Das and Poole (2004) have brought the margins of the state to the forefront of anthropological discourse. They focus on the notion of the state and its development in anthropological literature, and the notion of the margins of the state, especially as it complicates the relationship of the state to its margins as an anthropological problem. Daniel (1996) has specifically addressed the methodological problems that arise from ethnographic study on the margins of the state.
- Chapter 1. 1963–2008: History, Microhistory, Metahistory, Ethnography
- » Flesh and Light You Breathed into the Golden Rocks
Chapter 1. 1963–2008: History, Microhistory, Metahistory, Ethnography
Flesh and Light You Breathed into the Golden Rocks
We often rest comfortable in the notion that we, ánthropoi, humans , are interminably engaged in an attempt to understand the world around us, to make meaning out of garbled symbols. I would argue, with Yiorgos Cheimonas, for the opposite: that the farther away we are from power and its mechanics, the more we try to make ourselves understood by the world that surrounds us; that each of us is crying out to be heard and agonizes over the process of translating this cry, a process that often takes on a violent form, the more violent, the more desperate; and, further, that if this effort is at the center of the project of humanity, then the project of anthropology is to make this process of translation intelligible. It is to provide a map of the circuits that are traversed in the walk toward this translation.
Imagine that you find yourself in an old, walled city, with narrow, winding streets, dead ends, windows that open and close unexpectedly. A city inhabited by humans who have experienced terror and mistrust, hatred and joy, deep passions and frightening desires. At its vortex resides an ánthropos, a human being whose locations are always contested and interconnected: she is someone's parent, someone's child, someone's sibling, someone's friend and, perhaps, even someone's comrade; she is claimed by her family, by her state, by her party as an object of their want and desire, perchance she is a (their) subject too.
This central ánthropos (whose centrality lies only in the fact that, unbeknownst to her, she has been claimed as the subject of this project, too), who has desires, passions, needs of her own, acquires (or is given) dimensions that are beyond her physical capacities, is endowed with intentions, thoughts, ideas, and capabilities that could never materialize in one single human, becomes a specter that contains everyone she is made to stand for. She becomes dangerous.
Not only does she become dangerous, but she inaugurates a category that is made to fit her and she is made to inhabit: the category of the dangerous person. A person who posits a danger not because of the acts that she commits and the gestures that she makes, but because she (and those like her) thinks such acts and imagines such gestures. Her body, as flesh and bone, enfleshes the danger that she has come to embody and represent. Her presence becomes dangerous for the polis, as she is always suspected of thinking up thoughts of exploding (the categories, the borders, the classifications, the complicities, the secret treasuries of) this city. She becomes a suspicious enemy; she cannot be located in any specific class or neighborhood; she transcends the polis; she becomes a part of it; she knows its inner workings, makes hiding places in its buildings, learns and produces a topography that is also a topology completely unimagined and unsuspected by the sovereign who suspects her. She becomes one with the polis, a Homo politicus, hence dangerous, to whom we can, perhaps, give a name, let's say a “Lucy” or a “Rosa” or an “Oedipus.”
But she certainly belongs to the new (as in modern) category of the person, which is always being dreamt up as singular, monolithic, cohesive, and coherent, all “part of statecraft that depends on taxonomies of simplification for control,” as Ann Stoler has put it in Foucauldian terms (2002: 648), thus conjuring up a governmentality with a twist. This is a state that not only wants to control its population but wants to define the resistance to its own existence, so it produces the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century category of the dissident, the anarchist, the Marxist, the Communist, the Leftist.
Can this topology/topography be traced? Can we map the little streets and alleys, the dead ends, the secret passageways, stone arcades, overpasses, and underpasses through which she finds herself walking, crawling, slithering as she feels the breath of the sovereign on her nape? Can we map how and in what way she has been made dangerous and, even more, what sorts of daily realities, lived experiences, memories, thoughts, and speech acts this construction has produced for her? How it has organized her life, and everyone else's?
This is what this book seeks to do. It seeks to be a map of this city that is the conceptualization (by the sovereign) of the dangerous person as she becomes accountable for the collapse of political categories, right where the political sphere of engagement meets the demands of social and cultural order. There is no Baron Haussmann here; there are no wide boulevards, no direct, cohesive, unobstructed lines that lead from point to point, because the ways by which this polis has produced its own classes dangereuses are through the back alleys, dark corners, and dead ends of democracy. In these times, when dictatorships in “the West” no longer happen as a result of military coups and interventions but rather through the hyper-legalization of the minutiae of everyday existence (where the law deigns to regulate the amount of hair gel carried by passengers in an airplane cabin), the process of the gradual tightening of the juridical system that happened in Greece over the course of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century and the cultural, social, and political specificities that it has produced, the experience of history on the ground and the type of citizen that has been made possible or imperative, can help us read the experience of the citizen in the vortex of history in such times as these, when the Law becomes the skin of the state.
This is also to trace what happens to political categorical ascriptions (i.e., the “Leftist,” the “patriot,” the “traitor,” the “law-abiding citizen”) when this particular political danger is animated and “the dangerous and criminal” elements (the epikindyna kai kakopoia stoiheia of Greek legislation from the 1920s to the 1970s) are expelled from the body politic and enclosed in a (phantasmatic or actual) space of exclusion. Not what Veena Das and Deborah Poole have called “a simple story of exclusion” but what they, too, seem to be after, to try to elucidate, namely, what constitutes the margin, what passes for the margin in the story that wants to pass itself as the center, the matrix. I am speaking of specific spaces of exclusion, of camps where these citizens were concentrated, camps with names: Makrónisos (“long island,” but also, Long Island, in Yiorgos Chouliaras's felicitous word play), Yáros (or Yioúra, intimately known in that incongruity of the intimacy of terror), Trikeri, Chios, all of them names, topoi, locations known since antiquity, laden with significations independent of the project of national rehabilitation thought up in the twentieth century.
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).
“The state [to krátos]” is the term used on the ground. It is the “local” term for what Max Weber (after Engels and Lenin) has described as the cluster of administrative and authoritative practices, gestures, and architectonics that make possible the preservation of class structure and relationships over, above, and outside the specificities of any particular government or political party. To krátos in Greece is often extended and expanded to include the administration, the government, the state mechanism, and the sovereign, a conceptual and semantic expansion that includes both the official designation of Greece as a sovereign country, as the “Hellenic State [Hellēnikón Krátos]” and the disdain that permeates the relationships of citizens with the mechanisms of this state. This disdain, paired with a deeply seated suspicion of the state, acquires texture in the expressions “There is no krátos” or “What kind of krátos is this?” when the state is perceived as having failed to provide citizens with the (assumed as) necessary and indispensable services that they demand (ranging from adequate control of drinking water quality or medical coverage to prompt and efficient snow removal, or cleaning up after floods that have occurred at neighborhoods built illicitly and illegally—but with the tolerance of the state—in river beds, ravines, wetlands, on the beach, or on mountain slopes). Conversely, the invocation of the absence and lack of krátos in cases of blatant law breaking (such as illegal parking on sidewalks and ramps for the disabled, the occupation of sidewalk-guiding strips for the blind by outdoor cafes and restaurants, or smoking in public hospitals) almost always indexes the speaker as a Leftist, further underlining the peculiar, particular, and intimate relationship of the Left with the law. Tzavalás Karousos underlined this dialectic of the law and the (Leftist) citizen when he commented, at the height of the dictatorship (1967–74), after he had been released from the concentration camp of Yáros, at the age of sixty-four, for a grave health matter:
A people [laós], without arms, without newspapers, without schools, without radio, without anything, armed only with its desire to fight in order to make the Law stand up on its own feet. A Law that, nevertheless, it has not authored. And it was a meager Law, one that could not secure a relief in its life. And on the other hand, there was a krátos that did nothing but break its own Laws, break them each day more, until it arrived at plain murder. (Karousos 1974: 15)
This notion of the krátos complicates the means by which the experience of history, even when seemingly forgotten, organizes the ways people respond to their current, lived realities, as these register “on their very bodies,” as the expression goes. It also means that this conceptualization of krátos organizes the modes in which the experience of the body becomes translated into the experience of history through the collectivization of the memory of persecution, torture, and exile.
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.
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.
Karousos, Tzavalá.s. 1974. Yáros: He Prosopike Empeiria Enos Exoristou (Yaros: The Personal Experience of an Exile). Athens: Pleias.
This is not simply an expression but a robust and tight theoretical and epistemological position developed and expanded in feminist theory and critique, primarily by Minh-ha 1989, Butler 1990, and Grosz 1994. Loraux 1986 addresses the issue of the construction of the body as a body of inscription for the city in her seminal reading of Pericles's funeral oration.
The line comes from Takis Sinopoulos's poem “To Nesi tou Thanatou” (“The Island of Death”), from his 1957 collection Metaihmio II (Takis Sinopoulos, Sylloge I [Collection I]; Athens: Hermes, 1986).
The Island of Death
Flesh and light you breathed into the golden rocks
I heard the voice of the sea the wood's voice.
Different voices at midday.
The sandy sea-shore torched
And to the west of the rocks
The hands and the legs and the bodies
There the seaweed nursed
On the sun
Farther away dry stone walls yet farther the gardens
Under the sun motionless
Under the sun.
I heard the voices. I couldn't
Tell what they wanted.
I was only guessing the message.
The island was gathering up
The nails black on the body of the sea.
With flesh yes and with flesh still I yelled.
You place it against death
And it battles.
I was looking for you
My fingers crushing everywhere
On stones and on light.
The blood spurted from the wound.
I was looking for you what was I looking for?
You were you weren't you were leaving you were vanishing. I said hit me
On the face on the teeth and on the eyes hit me.
Break my body the strength
Because the voices are calling me.
On the rock I sat.
The voices were coming their heads were coming
White and I was chasing them away with my staff.
They buzzed they brought messages—
The hands nailed from the light
Salt light silence.
I heard all the voices
That favored the whisper.
Dream shaken by the wind—and I was going
To the water of the rock to wash
The hands and the face
For the blood to go away.
The blood does not leave the island. With flesh yes
Fighting death fighting
With you my dead the dead
The wood the sails—
Voice of the dead voice of the wood and of the sea
On the sandy island
Your own voice
Wasn't heard anywhere
Not the voice of denial
But human voice
Of fear or of annihilation
As I came out from the dream
And I was going where was I going?
These were hands
My hands your hands the hands of the dead
And the island in the sun
And the island on the seabed
And the sandy seashore
In the sun sharp rocks
Golden rocks
Whatever I heard only I know.
Because the dead hear only the language
of the dead.
I fully acknowledge how problematic this collective “we” is, for, as Derrida notes, “who could ever venture a 'we' without trembling?” (2001). But it is a “we” that attends to the writing of mourning (and still mourning, of things not that much different from in my Fragments; Panourgiá 1995). I am writing of the gestures of mourning, gestures that can be deciphered only through the exploration of deflected accounts, practices, narratives, and self-presentations that I am trying to trace in this present project. This is mourning that most often does not appear as such, does not cry out its melancholia, for a khōra (that happens to be my khōra, also, my place) where justice forgot to happen, where the pain of existence got flattened into discourses of entitlements and acquiescence, where the seduction of capitalist comforts (even when never attained and realized, even when eternally suspended as desire) has completely dislocated what one of my interlocutors noted (lamenting its loss), namely, the ethos of poverty as a cultural value. “Poverty [ftōhia] and friendship [philía] are what kept us together,” said this person, who has gone from being a barefoot village boy to a multi-millionaire restaurant owner. Therefore it is precisely in the name of friendship, as Derrida says, in that there is no “we” without or outside of friendship, that the utterance of “we” presupposes a friendship that allows, asks, and demands to share the burden and the responsibility of mourning, that this “we” that I invoke here wants to be heard.
Wendy Brown complicates and problematizes the use of “we” in different ways when she invokes the collectivity of the “we” in her discussion of mourning the revolution. Without a trace of hesitation (and rightly so), Brown speaks of the inclusiveness of the “Left” (my quotation marks) in socialism, in the antiwar movement, in a feminist revolution that “carried the promise of remaking gender and sexuality that itself entailed a radical reconfiguration of kinship, sexuality, desire, psyche and the relation of private to public” (Brown 2003: 8). Brown deploys this “we” in the face of mourning for the feminist revolution that has failed, for the emancipatory promise of that project, and it is a “we” that needs to be uttered and articulated in the face of so many carefully constructed fragmentations of identities that refuse to undertake the responsibility of a “we.”
In Jean-Luc Nancy's terms, we should not take this “we” as being “'composed' of subjects,” neither is it “a subject” as part of a process of a narrative of a self, and hence it does not necessarily posit or transcend the “aporia of all 'intersubjectivity'” (Nancy 2000: 75). But Nancy suspends the idea of the “one” and “with” in the colloid that produces the “we,” in that no “we” exists unless it exists as the one being “with-one-another.” In other words, the “we” presupposes and understands that all who comprise it are specific “ones” existing with other “ones” (2000: 76).
Elephantis (2008 [1997]) brings the entire question of “we” into sharp focus in the case of Greece (but, one would suspect, within a far wider context, and certainly with Derrida in mind) when he posits this “we” as a question in reference to the legacy of the October Revolution. Which “we,” Elephantis asks? “The radicals and socialists of the end of 1910, the Communists of the decade of the twenties, the socialists, the antifascists of the interwar period, of the antifascist war, the EPON, EAM, ELAS of the Resistance [the Leftist youth, civilian, and military organizations of the Resistance], the captains [military leaders of ELAS], the fighters of the emphýlios, the exiled and imprisoned, the Leftists of EDA [the coalition of the Left between the 1950s and the 1970s], the fighters against the junta, the ones who revered the Soviet Union, the Trotskyists, the Archive Marxists, the peasantists, the libertarians, those who considered the de-Stalinization of 1956 to be the 'true' vision of communism, the Zachariadists [loyal to the Secretary General of the Communist Party of Greece, Nikos Zachariadis], those who followed the 'Rebirth,' the Maoists, the Guevarists, the Lambrakides [followers of the assassinated Grigoris Lambrakis, members of the World Council for Peace], the Eurocommunists, members of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and its youth (KNE) after [the split of the Party in] 1968, those agreeing with 'the movement,' the ecologists, the feminists, the members of Synaspismos [the new coalition of parties of the Left], the partisans who fled to the countries of Eastern Europe, the exiled, the imprisoned, the 'movement,' the rest of the Left, the dēlôseies [those who signed declarations of repentance], those who denounced others, those who were 'rehabilitated,' the dead?” (42). But there is nothing stable in the categories that Elephantis gives, and he knows it. As he says, there are real, actual people who inhabit these categories; they are not just ghosts or specters of existence. He knows full well, as he says, that “there is no continuous 'we,' unchanged by time.” He recognizes that the history of the terms that he has produced is a history that belies uniformity and homogeneity but that nevertheless is the history of the current Leftists, sometimes grouped together, often fragmented, through the enchantment of friendship and the bitterness of betrayal, mourning for a better world that could not have come.
In any case, however, an act of mourning can be claimed behind every “we” that is uttered. The “we” is intimately connected to the work of mourning, and it is precisely this mourning that I am invoking here.
I recognize perfectly well the dangers that lurk in this universalism, as I recognize the utterance itself as a universalizing gesture. I do hope, though, in the course of these pages to show how this universalism slides between its own totalizing discourse and the particularity of specific and individual experiences. Ánthropos (in the plural, ánthropoi) is the term deployed in the narrative discourses of the experience of history that I am researching—as an existential category, not simply a biological one. In Greek the process of socialization, of making a child part of a social community, a social animal, is conflated with the process of “making one human [kánō to paidi ánthrōpo],” bringing one up from the realm of animality (as a biological being) into the realm of humanity, thus bringing one from the realm of no responsibility to the world of recognition of utter responsibility. Ánthropos is the biological animal that has been brought up to recognize the responsibility of its actions. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in 2001 commented on this concept of “making a child human” as a common locution in India, also. We will see how this existential attribution was denied to the Leftists in Greece when their fundamental humanity was explicitly denied to them, especially when, under torture, they would be told that through torture (and its educational effect) the torturer would make them human (tha se kano ánthropo).
Foucault argued in 1966 that the deployment of the term ánthropos as a concept that places a particular animal (the human animal) within the temporal specificity of its course of development happens at the moment when labor, language, and biological life become a constellation of existence, produce a new form of life, and are “unified around and constitute a would-be sovereign subject” (as Rabinow notes in 2003: 13). But Foucault (and Rabinow, through his reading) are concerned with the history of ánthropos as “the logos of modernity” (Rabinow 2003: 15). What concerns me here are the ways in which the concept of ánthropos is used on the local level, by social actors, and how in its plasticity, indeterminacy, and hesitancy it becomes politicized. In other words, I am concerned with how the concept ánthropos is constantly contested and redefined precisely because its porousness lends itself to such fluidity.
Yiorgos Cheimonas (1936–2000) was a prose writer and psychiatrist. His writings comprise prose, inquiries into the nature of logos, translations of ancient Greek drama and Shakespeare, articles, television interviews, and writings on psychiatry. On January 12, 1985, in what became Ta Taxidia mou (My Journeys), Cheimonas writes that, if the philosophical and scientific explorations of the human (ánthropos) aim at an understanding of the world by the human, the frightening demand of art is for the human to be understood by the world.
I am echoing here Clifford Geertz's critique of the discourses that have conflated the modern self (self-contained, bounded, autonomous) with the universal notion of the self as an existential, but also social, category. The critique that Geertz articulated is, obliquely, included in the “modern” category of the monolithic, cohesive, and coherent persona that I am animating here.
The significance of this legal tightening for the Left will become evident later on. For the moment I need only acknowledge that, as the state sought to place an ever-larger segment of its citizen body under tight control through the constriction of the law, the same legality allowed the Left to challenge the actions of the state and use the law as a means of resistance to the state. I am indebted to Abdellah Hamoodi, who pressed me to articulate this point.
Historically the term dangerous persons was used for the mentally ill, who were housed in special psychiatric units within general hospitals as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century in Europe. See Foucault 1978. Around the notion of the “dangerous person” spun rather rapidly an interwoven thread of risk and danger, so that the pre-emptive restriction of these persons from interaction with the general public became legitimized as the duty of the state. The term was initially formulated in Greece during the Metaxas dictatorship of 1936 as “dangerous and suspicious persons” to denote: (1) carriers of infectious diseases and (2) declared members of the Left and their kin (though otherwise uninvolved), or even persons merely suspected of belonging to the Left or being sympathetic to it. The term was employed as part of a discourse that sought to offer to the public a solution to the problem of “managing” this category of citizens, a management that took place through the establishment of concentration and rehabilitation camps.
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.
Krátos is only one of the four constitutive elements of the political in contemporary (post-eighteenth century and post–1821 War of Independence) Greece. The other three are éthnos (inadequately translated as “nation”), laós, and khōra (“country”). Schematically speaking, éthnos describes the totality of Greeks and Greekness anywhere in the world, without geographical or temporal restriction. It encompasses the presumed psyche and pneuma (spirit, Geist) of Greekness, what used to be “Greek,” and what is Greek outside of the geography of the country (which includes the diaspora). It is a designation that includes the totality of the kinship lines that allow for the articulation and recognition of the utterance “I am Greek.” Laós is the term for the living masses, the populace, that comprise the country who, when granted voting privileges, are transformed into polites (“citizens”). Khōra has become complicated by Derrida's development of the concept as it appears in Plato's Timaeus, though elsewhere in the Platonic dialogues the term bears the uncomplicated notion of space that it still retains in modern Greek. Gadamer and Vassilis Kalfas, however, give to the Timaean khōra the horizon of space that participates in the relationship between paradeigma (“paradigm”) and image, thus bringing the term to mean what is translated as “country”: the horizon that determines and contains the idea, the image, of what a khōra, a country, is. Khōra, then, is the term used to denote the geographical space that contains resident citizens, containing krátos, the state, without occupying the space connoted by éthnos. The literature on the Greek nation and Greek nationalism is vast, and I cannot reproduce it here. See Skopetea 1988, Leontis 1995, Gourgouris 1996, Tsoukalas 1999, Liakos 2005. On the Platonic concept of khōra as presented in the Timaeus, see Derrida 1995 and Gadamer 1980; the definitive work on the corpus of commentaries on the Timaeus remains the introduction and commentary in Kalfas 1995.