Hannah Arendt in the streets of Athens

Seeking to understand the political

This article attempts to understand the political phenomena that emerged in Athens (Greece) during the summer of 2011 and became known as the Aganaktismenoi (Indignant) movement (see e.g. Kallianos, 2013; Sotirakopoulos and Sotiropoulos, 2013) or the movement of squares (Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos, 2011; Leontidou, 2012). These protests could be seen as part of a broader movement that started with the Arab Spring (Moghadam, 2013) and were followed by the Spanish Indignados (Perugorria and Tejerina, 2013; Prentoulis and Thomassen, 2013; Taibo, 2013), giving voice to a global politics of justice (Benski et al., 2013; Glasius and Pleyers, 2013; Grinberg, 2013; Thorn, 2007). Some researchers view these events as the realization of true politics (Prentoulis and Thomassen, 2013) while others argue about the emergence of a new political subject revolting against bio-political capitalism (Douzinas, 2012). There are analysts who see continuities between the US Occupy movement and the South European Indignant spirit (Castaneda, 2012; Tejerina et al., 2013), while others trace a whole genealogy of global protest and argue for something bigger than the ‘empirics of each case’ (Sassen, 2011: 574). Irrespective of explanatory schemes, the scale and diversity of the 2011 global protests prompted the Time Magazine to name the anonymous Global Protester as person of the year (Time Magazine, print edition, 26 December 2011).

This article approaches the Aganaktismenoi events through the work of Hannah Arendt, one of the most celebrated political theorists of the 20th century. Her work, among others, expands from the study of totalitarianism (Arendt, 1951) to the nature of politics (Arendt, 1958, 1961, 1962), to international law and the workings of human conscience (Arendt, 1963), but also, to more abstract philosophical enquiries into the faculties of thinking and judging (Arendt, 1978). Although she has been criticized for separating the social from the political (Benhabib, 1996; Pitkin, 1998; Villa, 2001) and for attempting to purify politics (Ranciere, 2001), the strength and influence of her ideas are still immense (e.g. Borren, 2010, 2013; Celik, 2013; Cioflec, 2012; Moran, 2013; Schaap, 2011; Sindic, 2013; Speight, 2011; Straume, 2012; Walsh, 2008).

The main reason that Arendt’s method of hermeneutic phenomenology is deployed in order to understand the Aganaktismenoi movement as a unique political phenomenon is that it focuses on the interpretation of political events as political actions that unfold in public and through their outcomes make (or fail to make) ‘history’. In this sense, Arendt can be coined as the phenomenologist of the public sphere because of her efforts to understand the meaning(s) of political actions manifested through words and deeds (Moran, 2000: 287). This emphasis on direct political actions as politics proper along with the alleged superiority of political praxis to theory (Taminiaux, 1996) reverses the whole history of political philosophy and shifts focus from abstract ideas, normative constructions and societal considerations to the specificity of political actions (Arendt, 1958).

Philosophically speaking, phenomenology does not accept a subject/object division of the world, but instead, views the subject as immersed in the world (dasein); as being in the world with others. From such a perspective, we live a worldly intersubjective existence always in relation to others. If a subject/object division does not exist anymore, then the world becomes a series of phenomena that appear in the consciousness of the perceiver. However, it has to be noted that the same phenomenon can appear differently to different consciousnesses with phenomenology being almost perspectival (Borren, 2010; Moran, 2000). As a result, the work of the phenomenologist is to ‘save the appearances’ of phenomena as they present themselves in different consciousnesses and become ingrained in experience; this saving of appearances necessarily takes place through the descriptive analysis of concrete lived experiences.

Nevertheless, Arendt’s political phenomenology is of a hermeneutic character (Borren, 2010: 41). For hermeneutics, experience demands interpretation and subsequently the work of the hermeneutic phenomenologist becomes to approach the phenomena under investigation through concrete lived experiences and most importantly to try to understand them (Borren, 2013). Consequently, the aim of Arendt’s political hermeneutic phenomenology is to ‘save the appearances’ (Borren, 2010: 42) of political events, as they unfold in particular times and spaces (Arendt, 1958: 198), not only through their descriptive analysis, but also, by interpreting their meaning(s). Following such lines, this article attempts to save the appearances of the political events that became known as the Aganaktismenoi movement and emerged in Syntagma Square during the summer of 2011. First, this ‘saving’ takes place by analysing the stories of individuals who participated in the events; by shedding light on the ways that these political actors interpret their experiences. Such narrative analysis that sees life and story as interconnected and interdependent (Chase, 1995; Josselson, 1995; Rosenthal, 1993; Widdershoven, 1993) is very close to Arendt’s hermeneutic phenomenological method and her own emphasis on the narrative understanding of life (Arendt, 1958: 192; Benhabib, 1996). From this perspective, hermeneutic phenomenology is the broader philosophical framework upon which narrative analysis, but also, other qualitative methodologies are based.

Accordingly, the research that follows is based on 21 qualitative interviews conducted during the Aganaktismenoi movement and after it disappeared from the streets. The interviews were conducted in Greek and were subsequently translated in English. They focused on individuals who participated in the protests and were based on a snowballing technique. Twelve out of the 21 interviewees were female. The interviewees were a diverse group of people coming from different professional, economic and social backgrounds. Most of them were Greek citizens living in the city of Athens or in other nearby towns. The interviews also included two foreign nationals, who had been living in the country long enough to feel indignant, too. All names have been changed to protect the anonymity of the respondents. This interview-based research was supplemented by ethnographic work at Syntagma (Constitution) Square, the epicentre of the protests.

The phenomenological research that follows is based on a form of narrative analysis; it is an interpretation out of the interpretations of people who participated in the protests. Nevertheless, this second interpretation is informed by the immersion of the writer (of this article) in the political events, his commitment to them and the situated and restricted validity of his views. Accordingly, the analysis that follows is a selective story made out of the many stories that were told. It is phenomenological and thus totally intersubjective. It attempts to save the appearances of concrete political actions that were manifested in Syntagma Square through words and deeds. For Arendt, political actions manifested through ‘words and deeds’ are the true vehicles of politics proper (Arendt, 1958: 182–197) and carry the potential to start something anew. In short, we try to understand the meaning(s) of ‘words and deeds’ during the Syntagma Square occupation. More specifically, the next part of the article examines the streets of Athens as the spaces of appearances of politics proper and how these actions became the subjects of global media representation. Subsequently, we try to interpret the meaning(s) of words that were said and deeds that were done and their alleged correspondence. Last but not least, we reconstruct the end of the movement through participants’ narratives and ask what might be its legacies for contemporary formal politics; what might be the outcome of all these words that were uttered and all these deeds that were done?

The streets of Athens: From spaces of appearances to spaces of global media representation

Modern Greece, before the crisis, was a little known country with scarce coverage in international newspapers and television broadcasts fairly relating to its size, population and geopolitical importance. When represented it was mainly depicted as moving towards its European dream of integration. In April 2000, The Economist magazine presented the country as a boat in the hands of a prudent helmsman, the then prime minister Costas Simitis, sailing towards the safe waters of modernization and single currency (The Economist, print edition, 13 April 2000). Media representations, before the crisis, almost connoted something boring about Greece: a stable country, in the midst of a troubled neighbourhood, trying to modernize itself and catch up ¹ with its Northern and Western European peers. With the Athens Olympics set as the deadline for the modernized Greece to present itself on the world stage, the summer of 2004 was full of surprises, starting with the Euro 2004 Greek football victory and culminating in a successful Games taking place in an empty – blame it on the August holiday – but well-ordered Athens. As soon as the Olympic flame was put out, the country once again passed into global oblivion.

The ‘riots’ of December 2008 would change that and bring the streets of Athens to global media attention. On 6 December, Alexis Grigoropoulos, a 16-year-old teenager, was killed by police fire in a crowded street in the city centre. The incident spearheaded a massive insurrection and led to the most serious civil disturbances of the last decades (Astrinaki, 2009; Douzinas, 2010; Stavrides, 2010; Vradis and Dalakoglou, 2011). For weeks, the city centre felt the direct and indirect repercussions of the ‘riots’. For Douzinas (2010), this revolt brought to the fore what was up to then ‘invisible, unspoken and unspeakable’ (Douzinas, 2010: 276). Allegedly, these events were about ‘the right to have rights’ (Arendt, 1951) and signified the burst of ‘true’ politics into a sea of ‘post-politics’, where liberty has suffocated equality, neoliberalism has strangled social justice or simply economics have taken over politics (Douzinas, 2010, 2012). This concept of post-politics is particularly interesting as it tries to make sense of a new or not so new era of political economy where politics have succumbed to economics, globalization has rendered almost any concept of welfare irrelevant and people are more than ever personally responsible for their economic fates. More importantly, this concept of post-politics can be seen as the mirror image of politics proper. In this sense, Ranciere (2001) and Douzinas (2010, 2012) meet Arendt and the semiotic attempts to define politics are taken to their limits.

As the Greek political establishment could not explain the levels of anger exposed by the disturbances, it proceeded with politics as usual and swept everything under the state’s carpet. A year and a half later, with the country this time under international supervision, new rounds of protests burst out in the capital. Since then, the streets of Athens would erupt again and again under the weight of an economic crisis with war-like social costs. ² From now on, these eruptions would take place under the constant gaze of the global media. This media attention would carry images of the streets of Athens to other national audiences and beyond. As a result, the Athenian streets would transform themselves from spaces of appearances of politics proper to spaces of global media representation. Thus, the meanings of these political actions would be conveyed through specific points of view. These media representations construct, up to a point, the semiotics of the streets of Athens as spaces of resistance to an ever changing global and European political economy. However, the study of the media representation of the Athenian streets ‘rioting’ cannot be further explored within the scope of this article, but instead, deserves its own analysis and interpretation.

Words and deeds

Some commentators have hinted that Arendt’s work is characterized by a certain degree of Athenian romanticization (Euben, 2001) or even Graecomania (Taminiaux, 1996) while the same can be said for other theorists too (e.g. Castoriadis, 1991). Others have classified Arendt as a ‘reluctant modernist’ because of her split love towards Athenian political ethos and ‘anthropological universalism’ (Benhabib, 1996: 198). In the next pages, light is shed upon the birth, character and reasons for participating in the Aganaktismenoi movement. As will become obvious, the movement was a highly diverse one, sharing many common characteristics with the global politics of justice and its emphasis on multiplicities and pluralities. As long as this movement was alive, many words were spoken and many deeds were done. Nevertheless, there were instances when words stood for actions. Accordingly, we expose instances where words functioned like actions and a condition of vocal plurality became manifested and expressed through various speech acts (Austin, 1962).

In April 2010, Greece under the risk of default signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Troika (the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund). The MOU, on the one hand guaranteed the continuous funding of the state while on the other imposed an unprecedented austerity on the political body itself. At street level, the deal was met with revolt with much more to follow. Nevertheless, the reaction of the majority of the people was almost stoical with ‘rioting’ increasingly being seen by the political establishment even more cynically. For the next 12 months, there was no massive resistance to this newly found sociopolitical reality that defied any form of social contract theory in practice.

The birth of the Aganaktismenoi movement was instigated by their Spanish counterparts, who teasingly sang in Puerta del Sol in Madrid: ‘Keep quite or you will wake up the Greeks’ (Sotirakopoulos and Sotiropoulos, 2013). The insult was picked up by the media, who wondered how it was possible for the Greeks not to revolt while others had. The story was taken forward by a social media campaign, which organized the first meetings of Aganaktismenoi on 25 May in Athens, Thessaloniki, Patras, Volos, Irakleio and elsewhere too. These calls resulted in massive protests against the prescribed methodology of solving the crisis and the arrival of ‘disaster capitalism’ (Klein, 2008) in the country.

In Athens, the protest took place in front of the parliament in the same way that so many body politics before had physically stood opposite to their spaces of government. This body politic was protesting against the post-politics logic of a supranational sovereign in order to negate the liberal democratic pre-assumption of government by consent. The protests were repeated daily, with massive gatherings becoming a permanent feature of downtown Athens.

Andreas and Eirini are a couple of 30-something professionals who participated in the events from day one. Andreas works in a bank while Eirini is a journalist. They live in a suburb of Athens a few kilometres away from the city centre. But let us hear what they have to say about the birth of the Aganaktismenoi movement:

Giorgos is in his late twenties and works for an international NGO based in Athens. He lives with his family in a middle-class suburb a few kilometres away from the city centre and agrees with this notion of Aganaktismenoi as encompassing different people, ideas and experiences:

In the above quote, Giorgos prefers to name the protesters as people who have been unfairly treated (by the political system) instead of people indignant at their government. By all accounts, both quotes bring to the fore a story of multiple actors and voices included within the movement. Later on in the interview, Giorgos reflected on his reasons for participating in the protests:

By focusing on the above quote, we enter into the politics of accountability that have either resulted in anger or retrospection. ³ According to the former deputy prime minister T Pangalos’s infamous book: ‘We spent it [the money] all together’ (Pangalos, 2012), politicians and citizens were both accountable for the country’s debts as money was spent on unnecessary public sector job creation and unjustified social benefits. His thesis created a huge controversy and generated unlimited hours of televised reflection on political culture. Nevertheless, Giorgos partly agrees with such a thesis. As he says, the reason for participating was his indignation towards the politicians and the political body, too. Following such lines, politicians are not solely responsible for bankrupting the country, but the citizens, too, have their own share of responsibility. In this sense, the country was ‘bankrupted’ because of the prior moral bankruptcy of the political system itself that involves both the political body (citizens) and its elected representatives. Nevertheless, Aristotle (1984, 2000) would probably have some problems accepting such a position as for him politics were about the building of moral character and the role of politicians was exactly that: to create good (moral) citizens. In this sense, Giorgos’s statement that ‘the politicians could not really understand the responsibility that they had towards the people’ has some Aristotelian overtones. Furthermore, Arendt would argue that people are co-responsible for their government’s actions as members of a single political community. However, they are not necessarily guilty: the guilt would probably rest with politicians (Arendt, 2003: 147). As is obvious, the reasons for participating in the Syntagma Square occupation were closely intertwined with the politics of accountability.

To continue, it has been argued that the global politics of justice have something apolitical about them (Glasius and Pleyers, 2013). The fact that most of these movements have not been orchestrated by political parties, but instead, sprang out of self-organization and social media campaigning creates a sense of people’s politics irrupting within the sphere of ‘dead’ politics. Such politics have been described through the notion of the ‘multitude’ (Sotirakopoulos and Sotiropoulos, 2013), which stands for the possibility of resistance coming out of a multiplicity of peoples instead of a ‘people’’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000). In a similar fashion, Douzinas has stated that the contemporary ‘multitude of the demos’ does not have any ‘leaders or representatives’ just its own actions (Douzinas, 2012: 137). In Arendt’s vocabulary, there is a term that conceptually parallels the multitude. According to her, political actions as ‘words and deeds’ take place within a condition of plurality where people are different but equal at the same time (Arendt, 1958: 175). While multitude denotes difference and connotes equality, plurality presupposes difference and equality together. This notion of plurality manifested through ‘words and deeds’ is one of the major ideas of Arendt’s political work.

There were many instances within the interview material when a condition of vocal plurality became manifested through various speech acts. Arendt has argued that ‘many acts are performed in the manner of speech’ (Arendt, 1958: 178). Along similar lines, JL Austin (1962) has taken these ideas further by stating that we use language to do things as well as to assert things. Austin names as ‘performative utterances’ the sentences that do not really describe anything and hence they cannot be true or false. Nevertheless, by simply uttering them we perform some act: a speech act (Austin, 1962: 21). Speech act theory would later be taken over by others and develop into a major theory of linguistics (see e.g. Searle, 1969).

Keeping all these in mind, I will try to bring to the fore this condition of vocal plurality that became manifested through various speech acts. During my fieldwork I witnessed the daily organization of small assemblies with different agendas and interests. The speakers would wait for their turn to present themselves in public while the audience would actively participate. These were instances of a genuine public interest being expressed in the midst of a highly individualistic culture; the enactment of performative politics that would probably make Arendt happy. Andreas speaks again about vocal plurality being performed in the square:

As argued above, words and deeds once expressed in public can be taken over by others with unpredictable consequences; this is the beauty, but also, the danger of politics proper. Additionally, Arendt argues that words should not be empty and deeds should not be brutal. By that she means that words should correspond with actions while violence should be prohibited (Arendt, 1958: 200). In what follows, we shift emphasis to instances where allegedly there was not much correspondence between words and deeds while actions became brutal.

Deeds and words

As argued above, Syntagma Square became the theatre for the enactment of a vocal plurality manifested through various speech acts. Some speech acts found their ways into more concrete forms through the normative texts produced by the Organizational Committee of the Popular Assembly of Syntagma Square occupation. These political narratives took the form of declarations that summarized the spirit and principles of this newly found direct democracy. On 28 May 2011, the Organizational Committee issued its first briefing, where it argued for ‘Direct Democracy Now’ based on the principles of ‘equality, justice, dignity’ and called for all Athenians to come to the square and ‘take their lives into their hands’. On 5 June 2011 in its call for a pan-European uprising the Committee stated: ‘we have different ideological backgrounds, but we share a resentment of what is happening and a longing for justice, equality and dignity. We are different, but we stick together united.’ Later on, the Organizational Committee issued its thesis on direct democracy based on the principles of ‘freedom, equality, solidarity, autonomy’ and argued about the openness of public space, the equal participation of everyone in decision making and the establishment of many local assemblies (in neighbourhoods, municipalities, workplaces, etc.) in communication with each other as the cornerstone of direct democracy. In a sense, these declarations can be conceptualized as collective political promises verbalized and expressed during the Syntagma Square occupation.

Leaving behind such promises and going back to individual speech acts, not all of them allegedly were fresh and not everybody agreed with this image of a well-articulated direct democracy. Instead, there were voices that stated that many of the words uttered in Syntagma Square were ‘empty’ of meaning as they tried to describe new deeds in old political terms. Accordingly, political deeds were new and exciting. However, the ways that people tried to make sense of them were not new at all; words were empty, not because they did not correspond with actions, but instead, because the deeds were so new that they could not be properly articulated by established ideas and ideologies. Simply put, words were lagging behind deeds. Petros is a public sector employee, who lives with his wife and daughter near the city centre. Let us hear what he had to say about this alleged emptiness of words:

This narrative of youth as solely capable of putting new deeds into words appeared again and again in the interview material. Anna is an early-forties professional, who lives in the dilapidated and slowly gentrifying downtown. During her interview, she argued the following:

By reflecting on the above quotation, a number of narrative tropes come straight to the fore. To start with, the Aganaktismenoi movement is seen as part of a greater genealogy of street protest that begun with the ‘riots’ of December 2008 and has since then been continuously erupting. According to this story, an apolitical youth ⁴ came out into the streets to protest against this profound intergenerational injustice that the sovereign crisis stands for. It should be remembered that social contract theories of a social democratic tradition, apart from providing justification for the existence of a societal safety net, also include a notion of intergenerational justice (Rawls, 1971). This youthful politicization seems to signify the burst of politics proper into the well-established realms of old politics. However, the danger lies if their actions become hijacked by old political logics and empty words are put into their mouths. In a way, these new political subjects risk becoming decentred by letting old political talk (discourses) to speak through them (Foucault, 1973). This notion of decentred subjects originates from Michel Foucault’s ideas of the constitution of subjects through discourses. Accordingly, it is not the individuals who create discourses, but discourses speak through individuals making them their subjects and resulting in their decentring (Jorgensen and Phillips, 2002). In our analysis, decentred subjects cannot really challenge the new realities of post-politics while there is the danger for political newness to be lost forever.

Last but not least, this narrative is important because it tells a story of how political newness can enter the world. Allegedly, for political newness to emerge and openly challenge the realm of dead politics, political actions have to correspond with new ideas. If the newness of ideas cannot live up to the newness of actions, then political change cannot be established and political newness cannot develop into something concrete. As a result, politics proper fail us as they do not find concrete ways to erupt into the sea of stagnated politics. By characterizing political action as incomplete if not properly articulated through stories, politics proper become presented as a sign constituted by deeds as its signifier and words as its meaning (signified). If the signified cannot fix the meaning of the signifier, then what we are left with is a ‘floating’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) or ‘empty’ (Zizek, 1989) signifier. In this case, two options stand for the complexity of contemporary politics of the multitude: either there are no new meanings (discourses/narratives) generated to seriously challenge the semantic field of post-politics or they are too many of them, new and old together, contesting the meaning of collective political deeds. In the first case, politics proper become almost reduced to pure bodily manifestations, while in the second, different political subjectivities are maintained, or new ones are created, claiming broader political actions as theirs. In a way, isn’t that the fate of global protesting from Athens to Rio, Istanbul and beyond? Maybe Laclau’s question, ‘Why do empty signifiers matter to politics?’ is very topical for politics proper today (Laclau, 1996).

Brutal deeds

After shedding light on the non-correspondence between deeds and words, it is time to turn to the brutality of actions. As will become obvious, this brutality does not exclusively refer to political actions themselves, but also to how these actions were faced by state apparatuses (Dalakoglou, 2011). In retrospect, one could argue that the Syntagma Square occupation ended abruptly because of the brutality of actions and the even more brutal response by the police.

As argued before, the politics of vocal plurality in the square included many different voices and groups. Some commentators have put forward a story of geographical/political separation that reduces the multiplicity involved. According to this story, politics proper in Syntagma Square were split between the upper and the lower square. The upper square was more conservative and nationalistic while the lower square was leaning towards a libertarian/leftist ideology (Sotirakopoulos and Sotiropoulos, 2013). Whatever their differences were, the common aim for both was the blocking of the Medium Term Programme of Fiscal Strategy passing through parliament on 28 and 29 June 2011. These dates can be considered as the tipping-point, when the protests became violent and police reactions brutal. As a result, serious disturbances took place and the streets of Athens became headline news in all major global broadcasters. Once more, the streets of Athens were transformed from spaces of appearances of politics proper to subjects of global media representation. Amnesty International openly accused the police of excessive violence while a public prosecutor ordered the launching of an investigation into the use of crowd dispersing chemicals. Simply put, these two days were among the most violent days that the capital had experienced in a generation.

To turn to the interview material, there were instances when stories of political dichotomies became verbalized and expressed. Many informants argued about the existence of different political groups within the collective spirit. In some cases, these dichotomies became narrated as part and parcel of the politics of multiplicity that did not endanger the unity of the movement, as that was guaranteed by the common ‘anger’ towards the political system. Eirini again, reflects on her days on the square:

As the movement grew bigger and bigger, some informants noticed the infiltration of organized groups that made political affiliations more pronounced within the crowd. Despoina, a yoga teacher who lives in the outskirts of Athens, reflects on her reasons for stopping visiting the square:

For Despoina, the infiltration of the movement by certain political ideologies was enough to make her stop participating in the protests. Allegedly, the diverse politics of multiplicity were eroded by more pronounced political narratives. Other people too felt that the movement was infiltrated by certain groups in order to make it vulnerable and break it easily. Alexandra, a lawyer in her late thirties who lives in the city centre, narrates a conspiracy plan for the elimination of the movement:

Whatever the motives, the brutality of some actions rendered such politics unjustifiable and signalled the premature death of the movement. The brutality of some deeds was superseded by the police responses, putting an end to the most massive civil protests that the country had experienced in a generation. Maria, a university student in her late twenties, reflects on the death of the movement:

Syntagma Square as unkept promises

For Arendt (1958) political ‘power springs up between men [and women] when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse’ (Arendt, 1958: 200). Now that the Aganaktismenoi have dispersed and their power has disappeared can we reflect on the outcomes and aftermath of this movement? Did these political phenomena find a way to crystallize into any form of collective promises? And if yes, were these promises really kept? Last but not least, what are the legacies of the movement?

Historically, Syntagma Square can be loosely cited as an example of social contract theory in practice. In September 1843, King Otto, under military pressure and public protest, accepted the transition (from Absolute Monarchy) to Constitutional Monarchy and the forming of a new Constitution (Syntagma in Greek). As a result, the former Palace Square was renamed Syntagma Square to commemorate the events. Sticking with this social contract tradition, Arendt has argued about the importance of making and keeping promises (Arendt, 1958: 237). This faculty of making promises is what sustains the power ‘generated when people gather together and act in concert’ (Arendt, 1958: 244) creating ‘islands of predictability’ and acting as ‘certain guideposts of reliability’ (Arendt, 1958: 244); the only thing is that promises have to be kept.

Broadly speaking, the Syntagma Square occupation resulted in a number of political promises. The main promise was for political newness to enter the world of old (stagnated) politics. More than anything, the declarations of the Organizational Committee of the Popular Assembly of Syntagma Square can be seen as collective promises given, but not necessarily kept and materializing in the contemporary context of formal politics. These promises focused around the main themes of global politics of justice and especially the promotion of ‘equality, justice and dignity’. Most importantly, these promises were given in the midst of a new sociopolitical reality that rendered these Enlightenment concepts (and practices) more obsolete than ever. Although many promises were made in Syntagma Square, none of them was kept, and they never became realized within the framework of representative democracy’s formal politics. Nevertheless, the Aganaktismenoi movement was a huge challenge to established forms of democratic politics (Castaneda, 2014; Eklundh, 2014) that in Greece at the moment are identical to post-politics.

In retrospect, politics proper in Syntagma Square can be seen as a massive social expectation for a forthcoming political change that never came along; a promise that was given but not kept. Going back to Austin (1962: 9), one performative utterance he uses is the sentence ‘I promise to…’. He argues that when people materialize what they promise this is ‘happy’ or ‘felicitous’; when they do not, this is ‘unhappy’ or ‘infelicitous’ (Austin, 1962: 14–17). Although many promises were made in Syntagma Square, none of them came to be realized by the political body itself. Should the Syntagma Square occupation be simply characterized as an ‘unhappy’ event?

To sum up, this article has focused on a particular moment ⁵ of protest: the phenomenon of Aganaktismenoi, which can be seen as politics proper erupting within the midst of post-politics that the country has found or led itself to (Fouskas, 2013; Papas, 2013). After the Aganaktismenoi movement died out, a kind of normality returned to the streets of Athens (apart from brief instances of new ‘rioting’). In debt ridden Greece, politics proper have transformed themselves into institutionally untranslatable bodily acts while formal politics have become so socially pure that they have lost any kind of meaning. However, one question remains: If all these social expectations for a forthcoming political change simply failed, what then are the legacies of this movement? To put it differently, if this movement was simply an ‘unhappy’ one what did it leave behind?

Judging from the present, the years that followed were probably characterized by the total non-accommodation of politics proper by post-politics and the non-assimilation of the former by the latter. Through the passage of time politics proper found different ways to become enacted. On one hand, the creation of a solidarity culture took place within parts of the populace, mostly through the rise of civil society organizations and volunteering. ⁶ On the other hand the crisis brought forth the unimaginable rise of an extremely violent far-right. The Golden Dawn Party, notorious for its racist violence and strict lines on national purity, from a marginalized group of a few hundred people developed into a political phenomenon that acquired 7% of the national vote in the 2012 elections. At the same time, the streets of Athens became more and more the spaces of appearance of racist violence and fascist body politics. One could argue that politics proper carry the potential to either transform into a hope for the future or a nightmare of the past. Arendt, more than anything, knew very well of such nightmares and monstrous politics of ‘dark times’ too (Arendt, 1951, 1970).