ABSTRACT
On the evening of 17 June 2013 Erdem Gündüz stopped in the centre of Istanbul’s central square. Having cleared Gezi Park of the tents and bodies that had occupied it since May and banned all gatherings in the adjacent Taksim Square, the Turkish government had supressed one of the most decisive democratic struggles in modern Turkish history. But the genie was out of the bottle. That evening Gündüz crossed the square, came to a stop in front of the Atatürk Cultural Centre, and stood there, first alone, then with dozens of others, for close to eight hours. The novelty of the coming politics, ventured Giorgio Agamben, is that it comprises a struggle between ‘whatever singularity and the State’, between the State and those who ‘co-belong without any representable condition of belonging’, who ‘reject all identity and every condition of belonging’.1 And while the State, continued Agamben, ‘can recognize any claim for identity – even that of a State identity within the State…[what it] cannot tolerate…is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging’.2 It is a threat ‘the State cannot come to terms with’, and so ‘Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear’.3
