The Linguistic Pandemic and the Crisis of Subjectivity: A Metamodern Memory Analysis of the Novel Sıcak Kafa

Abstract

This study positions Afşin Kum’s dystopian novel Sıcak Kafa [Hot Skull] within the contemporary cultural logic of metamodernism, addressing a critical lacuna in the scholarship concerning memory’s function after postmodernism. It asks how the novel engages with Alison Landsberg and Timotheus Vermeulen’s nascent theory of “metamodern memory,” which posits a shift toward a politically paralyzing obsession with authenticity, origin, and the proprietorship of lived experience. Using a methodology of close reading guided by this theoretical framework, the analysis first demonstrates how Sıcak Kafa serves as a powerful diagnostic tool, meticulously instantiating the pathologies of the metamodern condition: a fragile subjectivity defined by trauma, a fetishistic reliance on corporeal indexes, and the societal balkanization fostered by a centrally controlled information ecosystem. The study’s central finding, however, is that the novel stages a radical break from this bleak diagnosis. It charts the protagonist’s ultimate rejection of the rational, trauma-defined self in favor of a post-rational, post-linguistic consciousness, culminating in a speculative vision of collective liberation. The article concludes that Sıcak Kafa is not merely an example of metamodernism but a profound and transformative critique of its political pessimism, offering a speculative path beyond its contemporary impasse.

1. Introduction

The contemporary era is often defined by a confluence of interlocking crises—ecological precarity, digital fragmentation, resurgent nationalisms—that have unsettled established modes of social and political life. Within this complex milieu, a successor sensibility to postmodernism has come into sharper relief: metamodernism. First theorized by Vermeulen and van den Akker (2010), this emerging structure of feeling is characterized by a dynamic oscillation between opposed modern and postmodern poles. It manifests as a pragmatic idealism, a hopeful irony, and a sincere yearning for depth, affect, and historicity, all of which are shadowed by an acute awareness that these pursuits can never be fully realized in a pristine, unmediated form. While the cultural expressions of this sensibility have been widely explored, the crucial relationship between memory and the construction of contemporary subjectivity has, as Landsberg and Vermeulen (2025) observe, remained a significant lacuna in the scholarship. This is a critical omission, for memory has long been considered the cornerstone of the self: as they powerfully state, “We are because we remember” (Landsberg and Vermeulen 2025, p. 2). Memory positions us in time, forges continuity between past and present, and provides the framework through which we approach the future. To comprehend the subjects produced by our current cultural logic, one must therefore investigate the specific ways in which their memory is structured, valued, and imagined.

In a pivotal intervention aimed at filling this gap, Landsberg and Vermeulen (2025) have theorized “metamodern memory,” a concept developed through a nuanced comparative analysis of Ridley Scott’s postmodern artifact Blade Runner and Denis Villeneuve’s metamodern sequel Blade Runner 2049. They argue for a decisive break from the logic of “prosthetic memory” (Landsberg 2004), a concept born of the mass media age where memory’s value lay in its functional capacity to foster empathy and mobilize political engagement, regardless of whether it was lived or acquired. In stark contrast, metamodern memory is defined by a fetishistic obsession with authenticity, origin, and source. In a world saturated with copies and simulations, the “realness” of memory, verified through tangible material and visceral sensory indexes, becomes paramount. This dependency, however, renders subjectivity exceedingly fragile; the self is performatively constructed upon the belief in a memory’s authenticity and is liable to collapse or “deflate” if that foundation is proven false (Landsberg and Vermeulen 2025, p. 12). Consequently, memories are reconceptualized as inalienable, non-transferable private property. This proprietary logic has profound political implications: Landsberg and Vermeulen (2025, p. 3) argue that it fosters a potentially reactionary, past-oriented politics that balkanizes identities, obstructs the possibility of solidarity across difference, and reserves the future for memory’s “‘natural’ owners”.

This powerful theoretical lens provides an ideal framework for analyzing Afşin Kum’s novel Sıcak Kafa (Hot Skull), first published in 2016 and brought to a global audience through a Netflix adaptation in 2022. This study will focus exclusively on the novel, as the adaptation, while sharing the same premise, fundamentally alters its thematic core. Specifically, the series transforms the book’s philosophical exploration of consciousness into a more conventional conspiracy thriller, culminating in a plot-driven cliffhanger that reinforces a past-oriented search for origins—the very condition the novel’s radical conclusion ultimately transcends (see for the Netflix series, Panjeta 2023; Mueller 2023; Atasoy 2023). Prescient in its depiction of a global pandemic, the novel imagines an Istanbul ravaged by a speech-transmitted memetic virus known as abuklama—an Acquired Reasoning Deficiency Syndrome (ARDS). This semantic plague turns language, the very medium of social cohesion, into a vector of disease, radically fracturing communication and atomizing society. The narrative is centered on Murat Siyavuş, a former linguist who embodies the metamodern subject, trapped between a traumatic, half-remembered past and a paralyzing present. His fragmented memory, indeterminate identity, and peculiar immunity—a “hot skull” that heats up to protect him from the virus’s semantic assault—drive his quest to understand his past, his body, and the nature of abuklama. The novel’s atmosphere masterfully evokes the metamodern condition: its splintered urban landscape of fortified gated communities and lawless quarantine zones, the ubiquitous headphones worn by citizens as a retreat from the communicative commons, and a populace dependent on a centrally controlled state television that curates a singular, pacifying reality. While existing scholarship has productively analyzed the novel’s worldbuilding strategies (Tan 2023), its place within the Turkish dystopian tradition (Topçu 2021), and its ethical dimensions from a Deleuzian perspective (Şen 2020), its profound meditation on memory as the primary locus of subjective and political crisis in the contemporary moment has remained unexplored. Although the novel’s engagement with state power or personal catastrophe could be productively illuminated through critical idioms such as biopolitics or trauma theory, this study privileges the Landsberg-Vermeulen framework for its unique timeliness and thematic precision. As a nascent theory designed specifically to diagnose the function of memory after postmodernism, its conceptual architecture resonates with striking accuracy in the socio-linguistic dystopia of Sıcak Kafa, a coeval cultural artifact, making it singularly equipped to foreground the novel’s central concern.

This article, therefore, asks: How does Sıcak Kafa engage with the theory of metamodern memory, and what does this engagement reveal about the political and philosophical possibilities of our time? This study argues that Kum’s novel serves as both a powerful literary instantiation and a profound critique of the metamodern memory framework. The article will first demonstrate how the novel functions as a meticulously crafted diagnostic tool, rendering the abstract concepts of metamodern memory into a tangible, lived dystopia. It traces how the narrative dramatizes the framework’s core pathologies: the protagonist’s obsessive quest for an authentic memory, the reliance on fragile corporeal indexes to verify the self, the construction of a fragile subjectivity defined by trauma, and the political paralysis engendered by a proprietary model of memory within a fragmented information ecosystem. However, the study’s central contention is that Sıcak Kafa refuses to conclude with this bleak diagnosis. It pushes beyond the metamodern framework’s political pessimism to stage a radical, speculative escape. The analysis will show how the novel charts a trajectory beyond the metamodern impasse by having its protagonist jettison the very rational, trauma-defined self that metamodernism seeks to authenticate, in favor of a post-rational, post-linguistic consciousness. The article proceeds by first detailing the Landsberg-Vermeulen framework. It then traces the narrative’s movement from a state of paralysis, fully consistent with the metamodern diagnosis, to a final, explosive vision of collective liberation, thereby positioning the novel not merely as an example of metamodernism, but as a critical and transformative response to it.

2. Theoretical Framework: Memory from Postmodernism to Metamodernism

To make sense of the memory dynamics and crises of subjectivity in Sıcak Kafa, we must first trace the transformation that conceptions of memory underwent in the shift from postmodernism to metamodernism. Landsberg’s (2004) concept of “prosthetic memory,” formulated in the age of mass culture, offers key insights into the postmodern understanding of memory. Landsberg argues that, with the proliferation of mass media such as film and television, individuals can acquire narratives of historical events and experiences they neither lived through nor inherited and incorporate them into their own mnemonic repertoire. Like a prosthetic limb, these memories, though neither “natural” nor “authentic,” can still function: they have the potential to galvanize individuals, cultivate empathy, and reconfigure their relationship with the world. The original Blade Runner illustrates this postmodern perspective: the Nexus-6 replicant Roy Batty deploys both lived experience and implanted memories to save his enemy, Deckard, while Rachael—aware that her piano-lesson recollections are not her own—can nonetheless play the instrument and fall in love with Deckard. As Landsberg and Vermeulen (2025, pp. 2–3, 6) observe, the focus rests not on the provenance of memory but on what it enables. Whether a memory is “real” is secondary; the crucial question is what possibilities it opens. This stance parallels postmodernism’s broader skepticism and its tendency to deconstruct notions of authenticity and origin (Jameson 1991; Bould 1999).

However, the crises and structures of feeling that have emerged in the twenty-first century signal a further transformation in how memory is conceived. Metamodernism, theorized by Vermeulen and van den Akker (2010), is characterized by a sincere yearning for historicism, depth, and affect—qualities thought to have been lost—beyond the irony and skepticism of postmodernism. Yet this longing is coupled with the awareness that the pristine modern versions of these ideals can no longer be attained, producing an incessant oscillation between hope and melancholy, sincerity and irony. Landsberg and Vermeulen (2025) argue that Blade Runner 2049 exemplifies precisely this metamodern structure of feeling. In contrast to the original film’s chaotic, vertical, neon-lit postmodern dystopia, Blade Runner 2049 presents a horizontal, gray-toned, empty, and “post-organic” landscape—one in which the artificial generates the biological (Landsberg and Vermeulen 2025, p. 5). Likewise, the protagonist K’s motivations—his obsessive desire for origins, authenticity, singularity, and the “real”—manifest this new sensibility.

Within this metamodern context, the form of memory that emerges—what Landsberg and Vermeulen (2025) call “metamodern memory”—differs fundamentally from prosthetic memory. At its core lies an obsession with authenticity. Whereas prosthetic memory is valued for what it enables or how it is used, metamodern memory is prized for its “realness,” that is, for whether it stems from experiences personally lived by the subject. K’s shame about his implanted memories—“I have memories. But they’re not real. They’re just implants” (Landsberg and Vermeulen 2025, p. 7)—lays bare this new hierarchy of value. The pursuit of authenticity generates a fetish for material and sensory indexes capable of verifying a memory’s truth. In Blade Runner 2049, the date-inscribed wooden horse K seeks serves as a “singular, unique, original, auratic … and fundamentally non-reproducible” index proving the memory’s reality (Landsberg and Vermeulen 2025, p. 9); by contrast, the origami unicorn in the original film, which has no real referent and is infinitely reproducible, points to a looser regime of meaning. While metamodern memory is thus authenticated through such indexes, it also assigns special significance to the sensory dimension of experience—hapticity, bodily feeling, and viscerality. K’s trembling and perspiring when he discovers the wooden horse demonstrate that the “realness” of memory is felt corporeally (Landsberg and Vermeulen 2025, pp. 7, 9).

Perhaps the most critical feature of metamodern memory is the fragile link it forges with subjectivity. As Landsberg and Vermeulen (2025, pp. 9–11) observe, in Blade Runner 2049 believing that a memory is “real” triggers the sense that the subject is likewise “real,” even producing a measurable physiological shift. After the memory-maker Ana Stelline confirms that one of K’s memories was in fact lived, K fails the subsequent baseline test—an algorithmic scan that should register flat affect—demonstrating that his faith in the memory has literally, if perversely, altered his interior state, a moment that reads like a literalized, distorted version of Judith Butler’s theory of performativity (Landsberg and Vermeulen 2025, pp. 10–11). Yet this subjectivity is exceedingly fragile because it hinges entirely on the memory’s authenticity. When K discovers that the memory is not his own, the newly gained sense of “realness” collapses and he, to borrow the authors’ term, “deflates” (Landsberg and Vermeulen 2025, p. 12). This collapse connects to another hallmark of metamodern memory: the inalienability and proprietorship of memories. No longer a part of a publicly accessible archive, memories are construed as non-transferable property belonging to specific individuals or groups. K’s act of returning the memory to its “rightful” owner, Ana Stelline, and his subsequent death illustrate the tragic outcome of this proprietary, essentialist logic (Landsberg and Vermeulen 2025, pp. 12–13, 15). Ana Stelline herself lives behind a glass partition, secluded in a personal “bubble,” recalling Sloterdijk’s (2004) metaphor of co-isolation—foam-like cells that touch yet never truly integrate—and underscoring the isolating nature of metamodern subjectivity.

Landsberg and Vermeulen (2025) relate these features of metamodern memory to the profound shifts in today’s media landscape. During the age of mass culture in which prosthetic memory emerged, a limited number of broadcast television channels and the collective experience of cinema exposed large audiences to similar narratives, thereby providing a shared cultural archive and enabling unexpected encounters across differences (Landsberg 2004). By contrast, the contemporary multi-platform, personalized media environment—streaming services, social media, algorithmic feeds—increasingly confines individuals to their own “media bubbles” or “filter bubbles” (Poniewozik 2019). This fragmentation diminishes what Cass Sunstein deems essential for a democratic society: the likelihood of “unplanned, unanticipated encounters” and “shared common experiences” (Sunstein 2001, as cited in Landsberg and Vermeulen 2025, p. 16). Constant immersion in content tailored to one’s interests and worldview makes confronting alternative perspectives more difficult and reinforces existing identities. According to Landsberg and Vermeulen (2025), this fractured information ecosystem fuels Sloterdijk’s condition of co-isolation and hampers individuals’ capacity to relate to memories or identities not originally their own, thereby obstructing solidarity across differences.

Consequently, the metamodern memory theory that Landsberg and Vermeulen (2025) derive from Blade Runner 2049 marks a decisive break with the fluid, instrumental understanding of memory characteristic of postmodernism. An obsession with authenticity and origin, reliance on material and sensory indexes, the fragile construction of subjectivity upon memory, the inalienable ownership of memories, and the condition of co-isolation linked to a fragmented media landscape constitute the core features of this new form of memory. Landsberg and Vermeulen (2025) argue that these traits pull metamodern memory in a politically reactionary, past-oriented, and balkanizing direction, reinforcing essentialist identity politics and diminishing the potential for collective action across difference. Their framework offers a powerful analytic tool for interpreting the representations of memory in Sıcak Kafa, the experiences of its characters, and the dynamics that underlie the novel’s dystopian universe.

This qualitative study employs a close reading of Afşin Kum’s Sıcak Kafa, applying the theoretical framework of “metamodern memory” developed by Landsberg and Vermeulen (2025). The analysis mobilizes the framework’s core conceptual tools—including the obsession with authenticity, the function of sensory indexes, the fragility of subjectivity, and the politics of memory ownership—to map the novel’s dystopian landscape. The methodological aim is twofold: first, to diagnose how Sıcak Kafa instantiates the pathologies of the metamodern condition; and second, to demonstrate how its narrative climax stages a radical critique of that condition, offering a path to liberation beyond the framework’s theoretical impasse.

3. The Metamodern Landscape and Structure of Feeling in Sıcak Kafa

Kum’s (2024) Sıcak Kafa immerses the reader in a post-communicational dystopia where the primary catastrophe is the collapse of meaning itself. The novel’s Istanbul is a city fractured not by industrial ruin but by linguistic paranoia. Communication has collapsed, leading to a landscape of fear, silence, and strict control. The city is segregated into fortified, sterile gated communities for the healthy and decaying, lawless quarantine zones for the infected. Public spaces are empty, social interaction is nonexistent, and movement is restricted and purposeful, all reflecting a society paralyzed by paranoia. This vision exaggerates real-world trends in Istanbul’s urban and socio-political history. The novel’s stark division between secure enclaves like Ataşehir and chaotic older districts like Fındıkzade mirrors the city’s actual history of rapid gentrification and social segregation, which has created isolated, affluent communities detached from the more diverse, historic city fabric. The sterile, controlled life in the novel’s Ataşehir reflects the reality of its development as a modern, upper-middle-class satellite city. Similarly, the depiction of social paranoia and isolation in affluent areas like Bebek serves as an allegory for the deep political polarization in Turkey, where fear of conflict discourages spontaneous public interaction. The novel’s ultimate expression of this division, the walled-off quarantine zones, is a dystopian extreme of Istanbul’s history of creating social and political “ghettos” through processes of urban renewal and the displacement of marginalized populations. This geography of containment creates a world of sterile transit corridors connecting insulated compounds, set against a vast outer expanse where social order has disintegrated. Within this landscape, public space has become a minefield of risk. To navigate it, the protagonist Murat Siyavuş adopts a strategy of performed purposefulness, following a predetermined route like a “mouse in a maze” where in his own words, there is “no goal, only the path” (Kum 2024, p. 10). This constant, anxious motion without a destination captures a quintessentially metamodern condition. The city’s atmosphere is thick with this anxiety: shops are sealed behind plexiglass barriers, neighborly relations have evaporated, and an oppressive tranquility (sükûnet) has settled over once-vibrant districts. This fragmented urbanism concretizes the loss of the “real”—in this case, a functioning society and natural human communication—and a fraught dependence on the artificial, heavily controlled structures that remain.

This atmosphere of physical and social collapse is intertwined with a profound sense of loss and longing that resonates within the characters’ inner worlds. The novel’s protagonist-narrator, Murat Siyavuş, embodies the metamodern subject’s oscillation: he feels intense nostalgia for the past, for a lost normality, and for the former self whom he believes was “a different kind of person in a different kind of world” (Kum 2024, p. 10), specifically a time when he believed “poetry and music were more important than anything” (Kum 2024, p. 9). This yearning extends beyond personal loss—old relationships, the tragic fate of Murat’s former girlfriend Derya—to the loss of meaning itself. Sheltered in a corner of his mother’s flat, he regards the “slowed-down” life he spends in front of the television (Kum 2024, p. 19) as a passive existence, an existence that embodies the very lethargy (atalet) the novel ultimately seeks to overcome. This condition dovetails with Landsberg and Vermeulen’s (2025) account of metamodernism, which highlights both the search for depth and meaning and the simultaneous awareness of that search’s futility. Murat’s life is trapped between a meaningful past he once believed possible and a present that appears devoid of sense: “Being conscious of all this does not change the agonizing fact that I am terribly alone and in pain” (Kum 2024, p. 11).

The ARDS outbreak at the heart of the novel—and its linguistic offshoot abuklama—acquires special resonance within a metamodern frame. By attacking language itself, the disease reduces humanity’s most fundamental organic capacity to meaningless noise incapable of communication. Language seems to become an artificial, degraded copy that preserves form while losing meaning. The devastating social consequence is a pervasive paranoia that is actively engineered by the state’s media apparatus. In the first abuklama scene, an elderly woman’s nonsensical phrase triggers a supermarket lockdown. Murat speculates that a “logical explanation” might exist for her words but immediately concedes that “even if such an explanation existed, none of us were curious” (Kum 2024, p. 14). This is a conditioned response, born from the constant televised mandate to “Control your curiosity. Don’t listen” (Kum 2024, p. 14). Until the last chapter of the novel, dialogues with characters who are all infected—Behzat, Nadir, Adnan, Haluk Hoca—underscore abuklama’s unintelligibility and the inevitable failure of any effort to converse. Murat’s “hot skull” condition, as a potential carrier of this linguistic state, traps him in perpetual ambiguity and uncanniness; he is neither entirely “sick” nor wholly “healthy,” mirroring the in-between existence of the metamodern subject.

Finally, the novel’s aesthetic and atmospheric construction reinforce this metamodern structure of feeling. Murat’s narrative voice oscillates between sharp, ironic observation and deep melancholy, punctuated by a fragile, flickering hope. His descriptions of the city accentuate both its physical decay—burned-out buildings and rubble-strewn streets —and the unraveling of its social fabric, captured in images of silent, headphone-wearing crowds (Kum 2024, pp. 50, 69, 116–17). The settings consistently reflect the characters’ profound isolation. The hyper-secure SMK (Pandemic Control Agency) campus, a sterile “paradise” for the elite, and Fazıl Bey’s (an SMK director) meticulously ordered home function as bubbles of control (Kum 2024, pp. 86, 112–13). They are spaces of physical proximity laced with insurmountable barriers, where individuals may exist side-by-side but cannot forge genuine connection. In this way, Sıcak Kafa situates its characters and its readers within a distinctly metamodern landscape defined by a paralyzing tranquility, an unfulfilled search for meaning, and a fundamental impasse in communication.

4. The Crisis of Metamodern Subjectivity: Memory, Body, and Performance

In the fractured world of Sıcak Kafa, the collapse of communication forces an intense turn inward, making the nature and value of memory a central field of crisis. The narrative vividly dramatizes the obsession with authenticity that Landsberg and Vermeulen (2025) identify as a hallmark of metamodern memory. The ARDS outbreak draws a stark line between the “healthy” and the “infected” (abuks), a line grounded in the presence—or absence—of the capacity to think and remember in terms of real “cause-and-effect relations” (Kum 2024, p. 107). However, it is through the protagonist, Murat Siyavuş, that this crisis becomes most acute. His own past is a landscape of uncertainty; he cannot definitively recall if he ever married his late girlfriend Derya, reducing his own life to “a film I fell asleep watching on late-night TV” (Kum 2024, p. 11). This contrasts sharply with the one memory that is agonizingly authentic: the trauma of discovering Derya’s body, an image seared into his mind for years. This trauma is deepened by the knowledge that Derya’s death was itself a tragic, failed metamodern project—an attempt to “take herself apart and put herself back together even more beautifully” to escape a body that had become like a “tight turtleneck sweater” suffocating her soul (Kum 2024, p. 30). For Murat, even the catastrophic fire at the SMK clinic, where he once worked, fails to register as a true trauma for one critical reason: he cannot properly remember it. Instead of a visceral, personal memory, the fire exists for him as an external narrative transmitted by Fazıl Bey, who directly accuses Murat of having started it. As Landsberg and Vermeulen (2025, p. 3) emphasize, under the logic of metamodern memory, memories are not transferable and belong exclusively to their “rightful owners.” This hierarchy—where only viscerally experienced, lived memory is deemed “real” enough to constitute the self—is the definitive condition of his metamodern predicament.

This quest for an authentic past manifests as a fixation on material and sensory indexes—tangible evidence sought to anchor a fleeting sense of reality. The novel presents a series of such indexes, each more ambiguous than the last, highlighting the ultimate fragility of this search. The most immediate is Murat’s own body: his chronic “hot skull” is treated by both the Pandemic Control Agency (SMK) and Victor’s project as a potential biological index, a text to be deciphered for the secret to ARDS immunity. A more culturally specific index appears in the form of Behzat’s linguistic outbursts; the politically charged Ottoman Turkish words he shouts, “İSTİKLAL” (Independence), “MÜSTEMLEKE” (Colony), and “hâlet-i ruhiye” (state of mind), function as more than markers of a lost passion for literature (Kum 2024, pp. 25–27). They are fragments of a repressed national-historical consciousness, suggesting that the disease dredges up not just personal but collective memory. Behzat’s eventual return to his signature farewell, “Haydi eyvallah” (Kum 2024, pp. 18, 187), at the novel’s climax further suggests that these indexes point not to a lost past but to a submerged yet continuous identity, destabilizing the healthy/sick binary. The novel also offers socio-economic indexes of societal rupture: the meal left unfinished on Halil Bey’s table poignantly marks a life interrupted, an archaeological trace of collapse that mirrors the old woman in the supermarket who, after contracting the illness, abandons her planned shopping list for a single, instinctual onion (Kum 2024, pp. 15, 23). Finally, the article Murat receives from Viktor—signed by Mary J. Esterhazy and mentioning two additional cases similar to his own (Kum 2024, pp. 123–24)—serves as yet another index: it questions Murat’s uniqueness while linking his condition to a broader, documented phenomenon, but it is itself fragile and unreliable because the author, the very source of its authenticity, has vanished. Each index promises clarity but delivers only deeper ambiguity, mirroring metamodernism’s central dilemma: the tension between a profound yearning for meaning and the absence of solid ground on which to anchor it.

The intensity of Murat’s search for memory is not merely an intellectual exercise but a distinctly metamodern quest where the body becomes the primary site for verifying an authentic self. His physical reactions are not generic signs of stress but are tied to what Landsberg and Vermeulen (2025, p. 5) might call a metamodern “fetishization of the real” and an obsession with origins. When Murat sweats uncontrollably under the gaze of the SMK, his body betrays him to a biopolitical authority, but it is during his unsettling interview with the abuk Adnan that this dynamic becomes acute. His intensifying itch and sudden nosebleed are physical eruptions that occur as his rational world begins to collapse. The fact that the nosebleed is based on a high school memory—a basketball hitting his head—is significant (Kum 2024, pp. 163, 179). This memory functions as a material index: a tangible, verifiable link to a lived experience that can anchor his identity (Landsberg and Vermeulen 2025, p. 8). The nosebleed is the “affective charge” of that memory given “form, texture and materiality” (Landsberg and Vermeulen 2025, p. 7) at a moment of profound internal crisis. This bodily verification of the self culminates in his dream after meeting the wise Haluk Hoca. The dream, in which his skin peels away to reveal a “dark green, metallic-colored” reptilian texture (Kum 2024, p. 181), is a visceral allegory for the emergence of a post-organic self—”the organic after the end of the organic” (Landsberg and Vermeulen 2025, p. 5). The peeling skin represents the shedding of a constructed identity, but what lies beneath is not a “real” self but an artificial one, a “prosthesis which fleshes out a temporary interior” (Landsberg and Vermeulen 2025, p. 13). This transformation is a measurable, qualitative change within him, registered on the body itself.

This crisis of authentic memory gives rise to a profoundly fragile subjectivity. For the narrator, Murat Siyavuş, this fragility manifests not merely as an ontological question of “Who am I?” but as a debilitating ethical paralysis centered on the question, “What harm will I do?” Haunted by the authentic trauma of Derya’s death and his role in it, Murat sees himself as inherently destructive—a “selfish man”—who is constitutionally incapable of preserving beauty (Kum 2024, p. 11). His conclusion that “Man is such a filthy animal” is not an abstract philosophical statement but a deeply personal conviction that governs his actions (Kum 2024, p. 33). Consequently, his initial flight from Şule is not a symptom of simple social anxiety but a deliberate act of ethical self-quarantine, an attempt to prevent a repetition of past tragedies by isolating himself from the possibility of connection. His subjectivity is thus defined less by what he remembers than by what he fears his own agency is capable of destroying. This trauma-induced lethargy (atalet) represents the critical starting point from which the novel stages its ultimate exploration: the possibility of a radical, transformative shattering of the self.

Upon this fragile ground of selfhood, the performance of normality becomes a constant, high-stakes act of survival. Having been targeted by the Pandemic Control Agency (SMK), Murat must meticulously curate his public self, adopting strategies to blend in, right down to calculating the appropriate length of his beard to project the image of a man with a job and purpose (Kum 2024, pp. 33–34). The most complex and telling instance of this is at the Kozyatağı metro station. To deflect the suspicion of an approaching guard, Murat engages Şule in conversation. However, the “normal” speech he produces is a stream of nonsensical clichés that perfectly mimics the linguistic chaos of abuklama: “Without understanding or listening, we took her curse and commended her to God. As you’ll understand, we settled the bill German-style, we hadn’t even set the alarm yet” (Kum 2024, p. 41). This is a brilliant metamodern paradox: Murat performs normality by feigning the very madness he is desperate to conceal. It is an ironic act that blurs the lines between his authentic self, his performed identity, and the pathology of the world around him, demonstrating the impossible contortions required to appear sane in a society where all speech is suspect.

This pervasive social paranoia solidifies into an experience of co-isolation (Sloterdijk 2004), a state that moves from the physical landscape into the most intimate spheres of personal connection. While the technologies of isolation—the headphones, plexiglass screens, and “magnetic cards and barcodes” (Kum 2024, p. 35) that render human interaction obsolete—are ubiquitous, its most tragic consequence is the inevitable failure of relationships. The bond between Murat and Şule, which promises an escape from this atomization, is ironically born under the sign of its own demise. Their first night of intimacy is scored by the music of Yeni Türkü’s album Günebakan, which features the iconic song of separation, “Olmasa Mektubun” (If Not for Your Letter) (Kum 2024, p. 143). This foreshadowing is realized in their penultimate encounter (where Şule insists on staying “healthy”). When Murat attempts to articulate his internal transformation through the poetic, nonlinear logic of his new consciousness, abuklama, Şule can only interpret this profound sincerity through the sole remaining public framework: pathology. Her panicked accusation, “You’ve infected me with the disease” (Kum 2024, p. 184), marks the ultimate victory of co-isolation. It is the moment where language, even between lovers, ceases to be a bridge and becomes an insurmountable wall, proving that in the “rational” or “healthy” world of Sıcak Kafa, no connection is safe from the bubbles that contain it.

5. The Politics of Paralysis: Past-Orientation, Memory Ownership, and the Media Environment

The narrative architecture and political climate of Sıcak Kafa initially align with the critique of metamodern memory as a politically “conservative, focused on origins rather than alternative futures” (Landsberg and Vermeulen 2025, p. 17). The protagonist’s quest is fundamentally past-oriented and restorative, not revolutionary. Murat Siyavuş’s primary goals are to re-establish a past bond by finding his friend Özgür, decipher his own fragmented history to understand his “hot skull,” and ultimately uncover a cure for ARDS that would restore the “normal” world that existed before. This logic of restoration extends to other characters; Viktor and Şule’s research project is not aimed at imagining a new society but at “healing” the abuks and returning them to a prior cognitive state. The novel’s world is thus initially trapped in a cycle of interrogating origins, lost normality, and past traumas privileging the restoration of what has been lost over any radical new possibilities. This establishes the political impasse from which the narrative must eventually attempt to break.

This past-oriented paralysis is rooted in the metamodern conception of memory as private, inalienable property, which directly fuels the political fragmentation, or balkanization (Landsberg and Vermeulen 2025, p. 3), of society. Because memory is not seen as transferable, it cannot foster solidarity across difference, leading to the sharp division between the fearful “us” (the healthy) and the dehumanized “them” (the abuks). This is evidenced by the existence of quarantine zones and the nationalist rhetoric on television calling for a “final solution” (Kum 2024, p. 21). The novel foregrounds this proprietary logic on multiple levels. The state, through the SMK, seeks to claim Murat’s body and mind as a data source, viewing his unique biological memory as a resource to be owned and exploited. Viktor’s research team treats abuklama as a manipulable object to be analyzed and “corrected”. Even Behzat’s historical outbursts raise the question of ownership (Kum 2024, p. 67): do they belong to his past self or to the disease? This view of memory as contested property provides the ideological foundation for a reactionary political climate where society fractures into isolated, fearful groups.

In this balkanized world of communicative collapse, where speech is a contagion and the internet has been shut down for years, a single, centrally controlled medium—television—rises to a position of absolute power. It functions simultaneously as a societal tool of control and as the protagonist’s primary psychological sanctuary. On a societal level, television is a pragmatic external lifeline. More profoundly, it serves as Murat’s internal refuge. The “corner in front of the television” (Kum 2024, p. 9) in his mother’s apartment is his initial safe space, a site of “tranquility” (sükûnet) (Kum 2024, p. 11) he yearns for and retreats to after every failure or moment of stress. He seeks comfort in television after his disillusionment with Dilara; he longs for his armchair after the chaotic night with Özgür, calling it “my real place” (Kum 2024, p. 78); he finds “peace” (Kum 2024, p. 86) in his SMK cell precisely because it contains a television; and he turns to it instinctively after confronting the traumas of the Haluk Hoca interview, Özgür’s suicide, and Şule’s departure. This dual function makes television’s power so absolute: the state’s tool for political control is perfectly mirrored by the individual’s tool for psychological comfort, creating a self-reinforcing cycle that keeps both society and the protagonist in a state of passive paralysis.

While foregrounding television’s centrality, the novel also underscores how the medium delivers a controlled and manipulated reality. Newscasts and talk-shows about the epidemic routinely echo the official line, portray the situation more favourably than it is, and employ language designed to soothe the public. A stark gulf yawns between the chaos, violence, and contagion that citizens witness on the streets and the broadcast narrative that things are “under control” and “recovery is near.” Control has a physical dimension as well: all active television channels operate from within an ultra-secure SMK compound, isolated from the outside world (Kum 2024, p. 90), a detail that reveals how centralized and insulated the production and circulation of information have become. Commentators, politicians, and experts who pronounce on TV interpret reality from within their own sterile “bubbles,” disconnected from what the public experiences. This constitutes a variant of the filter-bubble phenomenon that Landsberg and Vermeulen (2025) discuss in their reading of Blade Runner 2049. There, algorithms and personalized capitalism imprison individuals in private echo chambers (Landsberg and Vermeulen 2025, pp. 15–16); in Sıcak Kafa, a comparable isolation is created through centralized control of information, censorship, and sheer scarcity of data. Those who fall outside the official discourse must either rely on this controlled stream or place their trust in rumours—often conspiracy-laden—circulating within small circles (claims about the disease’s origin, allegations that a cure is being concealed, and so forth).

This fragmented and unreliable information ecosystem makes it exceedingly difficult for individuals to trust one another, to forge a shared sense of reality, and, by extension, to develop understanding or solidarity across differences. People live in a constant dilemma: should they believe the official narrative, their own limited observations, or the rumours that circulate by word of mouth? The situation reinforces the co-isolation discussed earlier: citizens are cut off from one another not only physically and communicatively but also because they lack a common world of knowledge and meaning. The “unplanned, unanticipated encounters” and “shared common experiences” essential to a functioning democracy have become almost impossible in the world of Sıcak Kafa (Sunstein 2001, as cited in Landsberg and Vermeulen 2025, p. 16). The media structure also shapes memory directly. Television accounts of the past—for instance, the mutually contradictory, fantastic claims about the outbreak’s origin (a Russian organic robot, a Swedish-speaking phone app, a Japanese translation machine)—deprive collective memory of any stable foundation and turn history into a speculative, unreliable realm (Kum 2024, p. 98). This aligns with Landsberg and Vermeulen’s (2025) broader argument about the media’s role in configuring metamodern memory: in Sıcak Kafa, media, especially television, strips the past of its solidity and folds it into the present’s uncertainty and fragmentation. Consequently, the novel’s media environment and information ecosystem function as a core driver of the characters’ uncertainty, isolation, paralysis, and fragile grip on reality, substantially contributing to the uncanny atmosphere of the metamodern condition.

6. The Politics of Liberation: Trauma, Freefall, and the Rejection of the Metamodern Impasse

While Sıcak Kafa meticulously diagnoses the metamodern condition of paralysis, its ultimate contribution lies in charting a radical path beyond it. The novel’s final act is not an endpoint of decline but a dynamic transformation, staged through the protagonist Murat Siyavuş’s evolving intellectual and philosophical journey. His initial state is one of pure lethargy (atalet), a condition he recognizes through the imagined gaze of a younger generation as a “wretch... waiting for death from the get-go, a house bird, a sofa creature, a brown cockroach” (Kum 2024, p. 28). This paralysis is a direct consequence of his belief that life and memories are structured by traumatic “blows” (Kum 2024, p. 179), making fearful retreat the only rational response. From this starting point, Murat first attempts a modernist search for a grand purpose, pleading with Özgür for a project that is “better than waiting wearily for the day we die” (Kum 2024, p. 79). However, this sincere quest quickly collapses under the weight of his own postmodern skepticism, as he rationally deconstructs all grand narratives—patriotism, revolution, religion—as cynical power plays, concluding that life itself has no inherent meaning beyond its cold biological function as “a coiled molecule... that happens to copy itself” (Kum 2024, p. 88). It is only after this intellectual exhaustion that he makes a quintessentially metamodern leap of “informed naivety” (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010, p. 5): despite knowing the chances are “close to zero,” he commits to Viktor’s project because the affective desire for connection with Şule makes participation feel “more meaningful... than staying outside and waiting for death” (Kum 2024, p. 134).

This fragile, project-based metamodern hope is, however, ultimately insufficient. The narrative’s final pivot is catalyzed by a series of unbearable traumatic blows that shatter this last-ditch effort. The televised, spectacular suicide of Özgür represents the death of the rational, scientific “cure” narrative, obliterating the hope of restoring the old world. Shortly after, Murat’s final, heartbreaking conversation with Şule—in which his attempt at sincere connection is misinterpreted as an act of contagion—marks the death of the romantic, interpersonal narrative. This collapse of both scientific and romantic hope leaves him in an existential vacuum, stripped of all backward-looking goals and thus finally receptive to a philosophy that lies beyond projects and meaning entirely. This alternative is provided in his encounters with Haluk Hoca, which function as the novel’s central philosophical breakthrough. Haluk offers Murat the tools for a new consciousness, one that is first fully articulated in Murat’s final, seemingly abuk speech to Şule. This conversation is not a descent into madness but a poetic and dense deconstruction of the core tenets that govern the “healthy” world’s relationship with memory, time, and modernity itself.

First, Murat presents a new model of memory that directly refutes the metamodern hierarchy of authentic, lived experience. He tells Şule that “the lived and the never-livable... will keep caressing one another like ruined buildings” (Kum 2024, p. 183). This powerful metaphor dismantles the binary between an authentic past and an inauthentic one. In this new understanding, both what happened and what could have happened coexist as a single, melancholic ruin—one is gone because it is past, the other because it never was. The gentle verb “caressing” suggests a state of quiet coexistence rather than a conflict to be resolved or a truth to be verified. The past is no longer a stable source of identity to be authenticated, but a complex and inescapable landscape composed equally of actuality and potentiality. This view transcends the metamodern subject’s desperate, backward-looking search for a “real” and verifiable origin.

From this new understanding of memory, Murat articulates a critique of the linear, goal-oriented temporality that underpins the rational world. “You think the present stands before the future,” he explains, “but actually, it passes through it” (Kum 2024, p. 184). This is a direct refutation of the cause-and-effect logic that defines the “healthy” mind and the past-oriented nature of metamodern memory. If the future is not a destination to be reached but a process that is already flowing through the present moment, then the quest to restore a past normality becomes philosophically absurd. He then connects this flawed perception of time to a critique of modernity itself, suggesting that the manic construction of the physical world is a defense mechanism against this very fluidity: “it must be so, there must be an explanation for all this love of concrete” (Kum 2024, p. 184). As seen in the landscape of Istanbul, with its “glittering high-rises” (Kum 2024, p. 114) standing in stark contrast to the primitive fires of the quarantine zones, the rigid, standardized, and permanent structures of the modern world are a desperate attempt to impose stability on an inherently uncertain and slippery existence.

Furthermore, this speech articulates the nature of a new, post-rational subjectivity. Murat’s declaration that Şule’s absence is like “the void of history” elevates his personal feeling to a universal condition, signaling a consciousness that has moved beyond the purely individual (Kum 2024, p. 184). His warning not to confuse the “void” with the “chain” suggests this new state requires its own form of discernment, a way to distinguish between nihilistic emptiness and meaningful connection (Kum 2024, p. 184). The philosophical climax arrives with his statement: “The desert does not long for rain, for it is the desert. It is enough if you only understand this” (Kum 2024, p. 184). This is the ultimate rejection of the metamodern oscillation between hope and cynicism. The new self (the desert) does not yearn for what it lacks (rain); it finds its full and authentic being in accepting its own nature. It is a state that has transcended the longing that defines the metamodern condition, proposing a subjectivity based on radical self-acceptance rather than a perpetual, unfulfilled search for meaning.

While Murat’s speech to Şule articulates the limitations of the old world, it is Haluk Hoca, in their final encounter, who provides the transformative key to unlocking the new one. This new philosophy offers the ultimate instrument of liberation by targeting the foundational fear that underpins the rational, trauma-defined self. Haluk explains to Murat that the secret to a new reality lies in overcoming mortality itself: “if you can completely erase the thought that you will one day die... distances and durations lose their importance, and you can instantly arrive wherever you want” (Kum 2024, p. 186). This is the novel’s most radical claim. As we have seen, Murat’s subjectivity is structured by a series of traumatic blows, a life periodized by impacts that have conditioned him for fear and paralysis. The logical endpoint of such a life is the constant, underlying fear of the final and ultimate blow: death. Haluk’s lesson is a direct antidote to this condition. By erasing the fear of the final impact, the entire psychological structure of a trauma-defined self collapses. If the ultimate consequence is removed from the equation, the linear, cause-and-effect reality that creates trauma in the first place loses its power. This is the mechanism that enables the surreal events of the novel’s finale. The instantaneous journey to Taksim Square is not a flight of fancy or a hallucination, but the logical manifestation of a consciousness that, having been liberated from its own finitude, is no longer bound by the rational constructs of time and space.

This new philosophy, which transcends the individual’s fear of finitude, finds its political and social expression in the novel’s final scenes, offering a radical antithesis to the metamodern impasse. Where Landsberg and Vermeulen’s (2025, pp. 3, 17) framework suggests that metamodern memory leads to a “past-oriented, conservative” politics that “reserves the future... exclusively for a select few” and ends in paralysis, Sıcak Kafa’s conclusion presents a vision of a collective, liberated, and radically open future. This new reality is manifested in the chapter “Kayganlık Bayramı” (Slipperiness Festival), a chaotic and joyful gathering in the politically charged space of Taksim Square (Kum 2024, p. 186) a site deeply etched into the nation’s collective memory as a center for civil dissent. The square’s symbolic weight was cemented in 2013, when a small sit-in to protect a park erupted into nationwide anti-government protests, becoming a powerful modern touchstone for public assembly and resistance. The festival is not a collapse into madness but is framed by Behzat Abi as a conscious political and spiritual revolution: “Thank God we have emerged [huruç ettik] from a monotonous tranquility [sükûnet] and lethargy [atalet]” (Kum 2024, p. 187). It is a deliberate uprising against the very paralysis that defined the old world.

Within this new collective, the nature of the self is not erased but transformed and liberated. This directly refutes the metamodern anxiety that subjectivity will collapse without a verifiable, authentic past. When Behzat addresses the protagonist by his full name, “Murat Siyavuş,” (Kum 2024, p. 186) he affirms that individuality persists because his identity had been denied during his first meeting with Haluk Hoca, when he was “healthy”. Furthermore, when Behzat departs with his signature, stylish farewell from his pre-illness days—“Haydi eyvallah” (Kum 2024, pp. 18, 187)—it proves that his core identity was not destroyed by the disease but was submerged, waiting to be liberated. In this new state, the self is more fully realized, freed from the fearful constraints of the rational mind. This new liberation is not, however, a nihilistic, postmodern free-for-all. It comes with its own paradoxical principle, as Behzat warns: “However, in that moment, one must show utmost care in defending the foundation/rule [kaide]” (Kum 2024, p. 187). The new collective must actively protect its own state of freedom and slipperiness from being rigidified into a new dogma or co-opted by the corrupt. This is a sophisticated and self-aware politics, one that seeks to preserve chaos from new forms of order.

This new philosophy is grounded in a completely new reality, one whose physics, cosmology, and mode of connection represent a final, decisive break from the anxieties of the past. The novel’s final imagery cements a vision of a post-traumatic and post-humanist future. First, it establishes a new physics by transvaluating the novel’s foundational trauma. Murat’s earliest memory from his childhood, the traumatic fall-with-impact that conditioned his lifelong fear and paralysis, is reclaimed and transformed (Kum 2024, p. 179). In the “Kayganlık Bayramı,” (Slipperiness Festival) he experiences the “limitless sensation of free-falling without ever having to crash into the ground” as a “magnificent feeling” (Kum 2024, p. 187). This is the physics of a post-traumatic world; the abuk consciousness does not erase the memory of the blow, but it liberates the act of falling from the fear of its consequence. The past no longer dictates the future through fear.

This new physics enables a new cosmology, shifting the quest for origin from the personal to the archetypal. The backward-looking search for an authentic, individual past is transcended by a mystical reunion with a collective one. Murat’s search for a mother he cannot remember is resolved not by finding a person, but by dissolving into an elemental consciousness: Mother Earth. This reunion requires the sacrificial destruction of the rational, man-made world, as the city’s “iron, copper, and tin” must melt to repay the “debt to the soil,” and in return, “we will get our mother back” (Kum 2024, p. 187). This is the ultimate rejection of the individualistic, proprietary memory of metamodernism in favor of a complete dissolution into a collective origin.

Finally, this new reality is embodied in a new form of connection. Murat’s final reunion with Şule is post-linguistic and post-rational: “We said nothing, there was no need to say anything” (Kum 2024, p. 188). They come together not through dialogue but through shared motion, moving like “two pendulums gliding through the air” (Kum 2024, p. 188). This harmonious, shared oscillation is the direct resolution to the paralyzing, individualistic metamodern oscillation between hope and doubt that defined Murat’s former self. The novel’s final sentence cements the sincerity of this new state: “Because infinity had ceased to be a joke” (Kum 2024, p. 188). This is not a dream or an ironic gesture, but a new and lasting reality, a future found not by restoring the past, but by courageously embracing the total dissolution of the rational, trauma-defined self.

7. Conclusions

This analysis has demonstrated that Afşin Kum’s Sıcak Kafa operates as a profound literary intervention into the contemporary cultural landscape, functioning as both a meticulous diagnostic tool for and a speculative roadmap beyond the metamodern condition. By immersing the reader in a dystopia governed by communicative collapse and social paralysis, the novel first serves as a powerful instantiation of the pathologies central to Landsberg and Vermeulen’s (2025) theory of metamodern memory. It masterfully dramatizes the obsessive quest for authentic origins, the reliance on fragile corporeal indexes to verify a selfhood defined by trauma, and the political balkanization that arises when memory becomes inalienable private property. The narrative meticulously charts the anatomy of the metamodern impasse, capturing its structure of feeling in the protagonist’s initial lethargy and the co-isolation of a society trapped within a fragmented and centrally controlled information ecosystem.

However, the novel’s most significant contribution, and the central finding of this study, is its refusal to remain within the confines of this bleak diagnosis. Sıcak Kafa’s final act stages a radical break from the political pessimism inherent in the metamodern framework. It pushes its protagonist through the crucible of total loss—of scientific hope, of romantic connection, of a stable past—to a point where the only path forward is the complete jettisoning of the rational, trauma-defined self. Through the philosophical encounters with Haluk Hoca and the collective uprising of the “Kayganlık Bayramı,” (Slipperiness Festival), the novel speculates on the emergence of a post-rational, post-linguistic consciousness. This new subjectivity, grounded in a physics of “freefall without impact” and a cosmology of collective belonging, directly refutes the metamodern anxiety over a collapsed self by revealing a form of identity that is more fully realized once liberated from the fearful constraints of cause-and-effect logic.

Consequently, this reading of Sıcak Kafa offers several critical contributions. First, it advances the scholarship on metamodernism by presenting the novel not merely as an example of the theory but as a transformative response to it. Kum’s work challenges the finality of the metamodern diagnosis, suggesting that within its paralysis lies the potential for a radical, forward-looking politics of liberation. Second, it positions Sıcak Kafa as a vital text in contemporary world literature, one that engages with cutting-edge cultural theory to explore the fundamental crises of meaning, memory, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. Future scholarship might productively place the novel’s vision of a post-humanist collective in dialogue with other critical idioms, such as biopolitics or trauma theory, to further probe the political and ethical dimensions of its proposed escape.

Ultimately, Afşin Kum’s novel does not simply leave us with a diagnosis of our fragmented present; it offers a startling, even paradoxical, prescription. It suggests that the only way to transcend the political and subjective paralysis of the metamodern condition is to abandon the very project of the authentic, rational self that we so desperately seek to salvage.