Žižek as the Monkey of Turkish Kemalists

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).”

I am speechless once again. I will not respond to this. Instead, I will just let him slam himself:

“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 ...