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in: Encounters with the Posthuman and the Environment, İnci Bilgin Tekin and Zeynep Talay Turner, Editor, Lexington Books, Lanham (MD), USA , London, pp.65-79, 2024
“If it were not Kafka’s venom” writes Nurdan Gürbilek in her collection of essays Benden Önce Bir Başkası, “if we had not been affected by these whimsical creatures interspersed in our dreams and nightmares, we would possibly not have noticed Dostoyevsky’s insects and his Kafkaesque world that reaches to the underground,” (Gürbilek 2011, 23). This tempts one to yet another analogous line of comparison stretching this time to a more contemporary reverberation of the Kafkaesque paradigm, The Garden of Departed Cats by Bilge Karasu, who famously rejects the idea of being labeled as and reduced to a Turkish Kafka. To be honest, I must insist unapologetically on the value of an interrogation into and reconsideration of Karasu’s modification of the Kafkaesque paradigm of metamorphosis through Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theory of a minor literature, scrutinizing especially the concept of deterritorialization. This I believe is an attractive if doomed attempt on the part of Karasu’s characters. Nonhuman and human interaction in the said work not only evades the well-established dualism of nature and culture, it also sheds new light on the environmental through non-anthropocentrism, calls the domesticated self into question and suggests uncanny possibilities of reflexivity.