I have returned to the classroom. After years inside bureaucracy – the slow gravity of minutes, clearances, and protocols – I am again among students, texts, and the low hum of ideas. The air is lighter; my wings that carry my creativity remember their work. It has been thirteen years since I stood at a graduate conference lectern at Birkbeck College, reading an early paper with a seriousness that only the young can afford. The text, Draft for BBK Graduate Conference, had slept in a forgotten folder until recently. When I opened it, the voice that greeted me felt both intimate and foreign – earnest, over-theorised, and trembling with the ambition to be critical.

“Pero yo ya no soy yo,
Ni mi casa es ya mi casa.”
Federico García Lorca, “Romance Sonámbulo”

Much has changed since then: the world’s crises, the university’s tone, the language of critique itself. I have changed too – moving between diplomatic corridors and lecture halls, between state service and the solitude of thought. Now, freed from bureaucratic gravity, I wish to reread that early paper not as a youthful embarrassment but as method.

This essay is an experiment in temporal reflexivity – reading the self as archive, treating contradictions as files. I want to show how our early critical gestures, even when awkward or vain, illuminate the structures that shape them. In doing so, I hope to contribute to academic literature on three intertwined fronts.

First, by extending critical legal studies to include the scholar’s own positionality – how our bodies, accents, and passports silently contour our analysis. Second, by developing temporal reckoning as method – how critique ages, how vocabularies fade or turn into habit. Third, by grounding border thinking in lived experience – tracing how law and race inscribe themselves not only on texts but on the traveller’s documents and the migrant’s face.

This is not an apology for the self but an argument for the self as site of theory.

I. The Flowerpot Moment

In that 2012 presentation I confessed:

“Somewhere in between a flowerpot landed on my head and all changed. Rather than going into theory and trying to look sophisticated, I will simply talk about myself, whatever it means.”

The flowerpot was imaginary – a comic device to mark rupture – but it captured the unease that still guides me. I had intended to lecture on Kantian cosmopolitanism and the European Court of Human Rights, on how Europe excludes in the very act of proclaiming universality. Yet I began instead with myself. I thought this was confession, but it was my first theoretical gesture.

Rereading that moment now, I recognise the proto-auto-theory hiding beneath its irony. It was a decision – or perhaps an accident – to turn inward, to treat the I not as distraction but as instrument. The flowerpot became a metaphor for the shock that transforms critique: when theory lands on the head and becomes lived experience.

II. Criticality as Performance

“Using the works of our grand masters, quoting them, analysing them… to impress each other or random others, to show how critical we are… I finally accept that I am not that different from the ‘cool kids’ that I criticise.”

That line embarrasses me and consoles me. I wrote it in a rush of self-mockery, thinking I was exposing vanity. Only later did I see the deeper structure: criticality itself had become performance.

At Birkbeck College we prided ourselves on being the uncool ones – suspicious of orthodoxy, allergic to doctrinal comfort. Yet even our refusal was stylish. We cultivated a vocabulary of negation, a posture of knowing doubt. We were, as I see now, fluent in critique’s accent.

This was my first encounter with critical performativity: dissent turned into intellectual currency. In the neoliberal university, critique too is commodified –circulated in the same networks of prestige as the doctrines it opposes.

Reading Sara Ahmed’s On Being Included later, I saw how institutional critique can decorate rather than disrupt, how dissent becomes diversity. My 2012 irony was not subversion but participation – a way of belonging through disaffection.

III. The Ethics of Representation

“I still remain at my desk trying to write theories about events related to certain groups of people that I half-know and the others I do not know… I am creating my universal in denying to be universal.”

Here the mask slipped.

Even then I sensed that my so-called critical work risked reproducing the hierarchies it condemned. I wrote about refugees, minorities, and “the excluded” from within the safe coordinates of inclusion – scholarship, visa, stipend. I justified it as solidarity, but it was representation, and representation always entails distance.

In 2025 I call this the scholar’s double bind: to critique privilege while inhabiting it. But rather than disown the contradiction, I now see it as material. The contradiction is the method. The act of writing exposes the conditions of its own possibility.

To claim objectivity would be dishonest; to claim pure solidarity would be sentimental. The only ethical stance is to treat one’s own implication as part of the field. The 2012 desk remains a legitimate ethnographic site: the scholar’s body as border post, stamped and self-aware.

IV. The Border Self

“Here on this continent, I am the Other par excellence. Since Antiquity, European history is built through me… Europe was taken through Anatolia – the myth of Europa begins in Asia, carried westward by a bull from these very shores. I am Troy, I am Persia, I am Saracen, I am Turk. Europe’s self-portrait has always been painted against an Anatolian background.”

I once meant this as rhetoric; it has since become record. Critical theory taught me that identity is a construct; airport control reminded me that it is also an algorithm.

The European project that I studied as abstraction now greets me at every checkpoint. Each gate repeats the lesson: law is not merely discourse but infrastructure, not merely text but procedure.

Walter Mignolo called this border thinking – knowledge generated in the in-between. For me it is not metaphor but itinerary. I inhabit Europe as both subject and object of its legal imagination: Ottoman descendant, EU interlocutor, academic migrant.

Gloria Wekker’s white innocence captures the asymmetry – the way Europe’s self-definition depends on the silent presence of its Others. To be a legal scholar from the periphery is to teach in a room that politely doubts your accent.

In 2012, I found that romantic. In 2025 I find it bureaucratic. The border has become less poetic, more procedural; yet its power to define remains absolute.

V. Law’s Genealogies

“… for example, in France by law I belong to a nation that committed genocide. The law does not ask who or where my ancestors were when acts were committed, the law recognises only my passports and delivers its judgement… my son, by acquiring my passport and living in France carries the burden already, 14 months old.”

Few sentences I have written weigh as heavy as this line. It was not academic provocation but rather captured the paradox of European legality: how the rhetoric of universal rights can coexist with the selective distribution of historical guilt. They remind me how law performs genealogy – how “collective guilt” becomes administrative fact.

France forgetful of its own crimes retains the authority to legislate the memory of others. It universalises its forgetting and codifies its judgment. The gesture is more than hypocrisy; it is a juridical technique. The law that claims to transcend history becomes its instrument. By defining perpetrators and victims through laws based on national lineage, France re-enacts the racial imagination it claims to have overcome.

When the state classifies a people as perpetrator or victim, it freezes time. Law becomes memory’s clerk, assigning inheritance without inquiry. My own name, passport, and accent became evidence of a past I never lived. I am stolen of my ability to think and judge, even my possible connection to justice to come is taken away from me.  

Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason articulates this: how Europe projects its violence onto racialised others, then forgets the projection. The law’s declaration of universality conceals its racial genealogy.

To write law’s history, then, is also to write one’s own misrecognition.

VI. Temporal Reckoning

“I am aware not to be breaking grounds once I complete my thesis, it will remain a big step for me (defining more than three years of my life), yet in the broader picture, an irrelevant step…”

This confession, buried at the end of my graduate paper, reads now like an x-ray of scholarly anxiety. I wrote it as an afterthought, unsure whether to apologise for my smallness or defend it. I was a young scholar convinced that every argument had to be original, transformative, loud.

Thirteen years later, I recognise that this fear of irrelevance is part of the critical temperament. Each generation inherits the same unease: that our words will dissolve into the academic ether, archived but unread. The irrelevance I once feared, is transformed into the scholar’s quiet privilege for me – the freedom to think without spectacle.

Temporal reckoning, as I understand it, is the art of rereading one’s past work without nostalgia or disdain. It acknowledges that every critical vocabulary ages, that yesterday’s radical syntax may sound complacent today. The point is not to correct the old self but to listen to its frequencies.

Each rereading becomes an ethical act: recognising the privileges, blind spots, and idioms that shaped our earlier critique. The self becomes an instrument of calibration, tuning theory to new conditions.

The 2012 me is not obsolete; he is an interlocutor. He reminds me that every “critical turn” begins as affect – irritation, shame, fascination – long before it hardens into theory.

VII. Transformation: Critiquing Through the Self

The years between then and now have changed me. I carried my critique into institutions that claimed to speak for universality – diplomacy, bureaucracy, committees – and learned how easily ideals congeal into procedure. Words that once held ethical urgency became templates, press releases, or talking points. I began to see how bureaucratic reason disciplines language, how it files away dissent in the name of efficiency.

Returning to teaching has not been a retreat but a release – a reawakening of the critical impulse that had been buried under institutional prose. The classroom, unlike the conference room, allows imagination to breathe. Here, I am free to bring multiplicity to law: to make theory audible, visible, and sometimes even melodic.

My courses have become experiments in multiperspectivity. Law meets philosophy, music meets politics, anecdotes meet archives. I use film stills, courtroom transcripts, Pink Floyd lyrics, fragments of Arendt and Koskenniemi, even the melancholy of a lamppost at dusk. Each week becomes a polyphonic exercise – anattempt to think through the senses as much as through the intellect.

In those spaces, critique becomes a shared art form rather than a solitary performance. Students learn that legal reasoning, like music, has rhythm and dissonance; that a map or a melody can disclose power as vividly as a statute. The method is not to simplify but to open – to make the familiar strange again, to let contradiction speak in its own accents.

The same analytic instinct that once trapped me in irony now opens a different path. I critique again, but this time through myself, through the fragments that compose me: diplomat and teacher, jurist and dreamer, theorist and poet. The self becomes not mirror but method – the only honest instrument I have left.

VIII. Dream-walker: Lorca and the Rhythm of Critique

When I first cited Lorca’s Romance Sonámbulo – “But I am no more I, nor is my house my house” – I meant it as confession of displacement. Now I read it as method.

Lorca revolutionised Spanish poetry not by destroying its traditions but by listening to them until they cracked open. He took the familiar romance form and filled it with dream, desire, and political urgency. In his hands, tradition became subversion.

Critique must do the same. 

The academic forms we inherit – the conference paper, the thesis, the essay – are not relics to be mourned but instruments to be returned. They still carry revolutionary rhythm if we let them breathe differently, if we let experience, contradiction, and vulnerability play through them. The task is not to abandon the form but to force it to speak otherwise, to turn its very structure into dissent.

I do not write about myself; I write through myself, as border, as echo, as contradiction. The dream-walker does not wake; he learns to walk more lucidly.

Endnotes:

1. Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Duke University Press, 2012).
2. Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Duke University Press, 2017).
3. Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton University Press, 2000).
4. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books, 1987).
5. Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (Duke University Press, 2016).
6. Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society (Stanford University Press, 2015).
7. Federico García Lorca, “Romance Sonámbulo,” in Romancero Gitano (1928).