Abstract
In this chapter, the discussion revolves around the discourses about the 2007–8 financial crisis and the paradoxical interpretations that were circulated in the ranks of both dominant and critical discourse. The paradox lies in the fact that, while the crisis was initially interpreted as a “capitalist” one, very soon a displacement of the signifiers took place, and its interpretation as “humanist” became the dominant one. This displacement is based on a repression and oblivion of capitalist function and its historical link with modern subjectivity.
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Notes
- 1.
Etymology shows the common thread between the signifiers “play”, “game” and “gamble”. While “play” is the unimpeded movement, “game” shows the fun and the amusement produced by this unimpeded movement. “Gamble” until the eighteenth century means “play games” (see, Online Etymology Dictionary: “play”, “game”, “gamble”). Moreover, this etymological relation between “play” and “game” reemerged convolutedly during the last century, as “French mathematicians rendered game as jeu and created a heterolinguistic supersign jeu/game in the course of introducing John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s mathematical theory of games applicable to economics and nuclear warfare” (Liu 2010).
- 2.
As the German poet Joseph von Eichendorff lamented in a letter in August 1849, namely, after the defeat of the 1848 revolutionary movements that swept Europe and just before the great capitalist growth, humanism and its values were already in deep crisis, at least since Shakespeare’s age: “Truly, if I were younger and wealthier than I unfortunately am, I’d emigrate to America today. Not out of cowardice – for the times can do me personally as little harm as I can do them – but out of over-powering disgust at the moral rottenness which, to use Shakespeare’s phrase, stinks to high heaven” (cited in Hobsbawm 1995: 21).
- 3.
In fact, the question “What is to be done?” had been articulated in 1863 by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a Russian radical journalist and scholar, whose novel What is to be done? was Lenin’s favourite. Lenin was carrying always with him a photo of Chernyshevsky, as well as photos of Marx, Engels, Herzen and Pisarev (Lih 2008, 2011).
- 4.
As it has been aptly remarked, “Bourdieu summarizes this relation using the following equation: [(habitus)(capital)] + field = practice. This equation can be unpacked as stating: practice results from relations between one’s dispositions (habitus) and one’s position in a field ( capital), within the current state of play of that social arena (field)” (Maton 2008: 51).
- 5.
Admittedly, Deleuze and Foucault were not prophets. They had already witnessed this transformation in France after May ’68 and the consequent decline of critique. For, neither political violence nor elections have been effective in subverting or obstructing bio-political control, as Capital had already started taking measures against its critics, in order to control and discipline individual and social body. Historical details: the first ATM had already been in function before May and at another place, as Barclay’s materialised the 24/7 capitalism on 27 June 1967 at London (Robat 2006). In France, the 1966–1967 “Debré reformations” paved the way for the invasion of banks into the households: in 1968, ATM cards are introduced; in 1969, only 10% of salaries are paid monthly via personal bank accounts, while 75% in 1972 (de Blic and Lazarus 2007: 51–63). Bourdieu describes this process as “democratization of credit”, which results in constructing calculable subjects, who aim at preserving and not overthrowing financial and social order (Bourdieu 2005).
- 6.
“Better to die from a bullet than working: That is the mantra of pampered, lazy Greek rioters used to living off the state”. This was, for example, the headline of a reportage in Daily Mail only a few days after the voting of the “first memorandum” by the Greek parliament (Fernandes 2010).
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Lagios, T., Lekka, V., Panoutsopoulos, G. (2018). Discourses on Crisis and Critical Discourse. In: Borders, Bodies and Narratives of Crisis in Europe. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75586-1_8
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