“Two Brotherless Peoples”: On the Constitutive Traumas of Class Struggle

Abstract

In this article, I use as a starting point a “social symptom” of contemporary Greek politics: Greek left patriots have mixed feelings toward Jews, feelings that have arisen because of the Jews' universally accepted victim status. In the postwar period, the patriots have come to view Jews as a threat but also as a model for imitation. The mixed feelings, I argue, are linked to a specific subjectivity formation, which I term “radical nationalism”, and which I attribute to the specificities of 20th-century Greek history: to the civil war during the 1940s, and the subsequent handling – or non-handling – of the painful memories from this split in the national subject. Accordingly, in the first part I go through the genealogy of this subjectivity formation and its affective economy; then, departing from this specific historical example, I try to draw some more general conclusions about social antagonism and the nature of the traumas in which it results – or really, in which it consists. In the last part, I go back to a corpus of social discursive material – declarations, articles in newspapers, public rallies – and try to show how these illustrate my construction and in what sense they can be construed as efforts to suture the chasm of social antagonism.