The Mūthoi of Selahattin Demirtaş

Abstract

This article is concerned with the stories of Selahattin Demirtaş, with the preposition “of” indicating Demirtaş as both the storyteller and subject of stories. For many, if not most of us, he is known as both, with the stories about him circumscribing, and often overshadowing the stories he tells. Focusing on the stories told about him and that he tells in judicial proceedings about his political speeches, as well as those he tells in his first book of short stories, Seher, it considers how those stories pose a challenge to the account about the relationship between storytelling, speech, action, and politics predominate in political philosophy since Aristotle, giving particular attention to Hannah Arendt’s critique of that account. At the crux of the stories of Selahattin Demirtaş is a fundamental contestation about the relationship between ethnicity and the nation state, whether the demand for the political and territorial integrity of the nation necessitates foreclosing on the plurality of democratic dissensus.