Beden İblisleri
Published:
Beden İblisleri
Originally published in Picus — exact date unknown
Archived by Egoist Okur — 13 January 2016
Interview by Tolga Meriç
Among the surviving Nejat İşler interviews, Beden İblisleri is unusual.
It is not organized around a film.
There is no conventional promotional structure.
Instead, Tolga Meriç asks İşler about the body.
The result moves through:
religion,
childhood,
gender,
sexuality,
clothing,
class,
celebrity,
death,
masculinity.
The questions are often deliberately strange.
The answers are sometimes provocative.
But underneath the humor is one of the clearest early records of İşler’s resistance to fixed identity.
The body, in this interview, is never simply biological.
Society keeps trying to write meanings onto it.
Discovering the Body
Asked when he first became conscious of himself as a biological creature, İşler returns to childhood religion.
He says he grew up in a strongly Muslim family and prayed regularly with his grandfather.
Then one morning, while waiting for his grandfather before prayer, he looked outside.
Trees.
Birds.
Bodies.
Organs.
Living things.
Something shifted.
Religious practice gradually stopped.
The memory is valuable because it describes change not as ideological rebellion but as a moment of physical awareness.
Religion Becomes Material
The child begins asking:
what is a human being physically?
That question does not automatically destroy spiritual interest.
Later in the interview, İşler says he still likes religions and compares them almost to music.
But bodily existence changes the way he thinks about metaphysical certainty.
This is an important distinction.
He does not move from:
belief
to
simple hostility toward religion.
He moves toward ambiguity.
The Second Encounter with the Body
Another formative memory comes from military service.
İşler describes witnessing the physical consequences of a shooting between two young men.
The event removes abstraction.
A body is not an idea.
It can break.
Open.
Die.
Again, mortality enters his worldview long before the 2014 health crisis.
Mortality Before Illness
This is now supported by several independent archival records.
In 2011, İşler speaks openly about death while discussing Kaybedenler Kulübü.
This older Picus interview also shows bodily mortality occupying his thoughts.
Therefore the later narrative should not be:
Nejat İşler discovered mortality when he became seriously ill.
A better formulation is:
the illness made an old awareness personally unavoidable.
Suspicious of Body Worship
İşler says he dislikes becoming excessively dependent on caring for the body.
He is suspicious of a culture built around:
vitamins,
creams,
medication,
constant medical attention.
His position is deliberately extreme and should not be taken as health advice.
What matters archivally is the philosophy underneath it:
he does not want the maintenance of the body to become the central purpose of living.
The Body as Temporary
This fits his later relationship with property.
The logic is similar.
Do not become excessively attached to:
things,
property,
body,
status.
All are temporary.
The mature philosophy visible in 2017 has an earlier bodily version here.
Gender as Something to Play With
One of the interview’s strongest sections concerns gender presentation.
İşler talks about long hair and earrings.
Culturally, these could be coded as feminine.
But he says they can make him feel more masculine precisely because they disturb the expected visual rule.
The important idea is not the specific hairstyle.
It is the pleasure of contradiction.
The Social Meaning of the Body
İşler says he likes bodies that do not fully obey their expected social meaning.
He mentions women with:
short hair,
little or no makeup,
stronger or more boyish presentation.
His interest is in people who play with the signs society attaches to gender.
This is striking when compared with the later “delikanlı” mythology around him.
The public often constructs İşler as a highly conventional figure of hard masculinity.
His own comments are much less rigid.
Masculinity Without a Manual
For İşler, being male does not seem to require continuously proving masculinity.
That becomes important later.
The media will associate him with:
fighting,
women,
rebellion,
toughness.
But here, masculinity itself is treated almost playfully.
Something that happened.
Something socially interpreted.
Not a sacred identity.
Life as a Joke
One of his broader observations is that even categories such as being male or female contain an arbitrary element.
Nobody is asked beforehand how they would like to exist.
Existence happens first.
Meaning comes later.
That attitude appears repeatedly in his public philosophy.
Life is serious because it ends.
But many identities people take extremely seriously are partly accidental.
Second-Hand Life
Another unusually revealing section concerns clothing.
İşler says he has spent much of his life wearing second-hand clothes.
He also bought:
used books,
old records,
objects previously owned by others.
What attracts him is their story.
This is much more than a fashion preference.
Continuing Someone Else’s Sentence
İşler describes wearing an old piece of clothing almost as continuing a sentence started by someone decades earlier.
That is one of the most beautiful ideas in the interview.
An object is valuable not because it is new.
It is valuable because it has history.
An Early Theory of Miras
This becomes fascinating when compared with Miras in 2025.
The older interview says:
objects become meaningful through the lives already attached to them.
The later book asks:
what do people actually inherit from one another?
The answer gradually becomes:
stories,
memories,
character,
experience.
The conceptual bridge is surprisingly strong.
Consumption Without Newness
Second-hand culture also fits İşler’s later resistance to accumulation.
Modern consumption says:
new is better.
More is better.
Replace.
Upgrade.
İşler is attracted to the opposite:
continuity.
Reuse.
History.
A used object may be more meaningful precisely because it is not new.
Then Fame Changes the Body
The conversation becomes much more personal when Meriç asks what public desire has done to İşler’s relationship with his own body.
İşler gives one of the archive’s strongest statements about fame.
Earlier, he says, people may have found him personally attractive.
Now they are responding to the label attached to the body:
“Nejat İşler.”
This is an extraordinary description of celebrity.
The Brand Replaces the Person
The body remains the same biological object.
But fame adds symbolic value.
Face.
Hands.
Hair.
Voice.
None is interpreted neutrally anymore.
They belong to a celebrity.
The name changes how the body is seen.
This is perhaps the earliest and most precise form of the archive’s central public-image problem.
The Body Becomes a Shop
İşler jokes about tattooing official identification numbers onto himself and describes his body almost as a commercial shop because it is what he uses to earn money.
The humor hides a real professional fact.
Actors sell access to:
face,
voice,
movement,
physical presence.
The body is both person and instrument.
Acting Is Embodied Labor
This becomes especially interesting after his later illness.
The actor’s body is not decorative.
It is workplace.
A writer can continue writing with major changes in appearance.
An actor’s physical transformation immediately enters the professional image.
The 2016 İkimizin Yerine interview, where he discusses bodily losses after illness, becomes much more meaningful when read beside this older conversation.
Fame Commodifies the Body Twice
An actor’s body has at least two economic lives.
First:
production pays for performance.
Second:
celebrity culture gives the body independent market value.
Photographs.
Advertising.
Magazine interest.
Romantic gossip.
The body becomes culturally valuable even when the actor is not acting.
İşler clearly finds that second process uncomfortable.
Public Desire Is Not Intimacy
This also explains his persistent discomfort with public attention.
Being desired by strangers does not necessarily mean being seen.
In fact, celebrity may produce the opposite.
The person disappears behind the recognizable label.
Physical Boundaries
The interview becomes particularly revealing when İşler discusses unwanted touching in public.
He distinguishes verbal behavior from physical intrusion.
Words may be ignored.
Physical contact crosses another boundary.
This is an early version of something that remains consistent for decades.
Public visibility is not physical permission.
The Same Boundary in 2025
In 2025, the conflict concerns cameras, reporters and private working space.
Here, the boundary concerns the body itself.
The underlying principle is the same:
access must have limits.
Violence and Masculinity
İşler also reflects on the fact that some women appear attracted to visible male aggression.
He describes being disturbed by the possibility that causing pain or displaying violence could increase attraction.
This directly complicates his later hard-man persona.
He understands that violence can function socially as masculine performance.
He does not seem comfortable with that mechanism.
Before “Delikanlı Değilim”
Years later, he would reject the delikanlı identity assigned to him.
This older interview shows why.
The mythology says:
strength,
violence,
male authority.
His own response to those cultural signals is much more skeptical.
The later rejection did not appear from nowhere.
Gender Is Performance Before Performance Theory
The interview repeatedly treats gender through:
hair,
clothing,
body,
sexual behavior,
social expectation.
Without turning the conversation into academic theory, İşler arrives at a practical observation:
gender is partly something society reads from signs.
Those signs can be played with.
Eyüp and Class Again
The body also becomes a class subject.
İşler remembers growing up in Eyüp among working-class families.
His childhood examples do not come from an abstract discussion of poverty.
They come from:
school,
clothing,
cleanliness,
embarrassment,
difference between families.
Again, Eyüp becomes the source from which he understands social categories.
Class Is Visible on Bodies
Money changes:
clothing,
cleanliness,
health,
presentation.
The body can therefore reveal class before anyone speaks.
This makes the conversation wider than sexuality or celebrity.
The body carries social history.
Childhood Satisfaction
Another subtle detail is İşler’s claim that he did not particularly want to grow up and was generally satisfied with his childhood self.
This is interesting beside his later low appetite for conventional ambition.
There is a recurring resistance to the demand:
become more.
Older.
Richer.
More successful.
More important.
“Enough” Appears Again
The word may not be used directly here, but the philosophy appears repeatedly.
Why must the body be perfected?
Why must identity be optimized?
Why must every object be new?
Why must success continually expand?
Later interviews will make this philosophy more explicit.
Here it already exists in fragments.
The Question of Children
İşler also explains why he does not want children.
The reasoning is existential rather than practical.
He was not asked whether he wanted to be brought into existence.
He is therefore uneasy about making that decision for another person.
Whether one agrees with the conclusion or not, the logic is consistent with the rest of the interview.
Existence is received without consent.
He remains slightly resentful — or, in his own softer description, bruised — by that condition.
“Kızgın Değilim, Buruğum”
This gives the archived republication its secondary headline.
He is not simply angry.
He describes himself more as emotionally bruised.
That feeling, he says, influences the direction of his life.
This is a much more useful emotional category than “rebel.”
Not Angry: Bruised
The distinction deserves attention.
Anger moves outward.
Bruised feeling can remain internal.
It produces:
distance,
irony,
suspicion,
withdrawal.
A great deal of İşler’s public behavior may make more sense through this word than through aggression.
Public Nejat Versus This Interview
The interview is especially valuable because it destabilizes almost every simplified public category.
Hard masculine actor?
He treats gender signs playfully.
Celebrity sex symbol?
He is uncomfortable when desire attaches to the celebrity name rather than the person.
Rebel?
He describes himself as bruised rather than simply angry.
Materially successful star?
He celebrates second-hand objects because they carry stories.
The contradictions are the point.
A Useful Comparison with 2012
The Marie Claire interview later gives a cleaner formulation of the same identity conflict.
The public sees one person.
The private person describes another.
Beden İblisleri shows the mechanism more deeply:
the public literally reads meaning from the body.
A Useful Comparison with 2016
After his major illness, the body changes permanently.
That later event creates an extraordinary contrast.
In this earlier interview, İşler discusses his body as:
symbol,
gendered object,
commercial instrument.
After illness, it becomes something else as well:
evidence of survival and physical loss.
A Useful Comparison with 2025
The second-hand-object discussion also anticipates Miras.
Things matter because somebody used them before.
People matter because they leave:
stories,
gestures,
memories.
By 2025, İşler will explicitly say that the inheritance he wants to leave is not property but good memories.
The early aesthetic preference becomes a mature philosophy of legacy.
Why This Interview Matters
Beden İblisleri is one of the strangest and most revealing records in the Nejat İşler archive.
It does not explain a film.
It explains a relationship with embodiment.
The body is:
biological,
gendered,
classed,
desired,
commercialized,
temporary.
And fame adds another layer:
the body begins carrying the brand “Nejat İşler.”
That observation is particularly important.
Many later interviews describe İşler resisting public identities.
This interview helps explain where those identities begin.
They begin with people looking at the visible person and assuming the visible person tells the whole story.
It does not.
Perhaps the interview’s deeper principle is therefore the same one that later defines his acting:
never confuse the label with the human being underneath it.