london university seminar

Sardar Aziz سه‌ردار عه‌زیز
PhD Candidate
Department of Government
University College Cork /Ireland
ستوننوس له رۆژنامه‌ی
Awene (newspaper) Columnist
The map of the areas where the Kurds are living
“If we supply an aggregate of human beings, more or less homogeneous in language and religion, with a little assistance and a good deal of advice, if we protect them from external aggression and discourage internal violence, they will speedily and spontaneously organize themselves into a democratic state on modern lines.” Balfour describing Sykes-Picot agreement.
The Nudes and Their Masters
The concept of nude is an amalgamation of the Agambenian conceptualisation plus the Kurdish use of the word.
For Agamben the bare life is the antonym to the political life. A life that is depoliticised in order to make it a political subject.
خه‌ڵکی ره‌ش و رووت (black and nude people) in Kurdish is a description used to describe the ordinary people.
Black signifies mass, uniform and nude denotes poverty.
The Nudes and Their Masters
Who are the masters of the nudes (Kurds)?
There is no Hegelian Master-slave relationship (Phenomenology of Spirit).
It is the relation of ban (Agamben, 1998).
The Kurds are less than a slave for their master: a slave is not murdered by the master (به‌ختیار عه‌لی
The master laughs at the consciousness of the slave (Fanon, 1967).
Becoming a nude
Emergence of non-relational relation: tool
Occidental modernity & the Kurds
Arrival of occidental modernity both as power and ideology impacted on the status of the Kurds.
They became stateless, minorities, separated by border lines, forced to assimilate,
They were identified as prospective-Turks, tribes, bandits, sheikhs, pre-modern past, Iraqi, Syrian, cancer, destructors, اجنبی، مکتوم، عصاد، مغرب etc.
No right to resist, to disagree, to speak, to be human
A figure of security threat: Security as the basic principle of state politics dates back to the birth of the modern state (Agamben, 2002).
Kurds & Modernity
“I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes” (Churchill).
‘backward’, ‘tribal’, ‘looter’, ‘plotter’, ‘other’ (Demir& Zeydanlioglu, 2010)
Politics of Citizenship: Syria and Iraq-Soviet Model (Alexopoulos,2006).
Stripped off rights, language, dwelling, life, expression, freedom.
“not able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” (Little, 2010).
The Emergence of the Failed Modern State (FMS)
FMS
Modernity Tradition

Mass
FMS
As the above diagram shows the Failed Modern state is in a circular shape i.e. it is a closed state (family, tribe, and sect).
Through the various components of modernity and tradition, it makes a mass out of the population and relates to them accordingly.
This state is distant from the population i.e. external. It is in the relation of exception which is a relation of ban.
As Agamben (1998) puts it; the ban relation is not, in fact, simply being outside the law or being made indifferent to it but rather being abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable.
FMS Features
It is neither modern nor traditional
It resists being either
The state and the sovereign are fused: no boundary for the sovereign power
No society, no citizenship, no community, no public sphere
Becoming divine is the sovereign’s desire: politics is theology (Schmitt)
کن فیکن be, it is
The state of exception (emergency), suspension of law by law
The Kurds in the FMS
In the absence of their own border the Kurds have no sphere to practice politics, in Hegelian terms, no space for the spirit to become conscious of itself.
Only when there is a political space a public space becomes possible (Etienne Balibar, 2004).
Biologically suffering, legally dead
Can be killed without sacrificed, homo sacer
people live a naked life that modernity necessarily created,
and whose exclusion is included as exceptional
Driving thoughts out of ideas: ‘analyze the way institutions, practices, habits, and behavior become a problem for people’
Deducing thoughts out of modernity’s ideas and analyse the way institutions, practices, habits, and behaviour of the FMS become the problem for the Kurds.
Enframing and condemning
Based on modern ideas and practice the masters enframed the Kurds and condemned them for being so.
When there is no state there is no standard language.
‘Kurds have no language’, ‘Kurds are tribes, not a nation’, ‘Kurds are traditional, not modern’ etc.
silenced
Killed for desiring modernity
The language of modernity which is a monologue of master about the Kurds, has been established only on the basis of such a silence; to paraphrase Foucault (2002).
Deconstructing Modernity
Modernity politicized/depoliticized the Kurds & the Kurdish study (Foucault/Aristotle).
No room for autochthonous politics.
Hardly any other field of Near Eastern Studies has ever been so politicised as the study of the history and culture of the Kurds, having produced an industry of amateurs, with few rivals in other domains of Orientalistic knowledge (Asatrian, 2009)
To have a Kurdish politics a deconstruction of modernity’s politics is urgent.
Line of Flights*
If modernity is a line, a line of flight is needed.
The point of taking off is the moment of realising the reality, deconstructing the discourse of modernity.
The status of the Kurd is a homo sacer, in a relation of ban with the authorities
The states are the state of exception, fused with the sovereign, the sovereign is law.
Explanation of the abuses, the hatred, the mass killing.
Poetry of the Future
The Kurdish social revolution of the 21st century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future (to paraphrase Marx, 1852)
In the future is contained the poetry of the new understanding.
Modernity and its consequences shaped the Kurds in a way to not have a past to draw from it for its future.
Therefore a poetry required not a history
A new imagination
The Kurd cannot begin with him/herself before s/he has stripped away all superstition about the modernity (paraphrasing Marx 1852).
Conclusions
Applying postmodern concepts to the current Kurdish situation is the only way to deconstruct the discourse of modernity.
Postmodern concepts welcomes us to the desert of reality (to paraphrase Zizek, 2002).
Despite the abjectness of the situation there is resistance.
The question of resistance has to be hybridised with postmodern notions.
Can a homo sacer become a citizen; can an exceptional state be non-exceptional ??????
Conclusions
Marry who love: Right of secession (Wellman, 2005).
The question of citizenship! As a status, as a form of contract
In a liquid globalised world there, one should not be imprisoned among the narrow walls of modernity
People and the significance of space; a redefinition
State; FMS, Sovereign apparatus or? a redefinition

گه‌له‌ک سوپاس
Thanks a million!!
To the KSSO team
Questions پرسیار