The Archipelago #18: Samo Tomšič – On Alienation, Enjoyment and the Damaged Life

In the years of the Greek crisis from 2010 onwards, a new style emerged in Greek cinema. Named by curators and journalists “Weird Wave,” it gradually took over international audiences despite its vast diversity in themes and styles. In 2018, “The Favourite,” the latest feature film of one of Weird Wave’s pioneers, Yorgos Lanthimos, was nominated for 10 Academy Awards. Following years of work in the field of Modern Greek Studies, Dimitris Papanikolaou, an Associate Professor and Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford has published the book “Greek Weird Wave, A Cinema of Biopolitics.” In this episode, he talks about this peculiar cinematic style, the understanding of power it proposes and the concept of biopolitical realism.

With his first book ‘The Capitalist Unconscious’, Samo Tomšič, a philosopher and researcher at the Humboldt University in Berlin, provided a thorough account of the influence of Karl Marx on the work of French Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Then, in his second book, ‘The Labour of Enjoyment’, he moved even further, by proposing a fusion of the works of Marx, Freud and Lacan as a means to unravel the workings of politics, economy and society. In this episode of The Archipelago, Samo Tomšič talks about the articulation between psychoanalysis and marxism, the damaged life of the subject they both describe, the importance of enjoyment in the reproduction of capitalism and the multiple meanings of alienation as a default way of being.

Twenty five years ago, Stathis Gourgouris, a Professor of Classics, English and Comparative Literature published his seminal work “Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece”, in which he applied the tools of psychoanalysis and post-colonial theory in Modern Greek history. In this episode of The Archipelago, the second of two specials to coincide with the bicentennial of Greek Independence, Stathis Gourgouris talks about the fragmented dreams of different groups that came together to imagine Modern Greece, Europe’s need for a Greek state to connect their own nations with classical antiquity, as well as the remnants of orientalism that still shape the European gaze towards Greece today.

In her latest book, ‘Unknown Country’ (Άγνωστη Χώρα, Πόλις, 2020), Efi Gazi, a Professor of History at the University of Peloponnese, freezes the frame halfway through the 200 years of Modern Greek History, at the turn between the 19th and the 20th century, in order to focus on a group of intellectuals who gave shape to their anti-western ideas on national identity. In this episode of The Archipelago, the first of two recorded to coincide with the bicentennial of the Greek Independece, Efi Gazi talks about these intellectuals, the battle between ideas of East and West in defining Greekness, the peculiarities of Greece’s relation to the West and the legacy of the debate on orientalism.

Following the murder of George Floyd, Alex Vitale, a Professor of Sociology in Brooklyn College, New York, and author of the best-selling 2017 book “The End of Policing” became one of the most cited authors in public discourse on defunding or even abolishing the police. In this episode, recorded after a wave of protests against police brutality took over Greece, Alex Vitale talks about the transformation of the meaning of crime over the last sixty years, the perils of extending the role of police to more and more aspects of our everyday lives, and how we could move away from policing towards relying on our communities.

Since her influential book Network Culture - Politics for the Information Age came out in 2004, theorist and activist Tiziana Terranova has been studying the workings of technology's effects on society. She has elaborated on these themes in numerous essays and has been part of many research groups that dive into the various ways social relations are organized and mediated. In this episode, Tiziana Terranova talks about her recent work on the concept of recursive colonialism, how colonialism is reproduced through repetition and diversification, as well as her interest in how technology affects the Mediterranean and the importance of looking at the history of technology from a non-Western perspective.

For many years, Yannis Stavrakakis, a Professor in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, has been studying the issue of populism as part of his thorough research on discourse analysis. His interests range from the relationship between psychoanalysis and the political to the workings of ideology in politics. His work on populism has produced numerous books and collections of essays and has spurred the working group Populismus, dedicated to the study of the phenomenon. In this episode, Yannis Stavrakakis talks about one of the most contested political terms of our time, how this discourse transforms the political field, as well as the interesting findings of the Populismus working group's recent study on Populism and the Pandemic.

In his second book, titled “Shard Cinema,” writer, theorist, and artist Evan Calder Williams used the all-too-familiar slow-motion images of breaking glass in blockbuster films as a means to unravel the ways in which images are produced, circulated, and consumed. In the second episode of The Archipelago with Evan Calder Williams, he talks about this certain cycle in contemporary visual culture, permeating everything from action movies to visions of disaster, while also interpreting the recent shift in his interests towards architecture, infrastructure, sickness, toxicity, and conspiracy theories.

Evan Calder Williams began exploring his ideas on post-apocalyptic thinking and politics in the blog “Socialism and/or Barbarism.” Since then, his work has expanded in two books, numerous essays, as well as films. He is part of the editorial collective of Viewpoint Magazine and a founding member of the film collective Thirteen Black Cats. In this episode of The Archipelago, the first of two conversations with Evan Calder Williams, he talks about how his ideas of Salvagepunk and the Apocalypse have evolved during the decade, his thorough study on the history of sabotage as a practice, and the impact of established visions in our collective thinking.

In the following episode, Geert Lovink talks about the repercussions of the proliferation of Zoom in our everyday routine during Covid-19, the underestimated politics of social media, as well as the strategies and practices that could move us beyond our subjugation by platforms. For two decades, media theorist Geert Lovink has been writing and researching on critical internet culture. In his 2019 book “Sad by Design,” he studies the emotional effect of the domination of digital platforms on society and lays the foundation for a new field of internet studies. This episode features music from the album “Sad by Design” by We Are Not Sick (Geert Lovink and John Longwalker).