Akkanat, Salih

Abstract: This article is a study on Walter Benjamin's aesthetic and political thought. He tries to position Benjamin's aesthetic understanding in the context of today's aesthetic debates. He bases aesthetics as a sensibility regime and proposes that a sensuous relationship can be established between politics and aesthetics. Rather than being an ideological tool that serves the illusion of autonomy and freedom, it focuses on the potential of aesthetics that forms the basis for the experience of freedom and re-establishes the social bond. In this respect, he emphasizes that Benjamin's effort to draw conclusions for aesthetics from the sociology of modernity and the connections he established between the capture of meaning and the liberation of meaning that limit the form of relationship between aesthetics and politics. Therefore, the article focuses on the coherence and inconsistency between his political and epistemological engagements and his aesthetic thought, and discusses the extent to which he has an aesthetic thought in congruence with politics.

Demir, Sertaç Timur

This article focuses on the nature that has turned into a kind of salvation recipe in recent years through bodily, temporal and spatial experiences. The modern individual who once desired urban-style life now gets bored of it and embarks on new quests. Today the centre of the orientation is nature. In this sense, it is high time to debate the story of returning that take places on distant geographies because the expectations of those who migrated to big cities with dreams have been tested, then they had disappointments and once left villages started to be missed again after years. In this context, the nature and province as the place of past and memory are conceived as untouched and intact and as an absolute antithesis of the city. The main question that rises here is whether or not the virgin and purified nature is excluded by the modern society figuration that centralises the urbanisation. In other words, is escaping to the nature or returning the province a permanent solution or temporary solace? All these ambivalent questions constitute the framework of this study.