I will return to this point of the “enemy” later, but for now I need to note what Anidjar (2003) has developed, namely, that “we don't have a theory of the enemy,” a lacuna that Anidjar craftily fills through his reading of Carl Schmitt and Edward Said. See also Anidjar 2004.
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These were concentration camps established with the expressed aim of reeducation and rehabilitation of the actual or suspected “enemies of the state,” by and under democratically elected governments, in the context of a parliamentary democracy, of active parliaments that included parties of the Right and the Center. What is it that makes such a conceptualization and actualization possible? And what happens not only to these interned bodies but to the body politic in its entirety when such a possibility is initially conceptualized and eventually actualized? If the aim of these camps was to produce Foucault's “virtuous” men (1974: 154), can we set the question “What was produced there?” against Foucault's certainty that in such spaces (like Attica, in New York, Auburn, or Philadelphia, or in what we will be reading here) “nothing is produced” (155)? Can we, in the end, say that, since Attica, Philadelphia, Auburn, or Makrónisos and Yáros did not manage to produce “virtuous” men or “nationally minded citizens,” they did not produce anything at all? Can we say that the negation of virtuousness produced in these places, the negation of the nationally minded ideology, is indeed a nothingness?
Such questions need to be addressed with more questions, which I lay open here. How is the human (ánthropos) conceptualized as a cultural category opposed to the animal and the divine, while being foreclosed as a categorical ascription for certain classes of citizens (here, the Leftists)? How is this human an object of biopolitics—meaning, how is it that he becomes a citizen and, as a citizen, submits to the rule of law that seeks to rule over his life, body, and mind?
How does this life, circumscribed by its legal definition, become an object of contention as to its ownership, and how are the synapses of the state and its law articulated through the presumption of this ownership? What is the nexus of life, law, and the body of the citizen? What is the point where a perceived illegality becomes metaphorized through medical references? In other words, where does medical discourse become intelligible to legal discourse? Where does the medical become part of the imaginary of the political? As Athena Athanasiou points out, “there is no such thing as the human… there is only the dizzying multiplicity of the cut human, the human body as interminably cut, fractured” (Athanasiou 2005: 125), and it is this fragmentariness and its attendant hesitancy about the possibility of producing a whole subject that I want to map.
At the heart of all this pulsates the following question: What are the parameters within which a state categorizes a portion of its citizens as “dangerous and suspicious,” and what are the long-term effects of this categorization for how that specific society comes to understand itself as a cultural and political entity? The state has reserved this right of deciding who among its citizens is dangerous so that it can then engage in recognizing human rights as privileges or entitlements, Judith Butler has noted. Once the state has deemed that someone is dangerous, it is enough “to make that person dangerous and to justify his indefinite detention,” she continues (Butler 2004: 59; my emphasis).
Athanasiou, Athena. 2005. “Technologies of Humaness, Aporias of Biopolitcs, and the Cut Body of Humanity.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 14, no. 1: 125-62.
Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life. London: Verso.
When it appeared in Greece, the project of re-education was not new. In July 1944, the U.S. Army produced a “Draft Directive on the Re-education of Germany,” which later came to be known as the Morgenthau Plan. The directive outlined two phases: a period of coercive and repressive measures immediately after the end of hostilities, and a second, larger phase, during which “interest in the ideas of popular democracy, such as freedom of opinion, speech, the press and religion” would be promoted. In 1947 Great Britain tried to put this plan into effect, although the assessment of the State Department by that point was that “it is difficult to educate; it is more difficult to re-educate; it is well-nigh impossible to re-educate a foreign nation.” For an assessment of the importance of the plan for the mentalité that made the idea of re-education possible, see Marcuse 2001. For the text of the Morgenthau Plan and its contextualization within U.S. and British foreign policy, see David Irving, http://www.fpp.co.uk/bookchapters/Morgenthau.html.
The easiest of these deployments to observe is, of course, the recent proliferation of the use of medical discourses in war operations. (“Surgical precision” is often invoked for operations for which, had they been really surgical, the surgeons performing them would have been prosecuted for criminal negligence.) In the case of Greece, however, Prodromos Yannas has shown how, in the containment discourses produced by the Truman administration regarding the reconstruction of Greece after the civil war, clear distinction was made between medical discourses referring to Greece and to Europe. For Europe, the terminology employed was biomedical, whereas for Greece the terminology was psychiatric. Yannas has drawn our attention to the fact that, whereas Europe was “medicalized,” Greece was “psychiatrized.” Yannas argues that the Truman administration relied upon “hearing” in the Greek case and “seeing” in the case of Europe, delineating thus the different epistemological approaches that produced the diagnosis of the post–World War II European landscape. Yannas quotes Paul Porter, head of the first United States Economic Mission to Greece, who, in an article in Collier's magazine (later republished in Reader's Digest), referred to Greece's “national psychosis” and “psychological paralysis” (Yannas 1994: 118). Emmanouela Mikedakis, in her dissertation, has traced the use of biomedical and psychiatric tropes in the language used by the dictator George Papadopoulos (1967–73) in his political speeches. See Mikedakis 2007.