Kurdish Studies and Student Organisation

Seminar on The Nudes and Their Master: a Postmodern Re-conceptualisation of the Kurdish Issue

Posted on 01. Dec, 2010 by KSSO in Calender, News, Seminar

Kurdish Studies Seminar

You are kindly invited to our forthcoming seminar on

The Nudes and Their Master:

a Postmodern Re-conceptualisation of the Kurdish Issue

Speaker: Mr Sardar Aziz PhD Candidate Department of Government University College Cork/Ireland

Date and Time: 16.12. 2010 @ 7:00pm

Venue: School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, Room B104 Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG

Organised by Kurdish Studies and Students Organization (KSSO) and Kurdish Society at SOAS (KSSOAS)

Seminar abstract

The Nudes and Their Master: a Postmodern Re-conceptualisation of the Kurdish Issue

This seminar aims at analysing the Kurdish status within the discourse of modernity. It argues that modernity and local utilisation of modernity shaped and limited the Kurdish role and justified unjustified acts against them. The Kurdish problem in the Middle East, like the Middle East itself, is modernity’s product. It was made, through making them minorities, maintained by Westphalian model of sovereignty. This sovereign established state and fused with it, based on occidental modernity’s institutions, practices and ideas (Max Weber) legitimatised the monopoly violence and use it against the Kurds. Through the model of the Failed Modern State, I analyse the states in the Middle East from a different perspective.

My intention is neither to go through the history of the Kurds nor of the region. It is rather an exercise, based on Foucault’s methodology, to drive ‘thoughts’ from ‘ideas’. The notions of State, borders, sovereignty, people, citizen, nation, nationalism: civic and ethnic, minority, civil society, etc. are ideas belong to modernity. They urgently require to be transformed into thoughts, in order to analyse they become a problem for people, to paraphrase Foucault.

I argue that modern notions construct its own Other and refuse to reasoning it. For instance ‘Kurds have no language’ without ever taking in consideration the sine qua non relationship between the standard language and the emergence of the state or to analyse it comparatively. The Kurds portrayed within the discourse of modernity as people who their culture, identity, history and mode of life are pre-modern and for them in order to be modern have to abandon it. Hence, accordingly, one cannot be a Kurd and modern concurrently. As a result of the modernity’s ideas the Kurds are reduced to apolitical being, prohibited to use language (human), thus, they only have voice

In contrast to this, postmodern thoughts such as homo sacer (the one who may be killed yet not sacrificed), abandonment (positing of relation with the non-relational), exception (the ultimate configuration of facts), state of exception (emergency), potentiality (resisting actuality), people and People, will contribute in demystifying the reality and deconstructing the constructed discourses of modernity. Postmodern concepts are breaking the taboos and offer a new poetry of politics.

Sardar Aziz a Kurd from Iraqi (south) Kurdistan, final stage PhD (waiting for viva) at the Department of Government University College Cork/ Ireland. Columnist in a non-partisan Kurdish newspaper Awene: www/awene.com.

Further information

www.ksso.org.uk

mc@ksso.org.uk