Dis-assembling the Social: The Politics of Affective Violence in Memorandum Greece

Abstract

Several years have elapsed since Greece entered the realm of the so-called sovereign debt crisis, bailout loan treaties and memoranda of austerity measures. Taking my cues from the shattering of post-dictatorship political imaginaries during the 1990s and from political subjectivities as revealed in recent youth mobilizations, I will explore students' political subjectivities during 'crisis' as evinced in my ethnographic research. I will show that these are dominated by imaginaries of denial, disempowerment, shock, anxiety, numbness, fear and mistrust, as well as by disaffection vis-i-vis politics altogether. I will argue that, rather than being 'natural' effects of the 'crisis-shock' and trauma, they have been actively engineered by politics of affective violence aiming to render hegemonic the idea that the neoliberal 'reform' is ineluctable. These politics strive to dismantle the very idea of the political and the collective through discourses and practices that disintegrate forcefully the political and social fabric. They are politics of social enmity, mistrust, guilt, fear and uncertainty that introduce double binds, dilemmas and confusion in the social body and generate for individuals a mental gap and a sense of social chaos. Here, I must clarify my subject position. Writing from within the space of 'crisis', being subjected to the violence, destruction and social suffering it entails, I cannot rely on a detached observer position-anthropological accounts convey partial and positioned truths. Academic work critical of the neoliberal rationality creates the space from which I approach both the 'Greek crisis' and my interlocutors' views. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)