ABSTRACT
In Istanbul: Memories and the City, Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk writes on hzn, or melancholia, in a way that highlights the agentive power of a melancholy state. Pamuk suggests that hzn is the collective mood of the city of Istanbul and its inhabitants. The mode of historical realism that underlies IRs positions in politics simply produces its own knowledgeable displacements, absences, silences, and forgetting implicated in the vulnerabilities of people positioned differently across the world. In the revelatory moment, there was a powerful realism attesting to melancholic agency. Melancholic thought as praxis resonates in ways that implicate the prevailing sense of political realism, including the so-called realism or Realpolitik in international relations. For political realism, melancholia, along with other dissonant conditions, is a luxury political agents cannot afford. This chapter highlights how the dominant political realism in IR is still fashioned by disjunctures between its epistemological rhetoric and its ontopolitical realities.
