Shadow Theatre of Karagöz and Hacivat (Turkey)

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

Karagöz and Hacivat, though humble in medium—leather puppets on backlit screens—enacts a remarkably potent theatre of social reflection, inversion, and the playful cultivation of ethical subjectivity. It operates as a low-theory mode of parrhesia (truth-telling), where subaltern wit challenges the moral order of Ottoman society through laughter.

Foucault emphasizes in The Care of the Self that subject formation is not merely disciplinary, but also aesthetic—the subject as a work of art. In this tradition, Karagöz the irreverent, coarse-tongued trickster becomes an agent of counter-conduct, interrogating the norms embodied by the pompous, bookish Hacivat. Their dynamic—earthy instinct versus scholarly decorum—mirrors the Foucauldian dialectic between rules imposed by regimes of knowledge and the autopoietic (self-making) resistance of life.

The power of Karagöz is in its decentering of authority through mimicry. Government officials, theologians, doctors, foreigners, and aristocrats are all flattened into satirical types. By mocking the roles society assigns, Karagöz discloses the artificiality of those roles. Foucault might call this a reconfiguration of subject positions—we begin to see ourselves not as fixed identities, but as mutable enactments within historically specific discourses.

Furthermore, the framing device of shadow embodies Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge: truth appears not in the illuminated, grandiose centers, but in silhouettes, margins, and distortions. As such, the screen is less a division than a membrane of transgression—a Foucauldian heterotopia where multiple knowledges meet: Turkish, Arab, Greek, Armenian, Persian, mystic, secular.

The characters’ obscene jokes, puns, and poetic double meanings are not mere entertainment—they are “technologies of the tongue”, training the audience in improvisation, irony, and detachment. Watching Karagöz, one does not simply laugh but learns how to speak sideways, how to live artfully within an unjust order.

Thus, Karagöz and Hacivat become what Foucault describes as “techniques of self-care through comic distance”—a minor but enduring practice in the cultivation of truth, critique, and the ethics of laughter.