Kültür Araştırmaları Dergisi

Öz

This study discusses Russian writer Andrey Platonov’s
novella Dzhan, written under the
inspiration of Turkmen folk beliefs after the writer’s Central Asia tour. The
novella, a product of the social and literary atmosphere of 1930s, described as
the "Middle Ages" of the Soviet Union, is fictionalized on the notion
of “dzhan”, which means “a soul in pursuit of bliss”. Sociological method is
followed in the thanatopolitical analysis of the novella that tells the story
of a nomadic and miserable tribe gathering “the others” of the society called
Dzhan, which chooses an eudaimonistic death by refusing the transition to
settled life and living for the sake of continuity of power. Thanatopolitics,
politics of death in its most general definition is discussed as the reverse of
biopolitics that indicates political practices by which the vital capacities of
the population are taken under the control of the sovereign power.
Thanatopolitics is considered as the other side, an extension, a supplement, a
reversion of biopolitics, an intertwining of politics over life and death, or a
resistance to biopolitical norms. The study aims to deal with the
politicization of death through the victim's perspective and to read the
resistant character of thanatopolitics through an exemplary literary text that
is the product and mirror of totalitarianism. The study inquires how thanatopolitics
is turned into a weapon that is reversed and directed against sovereign power
in the civil disobedience of the people of Dzhan, who submit themselves for a
slow death by dancing inspired by Danse Macabre, a medieval allegory of plague.