Gezi-envy

• In Event: The Politics of Ugly Feelings

Abstract

This paper analyzes a series of pro-government popular mobilizations which took place in Turkey during Summer 2016 in the immediate aftermath of a failed coup attempt—namely the “Democracy Watches,” a set of theatrical mass gatherings, elaborately stylized and carried out by the local party organizations of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in major cities across Turkey. It highlights the resemblances between these government-sponsored gatherings and the anti-government Gezi Protests of 2013, with similar forms of space-making activities. It also stresses a simultaneous yet conflicting trend: the persistent vilification and defamation of the Gezi protestors by the members of the regime. Against the backdrop of these two seemingly contradictory governmental responses, this paper asks the following questions: Given the government’s repression of the Gezi Protests when they were initially waged—a repression which has only intensified since then—why do the regime members continue to bring up Gezi rather than consigning it to the dust heap of history? Why does AKP, in its production of the Democracy Watches as a rival popular mobilization, effectively reproduce Gezi through imitation?
I answer these questions through the analytical lens of “envy,” drawing on Melanie Klein and Joan Copjec, and through René Girard on “mimetic desire.” I argue that the regime reproduces Gezi because it envies Gezi’s collective jouissance and that it envies that jouissance for the desire it generates in and through immediate corporeal experiences and intermediating communal practices. Invested in electoral supremacy while at the same time recognizing that a desiring people can exceed an electoral people, the regime, in an effort to suppress and also surpass Gezi, seeks to appropriate that desire through mimesis.

Author

• Nazli Konya, Colby College