Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis

This book is about the global crisis and the right to resistance, about neoliberal biopolitics and direct democracy, about the responsibility of intellectuals and the poetry of the multitude. Using Greece as an example, Douzinas argues that the persistent sequence of protests, uprisings and revolutions has radically changed the political landscape. This new politics is the latest example of the drive to resist, a persevering characteristic of the human spirit. The EU and the IMF used Greece as a guinea pig to test the conditions of social reconstruction in times of crisis. But the manifold resistances turned the object of experimentation into a political subject and overturned the plans of elites. The idea and limits of democracy are redefined in the place of their birth.

Prologue: The age of resistance page 1 Part I Crisis 1 The Queen’s question 19 2 The biopolitics of pleasure and salvation 32 3 Anomie I: Social ethos and political cynicism 49 4 The crisis as spectacle 64 Part II Philosophy 5 Adikia: The eternal return of resistance 77 6 Anomie II: Disobedience, resistance, sovereignty 89 7 Political ontologies 107 8 People, multitude, crowd 119 Part III Resistance 9 Stasis Syntagma: The subjects and types of resistance 137 10 Demos in the square 155 11 Lessons of political strategy 176 Epilogue: The Europe to come 198 Notes 209 Index 224