E. Efe Çakmak

An “interventionist, cultural-activist, pan-European community of journals” should not limit itself to an expanded Europe, Homi Bhaba suggests. The work of cultural journals is per se internationalist and has to link communities of intellectuals and activists around the world. This interview first appeared in “Crosswords”, a multilingual and transnational journal on multilingualism and digital networking, published in the context of “crosswords X mots croisés. 21st European Meeting of Cultural Journals” in Paris 2008.

This interview first appeared in “Crosswords”, a multilingual and transnational journal on multilingualism and digital networking, published in the context of “crosswords X mots croisés. 21st European Meeting of Cultural Journals” in Paris 2008.

The conference “Ottoman Armenians during the decline of the empire: Issues of scientific responsibility and democracy”, held at Istanbul Bilgi University in 2005, marked the beginning of a fierce public debate on the “Armenian issue” in Turkey. Attempts to hold the conference at Bosphorous University were twice blocked by the Turkish government, and in a speech given to the members of the parliament before the conference, the Turkish minister of justice accused the conference organizers and participants of treason. The “Armenian issue” then emerged “full-blown onto the public sphere”.

In the case of Hrant Dink, there was something that troubled the popular imagination other than that an outspoken Armenian journalist had become a prime-time figure, says E. Efe Çakmak. It was his contamination of the pure categories of Armenian and Turk, Christian and Muslim. But how are we to make sense of Dink’s murder without falling prey to an instrumental reasoning that claims that Turkish democracy has also been shot dead?

British feminist and psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell talks to Cogito about her role in the British New Left in the 1960s. Mitchell was at the centre of the movement: as editorial board member of the New Left Review, as participant in Third World and anti-psychiatry movements, and as co-organizer of grassroots initiatives, including the “Anti-University”, founded on the steps of Shoreditch Church in East London. Here, Mitchell outlines her intellectual trajectory from her early Marxism, to feminism of the mid-1960s, and to psychoanalysis in the 1970s.

The Cambridge anthropologist argues that in seeking to expose the “structures of the mind”, Levi-Strauss and the Structuralists projected the categorized worldview of literate cultures onto simpler societies. In analysing oral cultures, a more flexible approach must be employed to take in the inconsistencies in myth-making, something made apparent by modern recording technology in the 1960s. In the second half of the interview, Goody discusses language development and the pitfalls of the genetic approach; the processes of “naming” and “discovering” in relation to western ideological concepts such as “freedom” and “slavery”; and the reception of western religion in non-western and formerly colonized cultures.

E. Efe Çakmak challenges our views on suicide-bombings – rather than submitting to the temptation of regarding suicide bombers as “personifications of the absolute evil” we should view them as our likes. According to Çakmak, works of art and poetry can serve to fulfil this function:
one example is the installation by Dror and Gunilla Sköld Feiler Snow White and The Madness of Truth which shot to fame after it was being attacked by the Israeli consul-general to Sweden, Svi Mazel. Read “why the insertion of poetry into this complex reality is different from other methods of rationalising and establishing cognitive links”.