REVOLT AND CRISIS IN GREECE
The riots of December showed that no blood was left to dry and they erupted as a worthy retaliation to peace’s everyday war. Revenge while the blood was still fresh. The very vindictive preparation of the riots instantly lifted the burden of decision and declared that it would allow both mourning and celebration,6 that it would allow space for both creation and destruction. And it hosted first and foremost in its illegal territory the purest—in a Benjaminian sense—form of violence.7 The kind of violence that exists beyond the boundaries of law and that no compromise whatsoever can be reached with it. “The proper characteristic of this violence is that it neither makes nor preserves law, but deposes it and thus inaugurates a new historical epoch” writes Agamben (2005: 53). He then states that this violence resides outside the law, that is, precisely where the state of emergency does too. It occupies a void area of law that “seems, for some reason, to be so essential to the juridical order that it must seek in every way to assure itself a relation with it, as if in order to ground itself the juridical order necessarily had to maintain itself in relation with an anomie” (Agamben 2005: 51). …TO THE INTERMEDIATE COMMENTARY ON THE CONCEPT OF THE SPATIAL
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Beyond the temporal dimension of such development, however, it is important to observe its very spatiality since this marginal condition does not only suggest a historical break or a time interval from/within the linear-historical account of the winners but precipitates the unfolding of a huge range of elements entered directly into space. And this is precisely what arises from the positions of Agamben, too. For if one encounters pure violence in a non-juridical space, this violence simultaneously occurs in a natural-material place in whose territory dominant law remains—even temporarily—unable to show any force whatsoever. And this is what is shocking in true time: the fact, that is, that the sites of this violence are exempt from the legislative and administrative territory; in other words, that they produce an unlawful space—not to mention that this space may be unpredictable, sudden, and therefore uncodifiable, occurring in the heart of the safety of commerce and “Justice” like, say, in the heart of Kolonaki.8 Moreover, the definition of Agambian deduction as an extra-juridical site does not only reveal a situation unable to find its place in the syntax of the philosophy of law but also a natural or artificial space at the limits of which this syntax cannot be implemented. The exception, therefore, is not only a place outside of the frame of law but also a material (three-dimensional) location out-