Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Introducing dætachment, this paper traces tactics of living with and within a politically non-recognised state, exploring how irony, embarrassment, and aspiration hold complicity and critique together in everyday life.

Paper long abstract

The paper introduces the concept of dætachment to analyse how attachment and detachment to the materialities of statehood are produced, negotiated, and narrated in everyday life in Northern Cyprus, a politically non-recognised state.

Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s understanding of tactics as everyday practices of navigation and re-signification, dætachment attends to the affective and ethical ambivalence through which people both lean on and pull away from the state, inhabiting its promises while sensing and exposing its contradictions. The typographic ligature æ materializes this simultaneity: it visually binds attachment and detachment into a single form, mirroring, for instance, the lived ambiguity of desiring public employment in a non-recognised polity while speaking of the state with irony, frustration, and embarrassment.

The paper follows how such affective and narrative manoeuvres emerge in everyday speech, gestures, and silences. Utterances such as “they put us on the bus” or “we only took a sofa” appear not as neutral recollections but as improvisational acts of repositioning within a non-recognised polity. Stories of state-organised celebrations, the ambivalent privileges of public employment, and the moral uncertainties surrounding looted homes reveal dætachment as a repertoire for accessing fragments of a “good life” promised by the state while quietly unsettling the legitimacy of the very state that promises it. Hence, dætachment names everyday tactics through which people live with and within a contested state, revealing how complicity and critique fold into one another through irony, embarrassment, and aspiration.