Homines Sacri of Eskibahçe: An Agambenian Reading of Louis de Bernières’ Birds without Wings

This study aims to provide a political criticism of the 2004 novel Birds without Wingsby the English author Louis de Bernières, as the political background and overtlypolitical subplot of the novel render it open to one. In order to develop its ownargument the study reads Bernières’ novel through the political concepts of thecontemporary Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben, focusing mainly on two of them thatcan be found in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life of Agamben, and createdby the sovereign in relation with the sovereign exception or ban: The first concept isan indistinct concept of life, namely a naked or as Agamben puts it, a bare life. Andthe second is the homo sacer (sacred man), the one who dwells in this naked life. Livingin a small village named Eskibahçe, the characters in Louis de Bernières’ novel aredescribed as birds without wings that “are always confined to earth, no matter howmuch [they] climb to the high places and flap [their] arms” by the author himself(2005, p.621) and they are turned into homines sacri (sacred men) during a state ofpolitical emergency as the footfall of the upcoming change. Therefore, the study aimsto examine all the homines sacri in Birds without Wings of Louis de Bernières by anAgambenian reading.

Keywords:

homo sacer, sacred man, bare life, sovereign exception population exchange,

PDF

___

Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. California: Stanford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adengl.2011.07.005. google scholar
Aksoy, M. U. (2016). Giorgio Agamben : Mesihçi bir siyaset felsefesinde kutsal insan ve istisna. Uludağ University Faculty of Arts and Sciences Journal of Philosophy, Fall (27), 43-58. Retrieved from http://static.dergipark.org. tr/article-download/e14c/2bcc/dd7b/5880e34f76cda.pdf? google scholar
Bernieres, L. de. (2005). Birds without Wings. London: Vintage. google scholar
Çifçi, N. (2018). “Homo Sacer” için her gün bayram. Gazete Duvar. Retrieved from https://www.gazeteduvar.com. tr/forum/2018/08/19/homo-sacer-icin-her-gun-bayram. google scholar
Derrida, J. (2009). The beast & the sovereign. (M. Lisse, M.-L. Mallet, & G. Michaud, Eds.). (English, Vol. 1). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.47-4942. google scholar
Festus, S. P. (1997). De verborvm significatv qvae svpersvnt cvm pavli epitome. (M. L. Wallace, Ed.). (1st ed.). Stuttgart. google scholar
Fiskesjö, M. (2012). Outlaws, barbarians, slaves: Critical reflections on Agamben’s homo sacer. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2(1), 161-180. https://doi.Org/10.14318/hau2.1.009. google scholar
Golban, T. (2015). The apocalypse myth in Louis de Bernieres’ novel Birds Without Wings: Rustem Bey and an individual apocalyptic experience in the Kierkegaardian frame, The Annals of Ovidius University of Constanta -the Philology Series, 26(1), 44-52. google scholar
Golban, T. and Yürükler, E. (2019). Social constructions of identity in Louis De Bernieres’ novel Birds Without Wings. Humanitas, 7(14), 406-422. google scholar
Handwerk, B. (2018). When and how did wolves become dogs? Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved from https:// www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-wolves-really-became-dogs-180970014/. google scholar
Josipovic, S. (2016). Defining and undefining home and family space in Louis de Berniere’s novel Birds Without Wings, Folia Linguistica et Litteraria, 15, p. 74. google scholar
Schmitt, C. (2005). Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. google scholar
Şahin, Y. (2021). Lives amidst ruins: Greek nationalism in Louis De Bernieres’s Birds Without Wings, Journal of Nationalism Studies, 3(1), p. 156. google scholar
Woodson, H. (2021). “The one who decides on the exception”: The sovereign and sovereignty in Slavoj Zizek’s political theology after Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben. International Journal of Zizek Studies, 15(1), 1-21. Retrieved from https://zizekstudies.org/index.php/IJZS/article/view/1166/1232. google scholar
Zammit, F. (2017). A postcolonial reading of Agamben’s homo sacer project. Engaging the Contemporary, 1-7. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335501258_Engaging_the_Contemporary_2017 _-_A_Postcolonial_Reading_of_Agamben’s_Homo_Sacer_Project. google scholar