25 September 2026
Why I Write
I am not an award-winning writer or scholar. I live and work in conditions that are endlessly generative in terms of ideas that I could write about, and still, those very same conditions make it almost impossible to write. I write because I have come to know that it is a way in which I experience my humanness and a way in which I connect with the humanness of others across time and space. Perhaps this is why, for my writing, I do not use AI, at least not intentionally and not yet. Continue reading >>
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11 September 2026
Towards the Smoothed Word
İnsan olmaya geldim – I have come to be human. The line goes back to Nimri Dede, a folk poet from a village near Elazığ. If you know it, you probably know it in the voice of Arif Sağ, who turned the poem into one of the best-known spiritual songs of the Alevi-Bektashi tradition. Each stanza ends on the same rhyme: Özde, in the core. Sözde, in the word. Yüzde, in the face. İzde, in the trace. Közde, in the embers. Registers of becoming human, listed one after another, none struck out or played off against the others – like a refusal to split being human into a part fit to be shown and a part one merely brings along. The academic world I work in often demands the opposite movement. It demands the split: bring the word, leave the core at home. Continue reading >>
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24 July 2026
Cuts Behind the Scenes
How do I find ideas for what I write? Luckily, beyond law there is also theatre, where I do not have to choose between guilty and not guilty, where I can instead engage with social questions in all their ambivalence – though there too, crucially, you should not waffle, at least not without dramaturgical purpose. Because in theatre especially, you must think of the audience: away with overlong monologues, unnecessary scenes, confusing plots. Cut, cut, cut. I try to follow this rule when writing academic texts too. Unfortunately, the cutting does not happen in texts, where it would make sense, but behind the scenes, where it is devastating. Continue reading >>
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17 July 2026
Found Writing
In one of his tracks, the rapper Vega writes: I’m disappearing for a year, because I only write when it hurts. One could read that therapeutically, yet nothing in it speaks of writing as release, let alone redemption. The sting sits deeper: it sits in writing itself. Almost everything comes from outside. To write about creativity – perhaps even my own – in the age of “AI” therefore struck me as hardly worthwhile. It will already be written down somewhere, or at the very least is being written right now. And that is what this shall be about: a writing that reads – a “found writing.” Continue reading >>19 June 2026
Spotting Mushrooms
Hunting for mushrooms is a passion of mine. I walk through the forest and let my scout’s eye wander. Hold on. Something’s not right. There’s something not quite natural about the way last year’s leaves are layered there, between those patches of sunlight. Among all the earth-brown and dust-grey, there are strange, often strangely intense colours: an egg-yolk yellow, a velvety brown, an ivory white. That is how I find mushrooms – and that is how I find my ideas when I write. Lately, I’ve had someone – or something – by my side. He, or it, is called Claude, and he presents him-/itself the whole time as though he/it were a companion, a subject, a person. Continue reading >>
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05 June 2026