LAUSR

“The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.”1 So wrote Walter Benjamin in 1940, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” More than seven decades after the horrors of fascism, multicultural liberalism’s promise of recognition for alterity has once again given way to segregative policies that go to drastic extremes—border walls, urban wars, detention centers, refugee camps. Straddling the discursive and institutional terrains of the management of alterity in the post-1945 world, Aslı Iğsız’s Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange is an epochal account of the knowledge of cultural history such as Benjamin demanded. Iğsız’s perceptive analysis shows how arguments both for and against diversity are in fact informed by biopolitics. Her study thus presents a unique vantage point for an examination of the limits of the key notions of liberal cultural policies. In the book, Turkey figures as the geographical locus of a major instance of segregative biopolitics; namely, the 1923 Greco-Turkish population exchange. The topic is familiar for students of Turkey, as it has been the subject of many studies. Nevertheless, Iğsız’s work sheds wholly new light on the topic by specifically analyzing the exchange as part of the broader history of biopolitics N E W P E R S P E C T IV E S O N T U R K E Y