CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE GREEK CRISIS AS EVENTAL SUBSTITUTION
The rising Economic Crisis, with an already ominous body count on its bills, in the form of the three bank workers killed by anticapitalist militarism on 5 May 2010, has caused a ground-breaking deterritorialisation away from the social imaginary of political agency (the root of December, its hopes and miscarriages) and towards the realm of a social imaginary of survival. If, in other words, December was a real undiscernable event in the sense that it introduced in a radical way a non-decideable relation at the heart of the social, the Economic Crisis renders every decision always-already pre-emptively decided and unambiguously discernible. This return to the pre-decided is the role of neoliberalism as a strategic field and process that secures the “uniformity of effect” (Badiou 2007: 105). Through a prohibition of the contradiction which is the social, its effect is to render the latter unthinkable as what it really is, as the gap between the actual parts counted by the governmental enclosure and the “integrality of the one-effect” (ibid: 109) represented by it. It is precisely this debt/ guilt towards uniformity which is the work of the counter-event called Economic Crisis. All the more, as the above mentioned prohibition becomes a condition for the reproduction of the state-relation as a security state under the light of December which temporarily shortcircuited the relative autonomy of the state as a mode of class domination, forcing it to create the ground for new class alliances, for new strategic-hegemonic relations, for new governmentalities. According to the currently ruling social-democratic discourse, both the event of December and the Economic Crisis stem from the same void of the previous situation: the anomic condition of the postjunta transition to democracy, the so-called metapolitefsi. It is this generalised anomie institutionalised in the founding of the Third Greek Republic in 1974 that has supposedly led on the one hand to a “culture of violence” amongst the masses and, on the other, to a “culture of corruption” amongst the ranks of the state. Here the social-democratic enclosure of really existing problems facing Greece is typically crafty. By simultaneously pointing at two real symptomal wounds of Greek socialformation, and paradoxically constructing its legitimacy on the promise of a “liberation from the metapolitefsi” (i.e. from what is largely its very own socio-political child), the Greek social-democracy mounts an operation of governmental reformation based on notions of unmasking, purification, and purging, a constant theme in what Nikolai Ssorin Chaikov (2003) has described as the technology of the deferred state characteristic of Soviet-type totalitarian regimes; a narrative of persistent state-failure, which constantly reproduces state-formation as the
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