This is a review essay of K. Zanou's book Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850. Another, shorter version of this review essay in Greek was published by Χάρτης magazine in May... Show moreThis is a review essay of K. Zanou's book Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850. Another, shorter version of this review essay in Greek was published by Χάρτης magazine in May 2023. It was one of four contributions to a roundtable discussion in Piraeus organized in January 2023 by the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation on the occasion of the publication of the Greek translation of Zanou’s book, Τραυλίζοντας το Έθνος. Διεθνικός Πατριωτισμός στη Μεσόγειο, 1800-1850. Show less
This article is based on a panel discussion around the notion of national literature, organized at the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation (Piraeus, Greece) on the occasion of the publication of the... Show moreThis article is based on a panel discussion around the notion of national literature, organized at the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation (Piraeus, Greece) on the occasion of the publication of the Greek translation of Konstantina Zanou's book Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800–1850: Stammering the Nation. This paper along with the papers by the 3 other panelists, Karen Emmerich, Vassilis Lambropoulos, and Konstantina Zanou, which all responded to Zanou's book, were published in the literary magazine Χάρτης [Chartis] under the heading "Τι ήταν ο Συγγραφέας πριν γίνει Έλληνας και η Λογοτεχνία πριν γίνει Εθνική;" ["What was the author before they became Greek and Literature before it became National"]. Show less
This is the second volume of a two-volume co-authored study that explores the history of the concept of barbarism from the eighteenth century to the present and highlights its foundational role in... Show moreThis is the second volume of a two-volume co-authored study that explores the history of the concept of barbarism from the eighteenth century to the present and highlights its foundational role in modern European and Western identity. It constitutes an original comparative and interdisciplinary exploration of the concept’s modern European and Western history and combines overviews with detailed analyses of representative works of literature, art, fi lm, philosophy, and political and cultural theory. Volume 2 broaches figurations of barbarism and mobilizations of the barbarian across diverse contexts, media, and fields from the early twentieth century to our present: from avant-garde manifestoes to contemporary multilingual literature and adaptations of the Medea myth, from anticolonial to eco-socialist texts, from political philosophy and ethno-anthropology to contemporary pop culture, from Russian poetry to Western political rhetoric, from Europe to Latin America, from cinema to art biennials, and from (neo-)Marxists to the Alt-Right. Show less
This chapter belongs to a co-authored book so not really an edited volume, but there was no option in the system for a co-authored book. Thus the editor’s names (Boletsi, Winkler) are thus the... Show moreThis chapter belongs to a co-authored book so not really an edited volume, but there was no option in the system for a co-authored book. Thus the editor’s names (Boletsi, Winkler) are thus the chief authors and project leaders, but there were more authors involved. Show less
This is the introduction to the special issue "Greece and the South: Grammars of Comparison, Protest, and Futurity," edited by the authors of the introduction.
This chapter traces specific modalities for performing stasis and rethinking utopianism against the backdrop of the recent financial crisis in Greece and, generally, of conditions shaped within the... Show moreThis chapter traces specific modalities for performing stasis and rethinking utopianism against the backdrop of the recent financial crisis in Greece and, generally, of conditions shaped within the totalizing order Mark Fisher has called “capitalist realism.” Boletsi probes the ways two works deal with the (im)possibility of resistance from within the neoliberal “now”: the short story “Placard and Broomstick” (Ikonomou) and an Athenian wall writing that translates as “I am bored imaginatively.” The empty placard that takes center stage in Ikonomou’s story and the imaginative boredom registered on the walls of Athens test different modalities of stasis against alienation, dispossession, and the contracting of the future. Boletsi argues that both works disengage from conceptions of subjectivity that rest on the binary of either a passive or an active subject—either an acquiescent victim or a revolutionary hero who challenges power from its outside. The story stages the desire for alternative languages by registering a crisis of representation and the inadequacy of existing narratives. The wall writing taps into the modality of the “middle voice” to reconfigure one of the symptoms of capitalist realism—the boredom of unemployment, consumerism, or an indebted life—into a potential resource for different modes of being that carry glimpses of utopianism. Both works, albeit differently, challenge neoliberal imperatives of acquiescence, normalization, or “moving forward.” Although they stage the limited possibilities for resistance within a totalizing system, they also enable alternative configurations of subjectivity, agency, and futurity. Show less
This article traces the interrelation of two forms of debt – financial debt and the symbolic debt to the past – in order to propose a rethinking of the discourse of debt through the ‘middle voice’,... Show moreThis article traces the interrelation of two forms of debt – financial debt and the symbolic debt to the past – in order to propose a rethinking of the discourse of debt through the ‘middle voice’, understood both as a grammatical category and, more generally, as an expressive modality that can take shape through different media. Can we revisit discourses of debt through ‘grammars’ that could restore a form of agency to the ‘indebted subject’ and disrupt the asymmetrical power relation between debtor and creditor? To explore this question, the article turns to literary and artistic responses to the discourse of debt against the backdrop of the Greek debt crisis. Through a close reading of the novella Close to the Belly (2014) by Sotiris Dimitriou and an untitled art installation by Stefania Strouza (2011), it traces how these works cast the subject as produced by the discourse of debt and test alternative conceptions of the indebted subject through the modality of the middle voice. Dimitriou’s novella tries to transcend both the moral discourse of financial debt and the debt to the past by envisioning a disengagement from all debt, which eventually yields a society without past and future. By contrast, Strouza’s installation reconfigures the debtor-creditor relation without renouncing debt altogether. By staging an encounter between Sophocles’ Antigone and Marx’s Capital, it transforms the power relation of debtor and creditor into a deictic exchange that makes these positions malleable and reversible. Through these works, the article explores the conditions for reconsidering the notion of debt through the modality of the middle voice and the risks but also the politically promising possibilities the middle voice opens up for conceiving the indebted subject and the temporality of debt otherwise. Show less
This essay probes the intersection of irony and affect. Contrary to approaches to irony as an intentional strategy and to the ironist as a detached sovereign subject, this essay foregrounds a kind... Show moreThis essay probes the intersection of irony and affect. Contrary to approaches to irony as an intentional strategy and to the ironist as a detached sovereign subject, this essay foregrounds a kind of irony that issues from a vulnerable subject and from transmissions of affect that exceed the speaker’s intention. This irony unravels through a close reading of the diary that the Greek Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933) – a master of irony - kept from his first trip to Athens in 1901. Revising previous approaches to Cavafy’s irony, the essay reads his diary as an ironic text that yields a non-sovereign ironic subject. While the diary consists of dry, factual information and commonplace descriptions, blocking access to the author’s personal experience, its language is haunted by embodied forms of knowledge that draw attention to text’s other: the poet’s body. Irony emerges when the detached mode of writing is disrupted by manifestations of bodily demands and affective forms of knowledge that thwart the writing subject’s desire for control. Proposing the figure of the reluctant ironist, the essay shows how irony springs from repressed physiological forms of knowledge that disrupt a text’s regulatory mechanisms and the speaker’s integrated self. Show less
The age of ‘post-truth’ has shifted the grounds of the debate around fact and fiction. As fact-checking is not proving an adequate antidote to post-truth politics, the need emerges for new modes of... Show moreThe age of ‘post-truth’ has shifted the grounds of the debate around fact and fiction. As fact-checking is not proving an adequate antidote to post-truth politics, the need emerges for new modes of critique. This essay probes the political force of the fictional in new languages of protest. It centers on recent demonstrations in Madrid, Seoul, and Toronto that used holograms to oppose the criminalization of protest, increasing state control of public space or violation of people’s land. The hologram protests fostered a spectral space, in which the oppositional hierarchy between fiction (as non-serious, trivial) and reality was contested and redrawn, but differently. They thereby issued a critique of neoliberal governmentality that also posed an unexpected challenge to post-truth politics. If post-truth rhetoric invites people’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ by simulating facticity to produce ‘felt truths,’ the hologram protests used the virtual and the fictional to pierce through this illusion. Functioning as Freud’s ‘literary uncanny,’ they reintroduced the conflict between fiction and reality as a condition for critique in a post-truth era. Show less
Since 1989 and particularly since the attacks on September 11, 2001, talk of barbarians and civilization is common practice in public and political rhetoric in Europe and the US. This rhetoric... Show moreSince 1989 and particularly since the attacks on September 11, 2001, talk of barbarians and civilization is common practice in public and political rhetoric in Europe and the US. This rhetoric often mobilizes the trope of the ‘barbarian invasions,’ constructing analogies between present realities and the historical narrative of Rome and its barbarians. Revisiting this narrative as it was popularized by Enlightenment historiography and especially Edward Gibbon, this article critically probes contemporary evocations of the trope of barbarian invasions and the framing they produce for understanding contemporary realities. To that end, it charts the political climate that motivated the rekindling of the barbarian as a pivotal figure in Western rhetoric from 1989 to the present. Show less
As a grammatical mode in which the subject remains inside the action, the middle voice has been said to unsettle binary distinctions between active/passive, or perpetrator/victim. This article... Show moreAs a grammatical mode in which the subject remains inside the action, the middle voice has been said to unsettle binary distinctions between active/passive, or perpetrator/victim. This article revisits theorizations of the middle voice by Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra and others, and explores its potential in fostering alternative accounts of the contemporary Greek subject against the backdrop of popular discourses on the Greek ‘crisis’. The middle voice takes centre-stage in a currently popular Greek wall-writing featuring the word vasanizomai (‘I am in torment’) – a wall-writing that also plays an instrumental role in the recent novella by Sotiris Dimitriou Konta stin koilia/Close to the belly (2014). In the face of hegemonic discourses that narrativize the Greek crisis as krisis (judgement and distinction) between perpetrators and victims, vasanizomai signals a different kind of crisis: it unsettles dominant accounts of the Greek subject that either hold Greek people responsible for the crisis (e.g., the stereotype of the ‘lazy Greek’) or cast them as disempowered victims of a political system or of uncontrollable global forces. By enabling an agency grounded in the subject’s publicly shared vulnerability, vasanizomai de-centres the notion of the liberal ‘willing’ subject but also of the subject as fully determined by ideology. While a middle voice discourse harbours political pitfalls, the article lays out the conditions under which it could constitute a critical tool, able to accommodate voices of dispossessed individuals. Show less
Barbarism, Otherwise is an interdisciplinary inquiry into the operations of the concept of barbarism and the figure of the barbarian in modern and contemporary works of literature, art, and theory.... Show moreBarbarism, Otherwise is an interdisciplinary inquiry into the operations of the concept of barbarism and the figure of the barbarian in modern and contemporary works of literature, art, and theory. The terms __barbarism,__ __barbarians,__ and __civilization__ figure prominently in politics, the media, historiography, cultural theory, and everyday language in the West. This study takes issue with the currently popular rhetoric of __civilization versus barbarism__ and interrogates contemporary and historical uses of the __barbarian__ in the West. Although __barbarism__ is traditionally viewed as the negative offshoot of __civilization,__ this study shows how it can be recast as a critical concept in cultural theory. The central issue is not __who (or where) are the barbarians?__ but what kind of critical operations barbarism can be involved in. This study thus proposes a shift from an essentialist to a performative approach to barbarism and the barbarian. How can the operations of barbarism in literature, art, and theory unsettle the concept__s violent uses in Western discourses? How can barbarism trigger new modes of knowing, comparing, and theorizing? Can it inspire alternative ways of relating to others that are not based on essentialist binary schemes? In order to pluralize barbarism and chart its complex operations, this study draws from theory, politics, history, literature, visual art, film, and philosophy, and engages cultural objects from various national contexts. Show less
