Desert islands: Ransom of humanity

Public Culture

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 395-421

  Panourgiá, Neni ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 47249112250     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-2007-031     Document Type: Article

References (104)

1. The Left in the case of Greece and for the purposes of the state, at this point in time, included the membership of the parties of the Left: the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the Agricultural Party; trade unionists; readers of the leftist newspapers; anyone adhering to the ideologies of the Left even when not being an organized member of any party; and "fellow travelers."
2. In 1917, the liberal republican (antiroyalist) government reenacted the 1871 law against brigandage that authorized the banishment of relatives of bandits. In 1913, another law authorized the penalty of individuals suspected of engaging in the disruption of public safety and order, effectively banishing the first socialists and trade unionists. For a comprehensive and succinct historical account of the political and social developments in Greece during the times that are of interest to us here, including the interwar period, World War II, the civil war, and the post-civil war period, Constantine Tsoucalas's The Greek Tragedy (London: Penguin, 1969) is indispensable. For a more detailed assessment of Metaxas and his dictatorship,
3. see P. J. Vatikiotis, Popular Autocracy in Greece, 1936-1941: A Political Biography of General Ioannis Metaxas (London: Frank Cass, 1998), a book that maintains the apologetic line about Metaxas that, although he was a dictator, he established a social state that cared for and about the masses, established a system of socialized pension, and legalized the workers' unions, and that Metaxas himself decided to enter into war with Italy in 1940 rather than allow the surrender of the country to the Italian forces of Mussolini;
4. and Marina Petrakis, The Metaxas Myth: Dictatorship and Propaganda in Greece (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2006), which deals more specifically with Metaxas's use of propaganda and the use of the press and cultural institutions for the cultivation of an image of the regime as benevolent, caring, and paternal. In Greek, Spyros Marketos's Pos Filesa ton Moussolini! Ta Prota Vemata tou Hellenikou Fasismou (How I Kissed Mussolini! The First Steps of Greek Fascism) (Athens: Vivliorama, 2006) is the most comprehensive and detailed analysis not only of the Metaxas dictatorship and the bourgeois ideology that sustained its development into a form of fascism, but also of the process of aestheticization of Metaxism as modernism. Metaxas aspired to create a political environment in Greece akin to Nazism (he invited Joseph Goebbels to Greece shortly after the dictatorship was established and sent a Greek delegation to the School for the War against Communism that had been established by the Gestapo under the direction of Heinrich Himmler), although by his own assessment his ideology was closer to that of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's in Portugal.
5. See Georgios Andrikopoulos, Oi Rizes tou Hellenikou Fasismou (The Roots of Greek Fascism) (Athens: Diogenes, 1975), on the correspondence between Metaxas's Undersecretary of Public Security, Konstantinos Maniadákēs, and Himmler. For a history of the persecution of the Left during the civil war (1946-49) with a brief account of the history that preceded it,
6. see Polymeris Voglis, Becoming a Subject: Political Prisoners during the Greek Civil War (New York: Berghan Books, 2002), which remains the most systematic analysis of the relationship between the Greek state and the leftist movement in Greece until the end of the civil war in the Anglophone literature on the subject.
7. Maniadákēs commented on the ultimate inefficiency of the existing legal framework to dissolve the leftist movement in Greece when he, alluding to the failure of the Idiónymon to contain and obliterate the leftist movement, noted that "Communism, let us not have self-delusions, does not disappear through common policing means and through the material imposition of the state forces." Ho Kommounismós stēn Hellada (Communism in Greece) (Athens: Ethnikē Hetaireia, 1937), 3. This comment was further elaborated by the editors of the pamphlet in the section titled "Instead of a Prologue," where they wrote: "One must arrive at a point of great panic and mental confusion to think that simply by using proscriptions, imprisonment, exiles, in other words with the dynamic imposition of the state, could such an enemy be fought effectively" (6). Theodoras Lymberiou (Maniadákēs's nephew) further elaborated on this comment when he sneered and characterized as "sloppy" the manner in which the Greek state had tried to manage the question of subversive communist activity throughout the 1920s through a law that "was not concerned but with the prosecution of brigandage!"
8. Theodoras M. Lymberiou, To Kommounistikó Kinēma stēn Helláda (The Communist Movement in Greece) (Athens: Papazeses, 2005), 165.
9. Grigoris Farakos, former secretary general of the Greek Communist Party (KKE), mentions that during the Metaxas dictatorship 100,000 leftists were persecuted, of whom about half were members of the party, including the entirety of the leadership of the party's Central Committee. Approximately 2,000 members remained imprisoned or exiled until the German invasion. "Ioannis Metaxas," Eleftherotypia "Historika" supplement, August 2, 2001, 36-43. The article is important in the ways of assessing the role of Metaxas in the development of the communist and leftist movement in Greece by Farakos, who was deeply and intimately involved with the movement as one of its major actors. Farakos calls the idea of the delóseis a "diabolical invention" (36).
10. See also the edited volume by Farakos, Dekémvrēs tou '44: Neōterē Erevna-Nées Proseggiseis (December 1944: Latest Research-New Approaches) (Athens: Philistōr, 2000).
11. The term used for these camps during the Metaxas period, stratópeda sygkentrōseōs, was a direct translation from the German. During the civil war, when the camps of the Metaxas period were officially closed and new ones opened, the term was changed to "disciplined existence" (peitharhēmenë diaviōsis).
12. Another measure that Maniadákēs brought about was the establishment of a shadow KKE (since a second KKE would not be recognized by the Communist International), a second party newspaper, and a second Central Committee that were staffed by the five or six members of the party who were later proven to have genuinely and knowingly collaborated with the Special Security. The collaborators were called hafiédes (snitches), and an entire discourse (hafiedologia) was developed within the party and outside of it. The importance of hafiédes in the political landscape of modern Greece cannot be overestimated, as it has produced generations of suspicion and paranoia not toward outsiders but, particularly and significantly, toward friends, neighbors, and comrades, one's own closest.
13. Metaxas himself had died in January 1941, but the government remained in place until, led by the king and the cabinet, it fled first to Crete and then to Egypt while a collaborationist government was established. I use "Germans" as the local term used in Greece to denote the Nazis or the Third Reich.
14. Gilles Deleuze engages in the radical deconstruction of the notion of the "desert" island by invoking the lack of recognition by the European traveler/settler of the humanity already existing there. He is primarily thinking of and discussing the European travel literature of the Enlightenment. Deleuze is most emphatically not referring to actually desert islands, places where only the most tenuous of life can be sustained with the scant rainfall of a couple of months a year, places that have no aquifer or an aquifer that holds only contaminated or nonpotable water. Deleuze is speaking of the construction of the desert as part of a discourse that has sustained colonialism. I am speaking of actual desert (not deserted, even metaphorically) islands.
15. See Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974 (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004). Michael Taussig has actually captured not only the horror of the islands as colonies of the undesirables (Poulantzas's "anti-nationals"), but also the complicity in the management of undesirable life by capitalist ventures, especially in the way in which he erects the problem of offshore operations as not simply an economic but a political one.
16. See Taussig, My Cocaine Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
17. Greece marks the beginning of the Cold War. As Michael McClintock notes, quoting Lt. Col. Robert Selton, officer of the U.S. Army, the Greek civil war "constitutes the formal declaration of the cold war" between the "Free World . . . and the forces of communism." McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940-1990 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 11. It was because of the civil war in Greece (and the announcement by the British that they could not sustain their presence there any longer) that President Truman articulated his famous (or infamous) doctrine about the necessity for intervention on behalf of other countries to prevent the infiltration of foreign ideologies originating elsewhere. As McClintock mentions, as of November 1961, starting with an initial allotment in 1947 of $400 million through the Marshall Plan, Greece had been granted $3.4 billion for postwar reconstruction, out of which only $1.2 billion went to reconstruction, the rest being used for military aid and defense support, including the establishment and maintenance of the concentration camps and the containment of communism.
18. See Lt. Col. Robert W. Selton, "The Cradle of U.S. Cold War Strategy," Military Review, August 1966, 68;
19. and McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft, 466n31. The importance of Greece in the "containment" strategy of former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union George F. Kennan, cannot be overstressed, as it not only indexes U.S. foreign policy and political and military involvement in the southern Balkans at the time but also had far-reaching results in later U.S. foreign policy and involvement, primarily in Vietnam, which was seen by President Lyndon B. Johnson "as the 'Greece' of Southeast Asia." U.S. News and World Report, August 8, 1966, quoted in Todd Gitlin, "Counter-insurgency: Myth and Reality in Greece," in Containment and Revolution: Western Policy towards Social Revolution: 1917 to Vietnam, ed. David Horowitz (London: Anthony Blond, 1967), 178. For the parallels between the U.S. involvement in Greece and Vietnam and an excellent (if brief) account of the British, American, and local Greek right-wing forces in the Greek civil war and the events of December 1944 that preceded it,
20. see Gitlin, "Counter-insurgency," 140-82. George F. Kennan was U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union right after World War II. While in the Soviet Union, Kennan wrote a memorandum to President Truman that came to be known as "file X," in which Kennan explained why communism had to be contained within its borders and prevented from expanding to the West. File X was the primary material used for the composition of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Later on Kennan noted that his point had been gravely misunderstood and that "containment" referred to diplomatic means and did not include (or justify) the militarization of the Cold War.
21. Nikos Margaris, Historia tēs Makronisou (History of Makrónisos), vols. 1 and 2 (Athens: Dorikos, 1966). The category of the "suspicious" is not new, and we can find it both in totalitarianism and in liberal democracies. In the case of the Third Reich, we see its first institutionalization in the 1936 "A List" of suspicious persons as the object of the law to be arrested in case of situation "A" that (Gestapo chief) Reinhard Heydrich composed, which in 1937 included 46,000 names.
22. Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 32. The case of the Greek liberal governments of the early twentieth century was not much different, nor was the case of the FBI lists of dangerous individuals of the McCarthy and post-McCarthy eras. I want to note, though, that the first instance of the category of the "suspicious" outside the context of ideology was the case of the internment camps for persons of Japanese descent in place from 1942 to 1946 throughout the western, southwestern, and Pacific Coast states of the United States. "NARA/ALIC/ Japanese Relocation and Internment during World War II/Documents and Photographs Related to Japanese Relocation during World War II," www.archives.gov/ research/alic/reference/military/japanese-internment.html (accessed December 20, 2004);
23. see also, The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco/Western Defense Command and Fourth Army Wartime Civil Control Administration": "Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry," Internment of San Francisco Japanese, www.sfmuseum.org/war/evactxt.html (accessed December 20, 2004);
24. also, on the same site see Lt. Gen. J. L. DeWitt's letter of transmittal to the Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, June 5, 1943, "Final Report; Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast 1942," Headquarters Western Defense Command and Fourth Army, Office of the Commanding General, Presidio of San Francisco, California (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943), chaps. 1 and 2. Shortly after the establishment of the Makrónisos camp, similar camps were instituted in Malaya, from 1948 to 1960, where approximately six hundred communist partisans were interned by the United States with the explicit aim of being reeducated. There is a good-sized literature on these internment camps.
25. See Richard Clutterbuck, "Communist Defeat in Malay: A Case Study," Military Review 43 (September 1963): 63-78;
26. Clutterbuck, Long War: Counterinsurgency in Malaya and Vietnam (New York: Praeger, 1966);
27. and Clutterbuck, Revolution in Singapore and Malaya, 1945-1963 (London: Faber, 1973). The least known case is that of the Goli Otok island camp established by Marshall Tito in 1948 to reeducate and rehabilitate Stalinists.
28. See Venko Markovski, Goli Otok: The Island of Death: A Diary in Letters (Boulder, Colo.: Social Science Monographs, 1984);
29. Ivo Banac, With Stalin against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989);
30. Renata Jambresié Kirin, "The Retraumatization of the 1948 Communist Purges in Yugoslav Literary Culture," in History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, vol. 1, ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004), 124-32;
31. Tommislav Z. Longinovićet al., "1948: Introduction: The Culture of Revolutionary Terror," in Cornis-Pope and Neubauer, History of the Literary Cultures, 107-32. Lest the gravity of the importance of these camps be underestimated, I feel compelled to note here that the methods used in all of these islands were comparable to the methods used in the Nazi camps that preceded them. The similarities in the narratives of the survivors are uncanny, and there is no reason for us to believe that the narratives are the product of narrative cross-fertilization of experiences because (1) the narratives that I am referencing were produced during the time that the camps were still in operation, and (2) it seems that the inmates of these different camps (in Greece, Yugoslavia, and Malaya) were oblivious to the existence of the others. For further discussion of the rehabilitation/ reeducation camps for the Left as a paradigm of biopolitics,
32. see Neni Panourgiá, Dangerous Citizens (Bronx, N.Y.: Fordham University Press, forthcoming).
33. This seems to be a preposterous number of people for this island. Yáros has no level areas - it is a precipice of 45 degrees - so it would be hard for that many people even to stand on the island. The reference to Sulla's banishment of eighty thousand of his political enemies to Yáros (also known as Yioúra) comes from the anonymous publication Yioúra: Matōménē Vivlos (Athens: Ekdoseis Gnosi, n.d. [1953]), 85, a survey of the conditions of the exiles on Yáros and a historical account of the island. I have not been able to cross-reference the information on any of the published biographies of Sulla that I have consulted. This does not mean that the information is necessarily inaccurate.
34. Complete Works of Tacitus: The Annals, ed. Moses Hadas, trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (New York: Modern Library, 1942 [109 AD]).
35. The coup d'état of April 21, 1967, to July 24, 1974, that installed a dictatorship in Greece has come to be known as "the Colonels' dictatorship" because it was enacted by a troika of colonels of the Greek Army.
36. Throughout this text I use the terms leftist, Communist, and Marxist interchangeably because they were used interchangeably by the Greek authorities. I appreciate the nuanced differences in English usage that exist among the three terms. Obviously the terms, even in Greek, denote a hierarchy of involvement with a political movement, the leftist (aristerós) being the most inclusive one, the Marxist (marxistes) being the person who is interested in scientific Marxism, and the Communist (kommounistēs) being committed to political change sometimes by violent means (what constitutes revolutionary praxis), although all these connotations constantly bled into each other in the Greek case (and in certain circles still do).
37. Yáros was abandoned in 1952, when all its inmates were transferred to Makrónisos, although two hundred political prisoners were briefly transferred there from the Aegina prison in 1955. Trikeri was abandoned in 1953, when all the inmates, women and children, were transferred to the various exile "small islands" (primarily Ai-Stratis).
38. As has repeatedly been noted, there are no definitive answers as to the exact number of persons sent to the three islands during 1947-52, when Yáros was abandoned. For Makrónisos, the numbers range from 100,000 (the number given by the Makronissiotes themselves) down to 40,000-45,000, as presented officially to the Greek Parliament in the summer of 1950, up to one-tenth of the Greek population (a number that perhaps includes all the prisoners, exiles, and otherwise prosecuted by Metaxas up to 1953). The question of enumeration becomes even more acute when we take into account the fact that the Greek Army kept fairly accurate records of the soldiers who were sent to Makrónisos, but record keeping about family members sent to exile, the number of exiles under criminal law, and the number of children sent there was, at best, scattered and, at worst, concealed.
39. See Strates Bournazos, "To 'Mega Ethniko Sholeion Makronissou,' 1947-1950" ("The 'Great National School of Makrónisos,' 1947-1950"), in Proceedings of Scientific Meeting Historiko Topio kai Historikē Mnēmē: To Paradeigma tes Makronisou (Historical Landscape, Historical Memory: The Paradigm of Makrónisos) (Athens: Philister, 2000), 115-45.
40. As Voglis (Becoming a Subject) has pointed out, both of these categories emerge in the context of the "National Schism" of 1915 and 1916 engendered by the battle between the republicans (led by Eleftherios Venizelos) and the royalists. Although both positions were forcefully articulated by and comprised a large number of politicians, and produced a cleavage in the social and political body of the country, the Dichasmos (the Split) came to be known as the Venizelists and the royalists. The royalist side never came to be indexed by a specific name as the republican side did.
41. Nicos C. Alivizatos, "'Emergency Regime' and Civil Liberties," in Greece in the 1940s: A Nation in Crisis, ed. John O. Iatrides (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1981), 220-28.
42. See also Alivizatos, "To Nomikó Kathestōs tēs Makronēsou" ("The Legal Framework of Makrónisos"), in Proceedings of Scientific Meeting Historiko Topio, 337-45. For details on the succession of laws on dissent enacted between 1946 and 1963,
43. see Panourgiá, Dangerous Citizens.
44. Alivizatos, "'Emergency Regime,'" 222.
45. Begon̄a Aretxaga, "A Fictional Reality: Paramilitary Death Squads and the Construction of State Terror in Spain," in Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror, ed. Jeffrey Sluka (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 46-69, 60. Aretxaga looked at the narratives that surrounded the experience of state terror in the context of the constructed terrorism of ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna; Basque Homeland and Freedom) in Spain and the Basque country in order to underline the complicity of the established legal sovereign state (Spain) with the paramilitaries who existed in expressed opposition to the law but within a discursive space that was constantly being disarticulated as such.
46. "Die Wahreit über Dachau," Münchner Illustrierte Zeitung, July 16, 1933, quoted in Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau, 28.
47. There is a growing and robust bibliography on the issue of Makrónisos, ever since the island was accorded the status of a National Monument by decree of the Ministry of Culture in 1989. For a recent, succinct description of Makrónisos, see Yannis Hamilakis, "The Other Parthenon: Antiquity and National Memory at Makronisos," Journal of Modern Greek Studies 20 (2003): 307-38.
48. Voglis, Becoming a Subject, provides a comprehensive historical analysis of Makrónisos, Yáros, and the process of subjectification of the Greek leftists. John Iatrides, Greece in the 1940s: A Nation in Crisis (Hanover: University of New Hampshire Press, 1981), was one of the first scholarly attempts in English to explore the issue of the Greek civil war and the establishment of the concentration camp of Makrónisos.
49. One should also see John O. Iatrides and Linda Wrigley, eds., Greece at the Crossroads: The Civil War and Its Legacy (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).
50. "Noxious and superfluous" is the locution used by Wolfgang Sofsky to denote the Nazi progression of exclusionary ascriptions from "socially dangerous" to suspicious and, at the end, to the superfluous. See Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. William Templer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 33. Hannah Arendt has shown how humans are being construed as "superfluous" as they enter the process of tight capitalist production. Totalitarianism, she argues, received this notion of "superfluity" and applied it to different classes of people; in the case of early Nazi Germany, these were, in order of appearance, the mentally ill and challenged, the Communists, the union leaders, the Gypsies, the homosexuals, the beggars, the work-shy, the asocials (Asoziale), the prostitutes, those suffering from venereal diseases, the psychopaths, the traffic offenders, and, at the end, the Jews. I find Arendt's flattening of "totalitarianism" in the contexts of Nazism and Stalinism highly problematic and restrictive.
51. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1968).
52. "Bare Life," in Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). I find the translation of Agamben's original term vita nuda as naked life in the Binetti and Casarino translation to be far more convincing: Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vicenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
53. Agamben, Means without End, 2. In Homo Sacer, the ancients have been ascribed a specific name: it is Aristotle who is credited with the specificity of the distinction.
54. Jacques Derrida has alluded to the fact that the surgical distinction that Agamben is producing has never been so clear in reality, but Derrida does not elaborate on this. Derrida, Voyous: Deux essais sur la raison (Paris: Galilée, 2003).
55. Two modern Greek expressions are indicative: 1. Den einai zoē aftē ("this is not life" - indicating that life is so hard and abject that it has become a burden) 2. Bios abiotos ("my life has been made unlivable") In either case, however, the meaning is the same: it is life that is being debated, and a life that can be attributed or lived equally by humans and by animals. The terminology of the Greek camps, however, is the site where this lexical trampling becomes most problematic. The Greek camps are called camps of disciplined diaviosis, implicating the term bios precisely at the site where Agamben claims its absence. If the distinction between bios and zoē were the one that Agamben makes it out to be, it would be evident in the case of the Greek camps. The difference between bios and zoē is more a matter of time (bios implying zoē at its length) than of quality, since both animals and humans have a bios (whereas plants have physis: nature). Bios (with the accent on the o) means one's accumulated property. In Plato (Timaeus) we find tou biou zoē, the life of life in its length.
56. See Henry G. Liddell and Robert Scott, Great Lexicon of the Greek Language (Athens: Sideris, n.d.).
57. See Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 1993).
58. Osbert Lancaster, Classical Landscape with Figures (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 151.
59. Harper's Latin Dictionary (New York, 1897).
60. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (1913; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1950);
61. and Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (1939; repr., New York: Vintage, 1955).
62. Joseph Marie, comte de Maistre, St. Petersburg Dialogues: A Conversation on the Temporal Government of Providence, trans, and ed. Richard A. Lebrun (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1993).
63. Roger Caillois, Man and the Sacred (1950; repr., New York: Free Press, 1959).
64. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, trans. W. D. Halls (1898; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 13.
65. Yiorgos Yiannopoulos, Makrónisos: Testimonies of a University Student 1947-1950 (Athens: Bibliorama, 2001), 118 (emphasis added). The notion of the human ought to be taken, here, as a "local term" in the sense that it constitutes a local category of existence, not (necessarily) burdened by the discourses that have produced humanism as an ideology in the tradition of Western moral philosophy. "Human" is the category opposed to that of the animal and (decidedly) opposed to the divine. Therefore, the deployment of the term human in modern Greece does not inevitably invoke a metaphysics of existence but rather calls into order the responsibility of acknowledging the intersubjectivity that makes recognition of a human by a human possible and inevitable. It is precisely the resolute decision by the Nazis in Dachau or the Greeks in the camps not to recognize the Other (in both cases the Other is the leftist) as "human" that brings about the announcement of the humanity of the interned. On Dachau,
66. see Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau.
67. I take necropolitics from Achille Mbembe and biopolitics from Michel Foucault.
68. I use the term selfsame to denote the fiction of the self as the same, which is the fiction implicated in the process of totemism as examined in anthropology.
69. A political theology that is by no means confined to Christianity.
70. J. Derrida, "'Eating Well,' or the Calculation of the Subject," in Points: Interviews 1974-1994, ed. Elizabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995);
71. R. Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1972; repr., Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979);
72. Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Routledge, 1993);
73. Lrigaray, "The Question of the Other," Yale French Studies 8 (1995): 7-19;
74. Irigaray, I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1996);
75. J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).
76. See also Anne Caldwell, "Transforming Sacrifice: Irigaray and the Politics of Sexual Difference," Hypatia 17, no. 4 (2002): 16-39, for a very interesting exposition of the questions left unanswered in Irigaray's formulation of sacrifice, especially as refracted through psychoanalysis and deconstruction.
77. Cited in P. Geladopoulos, Makrónisos: The Great Massacre of 1948 (Athens: Alpheios Press, 1994).
78. Panos Terzopoulos, in Geladopoulos, Makrónisos, 52.
79. Bruce Lincoln, Death, War, and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 175.
80. Lincoln, Death, War, and Sacrifice, 175.
81. Despite the threats by the torturers to the interned that they would leave their last breath there, a threat that was almost always supported by the authorities of the camps, the Greek camps had been established as a project of education, not of extermination. See Bournazos, "To 'Mega Ethniko Sholeion Makronissou.' "The reason was partly practical: with the civil war raging, the state was in dire need of soldiers, whom it found among the repentant ones from the camps. It was also a matter of ideological hubris: as Maniadákīs had noted in 1937, if communism could infect the minds of the citizens, then nationalism could disinfect them.
82. See Ho Kommounismós stīn Helláda.
83. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 136-37.
84. Mbembe fixes this hesitant moment of sovereignty when he recognizes that there exists in sovereignty a "central project" that does not struggle for autonomy (Mbembe does not define autonomy, but from the position he takes and the development of his argument, it seems that it is the autonomy of both Immanuel Kant and Cornelius Castoriadis) but rests on the "generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations" Achille Mbembe, "Necropolitics," Public Culture 15 (2003): 14 (emphasis original). In the case of the Greek camps, the specter of extermination looms ominously, as it involves the total extermination of the leftist as a form of life, on the level of ideas, and its reformation as a nationalist - extermination twice over.
85. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 136.
86. Dionysis Georgatos, in Makrónisos: Historikos Topos, vols. A, B (Athens: Synchrone Epoche, 2003), 45.
87. Yiannopoulos, Makrónisos, 80.
88. Officials at Guantánamo Bay have reported forty-one unsuccessful suicide attempts by twenty-five detainees since the United States opened the concentration camp there in January 2002. The numbers indicate that the same detainees have attempted suicide more than once.
89. BBC News, "Guantanamo Suicides a PR Move," June 11, 2006 (emphasis added).
90. Agamben. Homo Sacer, 167.
91. Among them, the secretary general of the Greek Communist Party, Nikos Zachariades.
92. Phálanga is the term used in Greece for bastinado, the practice of strapping the prisoner on a bed or a plank and with his/her shoes on or off hitting the bottom of the feet until they swell and bleed and the flesh becomes pulp so that the person cannot walk or even stand, sometimes for weeks. The damage is permanent and ranges from permanently swollen feet to fractured or shattered tarsal bones. The connection with Oedipus (even if it had not been made by Yiannopoulos) is painfully obvious.
93. See the pamphlet Ho Kommounismós stīn Helláda published by the Ethnikē Hetaireia in 1937. Although anonymously written, this pamphlet has a motto by Ioannis Metaxas and a frontispiece by Konstantinos Maniadákēs.
94. Ho Kommounismós stēn Hellada, 4.
95. The first camps were established for the concentration of the Communists and socialists. It was only after 1938 that these same camps were used to intern "Jews" as a distinct legal category, over and above the existing category of race (if a separation of the racial could ever be distinct from the legal-I am using the distinction here catachrestically, as a heuristic tool). But the "Communists" of 1933 were also largely Jews, although they did not become explicitly and uniquely "Jews" until the Final Solution was articulated (at which point the majority of the Communists in Dachau were already dead). The collapse of the Jew and the Communist in interwar Europe was one of the most banal locutions that survived through the Cold War (so, communism was repeatedly announced as part of the "Jewish conspiracy").
96. See Sofsky, The Order of Terror.
97. Ho Kommounismós stēn Helláda, 3.
98. Nicos Poulantzas has noted that concentration camps are a particularly modern invention in the sense that they are drafted into concretizing the same "spatial power matrix" as the national territory, thus making possible the notion of the "internal enemy" by internalizing "the frontiers of the national space at the heart of that space itself." Poulantzas correctly identifies the fact that concentration camps are constructed in order to hold "anti-nationals" within the national space. Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (1978; repr., London: Verso, 2000), 105. Poulantzas's position, however, further underlines what Gil Anidjar has explicitly pointed out and convincingly addressed, namely, that we don't have a theory of the enemy.
99. See Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003).
100. See also Anidjar's further argument on the construction of the enemy in his reading of Carl Schmitt's The Theory of the Partisan: A Commentary/Remark on the Concept of the Political (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1963), English trans. A. C. Goodson (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004), in Anidjar, "Terror Right," Centennial Review 4, no. 3 (2004): 35-69.
101. Aretxaga, "A Fictional Reality," 51.
102. Andreas Kalyvas, "The Sovereign Weaver: Beyond the Camp," in Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, ed. Andrew Norris (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 107-35.
103. Of course Foucault, in II faut défendre la socié té: Cours au Collège de France, 1975-1976 (Paris: Seuil, 1997), does address the question of the extermination camps when he interrogates the sovereign's right to kill, and posits the question of how biopower could have been effectively applied to the Nazi death machine.
104. Neni Panourgiá, "Colonizing the Ideal: Neoclassical Articulations and European Modernities," Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 9, no. 2 (2004): 165-81.