About MonoKL- "Friendhip of writing and writing of friendship"
MonoKL (Mono Kurgusuz Labirent- Mono Disorganized Labyrinth – www.monokl.net) is a network/journal of philosophy, literature and culture established in June 2006, based in Istanbul and published by a group of young intellectuals biannually. It is an independent cultural organization with no direct affiliation to any publisher or institution. The chief editor and the founder of the network/journal is Volkan Çelebi.
MonoKL aims at constructing a lively, rational and balanced relational framework between Turkish and world cultures, and to meet this end it contains bilingual essays whose number increases with each issue. Its special issues on contemporary thinkers also serve as companions and critical editions.
It was its Special Hegel Issue (2008) that has led to the creation of an international network, with whose support the journal began to accept more contributions from scholars across the globe and to organize conferences in Istanbul. The International Hegel Conference (kongre.monokl.net) was held in Istanbul on November 14-16. Each issue of MonoKL is complimented by interviews with world-renown scholars of respective fields, MonoKL’s memorable themes are The College of Pataphysics, Forgetting, Visual Poetry, Light, Avant-garde Art Theories, Manifests, Special Maurie Blanchot Issue and International Hegel Issue.
MonoKL’s International Lacan Issue came out in June 2009, and an International Lacan Congress (held on June 20-21, 2009) followed. Recently International Levinas issues (2 volumes, one is International and the other is Turkish) appeared. International issue includes 24 French, 35 English and 1 German articles.What makes this publication unique is that all contributions except 4 four article were written for MonoKL and being published first time in the world. It is a complete companion to Levinas. The title of issue is Reflections on Levinas.
The Idea of Democracy conference took place with the special participation of Jean-Luc Nancy.
Future issues include special volumes on Jean-Luc Nancy (2011 January), Deleuze (2011 October), Heidegger (2012 October) and Marx.
Title - Titre : MonoKL - Mono Disorganized Labyrinth - Labyrinthe Mono Désorganisé
Editor in chief - Chef éditeur : Volkan Çelebi
Article Languages - Langue des articles : French, English, German and Turkish
Postal address - Addresse : Pürtelaş Mah. Samanyolu Sk. No:14 Daire:1 Cihangir Beyoğlu / İstanbul
L’équipe éditoriale de Monokl - Monokl Editorial Board :
Volkan Çelebi, Eren Rızvanoğlu, Yeşim Keskin, Cem Kurtuluş, Mert Bahadır Reisoğlu, Sibel Kibar, Atakan Karakış, İlksen Mavituna, Ali Bilgin
Comité d’honneur - Honorary Board :
Jean-Luc Nancy, Danielle Cohen-Levinas, René Major, Joan Copjec, Kenneth R. Westphal, Ahmet Soysal
Email : editor@monokl.net
Commercial contact : oneri@monokl.net
Site : http://www.monokl.net/
Frequency : annual
Format : 16,5x23,5 cm, 856 pages (Levinas issue)
Print run : 1000
Price : 45 Euro (International Emmanuel Levinas Issue)
Issn : 1306 – 715X
A French presentation is available here:
http://www.europhilosophie.eu/recherche/spip.php?rubrique216
And a news about latest meeting of French and Turkish journals in Istanbul (regarding also MonoKL):
http://www.corlevour.fr/spip.php?article641&var_recherche=monokl
And more from MonoKL
We are not only pushing the borders of thinking or looking for the content of a higher truth by thinking; but also intentionally we are going towards the aporias of our own language, our own experiences by writing in Turkish. There is an in-between of thinking and writing or writing and thinking. In-between is the experience of outside, unavoidable encounters with the future and with the factual existence. When Turkey’s position is taken into consideration from social, cultural and historical perspectives, I believe it will be clearer why MonoKL is a unique socio-cultural project and how it can contribute to the horizon of philosophy. We should not keep asking: How can we face aporias truthfully without having a reflection of them? What does to have mean? If they are pure aporias and the limits of what we have already -because our present thinking and its tools or our current experience and perception styles cannot understand them- how facing is possible at all? How will a reflection, which is absolutely not ours, come to us? How will we be able to wake up from the deep sleep of unproductive culture -in Turkey- without the interruptive, breathtaking touch of this comer? Who is this comer? Is it a who? The comer is nothing but be-comer of our future-self.
The be-comer which is new, foreign, suffocating should take over us. We should be defeated on the borders of thinking and writing, on the edge of non-present, non-representable and absorptive. We should meet aporias as the absent factualities of the future until the day of new thinking comes by complex, dynamic, absencing efforts of the writing. Until the disaster of present world reverts into the absence of itself, thinking and writing should resist the presence of this world by the experience of future, horizon and void, which are all beyond,in the name a world of factual justice, peace and friendship. Every thought should own meontological factuality of future. And the only thing we have as that factuality without being pure factuality is the writing.
Goethe had announced the world literature as an exchange of ideas, imaginations, concepts, experiences. Then, what is of a world philosophy? What does that mean in the age of technique, internet and consumer society? Millions of people are dying, starving, suffering. Clashes, conflicts and wars represent deus ex machina of the unsustainable system. The machine touches and for a while, everything is rosy. Everyone knows that everything only serves to the economics and the politics of the national or inter-national interests. Is there anything left that is beyond these interests? Maybe, philosophy! Or rather we should say: a philosophy of hope rather than a hope of/for philosophy? No. Philosophy goes to no-where, everything else does. No-where is the site of real philosophy, like the null-site of Levinas. For sure, this fact does not represent the vanity of philosophy. Who or what will take the burden of world facts without being articulated to the present totality of the world system? Who will announce the truth, which hollows out the present, who will take the responsibility of insufferable scenes of communities? Who will produce discourses without being captured by the eyes of the system? Who will dare to talk about justice, universality, good, ethics, communism, revolution, socialism and ecological matters rather than the profit maximization, business facts, political lies and war industry? A world philosophy must lead the way. MonoKL’s unique purpose is to be a true follower of this philosophy.
Since MonoKL is working to create a lively, productive and creative relationship with Western culture and philosophy, we have been giving great importance to the works and ideas of important philosophers, which are rarely known or studied in Turkey, in order to understand the modern life, its ancestors and its extensions. These issues give us different and fresh perspectives in various disciplines, from philosophy to literature, from sociology to psychoanalysis, from critical theories to scientific methods. Philosophical, ideological, cultural and social similarities and differences are being assessed in a theoretical manner with the original contributions of scholars, writers and thinkers from all around world.
More importantly, the main target is not to know every detail on the works and lives of great philosophers but to understand, to experience their perspectives and methods of thoughts. To search and observe how a conceptual architecture is designed by the very process of thinking and writing. To learn how to internalize our own outside, our own limit experiences and our own existential matters. The horizon of project is to pass through alterities by which we are totally surrounded.
What we would like to do is to see and to live through an intellectual world of the Spirit which bypasses all priorities of the daily life by means of the hand and the body of thinking. With our creative hands, we must design the body of a factual thinking that will have contact both with outside and with thought itself. Those productive efforts will be guiding us to create our own thoughts and thinkable or non-thinkable factualities which we live in every moment here in Turkey but fail to write about or to reflect upon. Without our own conceptualities in Turkish, without new horizons which go beyond a classical academic perspective and its restrictive tools, we will fail to think on and to write that which comes from the dynamics of our own culture, from the very core of our own impasses.
We are pursuing a Turkish hand of thinking. Pursuing the authentic one of the conceptual and non-conceptual exscriptions of our experiences, both in-side of thinking of Turkish and factual existence of our inter-related bodies. Our hope is that there will be a hand that will write, that will be an intruder to present culture, its dehumanizing structures. The hand that will create a hole in the language first, and then in the culture itself. It is not only a hope for temporal consciousness or constructions but for an actual spatial experience: The spatial experience of/in Turkey through labour of writing and thinking.
Without stepping back,,, with MonoKL on one of our eyes,, with the labour/responsibility of reality on our shoulders,,, always be resisting to any fake communion of thinking. Always with a hope of a revolution of/in the thinking… always with the hope of another worldliness…
We published semi-international issues on Blanchot, Hegel and Lacan. We had also issues on “Pataphysics College”, “Forgetting”, “Light” and “Visual Poetry” in initial issues. We have lastly published on Levinas. Two different issues (Turkish and International) appeared. Turkey version includes translation of 70 articles and interviews (860 pages). International version includes 60 articles and interviews (760 pages) all of which were written specially for MonoKL on Levinas.
Here are some informations on what we did and what we plan to do:
- There were 25 Hegel scholars who participated to the Hegel Issue of MonoKL from 7 countries. Only German contributions appeared in the bilingual format.
- Lacan issue had 33 specialists from 10 different countries of the world. French contributions appeared in the bilingual style.
- We have also held international congresses on Hegel (November, 2008) and later on Lacan (June, 2009) with participants from several countries.
- Recently, we have organized conference on the idea of democracy with the participation of Jean-Luc Nancy (October 282010). The organization has been ealized with the collaboration of Istanbul French Culture Institute. MonoKL has also been working on a special international issue on Jean-Luc Nancy that will be published within a month.
- We have also been trying to arrange an International Levinas Congress in the 2010 Spring.
- Forthcoming issues will be on Deleuze (2011), and Heidegger (2012).
- To improve our collective, we are also showing much effort to establish Monokl International Culture Institute.
- MonoKL Publishing House became officially active last month with the book of Jean- Luc Nancy: “The Truth of Democracy.” MonoKL Publishing House, as an extension of journal, will be dealing with translation projects and international congresses. And making new Turkish philosophers appearant to local and international philosophical community will be the real target.
What has been said about latest issue, Reflections on Levinas?
Alphonso Lingis
MonoKL is an extraordinary project by Turkish thinkers, bringing their most rigorous and demanding work together. They soon enlisted and received work from a growing number of thinkers in many countries. This Levinas project is the most comprehensive assemblage of all aspects of Levinas’s work, by thinkers from whatever land, that has yet been achieved. Congratulations and gratitude to Monokl.
Jeffrey Kosky
MonoKL Team have assembled a major collection of essays by an international group of scholars. The collection is remarkable both for its international character and for the inclusion of several generations of scholars, ranging from those who first helped establish Levinas’ reputation in Europe and America to a new generation of young scholars who bring the new questions of their unique time and place to bear on Levinas’ corpus. The result is a volume that should be indispensable to the ongoing discussion of Levinas by students and scholars of philosophy and religion, art and politics. We all will gain from the internationalization of this discussion and from its trans-generational opening thanks to the MonoKL Companion to Levinas.
Robert Bernasconi
MonoKL must be congratulated for having assembled such a remarkable group of scholars to contribute to their Levinas issue, This promises to be a major collection. I am honored to be included.
Richard A. Cohen
It is not only of enormous scholarly and scientific significance that the study of the profound and original ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas is the focus of this groundbreaking collection of articles. It is also an important event in our consciousness and our conscientiousness. It is important because ethics is important and points to the elevations - morality and justice - which make life worth living. We no longer have to be told that science brings the world together in peace, that there is now a world scientific community, a community serving universal truths. But perhaps we do need to be reminded that there is also and even more deeply a world ethical community, a local and a global humanity, "the humanity of the human" alive in the quiet acts of kindness, the compassion which transpires between friends, neighbors and strangers alike. There is not simply the alleged conflict of civilizations, cultures or worldviews. The very civility of civilization is built upon these unpublicized proximities of which Levinas's philosophy enlightens us, and to which the studies in the present collection are devoted.