ABSTRACT
Is Turkey going to become a European Union member? Or is it going to remain in-between the West and the East, between secularism and fundamentalist Islam? Indeed, in its permanent suspension between the two horizons, being both attracted to and repelled by the West, life in today’s Turkey is perhaps a good metaphor for the global Unsicherheit attached to liquid modernity in which there is nothing, no secure guide, that automatically leads the majority of people from one extreme to another, e.g. from collapsing into nihilism to a meaningful life (see Bauman 1999, 2000). Climates, a film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (2006), dramatizes the suspended lives of the two members of the Turkish petty bourgeoisie, I˙sa and Bahar, focusing on their fears and frustrations in the grip of nihilism.
