Capacities and ill health :|Deleuzian ethics in the Flame Alphabet and Sıcak Kafa

Abstract

This thesis explores the possibilities that Deleuzian ethics offers—the investment in the body's capacities to enter affective and transformative relations, thus lead a response(able) life—as they become manifest in two contemporary novels revolving around language-related diseases: Ben Marcus' The Flame Alphabet (2012) and Afşin Kum's Sıcak Kafa (2016). In The Flame Alphabet, children's speech becomes poisonous for their parents, which causes pain and deformation in their bodies, whereas in Sıcak Kafa a memetic language disease—abuklama—causes people to talk in grammatically correct but semantically nonsensical ways. The diseases disrupt the flow of normalcy in life, thus revealing the suppressive power mechanisms in society, and transform not only the interrelations between the bodies, but also familial, social, and economic relations. In both novels, the employment of a subversive language as a disease signals an ongoing state of becoming, and opens unforeseen paths into diverse and mutually transformative relations to the world, and as such emerges as an enterprise of health. Both novels foreground language exchanges, and experiment with an alternative use of language beyond conventional forms of communication and mere representation. The disease provides a perspective on the sickness caused by the oppressive power regimes in society. These novels pave a fertile ground to discuss ethics, as they refuse the normative conceptions of health imposed on people and propose an understanding of health associated with the body’s capacity to act and affect as well as to respond and be affected.