch lesbian is desperately
obliged to use some artificial tool as the substitution for the
real-natural organ that she lacks, and also because she waives her
own pleasure in order to really possess her partner like a man would
do. This kind of pleasure found in waiving her own bodily pleasure, a
pleasure found in merely serving painfully the Other’s pleasure,
corresponds to female enjoyment. Behind their macho appearances
butches are therefore nothing but the usual obedient ‘good girls’.
However, this situation of which they are unconsciously aware doesn’t
disturb them much as long as they look macho from the view of the
Other, as long as they can keep on hiding their ‘good girl’ in
their inside.
Never
mind, these HDP+PKK’s look like butches who act like a macho,
challenging the State and the majority of people by way of using
dildo-like external weapons. There is a ‘good girl’ woman behind
this mask. There is a pathetic servant behind those who work for the
Big Other’s enjoyment (of secularism, of Israel, of Kemalism. What,
then, makes them endure the pain of masking their castrated
submissive femme, of leaving behind their original ‘good girl’
femininity? Here is the answer, the same as the butch lesbian’s
answer: they endure the pain in order to be able to be seen and
approved as a disobedient (leftist) and roughneck (secular) master by
the Big Other. That’s it.
The
first contact of Žižek’s answer with my article is as follows:
“A
typical example of the mentality parallel to the Boko Haram logic is
Suheyb Öğüt’s ‘Butch Lesbians and the HDPKK’ article.”
****
We
will come to that stupid connection between Boko Haram and my article
he thinks he established. Let us move on for now:
“In
this brief comment, which is a shameful example of putting
psychoanalysis at the service of both the traditional patriarchal
ideology and the actual politics of Turkey, the author enacts a
blatant misuse of Lacanian psychoanalysis to make it fit the
theoretical and political nightmare in his head.”
And
how do I do that? I am curious. Let us see:
“He
offers sexual difference in the traditional sense (master and
servant, active and passive …) as a framework that defines the
specific agencies ‘for manhood and for womanhood’, and then
universalizes it as a model for all human relations, ‘political,
social or economic’; even when a sexual relation is not the
standard one, as is the case with lesbians, there has to be the
dominant masculine position and the submissive feminine position
(butch and femme). This framework is supposed to function as a kind
of formal a priori, a condition of possibility, of any relationship –
‘otherwise the relationship is an impossible one’ …”
I
am speechless! I sincerely do not know which point in this paragraph
I shall pick to start answering!
Is
it not the psychoanalysis itself which establishes and registers the
duality of master and servant, and the “universality” of the
structure (and the structural oppositions) brought about by this
duality? And is it not the psychoanalysis which puts such
“patriarchal” notions as the father or the name-of-the-father in
the center of existence? Is it not the psychoanalysis itself which
exactly on these grounds gets slammed by the Deleuze-Guattari duo
along with various feminists such as Rose, Mitchel and Irigaray? Does
not Hegel himself, through whom Žižek develops his all theory, put
the dialectics within this duality into the centre of the process of
the subject's (consciousness) coming into being?
Does
not Žižek know what does Lacan’s famous motto -“Woman is the symptom of
man”- mean which he repeated time and again?
If
woman is the symptom, then she is on the side of the Real and the
small other (its symbolization). And the symptom is an element that
undermines the class it belongs to, an exception-example which cannot
belong to the set it is included in or which cannot be included in
the set it belongs to. If woman is the symptom of man, then the genus
subverted and obliterated by woman is man himself. This indicates
that man is on the part of the universal, the big Other and the
master. In order to conceive of the universal, the big Other or the
master, it should be fantasized that the particular, the small other
or the servant – which the former trio excludes from itself and
from which it distinguishes itself – are not “present” in their
own bodies in the form of the Real -void or short circuit- that is
not yet symbolized and turned into a symptom. Which means that woman
is nothing but the externalizationof the inner void, the stain
or the short circuit that hinders man from absolutizing himself.
Hence, man is on the side of the fantasy. He can only affirm himself
by masking the Real (woman) in his own structure – just like the
big Other. Just like reality. Just like master! So, woman is on the
side of the symptom. She coincides with the symbolization of the Real
and the small other repressed in man – just like the servant!
How
come the guy who knows all of these dares to present the man-woman
duality in Lacan as something that has nothing to do with the duality
of master-servant? Besides, is it not the Lacanian-Žižekian theory
which positions the master, namely man, on the side of the big Other
and the servant, namely woman, on the side of the small other only to
declare the fact that the omnipotence and omniscience of the
master are (necessary) fantasies from the beginning, and designates the servant “symptom” as the externalization of the inner
impossibility of the master preventing him from absolutizing himself?
Precisely because of this, is it possible to say that there is
another way of reading the thesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis
frequently reiterated by Žižek that “There is no such thing as
man (the big Other) (man is nothing but a fantasy) and woman is
nothing but the symptom of man” as “There is no such thing as the
master and the servant is nothing but his symptom”?
Moreover,
to what extent is it possible to conceive that the dualities produced
by Lacanian psychoanalysis (woman-man, unconscious-conscious, the
subject of enunciation-the subject of the enunciated, the
Real-symbolic, jouissance-pleasure
[principle], drive-instinct, praxis-deed, death-symbol,
desire-demand, master signifier [point
de capiton]-signifier
[chain], empty speech-full speech, dream-reality, Thing-symbolic
order, etc.) are distinct from the master-servant duality? Then, are
Lacan and I talking from the same (patriarchal) culture?
Is
it possible to talk about a real difference between the woman-man or
master-servant dichotomies and Lacanian-Žižekian dichotomies such
as fantasy-symptom, the big Other-the small other or reality-the
Real?
And
is it really possible for Žižek not to know the judgement stated at
the beginning of the structuralism course: There is no equality or
symmetry among the structural opposites (e.g. east-west or
woman-man). There is a firm asymmetry and a hierarchy that poses
itself again and again among them. If there is no possibility of not
admitting this the hierarchy which is present in each structural
opposition and prevails in many theoretical oppositions used by both
Lacan and Žižek (e.g. the big Other-the small other duality), are not we obliged to acknowledge that master-servant opposition,
which is the first example of the hierarchy that comes to mind, has
pervaded to all of the theoretical culture of Lacan and Žižek?
For
God's sake! I feel suffocated as I keep writing: how come a man who
knows Hegel so well criticizes someone for putting the master-servant
opposition at the heart of his thinking? Is it not Hegel himself who
explained that there is no explanation of existence, consciousness
and thinking that is far from the structure, structural
dichotomies (each of which is the continuation or an example of the
master-servant dichotomy) and the dialectics taking place between
these dichotomies – or put in more popular terms, from
"deconstruction"? And has Lacan, who began to flirt with
Hegel after attending Kojeve’s seminars that had concentrated on
the master-servant dialectic, ever made a single remark denying or
contradicting the Hegelian-Kojevian master-servant dichotomy and
dialectics?
How
come a man like Žižek is not ashamed of employing in his article a
criticism ("he then
universalizes it as a model for all human relations, ‘political,
social or economic”) which even the
most stupid Foucaultian has stopped a long time ago directing at
psychoanalysis? Is Žižek himself not the man who has been asking
the following question to the stupid
historicist-culturalist-conjuncturalist approach for years: How can
historicists, who have determined millions of varieties of men and
women in millions of different times and spaces, explain that they
have always come across the woman-man dichotomy in all known times
and spaces?
Sexual,
political and economic relations aside, is there no master-servant or
active-passive relationship event between two chatting persons? If
you speak, I go silent. And when I speak, I do so according to your
speech. Otherwise we would not be able to speak at all, that is, hold
a meaningful conversation.
The
man who best knows the truth of all I have saying, comes up and tells
me that the master-servant dialectic might not occur in the woman-man
dialectic, that it can be historicized and seen as contingent! What a
cynicism!
Let
us resume the sentence:
“...
even when a sexual relation is not the standard one, as is the case
with lesbians, there has to be the dominant masculine position and
the submissive feminine position (butch and femme).”
“And
is not the feminine counterpoint to this practice that of the ‘butch
lesbians’ who adopt a masculine stance and dress and, in their
sexual practice, renounce their own pleasure, focusing only on giving
pleasure to their partner (with the help of dildos, etc.). The
paradox here is that, precisely by adopting the masculine mask,
‘butch lesbians’ stand for the feminine subjective position at
its purest, for the jouissance of the Other as opposed to phallic
jouissance.” (Organs without Bodies, p. 88)
So
what did I say in fact? I just identified the position of butch
lesbian, Zizek speaks of, with that of the HDPKK which stands for the
enjoyment of the Other (the West, secularism, the left, etc.). At
this point, the fundemantal issue Zizek needs to discuss with me is
not whether a master-servant dialectic occurs in a lesbian
relationship – and there is nothing to discuss. The main point is
whether or not the HDPKK occupies the place of butch lesbian. But
despite all that, Zizek reduces the discussion to a matter of lesbian
relationship using rhetorical nonsense only to cast me as a bigoted
monster who brutally abuses psychoanalytical theory; and then tries
to present me as an idiot who universalizes his own patriarchal
culture and assimilates even the lesbian relationship into this
culture.
Let's
go on:
“But
Lacan's point is precisely this, namely that sexual relationship is
an impossible one: Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel. Every other (not
directly sexual) interhuman relation can be sexualized precisely
because 'there is no sexual relationship': sexuality affects other
domains not because of its overpowering strength but because of its
weakness. For Lacan, 'there is no sexual relationship' means (among
other things) precisely that no symbolic opposition (like
active/passive, master/servant, etc.) can adequately determine sexual
difference.”
The
same rhetorical shit again. Is it not Hegelian-Lacanian theory which
asserts that there is an unsymbolizable opposition between all
symbolic oppositions? Do not the parallax or the différance
that appears between symbolic opposites, and
the dialectics or the deconstruction that unfolds itself along
symbolic opposites, obstruct the symbolic stability of the symbolic
identities through which symbolic opposites manifest and affirm
themselves? Is it not already conspicuous that symbolic opposites
cannot determine their own -symbolic- distinction?
Moving
on:
“Things
then take an even worse turn: a lesbian relationship is explained in
terms of the opposition between the 'natural-real' sexual organ
(penis) and an artificial external dildo:”
He
who explains it before me, is Žižek himself.
“Butch
lesbians lack a real penis, so they have to rely on the artificial
dildo in order to impress some figure of the big Other (their Ego
Ideal) with their masculinity.”
This,
again, was stated by Žižek himself before me. Let's expose once
again the excerpt from Organs without Bodies
(p. 88) we noted down above:
“And
is not the feminine counterpoint to this practice that of the ‘butch
lesbians’ who adopt a masculine stance and dress and, in their
sexual practice, renounce their own pleasure, focusing only on giving
pleasure to their partner (with the help of dildos, etc.). The
paradox here is that, precisely by adopting the masculine mask,
‘butch lesbians’ stand for the feminine subjective position at
its purest, for the jouissance of the Other as opposed to phallic
jouissance.”
The
guy who wrote this continues unashamedly to chatter as if what I say
is any different from what he said.
“One
should also note the political dimension of Öğüt's text: written
in order to support the official policy of the Turkish government
(which denounces Kurdish opposition as terrorists), it is meant to
slander one of the greatest aspects of the Kurdish struggle in Syria,
the women-fighters who proved to be very effective against ISIS (we
should also note the late turn towards feminism of Ocalan, the
imprisoned leader of the PKK). The idea is that these women-fighters
are like butch lesbians: they fake their masculinity by way of
displaying their dildos (masculine guns) in order to impress the
figure of their Zionist-secular (i.e., anti-Turkish) big Other.”
He
finally got to the point! There is no one single element in my
article that violates psychoanalytical theory. But there is a
criticism of the HDPKK. Just as I underlined above, whereas the only
issue he needs to discuss is this and he started the debate through
this point, he nonetheless writes an article to regurgitate a bunch
of rhetorical nonsense as if there is a conflict between the
theoretical judgements we both agree upon, as if I pass judgements
that invalidate these judgements.
What
is worse is that my article contains no such expression as "Kurdish
terrorist". Neither did I say anything that focuses on the women
of the PKK while talking about the HDPKK. On the contrary, I
identified the whole HDPKK with the position of butch lesbian.
Likewise, I wrote no such thing as "anti-Turkish" as well.
And there isn't a single sentence in my article where I qualified the
HDPKK as "anti-Turkish" or "Kurdish terrorists".
What sort of mind reading is this? What a racist reading!
Žižek
knows nothing about neither my lifelong struggle for the protection
of the rights and freedoms of Kurds and the acknowledgement of their
oppression nor that the HDPKK oppresses the Kurds in the first place
and killed thousands of babies and children. Despite this, he has no
problem with writing about me absolutely accepting and not
questioning the slander about me uttered by this or that idiotic
leftist from Turkey he is in contact with in such a way as to pour
all of his racist fantasies over me. What a pity!
Moreover,
if criticizing the HDPKK automatically turns one into a supporter of
the official policy, it follows that members of democrat, liberal,
"leftist", Kurdish nationalist communities who has been
criticizing the official politics for all of their lives but also
criticized this movement are supporters of the official politics too.
And
finally, one needs to be either seriously ignorant or cynical to
claim that the PKK's distinctive feature is that it fights DAESH
efficiently: It is impossible to define the PKK as an anti-DAESH
organization that fights for freedom without knowing or denying the
fact that it is the PKK itself which committed killings of civilians
after trashing all of the policies of the government which pursued to
establish the peace, which returned to Kurds almost all of the
rights and freedoms the HDP tradition has been struggling for for
more than 30 years; that it is the PKK itself which conjured up the
fight again; was in solidarity with Fetullah Terror Organization
(FETO) during and after FETO's 15 July coup attempt; and made deals
occasionally with Assad who is known for his genocide in Syria, and
killed even the anti-Assad civilians.
“There
is a slight problem here. For Lacan, the phallus (which defines
masculinity) is not the penis but a signifier, the signifier of
castration, which means precisely an external supplement, 'structured
like a dildo' (to paraphrase Lacan's famous formula 'the unconscious
is structured like a language'). So the situation described by Öğüt
as a lesbian diversion is for Lacan a normal one: what defines the
masculinity of a man is not his possession of a penis but the way he
relates to some external phallic signifier on which his authority
relies, and he does this in order to be noted by a figure of the big
Other that confers on him his authority if he manages to establish
the relation correctly.”
It
is not that I've written a single word that contradicts with these
sentences. Žižek also knows this and the readers are aware of this
as well. We only need to talk about the part where he says "the
big Other that confers on him his authority if he manages to
establish the relation correctly". Or
more precisely, Žižek needs to talk. He must explain what this
"managing to establish the relation correctly" is –
without indulging in rhetorical shit if possible. What kind of
relationship should those stooges of the Other establish with it to
have more than receiving the approval of the Other, that is, to be
conferred authority by the Other?
“Consequently,
would Öğüt be ready to say that Erdoğan is also a butch, a weak
guy who displays his dildo in order to impress the big Other (Turkey,
Islam)? If Öğüt thinks saying so is disrespectful, then he must be
as much virtuous as not to use the same insulting formula for the
women-fighters fighting ISIS.”
How
can this guy allege that Erdoğan who declared that "he tramples
nationalism/racism" is a Turk-Islam cause fanatic? And how come
he is unashamedly able to say that there might be a theoretical
connection between a leader supported by the people who thwarted a
coup attempt by climbing onto tanks and a stooge-organization that
points the weapons given to them by the Other at anyone targeted by
the Other to kill them?
To
be continued ...