TragedyMachine(s): Performances of Power and Resistance in Indebted Greece

Abstract

TragedyMachine(s): Performances of Power and Resistance in Indebted Greece looks at the negotiations between Greece and its international creditors, street protests and demonstrations, refugee camps, and theatre productions in Greece within the larger context of the 21st century European debt-economy. Building upon Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s works on Nietzsche’s notion of tragedy, it introduces a concept of tragedy valid in contemporary frames of European neoliberalism. TragedyMachine(s) argues that the relations between Greece and its international creditors are non-resolvable power relations between a creditor and a debtor, hidden beneath the appearance and seeming promise of a resolution that nonetheless remains elusive. In the first chapter, titled “The Tragedy of the Greek Debt Crisis” I contend that the works of Deleuze and Guattari on Nietzsche’s notions of tragedy help us grasp the conceptual foundations of the 21st century European debt-economy. In the second chapter titled “Dromocratic Democracies,” I draw upon the tensions between Austin’s notion of a “happy performative” and Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of “order word” and “collective assemblages of enunciation.” I closely examine why the NOs of both the “NO” demonstration—the demonstration that took place two days before the Greek bailout referendum of 2015—and the Greek referendum of 2015 did not succeed in their resistance against Greece’s international creditors. The third chapter titled “Imperceptible Performances” focuses on the flows of forced migration that emerge from the Syrian War. In the fourth and last chapter of my dissertation titled “Theatres of Dramatization” I look at Zero Point Theatre Group’s—one of the most popular Greek avant-garde theatre companies—production of Buchner’s Woyzeck and Yiannis Houvarda’s—a well-known Greek director—production of Aeschylus’ Ορέστεια. I argue that these two productions dramatized the destruction of promises of resolution of the non-resolvable power relations between Greece and its international creditors.