The Autarkeia Paradox — cover
Forthcoming

PamphletsNo. 011 DECEMBER 2026

The Autarkeia Paradox

An Essay on Pluribus

Levent Yılmaz

Why do we fear the person who resembles us more than the stranger?

Reading Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus through Epicurus, the Desert Fathers, the Stoics and Ibn Tufayl — and then through Lévi-Strauss, Mauss, Sahlins and Rawls — this essay argues that the ancient dream of autarkeia, self-sufficiency, breaks not against difference but against sameness. Koumba’s garden, Manousos’s cell, the Others’ cosmopolis: three programmes of completeness, three collapses. What remains is Carol Sturka’s impossible position, and an atomic bomb in a front garden as the last counter-gift.

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Imprint
Pamphlets
Pages
48
Trim size
127 × 203 mm (5 × 8 in)
Language
English
Publication
1 DECEMBER 2026

Author

Levent Yılmaz

Levent Yılmaz (b. 1969, Ankara) is a historian and poet. He took his doctorate at the EHESS in Paris with a dissertation on the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. He has been a professor of history at Istanbul Bilgi, Koç, Paris Nanterre and Bilkent universities, directed AKMED (the Suna & İnan Kıraç Research Center for Mediterranean Civilizations) and lectured as visiting professor at the Collège de France. He is the author of Le Temps moderne (Gallimard, 2005), of edited volumes on Vico and of seven books of poetry, translated into English, German, French and Italian. He is a co-founder of HECAS, the Hekimbaşı Center for Advanced Studies.