The Mythical Interface of Turkish Intellectuals' Orientation toward the Armenian Genocide

Still prefaced in many commentaries as a taboo, the topic of the genocide in Turkey has ironically become a talking point de rigueur for anyone who is visible in the public sphere and who lays claims to an identity as an intellectual. Anyone, then, will momentarily serve as the working definition of the intellectual, for all intents and purposes, in this inquiry into the grammar among Turkish and Armenian intellectuals both within and outside Turkey. The litany of self-proclaimed firsts in addressing the topic of genocide in any given genre in Turkey is better understood in the light of Barthes' notion of the inflexion in myth. Such vocabulary of self-advertisement, of being a historic first, creates a curious hierarchy when it comes to the all-important topic of a foundational and denied genocide: it is not that the intellectual brings herself to the service of the topic, but that the topic serves up to the rejuvenation of the intellectual's prominence and controversial value in the public sphere. The emphasis is not on the quality, characteristics, or commitments of the works in question, but on the fact of the intellectual being a first, and thus, implicitly, a mythical figure above critical inquiry. © 2015 Cambridge University Press.