ABSTRACT
This chapter approaches the apology campaign as a performative speech act whose temporal unfolding highlights how, under the spectre of the Left, an oppositional politics was formulated, contested and stabilised in relation to questions of sovereignty, law and the project of living together in difference. The apology campaign was never introduced as a specifically leftist intervention. None of the initiators currently claims to speak in the name of the Left. The apology campaign presents itself as a gesture to overcome this legacy of nationalism by reaching out and connecting, by making amends and reconciling. The chapter mainly draws on ethnographic data collected during fieldwork conducted between January and October 2009 in Istanbul. It focuses on an online campaign that, as a performative speech act, marks a recent moment in which a leftist-liberal oppositional politics was crafted and performed.
