TARİH VE POİESİS: ÇAĞDAŞ KITA AVRUPASI POLİTİK TEORİSİNDE ZAMAN, ÜRETİM VE YARATICILIK

Abstract

This dissertation aims to make traceable, through the concepts of history and poiesis, the relation between the concept of history in contemporary Continental European political theory and the modern designs of political subjectivity and agency. In the thesis, history is treated not as a background narrative of the past, but as an operator that carries the boundaries of the political, the distribution of agency, and the conditions of both the constitution and the crisis of modern subjectivity. Poiesis, in turn, is constructed not as a compensatory, aestheticized notion of creativity, but as a focal lens that renders visible how subjectivity has from the outset been constituted as an assemblage formed within regimes of time, institutions, and techniques of recognition. The thesis’s initial problem is to interrogate how, in the post–May 1968 literature, the ways of separating “politics” from “the political,” together with the overinvestment in the concept of the “event,” converge with a tendency to displace the concept of history altogether. Against this tendency, the dissertation argues that abandoning history—or reducing it to a single event—may be connected to contemporary political impasses. The study follows three historical rupture-moments— the Industrial Revolution, May 1968, and the Anthropocene—as thresholds at which regimes of time, milieux, and techniques of recognition intensify, thereby shaping the institutionalization conditions of modern political subjectivity across three planes. To analyze regimes of time, the thesis develops the concepts of industrial-homogeneous time and the temporal transformation of publicity. It then seeks to conceptualize a set of milieux: a representational milieu organized around parliament, political parties, and elections; a labour milieu centered on the factory, labour law, and trade unions; a welfare–security milieu articulated through social insurance and institutions of risk; and, finally, a knowledge–media milieu inspired by educational institutions, the university, and public opinion. In this way, the dissertation examines how modern political subjectivity was theorized in modern theory between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries through the successive weighting of the concepts of politics, law, and history; how it was institutionalized after the Industrial Revolution; and why and at what scales it entered into crisis after May 1968—together with the end of the welfare state and the rise of neoliberalism—culminating in the Anthropocene that names the present age and reframes the future of political subjectivity. The thesis’s final proposal is to reconceptualize political critique not merely as negation and denunciation, but as a historical– poietic practice of reconstruction, and to treat the capacity for institutional invention capable of sustaining egalitarian affirmations as decisive for the future of modern political subjectivity.