Worldless time

The ships that set sail for Gaza had set out to save a dwindling world. The world had diminished so much that could so many ships save it? Alain Badiou wrote in his book "Logics of Worlds" that we were living in a dwindling world. We were in a period between a worn-out, deteriorating, exhausted world and a world not yet calculable or predictable. For Badiou, justice was what made the world visible. He emphasized that we were experiencing a time without a world, and therefore we were in a state of stagnant unrest, or rather, an uneasy stagnation. We were fixated on a flickering static image that created the illusion of movement and change. This was a state consistent with Adorno's words, "Home is finished." Everyone was experiencing an internal, if not always external, exile in this world.

ENDLESS RESEARCH

The path to rebuilding a diminished world lay through four main realities: politics, art, science, and love. According to Badiou, truths could only be universally generated from these four sources. Especially love. As Badiou argues in his essay "Love Must be Reinvented," co-written with Duane Rousselle, love was also a stage for the adventure of a new idea. This essay centered on Rimbaud's dictum that "love must be reinvented." Reinventing love meant reinventing thought as well. For Badiou, if love were present in poetry, music, novels, and films—in short, everywhere—it meant it opened up an infinite field of inquiry for future humanity. Love emerged as the most intense and widely shared experience capable of revealing humanity. At the same time, it bore such differences and similarities that it encompassed all civilizations and cultures, possessing a power that transcended them.

DIGITAL COFFIN

But love was frightening for today's rational human being, living in a worldless temporality. For in this worldless time, selfishness was an inevitable pursuit. Contemporary life was built on preserving the duration and content of our singular existence at all costs. The rise in health and beauty investments, the quest for longevity, a humanity slumbered with fantasies as if dreaming in digital coffins... On one side, those trapped in this image, on the other, those struggling to the death for a piece of bread. To be a good citizen-consumer meant reducing the world to a garbage heap of empty shells of fleeting pleasures.

THE CROWD'S DECLARATION

What would change all this was, in Mallarme's words, "the crowd's self-proclamation." Only through this would the past and future create the present, and the world be reborn. Badiou called this the torsion of past and future. He treated the political declaration as a declaration of love. A lover declaring his love... To truly say "I love you," was not to state a fact, not to convey a piece of information, but to acknowledge a "passion" spoken to the present unexpectedly and without calculation or guarantee of return. It was not economic, it was a pure expenditure without reward. It was a completely subjective experience, just like life itself.

Badiou said that the promise of love was the unique joy provoked by the discovery that we are capable of infinitely more than we ever imagined. The melancholy in our songs or poems was precisely about the loss or inhibition of this unique joy.

In Yusuf Atılgan's novel "The Wandering Man," as he walked with Güler in the tunnel, the Wandering Man said to himself: "One day, I will teach you that the only thing to endure in the world is love." Enduring is fine, so is creating...