Subjects in crisis: Paradoxes of emancipation and alter-neoliberal critique

Dimitris Soudias

doi:10.1177/00380261211019270

Abstract

This article examines the formation of political subjectivity in times of neoliberalization and crisis. It does so by following the meaning-making practices of Penelope, a participant of the 2011 Syntagma Square occupation in Athens. The Syntagma Square encampment was at the heart of Greece’s anti-austerity movement. Prior to this experience, Penelope says she ‘wasn’t the most sophisticated person’ politically, yet that she ‘changed’ for the better precisely because of her participation. What does Penelope aspire to and what does she demarcate her self from against the backdrop of austerity neoliberalism, crisis, and her experience in the square? And what remains of her participation experience years on with regard to subjectivity? This article claims that the relationship between subject formation and emancipation under neoliberalism is paradoxical: in her effort to overcome neoliberal rationalities in Greece, Penelope is also unwittingly reproducing them. In disentangling this paradox, this article concludes with a theorization of what I call ‘alter-neoliberal critique’: against and beyond neoliberalism.

Highlights

Penelope was 32 years old when she participated in the 2011 Syntagma Square occupation in Athens
The many protest camps that resisted authoritarianization, neoliberalism and precarious living conditions from Cairo to New York led scholars to point to the emergence of ‘new’ (Douzinas, 2013), ‘insurgent’ (Juris, 2013), or ‘resisting’ (Zevnik, 2014) political subjectivities
Influenced predominantly by critical theory and radical political theory, this literature draws the contours of an emancipating subject that is the product of its exposure to quasi-egalitarian spaces of discontent

Summary

Introduction

Penelope was 32 years old when she participated in the 2011 Syntagma Square occupation in Athens. Keywords alter-neoliberal critique, austerity, Greece, political subjectivity, radical imagination It investigates how participants experience themselves subjectively prior, during and after situations of upheaval, by following the meaning-making practices of Penelope – a woman in her early 40s, who actively participated almost daily in the Syntagma Square occupation.

Results

Conclusion