Impasses of Political Authority: Erdogan and the Gezi Resistance

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Abstract

This paper, Impasses of Political Authority, investigates democratic dissent and authoritarianism by borrowing the tools of psychoanalysis, and argues that political authority can be studied productively by attending to the structure of envy. Drawing insights from authoritarian populist regime in Turkey, my main claim is that what political authority wants for itself is not a mere entitlement to represent “the people” attained, in democracies, by electoral victory. It longs rather for the enjoyment that emerges in popular mobilization.
Former prime minister, now president, Erdogan, after a decade and half of stable electoral success, maintain to vilify, and allege the “illegitimacy” of the oppositional mobilization. Erdogan and party representatives persistently bring up the Gezi Resistance (2013) both to demean it as the other and also, in my view, because Gezi serves as the symbolic form that the party itself aspires to attain. Accordingly, I argue that the governing authority takes this approach to dissident mobilizations because the oppositional energy that moves people into the streets to assemble and stand resilient exceeds, in a non-quantifiable register, the numerical supremacy of the government’s voting base. That excess is exhibited as the collective experience of pleasure. The pleasure of being and acting together is thus enjoyed by another “people,” those who dissent. This pleasure is something that authority cannot appropriate, and thus it remains, for that authority, a lack, a source of envy. Melanie Klein (1928; 1957) defines envy as the pleasure enjoyed by another. As Klein describes, to long for another’s enjoyment is different from longing for an object of desire. When an object is possessed by another, one may feel jealousy, but envy differs from jealousy in being a longing for the enjoyment another possesses. I argue that the vitality of dissident mobilizations reinforces the envy that brings political authority to an impasse even at the height of its electoral power. Authority perceives dissident collectivities as withholding the object of desire— “the people” defined non-electorally—and thus as the reason for its failed gratification. Envy for the dissidents’ enjoyment drives political authority toward authoritarian, and often gratuitous, repression of its opposition. By turning to envy, my paper seeks to explain both the operativity of political authority as well as its susceptibility to authoritarianization.

Author

• Nazli Konya, Cornell University