Disorder in Heaven

Slavoj Žižek, "Is the bottom of the sky a mess or is it himself?" (Google translated from Turkish)

One of Mao Zedong's most famous sayings is this:

The bottom of the sky is a mess, the situation is extraordinary!

It is easy to understand the problem Mao expressed here: the turmoil that appears as the existing social order disintegrates offers enormous opportunities for revolutionary forces that can seize political power through decisive action.

We can express the difference of the current situation from the situation in Mao's mind with a terminological nuance. As Mao said, when the sky is chaotic, the forms taken by the "sky", the great Other—the inevitable logic of the processes of history, the laws of social development—are still in force and continue to give direction to social turmoil without causing it. Nowadays, we must say that the sky itself is a mess. What do I mean by that?

Christa Wolf's classic GDR novel Divided Sky (1963) describes the subjective effect of division in Germany, Manfred, who chose the West, said to his lover Rita, whom he met for the last time:

Even if our lands are divided, we will always share the same sky with you

But Rita, who chooses to stay in the East, gives him a bittersweet answer:

No, they divided the sky first.

Even if the crimes of the East are denied in the novel, it is important to establish that the ultimate ground of our "worldly" divisions and quarrels is always the "divided sky". The division of the sky is the division of the (symbolic) universe in which we reside in a much more radical and exclusionary sense, and the bearer and instrument of this divisive action is our language, because it is our language of the environment that sustains our way of living reality. In other words, the real divisive element is not our primitive and selfish interests, but our language. Because of language, we can live in a "world apart" from our neighbors, even if we live in the same neighborhood as them.

From the book Sema Karmakarma (Heaven in Disorder, 2021)

Turkish: Işık Barış Fidaner