Search Results for: disengagement

The Counter-Revolutionary Politics of Autonomist Disengagement

When modern radical politics stops investing in the messianic/apocalyptic prospect of a total Revolution, it usually adopts one of two attitudes or “moods”: either melancholy over the lost hope for emancipation, or indignation over a hopeless regime of oppression. A … Continue reading

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The prospects of a melancholic Left in a Democratic administration

The leftist response to Trump’s electoral defeat this month has been broadly melancholic.  Apart from the universal sense of relief, there has been little to proclaim or celebrate.  Instead, we witness the humble acceptance of a Pyrrhic victory that has … Continue reading

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Exiting Greece

Forty years-ago this month, in September 1979, I left my native Greece determined to spend the rest of my life in self-exile.  This was my refusal of nativist normativity, my Non serviam/I will not serve. I was just three years … Continue reading

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Pirandello’s “Enrico IV,” a tragedy of refusal

Luigi Pirandello’s tragedy, Enrico IV (1922), is a great post-modern Hamlet. I discuss its politics of refusal in terms of melancholic disengagement and destituent power in a chapter of my book-length scholarly project on the self-destruction of revolution since Romantic theater.

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Launching my research website “The Tragedy of Revolution”

This week I have published (that is, opened to general access) my research project, which runs parallel to this blog. It is a website/book-in-progress called The Tragedy of Revolution: Revolution as Hubris in Modern Tragedy. This scholarly project explores the … Continue reading

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The agonistic politics of eris, stasis, polemos

Questions of contest, strife, division, and war have been central to my autonomist politics.*  These questions have been circulating in my research explicitly since the 1980s. Here is a representative passage from my paper “The Rule of Justice” (1993): We … Continue reading

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Renouncing politics

As the funeral march for the revolution continues to intone the exhaustion of the emancipatory project, and left melancholy sets the mood of post-revolutionary critique, claims for radical negativity acquire a special appeal in the Trump era. What if not … Continue reading

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Melancholy as a mood of critique

Recent surveys of melancholy in the arts, literature, and thought highlight its function more as an artistic convention and critical disposition than a “demon,” malady or experience: Mélancolie : génie et folie en Occident (2005), edited by Jean Clair, is … Continue reading

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Left Melancholy and its poetry after the American elections

The total defeat of all progressive forces in the American elections has turned Left Melancholy overnight into the overwhelming mood of those who saw their hopes shattered. The unthinkable has happened and no explanation is giving a satisfactory account. An … Continue reading

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New Greek poetry after its crisis

Below is my review of two anthologies of new Greek poetry which appears in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies 34:2 (October 2016). It places in α broad context of literary configurations Crisis: Greek Poets on the Crisis (2014), edited … Continue reading

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