The End of Truth:
Five Essays on The Demise of Neoliberalism
First Edition: August 2021
What seems to be happening throughout the last decade is the gradual invalidation and dissolution of what we used to call ‘Truth’, and hence the disruption and gradual dissolution of what Foucault had called the existing hierarchical “Regime of Truth”. What remains is not what Marx had hoped to be a more egalitarian regime in which “the educator{s themselves are also] educated”, but rather a ‘Humpty Dumpty Regime’, where ‘Truth’ is whatever the Humpty-Dumpty in power wants it to be. This book argues that this is an unmediated outcome of the profound social, cultural and economic crisis of neoliberal capitalism, and its political corollary, the meteoric rise of populism and authoritarianism, not only in the so-called ‘developing’ countries, but throughout the entire globe.
Something is Missing:
Things We Don’t Want to Know About Love, Sex and Life
First Edition: March 2021
What a joy! Bülent Somay’s new-old text, translated from the Turkish by Bülent himself, takes us into the impenetrable heart of obscure Lacanian psychoanalysis and comes out with clarity, wit and epithetical precision. Theory comes alive here; and along with the fun and games, something dark is brought into the light.
Stephen Frosh,
Author of Those Who Come After
With clarity, wit and copious erudition, Bülent Somay brings his critical psychoanalytic eye to our most challenging human relations – the tribulations of sex, love and desire. Somay’s committed sexual politics informs this essential addition to our knowledge of the pleasures and perils of the bonds of desire. Something is Missing is not to be missed.
Lynne Segal,
Author of Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy
The Psychopolitics of the Oriental Father
First Edition: November 2014
With a foreword by Slavoj Žižek, this book explores the Father Function in the East in the process of 'Modernisation', arguing that 'Modernisation' and 'Westernisation' are euphemisms for the advent of capitalism in Asiatic and African societies which lead to fatal transformations of the cultural and political incarnatations of the Oriental Father.
The View From The Masthead
First Edition: March 2010
Bülent Somay offers a journey without an end, that is, a journey through dystopia towards an open-ended utopia. He discusses not only well-known examples of the genre but also new utopian science fiction. In that journey, utopia is located in the endless process of self-deconstruction, or what Trotsky would have called a ‘permanent revolution’. Permanence in revolution is the only guarantee against the lure of the ever-unreachable object of desire, the primordinal lack. Since this lack is structural, the desire for wholeness or completion will never be satisfied. The problem is, we never had completion: there never was a ‘Golden Age’, except in our imaginations...