Abstract
This chapter attempts to perform an associological working through of historical and contemporary versions of Greekness, both within Greece and internationally within what we call the Western world via an intersectional feminist perspective. Greekness is examined as an ideological and aesthetic apparatus and also as a fictitious origin drive, drawing on the comprehension of New World settler subjectivity. I call this apparatus ‘The Cornucopia of Greekness’, looking in the ways it reproduces itself and co-produces a series of eugenised commonings, corporeities and architectures within the realm of a tableau vivant humanism, nurturing modern white nationalism, heteronormativity and affective binds of debt.
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Notes
- 1.
“With Music for Porn’s repeated return to the cohering functions performed by the “soldier’s body hieroglyph of value,” as we see it put to the task of shoring up entities such as the nation, homophobia, the public sphere, imperialism, finance, the prison system, and capitalism, we might start to suspect that one reason both Halpern and Marx make use of the same catachrestic image of congealing substance as a metaphor for value is to underscore the socially binding or plasticising action of capitalist abstractions. And more specifically, they do so to emphasise the synthetic action of an abstraction-like value - the way it palpably shapes the empirical world of collective activity to which it belongs and in which it acts.” (Ngai 2015: 49–50)
- 2.
“At the center of the project, though, is that moral-intimate-economic thing called “the good life.” Why do people stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies—say, of enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political systems, institutions, markets, and at work—when the evidence of their instability, fragility, and dear cost abounds? Fantasy is the means by which people hoard idealising theories and tableaux about how they and the world “add up to something.” What happens when those fantasies start to fray— depression, dissociation, pragmatism, cynicism, optimism, activism, or an incoherent mash?” (Berlant 2011: 2)
- 3.
Το προφίλ του απόφοιτου της Ανώτατης Σχολής Καλών Τεχνών [The profile of the graduate of the Athens School of Fine Arts]. Available from (only in Greek): http://www.dasta.asfa.gr/files4users/files/meletes_ereynes/to_profil_tou_apofoitou_tis_askt.pdf. Although it depicts the graduates’ gender distribution within the period of 1993–2005, it is my estimation based on the yearly ASFA entrance exams results that these percentages remain similar up until the present day (2018).
- 4.
Interview of Yannis Kounellis with Dennis Zacharopoulos, op.cit. The translation is my own. Yannis Kounelis talks with Denis Zacharopoulos, Marina Iliadi and Jean Bernier on LiFO: “Stop making and you will stop living” (LiFO, 24.11.2010).
- 5.
“Since then, European powers were (and to a large extent, are still) seen as debtors to Greece. In their turn, popular discourses in European societies often relegate modern Greece to the status of a static and fossilised remnant of classical antiquity (often seen as unworthy descendants of glorious ancestors). The people of Greece were/are often seen through the eyes of the past, whereas they themselves were/are claiming a position in the European present and future, based on the symbolic capital of the past.” (Hamilakis 2007: 77)
- 6.
“The anoriginary drive and the insistences it calls into being and moves through, that criminality that brings the law online, the runaway anarchic ground of unpayable debt and untold wealth, the fugal, internal world theater that shows up for a minute serially – poor but extravagant as opposed to frugal – is blackness which must be understood in its ontological difference from black people who are, nevertheless, (under)privileged insofar as they are given (to) an understanding of it” (Harney and Moten 2013: 47).
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Sevasti, D. (2020). The Cornucopia of Greekness: Copies and Performances of a Body That Never Was. In: Panagiotopoulos, P., Sotiropoulos, D. (eds) Political and Cultural Aspects of Greek Exoticism. Reform and Transition in the Mediterranean. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19864-0_10
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