Writing of(f) hunger, life, and the self :|biopolitics and poetics of Nâzım Hikmet’s hunger strike

Abstract

In this thesis, focusing on his hunger strike in 1950, I try to problematize the presentim age of,and discourse on, Nâzım Hikmet. Drawing on a wide variety of fields including intellectual history,criticaltheory, social and political thought, and literary and cultural studies, I embark on a critique of the modern author/human as the unified and single authority over its life and thought. I examine hunger strike as a biopolitical protest, considering biopolitics to be a modern discourse in which the nation-state is defined by its prime duty of “social defense”and is necessarily linked to the human life. Speaking to the spheres presumably lying outside the state, hunger striker suggests that the violence inflicted on her body is what the state does to her and, thus, that the state deviates from the biopolitical norms that defineit self. In this sense, I try to understand what happens when Nâzım Hikmet, a renowned literary and political figure, a communist from Turkey, and a modern author, becomes a hunger striker. What is the significance of this event in the larger contexts of Nâzım’s life as “Turkey’s world poet,”of theTurkish politics, and of the modernity ?I try to illustrate that Nâzım’s hunger strike can be taken as a “synecdoche” of Nâzım’s life as a modern author who inscribes and asserts himself in his writings vis-à-vis the others’gazes that watch him. It is in this sense I see ananalogy between the modern author and the modern state, as both are constructed as self-generating entities with a definite outside and the gazes that monitor them. Historically, the modern state has been conceptualized closely following the model of the modern individualist self that owns itself and vice versa in the Western political discourse. It is these inside/outside, gaze/object binaries through which Nâzım Hikmet (and the overly positive existing Nâzım Hikmet scholarship) constructed himself that I aim to problematize in the thesis, by drawing a provocative similarity as well as a connection between the modern author and the modern state. Yet, while doing this, I also underscore the fact that inside always needs outside to be able to become inside and, thus, outside is already in. What makes the modern author (im)possible, then, is the gazes that watch him. There are unconscious fragments of this (im)possibility where Nâzım Hikmet writes off himself, especially in what I term his late style. Thus, I try to show that it is this instability that might help us 1ind still new possibilities in Nâzım Hikmet in an age marked by human-made catastrophes that are now beyond human.