Becoming-Wolf: From Wolf-Man to the Tree Huggers of Turkey

Focusing on the May 2013 anti-government demonstrations in Turkey, widely known as the “Gezi Park Resistance”, this chapter uses Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming-animal” and Freud’s “Wolfman” case study to explore the damaged memories of all its participants. During and after the protests, independent from being in denial or in defence, both the protesters and the police often claimed that they did not remember what actually happened. In some cases, they had a difficult time acknowledging that they committed certain acts despite seeing themselves in videos and pictures. This reminds us of fictional werewolf characters, who are accustomed to wake up and find themselves naked under a tree, feeling afraid or guilty, with bruises, scars, and no memory of how they got there. Thus the chapter explores how and why the Gezi Park protesters have common characteristics with the werewolves (of myth and fiction), how it is also connected to the Government's brutal response and how these resemblances might help us understand the resistance, in other words, start seeing the order of the chaos: How “becomings-animal” of people open up places and spaces of resistance and how they are actually unstoppable on a Deleuze & Guattarian plane of resistance.