Lost in Conversion: Mourning the Armenian-Turk

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed burgeoning interest in the inter-communal and inter-confessional dimensions of Ottoman subjecthood, leading to historical studies on the phenomenology of inter-communality and its demise. However, the paucity or inadequacy of such works’ archival sources have restricted efforts to explain how Ottoman subjects reacted to or absorbed the crises of differentiation that sundered their inter-communal coexistence. The discussion herein intervenes to redress this dearth by working through the auto-critical and autobiographical narrative of Ottoman-Armenian writer Hagop Oshagan (1883–1948). To that end, it renders a hitherto unattended phenomenology of the apostatic subject; a doubled figure astride laterally practiced socio-cultural synthesis and vertically experienced politico-religious differentiation. Tracing a term of Oshagan's usage, ‘hogekhaṛnut‘iwn’ (meaning, ‘soul-mixture' or ‘psychic disposition’), first posits conversion's centrality in the synthesized self-constitution of the late Ottoman subject. A literary critical interpretation, supported by psychoanalytic close reading, then identifies the loss of such convertibility as a form of doubling, one manifest as an unresolved ambivalence experienced through melancholia. This melancholic disposition appears to be not simply an aberrant form of mourning, but also a means of self-preservation. It provides a measure of anti-historical resistance represented by the apostatic subject, who preserves the consciousness both of imperialized synthesis and the crisis of its inflicted loss in the face of post-genocidal programs of national purification.