“Making the wound bleed”: Nostalgia, Mourning, and Morality among Turkish Revolutionaries in Istanbul

This article investigates nostalgia and mourning among former Turkish revolutionary militants, the main victims of state violence in the wake of the Turkish 1980 military coup. It understands these emotions as ethically imbued moods that are both conscious and unconscious and permeate both public discourses and the innermost spheres of former fighters. These moods pervade the everydayness of former revolutionaries, their discourses on the past and the present as well as ritualized occasions, such as anniversaries, gatherings, and commemorations. Based on fieldwork research conducted in Istanbul, this article conceptualizes these moods as inter-subjective emotional practices with a certain degree of agency that work as political and moral modes of engaging with the world. Although former revolutionaries intend these moods as practices of resistance against the ongoing state repression, this article argues that their active perpetuation does not lie in their political success in the public battle for memory and recognition, but in their ability to shape former militants’ subjectivity, invigorate their generational bond, keep alive the moral economy of revolutionary fighter, and create a community of loss. Likewise, this contribution demonstrates how revolutionary feelings of nostalgia and mourning shape a social poetics that reduces possibilities for acting in new ways on history and contributes to the creation of a community as cohesive as isolated from the rest of society. Notwithstanding the endurance of state oppression over time, this contribution warns against restraining our analysis to an unmasking of asymmetrical violence and unequal power relationships in the public sphere. It instead argues that, even in repressive contexts, it is important to investigate the symbolic codes and the political feelings that shape social actors’ subjectivities, their moral horizon and their possibilities of actions.