Surplus Citizens (2019)

Publisher: Pluto Press

Surplus Citizens, Pluto Press, July 2019
304 pages, Paperback ISBN: 9780745337784

Based on ethnographic research during Greece's debt crisis (2010–2017), the book brings into conversation the different movements, protest and solidarity infrastructures created by those rendered economically ‘superfluous’. It traces how movements responded to obstacles in that turbulent period – from the internal dynamics of activist groups, to the policing of movements and the rise of the far right – and looks at how imaginaries of solidarity, autonomy, democracy and universality came up against the class, patriarchal and racialised historical underpinnings of national citizenship. The project begun with my doctoral research, in 2010, and continued through to 2018, after the left-wing Syriza government failed to stop the continuing austerity and restructuring.

BOOK PRESENTATIONS

Book-Self: Surplus Citizens. Greek Studies Now: A Cultural Analysis Network. 2021.

Book presentation of Surplus Citizens. School of Philosophy, Politics and Economics, University of York, 22 November 2019.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK

‘Breaking the ethno-national and state-centred cage into which discussions of the Greek crisis have largely been confined, Kotouza’s book puts questions of race, gender and migration at the core of its analysis and provides us with a powerful model for investigating the dynamics and limits of contemporary surplus rebellions’
– Alberto Toscano, author of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis

‘In this original study, Kotouza powerfully shows how national social struggles, like the ones we witnessed in Greece in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008, are littered with contradictions and exclusions. Nevertheless by taking the politics of the excluded as its horizon, Surplus Citizens offers us the hope of a more inclusive, transnational politics’
– Elena Loizidou, Professor of Law And Political Theory, Birkbeck University of London and author of Disobedience: Concept and Practice.

‘An extraordinary guide to our present’
– Joshua Clover, author of Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings

‘An extraordinary achievement. Kotouza’s incisive contribution to critical social theory and to the analysis of the contemporary dynamics of capitalist social relations should be read by all’
– Werner Bonefeld, author of Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason

BACKGROUND

Back in October 2011, I began to trace the aftermath of the Movement of the Squares in Greece for the project that became Surplus Citizens. The project involved a politically-motivated ‘digging’ into the past and its supposedly established realities in order to give voice to what has been silenced, to throw into a different relief the social and personal anxieties associated with crisis, and to reinterpret popular scenarios for overcoming it, holding back from giving any easy answers.

I observed that the impulse to question the past, to re-narrativise authorised history, was present in every political and social space where the ‘Greek Crisis’ and what to do about it was being discussed. The stories offered by governments, whether those of Greece or its creditor states, had to be questioned, before it was possible to occupy Syntagma Square in Spring 2011. There, the questioning continued. But those revisions were multiple, troubling, opposed to one another, and while all of them provided their authors with a sense of emancipation, they certainly were not all emancipatory for everyone.

I was not a neutral observer documenting it all. My own agenda developed against what I called ‘the war discourse of the restructuring’: a proliferation, in a variety of fora, platforms and media—from the parliament and academia to national news media, to online blogs and social media—of historically revisionist discourses under the guise of ‘memory’ as a weapon in political conflict, which took archives of war as its material. This included, preferentially, the Second World War and the Civil War, but also the Greek War of Independence, the aftermath of the 1922 defeat in Asia Minor and the hanging of the ‘traitors’ that followed, as well as other historical moments of heightened political conflict, each time retold with a different inflection and highlighting a different episode depending on one’s side in the political struggle. After three decades of a mainstream political sphere dominated by what might be called a centrist common sense or political ‘apathy’, the polarisation between the left and right had returned explosively. Yet, the stakes of the clash were familiar and common to both sides. Each strove to prove that their political tradition had been the most loyal to the Greek nation and its people, while the other had betrayed them.

Meanwhile, the left-wing discourse on the crisis in Greece that reached the most prominent platforms of UK media, even when not engaged in this ideological war, still reflected the dominance of white male voices in the Greek radical left and anti-authoritarian milieux, leaving little space for other perspectives. Soon, the electoral victories of Brexit and Trump would even reawaken, among some Marxists, the condemnation of ‘identity politics’ for supposedly provoking a far-right backlash. In the book, I labour towards an analysis that takes Marx far beyond such conceptions of a class politics of unity. The politics of identity in movements is indeed problematic, but it is carried, in the first instance, by taken-for-granted socially and economically dominant identities claiming to represent the universal.

Given this ideological context, it seemed impossible to propose another view of the present without first tearing down the ‘icons’ of (right and left) nationalist rhetoric. Much of this work of disruption had already been done over the past three to four decades, challenging commonplace notions of what nation, race and their interrelation with class and gender has meant in the context of Greece. This formed the most crucial part of the book: the intellectual production and discourse in movements (the squares, assemblies, mutual support initiatives, labour actions, migrants’ mobilisations, environmental movements, anti-fascism) and radical collectivities across the left spectrum including anarchists, feminists, queer and antifa groups, sourced through public and individual discussions, political accounts and analyses, news blogs and magazines. They came into dialogue with critical scholarly work dispersed in a variety of Greek and Anglophone journals, books and self-published outlets that did not all speak to one another. Efi Avdela, Eleni Fournaraki, Effi Gazi, Penelope Papailias, Dina Vaiou, Athina Athanasiou, Stathis Gourgouris, Peter Bratsis were some of the academic authors whose work informed my incomplete ‘counter-archive’, alongside a North-Western critical literature that, inevitably, reflects its own geopolitical and cultural location. Their dialogue revealed the (often damaging) material consequences and emancipatory traces of attempts to resist intersecting forms of oppression/exploitation before and after the crisis. It signalled that ‘Greeks’—either as an idealised subject of struggle resisting austerity or as a scorned ‘people’ luxuriating in decadence and corruption—have never been a unified subject.

The range of historical, theoretical and contemporary ethnographic and documentary material collected for the book was used to ask the same question ad nauseam: who does the imaginary of each unity (Europe, the European citizen, Greece, the Greek citizen, the Greek ‘race’, Greek working and bourgeois classes, the Greek economy and industry, the ‘we’ of past and present social movements) oppress or leave out? What part of our material experience and identity does each attempt at unification force us to deny? For example, when and how did the labour movement in this region stop being multiethnic, stop being accused of Jewishness and ‘foreign infiltration’, and come to speak of itself as ‘Greek’? How has patriarchy been reproduced in the concept and practice of citizenship, as well as through the labour movement and the histories and imaginaries of the now ‘Greek’ left? And most important of all, when and how has this been challenged?

RELATED WRITING

Neoliberal Citizenship, by Luca Mavelli. Theory, Culture & Society: Global Public Life. 29 August 2024.

Biopolicing the Crisis: Gendered and Racialised “Health Threats” in Greece. In Biopolitical Governance: Race, Gender and Economy, edited by Hannah Richter. London: Rowman & Littlefield. 2018. ISBN: 9781786602701.

Labor Activism in Greece: Inside and Outside the Workplace. Journal of Labor & Society 20, no. 3: 379–97. 2017.

Ποιές Ζωές Αξίζουν; Εθνικισμός, Αντιφασισμός, και η Σχέση με τους Μετανάστες In Πέρα από την Κρίσηedited by John Holloway, Katerina Nasioka and Panagiotis Doulos. Athens: Futura. 2017. ISBN: 9789609489706 (Published in English by PM/Kairos Press and in German by Unrast Verlag).

Keepsakes: A Response to Ray Brassier. Mute, 28 December 2014.

The Illegitimacy of Demands. Mute 3, no. 2: 115–119, 2011.

Greece: We are Drowning - Let's Sink the Rotten Boat. Shift Magazine, August 2010. With John Barker. (On the dilemmas facing Greece's anti-austerity movements)

RELATED TALKS

2026. 'Solidarity, Equivalence, and the Limits of Self-Organised Reproduction: Some Reflections on Urban Infrastructures of Care', Hellenic Geographical Society Conference, Athens, 27-28 November 2026.

2024. ‘European Belonging through Self-orientalisation? Sociohistorical Narratives and the (Geo)Politics of Identity and Race in Greece.’ Worlding from South East Europe, Remaking International Relations. BISA South East Europe Working Group. 24 October.

2021. ‘Revisiting Biopolicing under COVID. Managing health from epidemic to pandemic’. Roundtable Series: Modern Greek Studies and Beyond: Local Cases, Global Debates, The Oxford Centre in the Humanities, University of Oxford, 21 January.

2019. Book presentation of Surplus Citizens, School of Philosophy, Politics and Economics, University of York, 22 November.

2019. ‘Identity and Its Questioning: Social Struggle, Self-Critique and Group Psychic Processes’. European Sociological Association conference, Manchester, 20–23 August.

2018. ‘The “Colonisation of the Imagination” and Irredentism as a Racial Project in Greece’. Historical Materialism Conference. SOAS, London, 9 November.

2017. ‘Trump and Memes’. Them! The visual cultures of ‘othering’ in post-referendum UK and post-general-election USA. Visual Arts Department, Middlesex University, 13 January.

2017. ‘The Psychic Borders of Popular Nationalism’. Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research, Lebanon, 11 March.

2017. ‘The “Borders” of Trauma and Abjection from European Nationalisms to Alt-Right Memes’. Department of Art, Goldsmiths, University of London, 13 March.

2017. ‘On Fetishism, Postcoloniality and the National Resistance to Debt’ at the ‘Parliament of Bodies’ with Nadia Bou Ali, Ray Brassier and Paul B. Preciado. Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany, 5 September.

2017. ‘Abjection as an Intersectional Conceptual Tool’. British Sociological Association Conference, Manchester, 4 April.

2016. ‘Crisis Racism and Sexism and the Psychoanalytic Concept of Abjection’, Historical Materialism Conference. SOAS, London, 13 November.

2015. ‘The Crisis of the Nation-State, Surplus Population Management, and Abjection’. The Body of the Governed: The Biopolitics of Race and Gender in Theory and Political Practice. Workshop. Department of Politics, University of Kent, Canterbury, 6 December.

2015. ‘Gender, Care and Legal Reason in Capitalism through Gilligan and Pashukanis’. Two Days of Feminist Discussions. Workshop. MayDay Rooms, London, May 15.

2014. ‘A Response to Ray Brassier’s Wandering Abstraction’, What Is to Be Done Under Real Subsumption? Workshop/debate with Ray Brassier, Marina Vishmidt and Rob Lucas. Bulegoa z/b, Bilbao, Spain, 28 November.

2014. ‘A Conversation on Self-Management and Self-Organisation’ [In Greek], 6th Documentary Film Festival, Yfanet Social Centre, Thessaloniki, Greece, 18 January.

2013. ‘Self-Management and Economic Collapse in Greece’. Money in the State of Crisis. The Example of Greece. Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, Germany, 27 January.

2013. ‘Repressive Crisis Management, Nationalism and Surplus Populations in Greece’, Historical Materialism Conference. SOAS, London, 7–10 November.

2013. ‘Crisis and Today’s Fascisms and Anti-Fascisms: The Case of Greece’, South East Doctoral Training Centre Conference: Power Revisited: Crisis and Opportunities. Royal Holloway, University of London, 20 March.

2013. ‘Considering “Semi-Peripheral” Capitalist Temporality’. Centre for Critical Thought Seminar, University of Kent, Canterbury, 10 December.

2011. ‘The Illegitimacy of Demands’, Historical Materialism Conference. SOAS, London, 10-13 November.BOOK PRESENTATIONS

Book-Self: Surplus Citizens. Greek Studies Now: A Cultural Analysis Network. 2021.

Book presentation of Surplus Citizens. School of Philosophy, Politics and Economics, University of York, 22 November 2019.

Dimitra Kotouza

Research, Writing & Editorial

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

CV