Liakos, Antonis. 2006. “To Hameno Rendez-vous” (The Lost Rendezvous). Archeiotaxio, 8, no. (May): 47-49.
- Chapter 7. 1967–1974: Dictatorship
- » The Red Housecoat
Antonis Liakos, who at the time was a student at the University of Thessaloniki, reports how the night before the dictatorship he and his friends were spending the wee hours discussing the dictatorship of the proletariat and when it would end in the people's republics of Eastern Europe, so that an authentic socialist democracy would be possible. Liakos remembers how, for the first time, the questions of sovereignty and applied Marxism as they were developing in the people's republics “resonated with the Greek Left and were finding a space in its journals and newspapers. The irony, of course, was that we were discussing one dictatorship as another one was happening. We left as the first tanks made their appearance in front of the White Tower and the owner of the bar said that he was closing up because a dictatorship had happened” Liakos, 2006: 48). Liakos goes on to talk about how the cartography of the city immediately changed; how everyone who was on the Left and charactērisménos (“characterized, classified as such”) changed his everyday itinerary, how a new conceptual map of dangerous places was immediately produced and unspokenly acknowledged. “The city that we had been crisscrossing leisurely until now stopped being the same from one day to the next. The Diagonal, the Square of St. Sophia, Aristotelous Street, the White Tower, became off limits. Crossing Egnatia Street, Tsimiske Street, was dangerous, traveling to the eastern suburbs became an adventure.”
But the most important event of the day of the dictatorship, Liakos mentions, was that he missed a date with a young woman to go on a three-day trip to Chalkidike. He wonders why this sense of loss should not constitute a political moment. Why should not desire, and the loss of its fulfillment, constitute a political gesture? Even more, he wonders, why would he actually think that they should not? Would the inclusion of desire in the revolutionary process betray a lack of political commitment? Of course, the questions that Liakos so craftily poses are rhetorical now, when it seems that we have cleared desire of the suspicion of false consciousness, when we have weeded through piles of Marxist analyses to bring to the surface the importance of desire both in Marx's own writings and in the psyches of revolutionary actors. But in 1967 desire was politically suspect.
I have no clear recollection of what happened later in the day on April 21. Some time in the early afternoon, my uncle, who was a high-ranking officer in the Special Security Police, came to our house. It seemed strange to me, because he had never before come to our house during the day. He pulled out the keys that were in the keyhole on the front door. “Don't leave the keys in the door,” he said, as he had said countless times previously. “And don't go out of the house after dark; do you hear me?” he said to me. “Not even downstairs to your grandmother's. There is going to be a curfew.” He left.
As late as 1997, during a presentation at Princeton University, a famous Greek political scientist responded with contempt when a literary critic in the audience asked about the role of desire in the revolutionary process. Desire is of no importance at all, the speaker said, either for social analysis or for politics. To consider this an idiosyncratic and individual response would be to overlook: (1) the importance that the social sciences have placed on the scientificity of their discourses, with affect and desire being thought of as excluded from the scientific method and (2) the epistemological rift theories of desire had in opening up the space of analysis when desire is posited as an analytical category. On desire and the processes of delimiting it in social analysis, as well as the complexities that arise from Foucault's analysis of desire in reference to the question of race, see Stoler 1995. See also Foucault 1985.