CHAPTER EIGHT: DECEMBER AS AN EVENT IN GREEK RADICAL POLITICS
tion is anything but accidental. Two layers in this discursive form must concern us. First, the sentence “December leads the way” is actually based on “November leads the way” in the context of Greek radical politics. This former discourse refers to the rebellious events that took place in November 1973 during the military coup d’état (1967–1974) at the Technological Institute of Athens (Polytechnic). My argument is that this discourse reveals a continuation in the radical political milieu’s consciousness rather than a substitution. However, this continuation can only happen if the fidelities of the past event have been saturated only to re-emerge exactly as fidelities to the new event. These fidelities interleave with a past situation to which the political subjects are no longer faithful, yet it has not been rejected. This can be seen in other discursive formations during that period: “Fuck May ’68, fight now”7 and “We are an image from the future.”8 Both slogans, written during December, connote a rupture with the past. If examined from Austin’s point of view, these utterances, and many others produced during December, imply, encourage and denote action in the context of December. Since, according to Austin, every one of these utterances is constructed within a specific context that formulates the kind of action (Austin 1975: 100), these slogans acquire a certain meaning only within the context in which they are being uttered. Yet, if studied from a semiotic perspective, the signified concept that completes the political sign is identified in the relation with the past; first, as a connotation that recognises a certain significance in another past event (May ’68), even in referential analogies, and second, in the notion of the image from the future. This, it could be argued, refers not so abstractly to a revolutionary forthcoming. Having said that, what is interesting here is political subjects’ attempt during that time to create an image which is neither motionless (we-the-subjects-of-an-uprising) nor is its message concrete (the future). How, then, is the message conveyed if the image is not detected? The only way to see the image, then, is to understand it as a representation not of an image from the future but of an image from the past. The “image from the future” is created upon a long tradition of radical political events. In other words, this “image” encompasses and corresponds to what Lowy frames as the “oppressed of the past” (Lowy 2005: 90). This is because when Benjamin makes the distinction between historical time and clock time (On the Concept of History) he reveals a structural link between past and present that is obvious when revolutionary events take place. Therefore, the future is not the faraway but rather the process of invoking the “oppressed of the past.” In Lowy’s words the oppressed of the past
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