Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition 9781503630642

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Praise for Dream Nation “Following the dream-state of the emergence and persistence of the nation as a cultural and political form, Dream Nation makes a crucial contribution to our sense of the quotidian histories of modernity. Gourgouris’s deft retrieval of the problematic history of the Greek Enlightenment and its rich, resonant cultural discourses gives a new turn to our understanding of the pedagogies of state formation. In this splendid book the archive of ‘Neohellenic’ writers converse animatedly with postcolonial and poststructuralist thinkers, while we, its readers, participate in an enlightened argument that deals with the ethics of ‘othering’ by suggesting that in order to be Greeks we must also entertain the possibility of being Turks.” Hom i K. Bh a bh a, au t hor of T h e Locat ion of Cu ltu r e “Stathis Gourgouris’s Dream Nation establishes a new kind of cultural criticism: It weaves together the methods of history, literary and psychoanalytic theory, comparative literature, and political science. This is a bracing, touching, exciting work, catapulting its author to eminence.” E dwa r d Sa i d, au t hor of Or i e n ta lism “A quarter century ago, Dream Nation revealed the genetic link between Orientalism and Philhellenism in the modern West: whereas the former helped to define Europe against its Asiatic others, the latter did so by placing its origins in Greek antiquity. Both processes were colonial in nature. This new edition returns this pioneering book to ongoing discussions of culture, power, and confl ict in these perilous times.” A a m i r Mu f t i, au t hor of E n ligh t e nm e n t i n t h e Colon y: t h e J ew ish Qu est ion a n d t h e Cr isis of Postcolon i a l Cu ltu r e “[A] general audience, too, can benefit from Gourgouris’s revisions of accepted theory, especially his questioning of the way in which the Greek Enlightenment created the fi rst phase of a new national identity. . . . Despite Gourgouris’s claim that he merely raises questions instead of forging conclusions, readers will fi nd that many conclusions are indeed offered, and furthermore that the Enlightenment is employed to reach both backwards and forwards in Greece’s imaginative history in a way that might even suggest a postmodern sort of linearity.” T i m es Lit e r a ry Su pple m e n t

“Crafting a story of nationalism that moves further than the linear logic of capital, Gourgouris studies the ‘dream’ of Greece as part of the ‘productive forces’ that operated in its making. . . . Dream Nation makes a powerful contribution to the theory of nationalism: it guides us down a fresh avenue of thinking, beyond the sociology of ‘imagined communities.’” R a dica l Ph i losoph y “We dream ourselves a nation. It is a conspiracy that perdures, and which hardens and constricts our global imagination. This halluci-nation is what Stathis Gourgouris dismantles with poetic precision and unabated urgency, over a prodigious range of fantastic elaborations and retroactive projections, urging us, finally, to develop an ear better attuned to the sounds of history.” Gi l A n i dja r, au t hor of Se m it es: R ace, R e ligion, Lit e r atu r e “This is an original and important study of nation formation as social imaginary signification, raising theoretical and political questions of collective identity, ethnicity, autonomy, culture, and tradition in the modern world. Adopting insights from a variety of disciplines (literary criticism, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy, economics) and drawing on material from different genres, the author approaches his topic in a synthetic way that allows for a multiplicity of perspectives and a wealth of data. A wonderful sense of adventure permeates this book, which offers a model for the study of national identities.” Vassi lis La m bropou los, au t hor of T h e R ise of Eu roce n tr ism: A natomy of I n t e r pr etat ion “By meticulously working through the Neohellenic nationalist fantasy as an interminable process of becoming universal in a particular way, bound up with European Philhellenism’s ‘colonization of the ideal,’ Dream Nation brilliantly performs the necessary paradox of theorizing in the crucible of history. A quarter of a century after its initial publication, the demands that Gourgouris’s critical mythography makes on the reader at the entangled site of ‘Greece,’ ‘modernity,’ and ‘nation’ are newly urgent.” Brook e Holm e s, au t hor of T h e Sym p tom a n d t h e Subj ect: T h e E m e rge nce of t h e Ph ysica l Body i n A nci e n t Gr e ece

Dr ea m Nation

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Dream Nation Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece Anniversary Edition

Stath is Gourgour is

Sta n for d Un iv ersity Pr ess Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2021 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Control Number: 2021941845 ISBN: 9781503630635 (paperback) ISBN: 9781503630642 (ebook) Cover design: Rob Ehle Cover images: Manuscript page from I. Makriyiannis’s Visions and Miracles, courtesy of the Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece (MIET); stamp from the “Mythological Air Travel” series, 1935–37, Dimitrios Biskinis.

In memoriam Petroula Gourgouris (1933–1984)

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Contents

Preface to the Anniversary Edition Acknowledgments A Note to Readers Prologue

xi xvii xxi 1

1. The Nation’s Dream-Work

10

The Great Wall of China, 10 The Nationalization of Imagined Communities, 1 5 National Sovereignty as Heteronomy, 18 The Permutations of Belief, 24 The Nation as Dream, 28 The Fantasy of Nationality, 32 A Theoretical Interlude: “The Burrow,” 38 The Topographic Desire (To Dream Up the Native), 40

2. The Formal Imagination, I: The Back Roads of Development from Enlightenment to Bureaucracy

47

Toward a History of Discontinuity,49 Facing the Curse of “Underdevelopment”: Communal Practices, 53 Facing the Curse of “Underdevelopment”: Clientelist Theories, 64 Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Modernization Thesis, 70 Against Administrative Culture: The Task of Reeducation, 76 The Predicament of Customary Culture: From Balkan Autonomy to National Bureaucracy, 82

3. The Formal Imagination, II: Natural History and National Pedagogy—The Case of Korais Korais in Context, 91 Philosophy, Language, and Revolution, 98 Philosophy as Pharmacology, 105

90

x

Contents

Excursus 1. Subversive Affinities: Enlightenment/Fracture 4. The Punishment of Philhellenism

113 122

The Disturbance of Bildung, 122 Travelers and Philologists, 128 Fallmerayer, or the Misfortunes of Ancestry, 140

Excursus 2. Of Modern Hellenes in Europe 5. The Phantasms of Writing, I: Makriyiannis and the Miracles of National Memory

155 175

The Salvaging of Discourse and the Profits of Salvation, 177 The Politics of Memory, 183 Visions and Miracles of Writing, 187 The Aesthetic Technology of the National, 196

6. The Phantasms of Writing, II: Nostalgia for Utopia— the Idolatries of Seferis

201

7. Homologia/Apologia: The Writing of National History

227

The New Rules of the Game: Rousseau’s Confessions, 227 Confessing to Oblivion, 236 Michelet’s Prefaces, 243 A National Philosophy of History, 252 Secondary Revision—Time and the Real, 261

Excursus 3. On the Catachresis of Otherness

267

Works Cited Index

285 299

Preface to the Anniversary Edition

One of the most enabling and liberating realizations for any author is to understand that books have their own lives, entirely disengaged from the person who wrote them. At best, they serve to remind the author of the spatial, temporal, and psychosocial circumstances of writing—writing itself being a field of relational experience that registers its autonomy at the very instance of its actualization. Dream Nation is special to me in that regard. Not only because it was my fi rst book and, from the standpoint of writing, a wondrous leap into the void, but also because of its long and multivalent life in a number of contexts and languages way beyond the frameworks and conditions that generated it. Indeed, the book’s success and influence is still befuddling to me, as unavoidably I can’t seem to reconcile its youthful writing—daring but at times overwrought and surely never fully self-aware—with the clarity of its resonance across the range of many readers of different cultures and generations, in different moments and contexts of reception. It’s important to note two key historical contexts that coincided with this writing. Approximately half the book was written between 1988 and 1991, with background on the historic events of 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet world. This coincided with the happy accident of fi nding myself in the midst of an extraordinary group of peers—fellow graduate students at UCLA—from an inordinate range of different social and cultural experiences worldwide and across the spectrum of different disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and performing arts, who coalesced around the now legendary journal Emergences, under the tutelage

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of Teshome Gabriel. This was the first phase of postcolonial studies entering the American university, and it was conducted not just by the few initial luminaries, but by scores of brilliant students from every part of the globe who had convened in this setting and sought each other’s company fiercely, thinking and acting together in a collective fashion I have rarely seen since then. As the geopolitical landscape was wrest asunder by these cosmogonic changes, which came to stand on the triumphant socioeconomic reconfigurations of the Reagan-Thatcher dogma, the sense of what was soon to be called globalization was already perfectly palpable in our youthful experience. The American university was already a sort of frontline laboratory, which we did not yet quite understand, as we reveled over forms of intellectual resistance against a number of established norms of both knowledge and power. Given that I was writing about nationalism, in retrospect I can certainly say that I was taught an organic lesson against both the commonality and profound peril of cultural exceptionalism. Very simply, I learned, at one and the same time, that my own cultural history was not only not unique and indeed part of incredibly complex transcontinental networks of history and life, but also that everyone else’s own cultural history suffered equally from the same delusion of uniqueness. Our shared Marxisms, of course, converged on an uncompromising commitment to internationalism, and this confi rmed the ground of thinking and arguing together; but nonetheless, this conjuncture was, for many of us, the fi rst time that: 1) the problem of capital was confronted from within a network of geopolitical particularities, and 2) this network was always and inevitably implicated in the histories of colonialism and empire, no matter where one’s personal cultural experience was situated on the globe. The second half of the book was written between 1991 and 1995, during the early phases of my academic career, with background on the horrific violence of the Yugoslav civil war, which was the first catastrophic event of the post-1989 world order. While newly reflecting on conditions of political economy in the Ottoman Balkans during the eighteenth century and developing a theory of national history as a specific genre of writing—two entirely different epistemological terrains that nonetheless informed the Dream Nation project in equal part—the events in Yugoslavia reverberated quite consciously. But I hadn’t realized the full significance until 2004, when the book received its fi rst translation and was presented in a series of events in Belgrade and Zagreb—now cities in enemy countries—in gatherings where a number of artists and intellectuals, who

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now sported different nationalities but self-identified as people without a country, came together to argue about post–civil war transitional justice. The sheer passion of these arguments will remain indelible in my memory, as will the subsequent revels in shared evening intoxication, all part of a continuous intellectual urgency. What emerged as the primary element that made Dream Nation so resonant in this situation was that social fantasy was not simply some intellectual concept. It was an absolutely tangible force that precipitated inordinate violence and destruction. The nation as phantasm and its dreamwork, which to me were axes of research and historical analysis, to my interlocutors were concrete experiences in real space and time, riveting their psyches and engraved on their bodies. The elemental dimensions of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, a brutal reality for millions of people, were traceable, readable, in the book’s pages in a way that could only have been unfathomable to me at the point of writing. Seeing this in real time, in another language and another signifying space, made me realize, fi rst, as I have already said, that books have an entirely different life of their own, and second, that it is possible, even if difficult, for academic research into histories and theories of events to indeed speak to actual problems and conditions in the world that affect real people in real time, as events unfold. As my subsequent research turned to more philosophical and less historical matters, this lesson never lost its urgency, as I also began to write more frequently in newspapers and mass media on current political issues. I revisited some of the arguments in Dream Nation on two occasions, which epitomized the complications of national fantasy with colonial power from the standpoint of art as critique and resistance: namely, the poetry of Derek Walcott, in what has been named the Afro-Greek encounter, and the fi lms of Elia Suleiman in the context of Palestinian partition.1 The Greek financial crisis in 2011 and the Orientalist response of European Union advocates of fiscal austerity against the populations of the South also brought about some of the book’s arguments concerning the social-imaginary constitution of Europe—the colonization of the ancient Greek ideal as national foundation; the nationalization of Europeanness as the sovereign arm of capital; the permeability of borders as neocolonial fantasy—starkly into the present. At the time, many friends and 1. See respectively: “Derealizations of the Ideal—Walcott Encounters Seferis,” in boundary 2 39:2 (Summer 2012), 181–200, and “Dream-Work of Dispossession: The Instance of Elia Suleiman,” Journal of Palestine Studies 176 (Vol. XLIV:4, Summer 2015), 32–47.

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colleagues insisted that I return to this book in more extensive writings, especially as it was attracting younger readers and conditions in the world kept reiterating its relevance. As time passed and perspective on the book gained greater distance, its connection to the problems of colonization proved particularly incisive. It is curious that this happened while the idiom of postcolonial studies in the university was placed under increasing self-critical pressure. The world was being conquered differently—the global fi nancialization of capital, the streamlining privatization of everything, the new sovereignty of internet and social media technologies, the theologization of power and war, and the planetary deterritorialization of populations migrating at an unprecedented scale due to economic, political, or ecological catastrophes reconfigured significantly how we judge colonial or imperial possession and dispossession. While material geopolitical conditions of colonization shifted, its social-imaginary dimensions remained intact—in fact, one might say they grew in significance—and as the book’s chief theoretical contribution was precisely this dimension of society’s phantasms and dream-work, certain key elements of the argument, although composed at another historical phase, became even more relevant. Moreover, the response to these new conditions was a surge of micronationalism in its most dogmatic metaphysical vein, producing a politics of exclusionary identities theologized without qualm, whose real political consequences are now widely apparent in the various resurgences of fascist-oriented practices at all levels of the sociopolitical ladder in many societies around the world. Just at the point when unfettered neoliberal values reigned without opposition and the logic of globalization controlled all political significations, shattering both the legacy of anticolonial internationalism and basic democratic self-determination of peoples worldwide, the nation form reemerged remarkably victorious, as if its catastrophic control over the entire twentieth century had never occurred. Indeed, this resurgence reminded us all of the nation’s resilience as a form that exceeds even the demands of capitalism—a form that, in its history so far, has shown remarkable adaptability across a limitless range of social and cultural norms, traditions, customs, and institutions. The nation’s dream-work engages all layers where society exercises its phantasmatic capacity, starting from the most archaic institutions, such as the family and its patriarchal structures, to the vicissitudes of race, communal organizations of culture, or what are still pre-capitalist remainders in people’s basic economic transactions. During a number of special events organized in 2021 to celebrate the book’s twenty-fi fth anniversary, which in Greece also coincided with the

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bicentennial of the Greek Revolution and state-sponsored events that unabashedly celebrated the nationalist fantasy, I was repeatedly asked, “What has changed since the time of publication?” My initial response was that, sadly, very little has changed in any substantial way, even though the geopolitical and geo-economic picture is drastically different. Societies are still whipped up in nationalist frenzy, often resorting to aggression or war against their neighbors. But even when they are not, they are engaging in extraordinary violence against populations within their ranks. Nationalism has always coincided with racist rage, no matter what might be the specific context, and the long-term colonial underpinnings of racist violence, whether in Europe or America, India or Palestine, are now more prominent than ever. The very concept of minority is a byproduct of the nationalist imaginary, not of the political framework of democracy, as is usually argued. So is, of course, all politics of partition and racial/cultural/religious homogenization or ethnic cleansing, which is where colonial power intersects with the national fantasy, using the nation-form to perpetuate its domination even as its territories of conquest are contested. This has been particularly troublesome for the imaginary of national independence movements, most of them explicitly anticolonial where, as Frantz Fanon so brilliantly alerted us to, we see how the achievement of national sovereignty became precisely the obstacle to the achievement of decolonization. As global capital, in its neoliberal form, extends its assault on every aspect of human dignity with unprecedented speed and scale, it is the nationalist fantasy that has been mobilized as its presumed adversary. Nothing is more delusional than this, for the nation-form has been an enabler of capital since its invention. Instead of there being an equally global—and as we would say in the anticolonial period, internationalist— response, according to the resolutely planetary demands that are increasingly essential to our survival as a species, and the democratic demands that are essential to our future as political animals (to invoke Aristotle in a contemporary vein), we see an outrageous retrenchment to the most exclusionary micro-identities imaginable, where what is other is assaulted with the most excessive narcissism conceivable. Of course, the national dream is neither unitary nor homogeneous— and certainly not democratically available to all. But this does leave room for subversive or alternative imaginings, for re-conceptualizing both the boundaries and the core of what makes national identity so seductive. The dire effects of globalization, which most certainly include mass migration, dispossession, and deterritorialization, could in fact be confronted by such re-imaginings, by breaking through the traditional solidity of nationalist sentiment, by dreaming of society otherwise, even within the

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scope of a nation’s dream-work. Let’s not forget that, right beside the stark displacement of populations, global capital also pressures populations toward greater and greater homogenization and absolutely false equivalence, through mechanisms of mass consumerism and mass media horizontality. An altered dream-work is upon us: how do we sustain our difference and otherness against homogenization, and how do we imagine another sort of relational terrain, across nationalist borders but against the reality of deterritorialization? This is where the political implications of the critiques developed in Dream Nation twenty-five years ago are necessarily entwined with radical democratic practices and planetary subjectivities in today’s terms. Strangely, in spite of a whole other geopolitical order in play, so much in Dream Nation seems so prescient, and about this I am just as much befuddled. Responding to questions in these anniversary events about Dream Nation in the present, I argued that I was not in some prophetic way insightful. If anything, the lesson here is that attentiveness to the peculiar details of a historical problem, which comes from a certain immersion in and respect for its parameters, will produce insights that will become more clearly evident in the future as the problem unfolds or reveals new dimensions. The same is true of writing. It, too, is a historical document, indeed a historical problem, and deserves to stand and be judged from different temporal positions. For this reason, the text of Dream Nation in this edition remains completely unaltered, in order to stand both as an instance of its present and as an (other) instance in the present. It is remarkably good fortune for me to be in a position to see it liberated from my hands yet a second time. For the initiative to put together a Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition in record time, I am profoundly grateful to Erica Wetter and the rest of the Stanford University Press staff who attended to the publication. This new edition is dedicated to the memory of my fi rst teachers, the ones who understood the significance of this project before I did: Shuhsi Kao (1945– 2013) and Teshome Gabriel (1939–2010). Galaxidi, May 2021

Acknowledgments

Every narrative has a history internal to its form. In this history can be traced the imprint of every narrative’s particular intersection with time and thus with all those forces of friendship—sometimes transitional and circumstantial, other times perpetual, but nonetheless always intrinsic— that nestle in the inner folds of thought. The very materiality of writing bears witness to this history and the turns of wind that engrave its path, in every case the traces of gifts from friends and mentors along the way. Sometimes, the imprint is immediate, opening a path where none was conceivable. Other times, it latches on behind your consciousness, until it encounters you around a corner, waiting for you at last to reach the crossroads it had been internally carrying all along. This project has a long and circuitous history, starting with its first faint glimpses in the autumnal light of my old family home in Galaxidi, Greece, some ten years ago. It bears names and precise places, without which it would have never been possible. Acknowledging them here is the very least of what I owe them in inspiration and guidance. From early on, I enjoyed the good fortune of an apprenticeship next to a truly wise, uncompromising, and gracious mind, a mentor in the ancient way of things. Shuhsi Kao taught me, above all, that posing the right question against the grain is the key to all teaching and thinking, a gift that could never be acknowledged in words alone. Next to her stand my other teachers, especially Margaret Alexiou, Jean-Claude Carron, Robert Maniquis, Donald Preziosi, and the late Joseph Riddel, as well as a group of old friends, whose creative intelligence and resistance to

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institutional logic was the reason why I chose to pursue this mode of life. I would like to extend, from this page and against the mysterious winds of life, my thanks to Mary Eichbauer, Annette Leddy, Marilyn Manners, and Howard Dickler particularly, for sharing with me their minds and their psyches in those formative years. At the initial stages of writing (1988–89), this project was nurtured by the activities of the Emergences Group at UCLA, those remarkable occasions of collective innovation, over which presided the aphoristic wisdom and disarming sense ofwonder of Teshome Gabriel. What I have learned from the countless engagements with Peter Bloom, Roberto Monte-Mór, Hamid Naficy, Chella Rajan, David J.Russell, Randy Rutsky, David Scott, and Jim Wiltgen is inestimable; they shall remain companions in speculative thought and experiment no matter where on the globe each of us happens to reside. Between 1990 and 1992, with the luxury of a two-year postdoctoral fellowship, this text was radically reworked and reshaped in the form that it fi nally took. My gratitude goes to Ohio State University and its Modern Greek Studies Program for their generosity in this regard, and particularly Victoria Holbrook, Gregory Jusdanis, Eva Konstantellou, Phaedon Kozyris, and Artemis Leontis for their welcoming spirit ofi nquiry, reevaluation, and debate. To Vassilis Lambropoulos, besides his exhaustive reading of the manuscript up to its fi nal stages, I am indebted for something greater; his personal engagement with the innermost philosophical desire of this project and his unreserved commitment to its implications. The long duration of this project has secured me the benefits of many readers and supporters in different places andat different times. For their generosity, encouragement, and critique, I am deeply grateful to Homi Bhabha, Claudia Brodsky Lacour, Eduardo Cadava, John Chioles, Yiorgos Chouliaras, Vangelis Kalotychos, Tom Keenan, Antonis Liakos, Alexander Nehamas, Yiannis Patilis, Edward Said, Charles Stewart, Khachig Tololyan, Dimitris Tziovas, Karen Van Dyck, Sam Weber, and Slavoj Žižek. To Edward Mitchell, I am grateful not only for the original impetus of the project and his interventions at crucial instances, but for the passion of his intellect and the inspiration that comes from our friendship. Without the love and wisdom of Aristeidis Baltas, I would have never understood that the horizon of thought is where one begins thinking. Without Neni Panourgia, the abyss of thought would have been lifeless and the act of writing desire’s empty shell. The passionate prospect of sharing our two brief lives on this earth makes the pleasure of thinking and writing untamable. My students at Princeton University have contributed to the refinement of these ideas in ways they would not imagine. Helen Tartar, my

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editor, embraced the project from the start with a gracious intelligence and a trust in its potential that cannot be matched. I am particularly indebted to Ellen Smith and Nancy Young for their meticulous editorial sense and their commitment to the manuscript. All have left their mark on the text, even in places I shall never realize, but I, alone, bear the brunt of this text’s errors and excesses. Fragments of this book in early versions were published as follows: “Writing the National Imaginary: The Memory of Makriyiannis and the Miracles of Neohellenism,” Emergences I (Fall 1989): 95–130; “Nationalism and Oneirocriticism: Of Modern Hellenesin Europe,” Diaspora 2 (Fall 1992): 43–71; “Notes on the Nation’s Dream-Work,” Qui Parle 7 (Fall/ Winter 1993, special issue: Nation and Fantasy): 81–101. S.G.

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A Note to Readers

English passages cited from Greek and other non-English sources are my own translations unless otherwise indicated. I have also translated the titles of all Greek sources named in my text and reference matter.

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DREAM N A T I O N Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking— and since it cannot, in order to become its echo, I have, in a way, to silence it, Maurice Blanchot Praxis, on the other hand, can exist only if its object, by its very nature, surpasses all completion; praxis is a perpetually transformed relation to the object. Cornelius Castoriadis

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Prologue

The mortality of dreams lies not in their being forgotten but in their being interpreted. The forgotten plunges back into the dark pools of the psyche; the interpreted seals the fate of whatever rises to the surface and is exhausted. Hence every emergence into waking consciousness, every morning after the anarchic ordeal of the night, involves a struggle against the order of interpretation. Nations seem to disobey this path. In the temporal scale of human history, nations do seem to arise overnight., evoked like perfectly transparent dreams whose interpretation requires no particular effort—this sense of effortlessness being fueled by the often enormous cost in human life involved in the making of a nation. Nations come into historical consciousness precisely by articulating their own self-interpretation while relegating to damned oblivion the historical time of their nonexistence. It would seem that nations put oblivion in the service of interpretation and, unlike dreams, die when they can no longer successfully interpret themselves. But the life of nations depends just as much on nourishing those elements that once sustained them, in the social imagination, as dreams. All nations were once dreamed as such at a historical moment prior to their emergence, which is to say that their emergence—their institution—already stands as the initial event in the course of their dream s interpretation. A nation is a historical form because it cannot but replace its dream state with its interpretation (history understood here as the force that brushes society's dream against the grain). History makes the pain of society's dreams sensible. Whether a nation will survive as a dream or not depends on how long it can sustain its selfinterpretation as a sensible symptom of its existence. Dream and nation are thus implicated in a paradoxical complicity of form, their antagonism over

2

Prologue

the significance of oblivion and interpretation being consubstantial with their structural affinity as social forces in human history. This dreamlike appearance of the nation is generally deemed a contemporary condition, its flashing image contrasted to the longue duree that gathers its meaning from the premodern (and precapitalist) civilizations that display a relative lack of interest in mechanisms of both forgetting and interpreting. The lightning speed by which nations are instituted in history (as true of France as it is of Algeria, Slovakia, Pakistan, or the United States) surely matches the swiftness with which nations seem to pass from making history to gracing the pages of history books. Speed is an epistemic condition of both modernity and capital and goes back, beyond the theorizations of either Benjamin or Virilio, to, say, the debilitating tourist experience of Montesquieu s Persians or the shooting down of the French bourgeoisie from its balconies, as Marx so vividly describes > by drunken mobs acting in the name of property, family, and order during the coup of Napoleon III. A modern sense of time obeys the order of rupture, of radical reinstitution, which is why modernity is often thought to underlie the formal configuration of the nation. The language of modernity, in the context of the Nation-form, may act as a wedge between dream and history, but it is also what remolds the act of history's brushing the dream against the grain into a story that can be told. Surely, one can counterpose to the nation's privileged access to modernity a long variance of events across the pathways of culture that tell the tale of national institution as the simultaneous subjectification and subjugation of a society's dream. All things being equal, Dante's exhortation of the eloquence of a "vulgar" (popular) idiom is replayed in Kemal Atatiirk s nomination of a "vulgar" (foreign) script to convey a defeated imperial eloquence. Likewise, the attempt of Renaissance theologians in France to fashion aprisca theologia that would insert the druids of ancient Gaul into the narrative of Christian revelation and bring to France the cultural cohesion that comes with the blessing of being the origin is replayed in Walter Scott's lending a medieval imaginary to the nineteenth-century historicist demands of British national fiction. All these mythological reiterations try to bend the past out of its eternal shape and are thus utterances of assimilation. Whether the myth involves Charlemagne or Ibn Saud, or Borges's taciturn gaucho from the South, the gathering of the tribes into the national fold (Gothic or Bedouin, Norman or Creole) cannot but mobilize the assimilative forces of the dream of civilization, whether that is to be positively or negatively exercised. If the Aeneid were indeed an example of a national-historical epic, this would be due less to its narrative of cultural foundation than to its being a chronicle of

Prologue

3

the enemy's assimilation into the integrity of this foundation, carried out by the epic narrative's sensitivity to the eloquence of the conquered. Reading history is in this respect an extravagant exercise, and placing the Nation as a form in history partakes necessarily of this extravagance. Yet there are certain delimitations in the history of the Nation-form, particularities and contingencies that cannot be outrnaneuvered. So this book, given the demands of its particular object of historical inquiry, respects Eric Hobsbawm s thesis that "the basic characteristic of the modern nation and everything connected with it is its modernity" (1990: 14), albeit with a crucial qualification. My inquiry stands on the premise that the nation is rooted in the epistemic shift that made the Enlightenment possible. Only if the Enlightenment can be said to have introduced the problematic of modernity can the Nation as a form be considered intertwined with modernity. This is a big "if," and one that the present study could elucidate only symptomatically The nation exemplifies the predicament of the Enlightenment insofar as it bears its central philosophical paradox: it is at once particular and universal. The exclusivity of nationality is spoken through a universalist anthropological utterance, in what is not only a doubling of meaning but a dubbing. (This is precisely why one s national enemies, on the other side of the border, are always treated as subhuman.) Such doubleness (and duplicity) demands an ambivalent mode of interrogation that weaves a morphological concern with the radical contingency of its terrain. In taking the risk of sketching a theory of the Nation as form, a philosophical task by definition, I am only furthering the need to make the murky processes of social and historical institution more palpable. Form is the implicit content of history, which is not a paradox at all, were we to take seriously Theodor Adorno s daring recognition of the transhistorical sedimentation of content. For this reason, such a study stands askew relative to the more celebrated sociological approaches to the phenomenon of the nation and the problems of nationalism. It recognizes a different terrain of interrogation and therefore does not address them. The Nation is a social form that exceeds any possible jurisdiction of social science, unless it is the kind of science that recognizes as its arche the force of historical contingency. The nonlogic of history is precisely what led me to contemplate the Nation as a form. In the midst of history's most dramatic discontinuities, a form of social organization is imagined and instituted that breaks down cultural boundaries even as it intransigently cements them. This is indeed a curious matter, and Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities is the first to take it seriously not just in its overall conception but in

4

Prologue

the very idiom that it employs. Delving into the labyrinthine ways of the social imagination is merely living up to the nature of the issue. In this sense, a strictly and exclusively empiricist and positivist approach to the phenomenon of nationalism (not to mention the emergence of the Nation as a form) is at this point finished business. I risk the apparent absolutism of this assertion in foil cognizance of the epistemological dangers of collectivizing the methods of psychoanalysis or of the philosophy of subjectivity. Talking mass psychology is, by definition, walking on a tightrope, and doing so to doubtful purpose. This book perhaps does assume such a risk insofar as it incorporates Freud's methods of dream analysis into a social-historical problematic, but it ultimately resides a great epistemic distance away from the vision of mass psychology. All the same, it means to expose (and work against) the great and unacknowledged fear that the psyche might enter the sanctuary of social analysis, an unfortunate remnant of nineteenth-century rationalism. The methodological contention of this book is that the psychic paragon of the national (ist) phenomenon emerges from the deepest stream of history and requires the most precise historical vision. My attention is thus focused on the nation's operative force as social fantasy, which is what adheres to those invisible and intangible forces that make history itself sensible (which does not at all mean comprehensible): forces that enable us to identify history, even for a fleeting moment, without ever enabling us to give history an identity. My wish to elucidate the nation's dream-work does not mean to provide an interpretation of a dream but to account for the dream lying in ambush behind every historical inscription. The particular historical inscription I examine consists, first, in the national formation of Greece as a particular (and peculiar) moment of social history and, second, in certain instances of Greece's national-cultural idiom (Neohellenism) that reenact this formative scene in order to revisit the realm of the nation-dream. The chronological focus initially spans the period from the 17805 to the 18305, a terrain shadowed by the Enlightenment's revolutionary acquaintance with the nineteenth century (chapters 2 and 3), and subsequently extends to those instances in the 18605 and 19405-19505 when the literary and historiographical (re)production of Greece partook of the demands of romantic history and modernist aesthetics respectively (chapters 5, 6, and 7). Embracing these specific instances is the foundational complicity between the Enlightenment and Philhellenism, whose relation hinges both on their specific historical intersection and on their variant negotiation of the battle between identity and alterity (Chapter 4). The extant bits of this conversation are gathered up in the inevitable tangential flights of thought that I identify here as excurses. The overall voyage is prefaced by a long essay on the

Prologue

5

nations dream-work (Chapter i), which is also a meditation on the nation as a social-imaginary institution in Cornelius Castoriadis's sense of the term. The terrain that allows such reflections to pose themselves in this way is already marked by an exigency altogether proper to itself. In my attempt to ground this interrogation of Greek national culture within a more or less concrete social-historical contingency and not rely on some prefabricated theory or some ethnically indigenous knowledge, I discovered that no precise situation of contingency was ever possible. My link to the entity "modern Greece" was, at one level, bound to a precisely specified necessity. At the same time, paradoxically within and by virtue of this necessity, I also found "myself" exterior to the logic of this entity, to the Neohellenic logos. This became the primary level of understanding Greece as a social-imaginary signification, in the sense that it remained stubbornly beyond reach, interposing itself between the moment of necessity and the moment of contingency that linked me to it and gave "my" relation to "it" its meaning. This "subjective" straddling, on the one hand, and this "objective" displacement, on the other, constitute the radical conditions that pressure this text toward its interrogation. What such an interrogation must seek—as an inevitable consequence of an ambiguous relation to an already displaced object—is not the what of Greece, which would inescapably plunge us into essential-ontological determinations (what is), but the very conditions of possibility in conceiving Greece. In other words, what must be brought into question is the how of Greece, in order perhaps to catch a glimpse of its where. The point is to draw out the difference between the essential-ontological and the onto-genetic "moment" in the process of signification, a moment that is constantly recirculated and reinstituted, and that is as such not a moment at all, but can only be, by its very nature of institution, a social-historical process. To cast the point in the current philosophical idiom: this study is interested not in the Being of Greece but in the situation of its being. The particularity of modern Greece is conceivable only in terms of its location within a wider range of historical formations. This project enacts a topological or, in Antonio Gramsci's sense, a geographical understanding of contending social forms. Reading Greece and Neohellenism as nationalimaginary institutions means also to read them as succinct expressions of the interceding sociocultural relations between Europe and the Balkan or Eastern Mediterranean region from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. As such, this study contributes to an elucidation of the resurgent nationalist forces in the Balkans today by retracing and reevaluating their formative institutions in the wake of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. In this

6

Prologue

process, an inquiry into the national formation of Greece, whether as a sociopolitical phenomenon or as the work of signification, problematizes directly the very institution of Europe as a geographical, historical, and discursive entity. And by the same token, it engages and expands the project of current postcolonial theory by reflecting on a nation forever situated in the interstices of East and West and ideologically constructed by colonialist Europe without having been, strictly speaking, colonized. This latter concern may not appear to cover the greater part of the text, but it is the most trenchant and underlies the entire framework. I need not insist on the obvious: the boldest and most incisive contemplations of the problem of the nation come from the wider domain of postcolonial studies. This is owing not merely to the coincidental arising of some great thinkers in these disciplines but to the very experience of decolonization, which brought the revolutionary politics of national liberation (and its sad demise with official nationhood) face to face with the nationalist passion that was inherent in the colonialist imaginary throughout its administration. It is a disturbing and explosive mirroring that nonetheless made possible an altogether different and subversive insight into the implicit elements of the problem. Homi Bhabha and Partha Chatterjee, among others, have spoken eloquently about this exact implication, as has the entire Subaltern Studies project through the years, with which (if I am allowed the conceit) this project s purpose has particular affinity. Once we grant the unequaled scale of heterogeneity inherent in India and look to the bare forces that frame its national history, we can see that there is actually a point where the story of India and the story of Greece coincide. Both are burdened with a classical past, a similar trap for the nationalist phantasm: modern malaise to be overcome and ancient glory to be regained. And in both cases, though in decidedly different ways, the trap is fed by Europe's own self-serving and autoscopic investment—self-serving because autoscopic. This is the great historical and institutional co-incidence of Philhellenism and Orientalism, Sanskrit and Greek being philology's bread and butter. In this respect, if the story of India is the paradigmatic condition of the colonialist imaginary, then the story of Greece is the paradigmatic colonialist condition in the imaginary (since modern Greece is after all history's sole witness of the consequences of what I call the colonization of the ideal). These two stories have a common history: the refracted history of "Europe," and hence the refracted history of the Nation as a form, all from the vantage point of this form s potential for hybrid incarnations. To posit the fundamental connection between the historical production of the Nation-form and the ideological reproduction of "Europe" is not to

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7

suggest that the nation is one more great Western invention and product for export. It is to suggest something much graver: that the power of the nation, just like colonial power itself (and indeed the remarkable collusion between the two), is not merely incidental to the development of modern power but necessary to its consolidation. The refracted mirroring of "Europe" will inevitably arise behind any effort to contemplate the imaginary of the nation, settled there undaunted to mark the dim horizon with its broken light. Likewise, no serious effort to confront the implicit and allegorical structures of the national imagination can succeed without the conceptual tools of postcolonial thought—Lauren Berlant's The Anatomy of National Fantasy (1991) or David Lloyds Anomalous States (1993) are paradigmatic in this respect. This project, therefore, in which Greece may be construed as a temporary and transitional landmark, is ultimately part of a much wider and constantly renewable project: the elucidation of the very processes of social institution in a post-Enlightenment world whose story is the ubiquitous story of capital. Chatterjee is right when he situates in the narrative of capital not only the internal problematic of the nation but the key to "Europe's" monopoly of the universal (1993: 235—39). He is particularly insightful in recognizing that the narrative of capital rendered all the communitarian forms that preceded it and engendered it a matter of prehistory. The battle between community and capital is no doubt central to the process of every national institution. Still, the Nation as a form would not have become so unassailable if it had not sat so comfortably with the social imaginary that made capitalism possible. For the nation goes so far as to borrow from this archegonous "prehistorical" narrative precisely those elements that, once incorporated in the dynamic of capital, make possible the notion of "the national community" (the nationalization of society), the political hypostasis of the modern nation and state. In these political terms, this work is implicated in the matter of contemporary history, being a meditation on the imaginary of the nation and on the writing of national history at a time when a large part of world culture is contemplating itself openly in transnational terms, while an equally large part of it is embracing what seems to be a mutation of nineteenth-century nationalism. However, unlike many of the works it respects and follows, this text is explicitly and by design a study not of modes of resistance but more of the formal means by which the Nation appropriates and outwits resistance. What remains consistent through most of the texts and figures studied here is an attempt to read that hole in their many folds that may make these texts and figures—inadvertently, unwittingly, accidentally—possible agents of resis-

8

Prologue

tance. It is an attempt to read the duplicitous language of a form as a cipher for the intangible ferment of history and the inscrutable ways of societal institution. Above all, this text enacts the writing-scene of a particular instance in the work of history, the history of the Neohellenic imaginary and, therefore, the history of "modern Greece" itself. This hardly makes it a national history, however, with all the repressed repudiations of fiction that a national-historical confession entails. Rather, this book aspires to a writing imbued as much by the fictional spirit that marks, say, C. L. R.James's remarkable history The Black Jacobins as by the historical spirit that swirls through Balzac's formidable fictional world in his Comedie Humaine, Such a spirit recognizes that the problem of history is a problem of the present. But since the sense of history is always retroactive, the problem of history concerns the topos of refolding. History, though unaccountable, is indelibly present as time frame. This very fact renders the meaning of present history absent, and therefore constitutes history, as presence (as "experience"), retroactive. Hence, to write history is inevitably to put into question one's unaccountable present while giving a form to one's intangible past. To make the nation the focus of a historical writing is to underline this quandary, the same methodological quandary that in the fictional world of another historical moment made of Sherlock Holmes such an endearing hysteric. For the nation is an entity that, as Hobsbawm realized, escapes classification and ultimately resides beyond a simple subjective/objective reasoning. What a nation is, pure and simple, shall always remain just one step ahead of our inquiry as to what it is. In this respect our research into the phenomenon of the nation cannot but abandon any ambitions as to its identity, which entails that writing about the nation cannot but be, simultaneously, both historical and speculative, both empirical and sophistic. These conditions certainly do not make for an efficient discourse, nor, might I add, for a sufficient one. The task is polymorphous; therefore the path is polyvalent—circuitous, I would want to say in a straighter language. Indeed, opting for a circuitous path lays bare the scaffolding upon which all inquiries are based but which they usually prefer to repress—which is another way of saying, from the other end of the spectrum, that the author must remain attentive and alert to the various ways in which the labyrinthine object of inquiry engraves its own passage. The result is that the actual process of interrogation is implicated in a constant conversational barrage, forging a path through the crossfire between discourses that may not be necessarily rivals but are often unyielding companions. This precludes resolution and often postpones the exegesis of a particular theorization until it is tested by the specific demands of the problem at some other point in the text, a process

Prologue

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that admittedly risks being perceived as the forwarding of rather dogmatic assertions. However, this perception would materialize only if the argument were engaged in linear fashion, with an inveterate faith as to its progress. This text grows instead by a process of unraveling, delineating the argument as it is posed retroactively by the elisions of the problem itself. Like the desire whose dream it is, the national fantasy cannot be ultimately analyzed; it can only be traversed. This project adheres, by design, to a narrative without center, or more precisely, to a narrative whose own reality is an ever-wandering phantasm. Thus, the choice of characters, of places, of stories, of motifs, as objects of study, is a choice of chance.1 The narrative/theoretical logic remains entirely incidental, and as such the very form of each section invokes the geography of its particular ways of passage. It is like certain of Hanns Eisler's musical settings for Brecht's short meditations: the melody winds persistently elsewhere, until the lyric passage abruptly confronts its passing. As is inevitable for this kind of voyage, my narrative traverses the same ground over and over, with the uncanny compulsion that characterizes wrestling with any fantasy Yet with each return the tracks were lost, and with each loss the ground emerged intractable. What can perhaps be contemplated as a recurring landmark may be precisely the signs of this text's inevitably asymptotic approach to neohellenizein, to that practico-poietic activity of the modern Greek imaginary that can only be expressed in the verb s infinitive form. The voyage of writing thus hinges on its becoming the subject to the creative verb of history, which does not at all mean that this writing succumbs to being seduced into making the voyage from subjectification to subjugation, to the petrifying allure of some historical law. Indeed, thought plays the game of history, as it were, precisely in order to stop being medused. In this game, no one's cards are laid on the table, for the game is played without cards, which is to say that on the table are laid bare, interminably, only the gestures. i. "If chance did not exist, history would be magic," said Marx. In this, Marx understood well the radical contingency of history. (By implication, he also vocalized the strictly systemic nature of magic.)

CHAPTER

I

The Nation's Dream-Work

'The Great Wall of China' Perhaps the most astonishing discovery American astronauts made in space during NASA's pinnacle years was that, in looking back at the earth, the only trace of humanity they could discern was the Great Wall of China. From the point of view of outer space, the miracles of antiquity, even if delegated to a single representative, had prevailed over twentieth-century science in their hold on both time and distance. In the marketplace of signs, the astronauts had traded their sparkling metallic armor for a dark winding shadow, like a worm poised on a silk blue surface. It is of no consequence that the global memory from those days is distilled down to an American flag and some small steps. The Great Wall of China reemerged in the modern technological imagination by the sheer force of its mythic magnitude. Not surprising, for throughout history, whatever propels the grand scheme of technology has never ceased to yearn for the legendary. That the Great Wall of China was someday to grace the radio waves in outer space could well have been a secret fate shielded in the walls of the imperial logic which had given it shape. But the articulation of this fate, the language that bridged ancient time with technological time, could only have been found in the dissimulating imagination of Franz Kafka. In "The Great Wall of China" (1917), Kafka opts for a narrative cast under the spell of the formal element of legend, endowing it specifically with that uncanny atmosphere of myth that makes the imaginary of history palpable. Here, as in most of his works, the space-time dimension remains fabular; yet the mysterious and invisible mechanism of terror that prevails, for example, in his sketches of

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the institution of law gives way to an ineffable, infinitely prolonged surveying gaze that matches the vastness of the landscape. We are told right off that nothing about the Great Wall can ever be verified, since the Wall's relationship to time is inexhaustible. This is a structure that may take hundreds and hundreds of years to complete, absorbing the labor of an indefinite number of generations. So, these architects of legend decide that the Wall should be built in segments that are not built consecutively but are simultaneously executed in various distant parts of the empire. In reducing and localizing the mythic scale of this building process, the point is to make the idea of completion attainable and experiential, to make sure that the desire for building will not give in to the obliterating ghost of futility. In this sense, the Wall is a series of fragments that are supposed to be united into one whole structure at some point in time. Although this projected point in time is logically perceptible (by imaginary extension), it is ultimately inconceivable, for it undoes the structure of time itself. The Wall partakes of both infinite and fragmented time, which makes it both timeless and historical, strictly speaking. In the building of the Great Wall, historical order embraces the legendary; this is Kafka's profound mythistorical core.1 This dissolution of time may be what lies behind Kafka's famous parable of the imperial message. The messenger, who is entrusted directly from the dying Emperor's lips with the one message exclusively reserved for you—a lone subject somewhere out in that abyssal imperial terrain—never succeeds in breaking through the infinite folds of the imperial court, not even after an effort of a thousand years, carrying a message from a now long-dead man while "you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself" (Kafka 1971: 244). The impossibility of completing the singular route of the message, projected from Emperor to subject, is merely another image of the impossibility of building the Wall itself. For infinite time requires infinite space, and the Wall needs to occupy infinite space since it belongs to the order of the mythistorical. What does this mean? The nominal reason for building the Wall is to protect the Emperor from the enemies of the North (241)—although, in another version, it is also deemed to protect the Emperor from demons with black arrows (249), hardly a practical proposition. But we soon discover that the Emperor is himself merely a figure, meaning he may or may not exist in reality (246). In fact, whether he does so or not is irrelevant, for he has no reality (even if he exists); that is, his reality resides in his being an imaginary institution. This is signified by the parable, but also by a view of the empire as i. In Greek, mythistorema is the word for novel or fiction in general.

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The Nation's Dream- Work

a terrain of such magnitude that time itself is exhausted in attempting to cover it: "So vast is our land that no fable could do justice to its vastness, the heavens can scarcely span it—and Peking is only a dot in it, and the imperial palace less than a dot." The same regime of mythic proportions exerts its force on the Emperor as well: The Emperor as such, on the other hand, is mighty throughout all the hierarchies of the world: admitted. But the existent Emperor, a man like us, lies much like us on a couch which is of generous proportions, perhaps, and yet very possibly may be quite narrow and short. Like us he sometimes stretches himself and when he is very tired yawns with his delicately cut mouth. But how should we know anything about that—thousands of miles away in the south—almost at the borders of the Tibetan Highlands? (243)

Given this predicament, a structure built to protect something legendary can only be itself legendary—or fabular, whichever word we might choose. The Wall is like the Emperor; indeed, it is the ceaseless building of the figure of the Emperor, the interminable creation of the Emperor (while various Emperors and dynasties come and go, an inconsequential succession of mortal bodies, much like life itself). The Great Wall is thus the people's own creation (and not just because the people build it), erected in order to mask precisely the fact that the Emperor is also, ultimately, the people s creation. The Great Wall is built in order to occlude the fact that the Emperor is himself an object—the Sublime Object—of the people's imagination. This self-occultation is necessary, for were the fact of the self-creation of society to rise to the level of consciousness, it would be utterly devastating to the sustenance of the social order. Thus, the Wall is also built in order to act as Emperor in the strictest political sense, to be Emperor, to make certain that humanity's radical imagination—the anarchic impulse that reveals humanity's abyssal creative/destructive force—is contained. It is not surprising then that the initial stages of construction were enveloped in a theory proclaiming the Wall an extension of the Tower of Babel project—or better yet, a correction of the foundational weaknesses of the Tower of Babel project (239). But neither is it any less surprising that this theory was soon perceived as a "wild idea," hence an obstacle to successful building and thus swiftly abandoned. The self-containment of social imagination is a triumph of social order, for it nourishes power s legendary (fabular) status. In the end, the Great Wall is built not to defend the empire against its enemies—there are no enemies, Kafka tells us, or if they do exist they can easily bypass the Wall's piecemeal structure. Instead, the Wall is built so as to defend the empire against its own people, against their self-consciousness as archogenetic agents, as autonomous

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beings. In order for this self-defense—or rather, defense against the self—to be effective, enemies from the North (or wherever) must be invented. The Great Wall of China is really the constitutive object of fantasy that holds a society's imaginary together. Before it even begins to operate as a cultural symbol, it has already sealed the operation of the symbolic field. Which is to say, it is itself the condition of possibility for its own signification, whatever that might be at a given time. In this respect, the Great Wall of China provides a condensed but lucid illustration of the formal characteristics of the nation as a social phenomenon in the modern world. Every nation is a social-imaginary institution, delineated in each case by specific historical markings. But in addition, the Nation is in a formal sense a social-imaginary signification that presides over the historical terms in the institution of every nation. This is a basic premise in my investigation.2 The social-historical domain of every nation is located in the ensemble of discourses and figures that institute and then adhere to or hinge upon an exclusive axis of allowed versus forbidden national articulations. This axis is not written down as law, that is, textualized in some already posited representational structure. When it does surface as such in the various utterances (literary or otherwise) that signify the workings of a national canon, it is merely an afterword to its already implemented (instituted) state. The play along the axis of what is culturally allowed/forbidden cannot be actually perceived, since it cannot even be presented. It is a play of shadows, of phantasms and phantoms, inexhaustibly generated and projected beyond our individual subjective orientation within that national culture—despite the fact 2. This premise rests on the profound meditation on society's self-creation by the political philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, developed from drafts in the last two issues of the journal Sodalisme ou Barbarie (Paris, 1964-65) and later elaborated in VInstitution imaginaire de la sodete (Paris, 1975). It would take me far afield to embark here on even a cursory presentation of what is an immense and complex body of work. Castoriadis's thought is woven into my inquiry throughout. So as to avoid confusion, however, let me point out that my employment of the notion of "the imaginary" has nothing to do with its predominant uses in contemporary theory, most of which are Lacan-inspired. In what sense the two uses might differ I expect will become apparent as we traverse the terrain of this interrogation. Besides The Imaginary Institution of Society (1987), I suggest consulting Castoriadiss various essays on social-imaginary institution (1982; 1984^3; 1991: 33-80). Although Castoriadis's work is best left to speak for itself, see Howard (1988: 224-63, 320-38) for a comprehensive discussion of his positions. As far as elucidating Lacan s notion of the imaginary, I favor the later work, particularly the transcript from his R.S.I. Seminaire (1975), as well as those commentaries on Lacan that take as their point of departure the contemplation of the social-historical domain that is of concern here: namely, Slavoj Zizek's investigation of the object of ideology (1989), Teresa Brennan's eliciting from Lacan a definitive theory of history (1993), and Homi Bhabha's insights into LacanJs contribution to the understanding of colonial and postcolonial social/psychic relations (i989a, I99oa).

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The Nation fs Dream- Work

that, in order to orient ourselves within it, we must identify (and often identify with) its boundaries. In Castoriadis s words, "social imaginary significations do not exist strictly speaking in the mode of representation. . . . They denote nothing at all, and they connote just about everything. It is for this reason that they are so often confused with their symbols," which leads people to attribute to those symbols "a role and an effectiveness infinitely superior to those they certainly possess" (1987: 143). It is in this respect that social-imaginary signification is itself the condition of possibility for signification. A society's imaginary is the "ground" of that society's institution—a "ground" in the sense of the generative flux signified by the pre-Socratic notion of chaos: a signifying abyss. Moreover, while providing the "ground" for society's coherence, this social imaginary cannot ever exist outside the bounds of that society; it is, in other words, also instituted by that society. "The institution presupposes the institution; it cannot exist unless the individuals made by it make it exist" (Castoriadis 1982: 119). Castoriadis calls this simultaneous and mutual institution "the primitive circle of creation," a creation that does not have in any positive sense an^rigin, a source, a cause, an end, a "history"; it is a creation ex nihilo. In this sense, the creation of signification—thus, of society itself—has nothing to do with the theological notion of creation, which presupposes, by definition, a source outside itself, a quintessentially heteronomous origin''(see Castoriadis 1982; I984b: 146-47). It is the work of every national imaginary, however, to present this process of auto-institution as a heteronomous structure, covered in most cases by an array of national symbols and ritualistic practices that serve the wants and demands of a national idolatry. Presiding over this ritual of self-occultation is the State itself, which is not, as is usually believed, the energy source of every nation but rather the chief representative of each nations symbolic order in the geopolitical stock exchange. In defiance of the hyphenated couple that is so endearing to political scientists, the State is to the Nation what the Emperor is to the Great Wall. In both cases, it is the latter element that safeguards social order, insofar as it constructs the necessity for an Emperor or a State to which it delegates the organization of society s symbolic order. Like the Great Wall, the nation creates the notion of the external enemy in order to lend to the State (Emperor) legitimacy of rule. And like the Great Wall, the nation too is an object of social fantasy, more abstract perhaps in conception but no less concrete as a historical force. That the Great Wall of China, as I have invoked it here, has little to do with that miraculous achievement of Mandarin logic and is rather an imprint of Franz Kafka s astonishing imagination merely attests to literatures great capacity for

The Nation's Dream-Work

15

theory. And if Kafka's Great Wall makes for such an uncanny image of national fantasy, it is precisely because the Nation is such an elaborate mythistorical form. But the Great Wall of China exceeds not only its imperial conception but even Kafka's reconstitution of it; it is itself a historical entity of profound mythical force. It is astonishing to hear of the astronauts' discovery that the Great Wall of China is the only human trace on the earth s surface visible from outer space. But can it be more astonishing than hearing of NASA's later admission that it had in fact penned this discovery into the space script? Of course, no rule was sacred in the media buildup of the American space program as part of its Cold War propaganda. Except that there is something uncanny in both the object and the timing selected for this fantastic representation. The Great Wall of China, the mythical emblem of the great enemy from the East, the yellow hordes in a sea of red scarves, rises right out of the greatest cultural mystery in the eyes of twentieth-century Western history: Mao's Cultural Revolution. A splendorous trick of the Cold War imaginary, and we cannot but stand in awe before its inevitable logic: the fictionalized image of the most forbidden alone breaking the limits of the earthbound. The Nationalization of Imagined Communities What makes nations imagined communities, in Benedict Andersons classic description, is precisely what may be termed their mythistorical energy. When Anderson insists on the importance of temporal/spatial simultaneity in the making of every nation, he is describing this same peculiar conflation of past and future into a permanent present that Kafka perceives in his meditations on the Great Wall of China. In every nation, antiquity coexists with modernity but also with infinity; no nation can imagine its death. But it can imagine an existence before its historical birth, an ancestral essence. This essence exists in infinitely reproducible and plural form in one's fellow Greeks, Americans, Malaysians, and so on. Anderson is right to identify in this phenomenon the signifying universe of the newspaper. Newspapers are daily engaged in building the Great Wall, cultivating both the myth of the Emperor (in what's newsworthy) and the myth of empire (in the reading public). The Nation is just that social form in the age of Enlightenment (the age of disenchantment/ demythification, as Horkheimer and Adorno would say) that evolves a new way of producing myth. Therein lies the rise of the Nation as a new imaginary form—which is not at all to say that it is not real. This is a point I cannot emphasize enough. A social-imaginary institution is more real than the "real," To invoke the notion of social-imaginary

16

The Nation's Dream- Work

institution is to undo the problematic that is woven around a differentiation and counterposition between "real" and "imaginary." It is to enter instead a problematic where the two notions form a nodal point in the chain of signification, whose always partial or tentative "fixity" opens the domain where history may be (again partially and tentatively) articulated, where it may be rendered signifiable. For, as Castoriadis never fails to point out, the socialimaginary itself has no history because it is what makes history present, but also because it is history in the deepest sense and therefore cannot have a history as a content. The nation is thus a historical form through and through. It is historical not because it can be pinpointed in a precise region on the historical and geographical map of human civilization (which, in effect, it cannot be), but precisely because it is a social-imaginary institution. This is to say that every nation is instituted by the particular society that imagines itself as a nation. But it is also to say, simultaneously, that this nation institutes its social community as a national community. There is no precedence between these two modes; they are in a literal sense co-incidental3 This tautological proposition, in which, however, the two terms (the two moments) are never collapsible into one (for they are, after all, grammatically separate, if not antagonistic: to institute/to be instituted), figures as the core element in the advent of all nations and is the shared characteristic in every national imaginary A national imaginary however, insofar as it is given over to the articulation of an indisputable cultural identity, lends itself to an equally indisputable self-occultation. This self-instituted opacity of the logic of cultural identity that figures prominently in the operation of the national imaginary as an instituting force may be said to resemble the workings of a dream. Indeed, by history's own testimony, nations exist literally as dreams before they become politically and geographically signified as nations, so much so that their initial ideological act is to create institutions that will preserve, and reinvoke when necessary, the originary dream-state. This is the meaning of Benedict Andersons "imagined communities," which are "to be distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined" (1983: 15, my emphasis). Here the question of authenticity/reality is irrelevant; it operates as a displacement. The style is the specific form of self-presentation a 3. The notion of co-incidence, as I use it here and continue using it throughout this text, is inconceivable within a framework that comprehends history according to the demands of the logic of identity. Coincidence occurs in a magma of time, never in a succession of time. Because in history no event (or form or logic or pronouncement, etc.) occupies a designated place that is exclusively its own, a place in which it can identify itself entirely unimpeded by an Other.

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given (national) community recognizes as its own and, therefore, as unique. This form is arbitrary in its institution, yet necessary in the terms of that specific community. Whatever may be the infrastructural forces bearing on the formation of a national community at a given historical moment, it is imprudent to assume that these forces are not themselves subjected to the process of a particular nation's institution. For there can never be a point from which a precise sense of a national community's formation (a precise moment of its having been imagined) can be contemplated. As Etienne Balibar would put it, there is nothing in a social formation, no matter what its cohesion, that does not render its representation, its history, problematic, because what is really at stake is not the chronicle of its formation but the means (and ends) of the reproduction of its form.4 In this respect, nations are being constantly (re)formed as such, through the constant cultivation and recultivation of whatever signs can be served up as significations of "common interest." This process would be provocatively rendered by Balibars notion of "the nationalization of society" (1990: 34245), were we to let the notion resound in its political-economic sense, as it would traditionally be applied to capital. This process of nationalization, perhaps unlike the one pertaining to privately owned industry, does not take place as a result of some State decree, for the simple reason that the State is itself already "nationalized" in the very process of operating in the name of a certain nation. The State is in so many words the Nation s property (and not the other way around, as positivist sociology, Marxist or otherwise, has gotten us used to believing).5 Herein lies the significance of initiating a population census in France after the Revolution (1801): to take an inventory of that (national) property—the citizenry—which grants a signifying license to the State. The thrust of this nationalizing operation resides in the signification/ institution of "a common law" designating the boundaries and the elements of inclusion/exclusion that confer upon a social community its particular nationality. Such is the work of a national imaginary. This proposition, however, must not allow itself to be menaced by that demonic tendency to look 4. "The problem posed by the existence of social formations is not merely that of their beginning or their end, but primarily that of their reproduction, that is, the conditions under which they can maintain this conflictual unity which creates their autonomy over long historical periods" (Balibar 1990: 334—3 5). In other words, how Greece reproduces Greece (and what Greece becomes in this reproduction) is what is at stake here. 5, It is crucial to my argument here to let the word property resound in its double meaning: that is, both property as the quality of an object and property as the object of ownership.

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for origins, itself a notion dictated by the demands of identitary logic. An imagined community always imagines itself.6 In so doing, however, it must occlude this act by instituting itself as an ontological presence that has, somehow or other, always already existed. Hence the "origin" of the timeless and perpetual Nation, The first order of a national imaginary is to institute its own People: the unifying signifier through which a nation can be identified as such, which is to say, can render its geographical presence palpable. Balibar s crucial insight here is that, given the inescapable problem of a socially and culturally heterogeneous population in every community, this process of unification under the imaginary signifier "the people" takes place "not by suppressing all differences, but by relativizing them and subordinating them to itself [the nation] in such a way that it is the symbolic difference between 'ourselves* and 'foreigners' which wins out and which is lived as irreducible" (1990: 347). The invention of every national people belies a fundamental ideological displacement from an intradifferential to an extradifferential condition. This is why every nation boasts of an indigenous homogeneity (or if needs be, homogenization), whether it be ancestral blood or a melting pot. The logic of this displacement is strictly identitary Not only must "the people" be instituted, but the very process of institution must itself testify that "the people's" national identity has always already been there. In other words, the institution of a "national people" is itself a chronicle of the language of exclusion/exclusivity. To be more precise, the key question in the institution of a nation is how the people can be "made" to institute and continually reinstitute itself as and through an always already exclusively identifiable national community. That is why Balibar argues that "every national community must have been represented at some point or another as a 'chosen people' " (1990: 348), But he also adds that a society's process of self-nationalization is always essentially delayed, "so delayed that it ultimately appears as an endless task" (344), Hence the necessity for the interminable reelection of a people as chosen, as unique—"interminable" because it lasts as long as the production of "the people's" community is necessary, which is to say, the span of this community's existence. National Sovereignty as Heteronomy This exclusivity or uniqueness is very much intertwined with the notion of sovereignty and freedom, which for Anderson is the constitutive dream of 6. This is the substance of Partha Chatterjee's significant critique of Anderson (Chatterjee 1986; 1993).

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every nation: "nations dream of being free" (1983: 16). But national sovereignty is, philosophically, an oxymoronic notion. Because when totally sovereign—assuming that such a political state can exist at all—a nation is at its full closure. It is tantamount to a perfectly transparent dream interpretation, which is to say, an entity at the zero point of self-occultation, a system concealed within its own interpretative boundaries that translates or transforms whatever happens to enter its world into its own terms. In this respect, national sovereignty—whose very signification, let us not forget, is guaranteed by the unquestionable presence of the national State apparatus—is by and large, philosophically speaking, perfect heteronomy. At this point, parenthetically and preemptively, I should make clear that this does not mean to discount either those revolutionary movements that aim at what is called national independence, or the (strictly speaking) political importance of the drive for sovereignty itself, or even the significance of national consciousness at such historical moments, Frantz Fanon, for one, has spoken thoughtfully on precisely this issue (1968). But the problem painfully registers itself once so-called "sovereignty" is achieved. As the overwhelming majority of situations of postcolonial independence shows, the signs of national culture (of society's nationalization) seem to fall inevitably into the hands of the ruling State, where they become an integral part of the very mechanisms of ruling. Let us consider for a moment Fanon's position in this matter more explicitly For Fanon, the problem of postcolonial co-optation is resolved with a relatively standard Marxist analysis: the national bourgeoisie that takes over in a postcolonial society is in all respects an undeveloped and therefore inauthentic bourgeoisie—the standard being, as always in elementary Marxist logic, the industrial bourgeoisie of the West, the colonialist bourgeoisie itself. Fanon hurls a truly ominous critique at the postcolonial bourgeoisie (which he calls variously "decadent," "useless," "stupid," etc.) by attributing to it a fundamental incapacity to act on its own, a most radical lack of independence, which results in its reproducing the worst kind of "colonial mimicry"—to use Homi Bhabha's celebrated phrase—in the process of ruling an allegedly independent nation (1968: 148-205). Although Fanons analysis of the postcolonial ruling bourgeoisie cannot be faulted in its basic terms (its implicit stagist determinism notwithstanding), it is nonetheless motivated by the identitary logic of the Nation-form. He argues explicitly for a social organization that would "make possible the existence of an authentic national culture" (175). Although an internationalist by conviction, Fanon retains in his thought the universalist aspects of national logic, the very social-imaginary that buttresses the enterprise of colonialism: "It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows" (247-48). Despite his remark-

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able insight into the many residual problems of colonization, Fanon still subscribes to the nation as that mechanism fundamental and necessary (even if only as a transitional historical phase) to society's self-determination, to social autonomy. I point this out in full cognizance of the great historical exigencies of Fanon's time and place, acknowledging full well that without Fanon's revolutionary vision, thinking through nationalism s trappings would be a dire task. No doubt, one cannot simply equate the concept of the nation regnant in nineteenth-century Europe with the one employed during the struggles against colonialism. In identifying an "anticolonial nationalism" springing from what he calls the domain of "spiritual culture," Partha Chatterjee speaks of a national imagining that coalesces before the anticolonial struggle begins and of a nation that achieves sovereignty precisely because it resides in the margins of colonial power (1993). So long as the hegemonic signs of power remain in defiance, national sovereignty of this sort is possible, as is always the case in a revolutionary situation. But how can this revolutionary defiance be reconciled with the governing power of official nationhood, especially since, in Chatterjee's own terms, the dissociation between the autonomous imagination of the (national) community and the vision (and later, reality) of the postcolonial state is irrevocable? This contradiction is the crux of the problem. For, at the point of official nationhood, whatever power is embodied in the communal imagining slips behind the facade of an awarded name and nag and empties out into an international form of power (the Nation), whose loyal servant is the State apparatus. This, I believe, is not a matter of negotiation, but it is philosophically endemic to the Nation-form, at least in its historical life so far. What do I mean by this? I shall provide an answer by deferring to Carl Schmitt's crucial reflections, written in the early 19205, on the concept of sovereignty as a politico-philosophical problem. In Schmitt's conservative political universe, sovereignty entails the proper foundation of State rule. His definition is clear-cut: "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception," the exception being what is characterized by a "principally unlimited authority, which means the suspension of the entire existing order" (1988: 5, 12). Schmitt's notion of the state of exception is primarily designed to dismantle whatever pretensions might exist for a normative, natural law as the governing principle of society and politics. Schmitt recognizes the inevitability of social struggle as the basic characteristic of all societies, a fact that for him can be neither disproven nor denied nor overcome. Yet, insofar as he subscribes to an ethics of security and order, he grounds his thought in the necessity of containing social struggle. This clearly historicist understanding

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of society thus leads him, paradoxically, to a statist metaphysics, insofar as he relegates to the State, not society, the domain wherein the contradictions of history are resolved. Hence Schmitt's undeniable conservative legacy. In the process, however, his theory demonstrates what liberalism veils with its myriad lullabying techniques: that the sovereign State is actually an expression of heteronomous society. There are two levels on which this is affirmed. For one, Schmitt posits his entire theorization on the premise that "the State suspends the law in the exception on the basis of its right of self-preservation" (12, my emphasis). The key assumption underlying this notion is that again the State, not civil society, holds the monopoly on the essence of political decision. There is a desire here for order and for the guarantee of order—that is, for order unimpaired by the multifarious demands of a society that will never be sufficiently homogeneous and free of conflict to guarantee an appropriate and prompt political decision. Thus, the realm of decision, which is otherwise the realm of jurisprudence in an ideal ("normal") situation, during the moment of exception ("sovereign rule") belongs to the State. For Schmitt, the problem with the liberal bourgeois State, and with liberalism in general as a sociopolitical discourse, resides in the fact that the bourgeoisie, as a fundamentally "discussing class," is given over to a radical indecisionism and is thus unable to cope efficiently with social conflict (1988: 58-6o).7 Schmitt's theory leads to a conceptualization of the sovereign State as an effectively divine order, free only in its hermetically sealed self-referentiality, in its positing itself as society*s impassable Outside at society's very core. This comes as the inevitable conclusion to his documentation of the decline in the theory of the State initiated by the Enlightenment and its substitution of organic models of rule over decisionist ones (1988: 36-52). Schmitt sees in Enlightenment secularism an outright mystification, concluding, "all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts" (36). This is so not merely by virtue of the historical force of the Enlightenment's shift from an apocalyptic to a rationalist metaphysics, but more importantly by virtue of modern political theory's very systematicity— by its willful reliance on identitary logic. The trajectory of Schmitt's thought leads him finally to proclaim, "the exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology" (36). This notion seals the obsessions of Schmitt's project, but it also simultaneously 7. In Greek, we would say that the bourgeoisie lacks krisis—it is an uncritical class. The fact that the emergence of liberal bourgeois rule co-incides with the emergence of criticism as a professional discipline, codified and practiced outside the realm of everyday life, makes for an inarguable demonstration of this historical marking.

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unlocks our way to the paradox of national sovereignty as heteronomy. By this analogy, Schmitt affirms that sovereignty ("the state of exception") is as such miraculous, insofar as it occupies the space of the absolutely redemptive moment in the face of social annihilation, in the face of death. This is so because Schmitt's analysis of society is always conducted from the point of view of the preservation of social order (mis)understood as the point of view of the preservation of society. Walter Benjamin, who in his youth was very much influenced by Schmitt s writings, provides us near the end of his hapless life—living indeed the epitome of the state of exception—with a response that strips away from Schmitt this redemptive moment. I am referring to Benjamin's famous statement in his "Theses on the Concept of History": "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' [exception] in which we live is not the exception but the rule*' (1969: 257). The difference is simple: the point of view that comes with the tradition of the oppressed always eluded Schmitt. Thus, for Schmitt, sovereignty becomes the supreme theological moment: the miracle that attests to the impossibility of transcending heteronomy, to the acceptance, without explanation or justification, of the absolutist salvation sought in the Other's decision.8 From the point of view of the citizen, then, a sovereign nation appears to stand in the place of God, despite the fact that it speaks an essentially secular language: the language of the social, of the historical. National sovereignty partakes, in essence, of a "political theology." The secularization of knowledge which characterizes the Enlightenment project gives to the Nation a logos and to the logos of the Nation a historical alibi. The nationalization of society, which guarantees the sovereignty of a nation both at the level of signification and at the level of social practice, may thus be said to consist in the elevation of the People to the position of the Sovereign (King, thus God), so as to secure the constitution of "the people" as 8. As another angle, consider for a moment Georges Bataille's thesis identifying the sphere of mysticism (the "theopathic state**) with complete sovereignty: a state in which "the subject becomes passive and suffers what happens to him with a kind of immobility" (1986: 249). In spite of his own implicit desires to inscribe in mysticism a transcendent position of power, Bataille's actual conceptualization of the matter reveals sovereignty's profound link to heteronomy. Whether it be the case of a mystic order or of citizenship in the republic (both imaginary incarnations of the Marquis de Sade, according to Bataille's genealogical frame), sovereignty entails what I see as a narcissistic submission to something profoundly Other: "In the sphere of mysticism we reach complete sovereignty. . . . The object of contemplation becomes equal to nothing (Christians would say equal to God), and at the same time equal to the contemplating subject" (1986: 249). We shall return to this issue, specifically the relation between mystic writing and the national imaginary, in the discussion of Makriyiannis in Chapter 5 below.

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chosen, protected, and obedient citizens—to secure their institution and signification both as the Nation's property and as national property. We need only recall what is underlined in Article III of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen: "The nation is essentially the source of all sovereignty; nor can any INDIVIDUAL or ANY BODY OF MEN be entitled to any authority which is not expressly derived from it." There cannot be a more concise expression of heteronomy in a language that disdains with rage any kind of metaphysical order. How can this paradox be accounted for? Balibar is right on mark when he characterizes the Declaration of 1789 as a hyperbolic proposition (i99ia). The locus of his analysis is the conjunction that links man and citizen together in a relationship that demands both equivalence and difference, where the two terms supplement each other, which means that both run in excess of their own domains and conversely (by the same logic) that both are inadequate without each other. Balibar ascribes to this particular historical event (which is not 1789 per se but which defers to 1789 as its primary reference point) an epistemic rupture in the psychopolitical sphere where the citizen comes to occupy the position of the subject (the governed subject—namely, the object of sovereign power, the feudal /Christian subjectus), marking in the process the passage to a new form of political subjectivity (the agent of political power, subjectum). This passage from the adjective to the substantive position of subject via the revolutionary properties of the citizen lies at the heart of the problem of national sovereignty as heteronomy At first glance, it would seem that the elevation of the people to the position of sovereign (which is what warrants the new designation: citizen) grants them the space of unharnessed subjective action (autonomy). Certainly, despite occupying the position of the king, the citizens do not simply inherit the properties of divine power (nemos empsychos or lex animata) that inform the sovereign of feudal order. Instead, a significant dislocation in the terminology of rule, in the political idiom itself, takes place, if only because the body of the king—the signifier animated (in-spired) by the law of God—is irreparably violated/The institution of the citizen appears to put an end to the divine delegation of rule (hence the symbolic necessity of renaming the King Citizen Capet before the necessity of dispensing with him altogether), and it does so in two ways: first, by lending each citizen the properties of legislator and second, by making legislation the work of a plural political subject, a new domain in which all individuals are bound together by virtue of political equivalence. This relationship is founded on an inveterate paradox brought about by inserting the principle of equivalence into the conceptual field of sovereignty,

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traditionally a hierarchical domain. It is "the paradox of sovereign equality" (Balibar 19913: 45), a paradox encapsulating the shift in society's imaginary relation to power, which generates in turn the problematic of national sovereignty. This shift consists in the internalization of power taking place along with the institution of national sovereignty: the making of power into an entity immanent to the state of national sovereignty. What regulates the shift resides in the new institutional configuration of law in relation to the new subjectivity entailed by the citizen—or seen from another angle, the place the law occupies in the new process of subjectification. However, to say that the law becomes immanent to the citizen is surely not to say that it becomes incorporated (nomos empsychos), but rather to say that both citizen and law coincide under a singular sign of value. In other words, as part of its dismantling the ancien regime, the French Revolution articulated textuatly (legally, constitutionally) a denial of power's externality and thus instituted a heteronomous order with the signs of autonomy: the Republic—the People's State, the Nation. What allegedly desacralized the old feudal order was a shift in the society's imaginary regarding the signs of sovereign rule, from overt divine inspiration to implied legal guarantee. The Revolution did succeed in de-Christianizing the State but certainly failed to desacralize society, for it merely displaced the metaphysics of power from an external source to an internal condition, Brian Singer, in his groundbreaking work on the social imaginary of the French Revolution, locates this matter perfectly in his contention that it is the imaginary of national sovereignty that institutes the Revolution and not the other way around, insofar as it is national sovereignty as power made immanent to society that forms the Revolutions central condition of possibility (1986: 85—87). 9 The Permutations of Belief Supposing that the Nation's actual, horizon of possibility resides in the domain of "political theology" makes it possible to understand that the socialimaginary significations guiding the experience of nationality exercise an 9. Derrida argues along similar lines when he recognizes the signature(s) to the American Declaration of Independence as the event of independence, of citizenship in the new republic (1986). Nonetheless, insightful though his observations may be (especially regarding the tremendous legal burden that the American citizen's signature carries), his insistence on the primacy of the proper Name—the last instance of which is God—shields from him the corrosive energy of the social imaginary that opens the space for the signature. The American Declaration of Independence may indeed institute a People by virtue of those representative signateurs who sign in the people's name, but independence is itself instituted before it is declared, before it becomes textualized in the signature, by the very nameless act of daring to imagine the people in the place of the king.

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institutional force similar to the social-imaginary significations that orient and guide religious belief. In other words, national institution cannot be seen merely as the configuration of a political ideology rising out of the will of a given ruling class, nor even the prevalent ideological mode of a society at a certain moment in history. The vision of national identity as it arises within the European domain of thought (which would include the domain of its New World colonial thinkers: Thomas Jefferson, Toussaint UOuverture, Simon Bolivar), is neither so simply the consequence or production of Reason, nor the result of the institution of capitalist social relations. It is possible to say that the institution/signification of nationality and national culture lies, strictly speaking, beyond the work of reason. It (presup)poses instead, as a fundamental element of its social imagination, the rational exegesis of its nonrational history: "If nation-states are widely conceded to be 'new' and 'historical,' the nations to which they give political expression always loom, out of an immemorial past, and, still more important, glide into a limitless future, It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny" (Anderson 1983: 19, my emphasis). The operative framework of nationality may be thus construed as a condition of beliefs, in the way that Michel de Certeau has identified the operation of belief: namely, as that which "occurs between the recognition of an alter ity and the establishment of a contract" (1985:192). One's nation then, as an imaginary reality, is an otherness—no one but the most ambitiously hyperbolic poets thinks of one's self as a nation—to which a "native" relates commercially. It is a relationship of exchange of credibility that relies on one's recognition by the nation in exchange for one's loyalty as a national subject. It is this act of belief (credo) that constitutes the basis for a relationship of exchange between the national subject and his or her imagined community.10 This is a relationship based on credit, one s purchase of recognition of oneself as a legitimate national subject in exchange for one's pledged loyalty: "an acquisition of a right [that] has the value of a 'receipt' " (de Certeau 1985: 193). This is precisely why an antinationalist opposition is always, legally, constituted as treason (although whether it is pursued and executed as such depends largely on the specific historical circumstances that may place the cohesion of the national imaginary in danger). However, this reciprocation between nation and "national subject" does not entail an open exchange, an exchange in which all cards are laid out on the table. It is in a sense an exchange between commodities, insofar as the "national subject" is already, by virtue of being credited as such by his or her 10. For the etymological associations of the word credo—credence, credibility, credit, etc.— and its implications in one's relation to history, see de Certeau s superior analysis (1985).

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nation, a commodity. Thus, one's experience of nationality can be imagined as akin to one s experience of cornmodification, which is an overall perplexing affair.11 It is only in this sense that nationality can be described, in Slavoj Zizek's terms, as "ideological" meaning "a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence" (1989: 21). For in the process of embracing this belief in a community's nationality, one suspends his access to the knowledge that this community (and thus this nationality) is in fact imagined, much in the same way one suspends his own credibility when he makes a pact with divinity in religious belief. These are the practical dimensions of a national cultures self-occultation. This self-occultation inherent in the institution of nationality resembles the one inherent in the institution of religion: granting a name or a topos to what occludes the (social) Chaos that initiates it. The social-historical logic of national culture, founded primarily on the allegedly ontological relation between a people and a language (which nineteenth-century secular theologists would "discover" to have been instituted without the permission of God), is thus no less an imaginary institution, despite its hiding behind such secular notions as "Reason," "the laws of nature" or "the laws of history" This is because, to borrow Castoriadis's terminology, a nation, just like a religion, assigns to the social Chaos the "sacred names/figures or places of existence, incarnations or texts/words that reveal it" as a nation (Castoriadis 1982: 126). The fact that the emergence of the nation as a cohesive social-historical practice seems to have co-incided with the reorganization of certain societies in the West into "secular bourgeois" societies does not preclude the contention that, as a social-imaginary signification, the nation might be instituted in a process akin to that of religion, I underline this point in order to preempt any misrecognition of my associating national culture with religion as an extension of that kind of judgment usually conferred upon, for example, Islamic nations. In terms of their social-imaginary institution, say, the Islamic Republic of Iran is not any more or any less religious (and conversely any more or any less secular) than the United States. This assertion does not claim any sort of profundity. Consider, for one, Marx s lesson in The i8th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, where constitutional law (the Napoleonic Code) becomes actually comprehensible as bourgeois society's new Holy Scripture. This is not to say that the nature of national consciousness is essentially ii. I am certainly not implying here that the contractual nature of belief is an offspring of commodification—thus, a relatively modern phenomenon. On the contrary, if I may risk the speculation, the overall triumph of commodification in modern societies owes a great deal to the entrenched experience of the contractual nature of belief upon which religious societies were founded. That is, the culture of commodities may have found there an infrastructure equally (if not more) amenable to its demands than capitalist relations of production.

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religious, or anything of the kind. The allegedly religious essence of national consciousness is characteristic of a modern sensibility, unfamiliar with the multireligious, multicorporate State, the most refined example of which is the Ottoman millet system (see Hobsbawm 1990: 69-73). It is obvious, however, that no nation could exist without its set of holy icons—the most compelling of which is- a rectangular piece of colored fabric, which duly comes with its own history (an iconography) and a prescribed ritual of worship (an iconolatry). The flag, which is the most widely recognized and respected idol in the modern world, may be the exemplary intersecting point between national consciousness and religious belief. Because what operates behind every religion—monotheistic religion especially—is society's mode of idolatry: "All religion is idolatry—or it is not a religion that is socially effective. In religion, the words themselves—the sacred words—function, and cannot but function, as idols" (Castoriadis 1982: 127). This is precisely why to be incredulous in the face of nationalist discourse is to bear the distinguishing mark of an infidel. Thus, interrogating the institution of national culture makes it imperative to understand the self-sufficient nature of a society's life of idolatry One of the most elaborate moments of national idolatry would have to be the occasion of Voltaire's funereal induction into the Pantheon in revolutionary Paris (1791), with the statues and icons of French Enlightenment figures in the front lines of the processional. Greece, like most countries, provides a dispersed manifestation of the same impulse: the Neohellenic fondness for erecting everywhere statues of heroes. But presiding over all these idols is the ubiquitous Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the most bizarre monument to sublime emptiness—the void at the heart of the Nation—in the history of human societies; to even think of repleting this cenotaph with actual bones or the grace of a name is the utmost sacrilege, as Anderson duly observes (1983: 18—20). Still, the most refined idolatry would have to be modern society's monotheistic propensity itself: the idolization of what is unplaceable, unrepresentable, unnameable. One could argue—and the profound roots of Christian Fundamentalism in the United States would make a good case—that all nations, at their most insular core, are still seeking to appropriate monotheistic desire. In an increasingly global state of affairs, which brings one's cultural identity to par with the commodity, the national psyche yearns for the legitimacy of patrimony and dreams incessantly of an Egyptian Moses.12 12. Here it should be made clear that the idolatrous, and indeed the heteronomous, foundation of religion neither contradicts nor precludes its formative force as a revolutionary signifier in certain specific social-historical contexts, as Stuart Hall has demonstrated to be the case in Jamaica (1985). A careful reading of Hall's article would bear this out on several points: the

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The Nation as Dream In a later addition (1925) to, 77^ Interpretation of Dreams, Freud makes this well-known assertion (which is in fact a paraphrase from Aristotle): "Dreams are nothing but a particular/arm of thinking, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep" (1965: 545n). I find this intriguing even beyond its professed object and I cite it paradigmatically, transfiguring Freud's insight into a methodological condition for the problematic of the nation. The point is to explain not so much the content of national formation (its relation to capitalism, for example) as the selection of this form called the nation as a particular means of organizing a community or a society, which may or may not show preference for capitalist social relations, depending on its own particular history's overdeterminations.13 To investigate the secret of the Nation/dream as a form means to explore the kind of mysterious iconography or language of idolatry that accounts for a nation s social-imaginary institution and hence its historical being. This mystery, which contains a particular society's process of "selecting" the nation as its form, may be deemed this society's (nation's) dream-work—if we may pursue the paradigm further, as it is articulated by Freud s next sentence in the same passage: "It is the dream-work which creates that form [the dream], and it alone is the essence of dreaming—the explanation of its peculiar nature" (1965: 545n). In other words, the formal peculiarity of the Nation as a social creation may be said to reside precisely in the nationalizing operation itself, in the process by which a society institutes its members as national subjects. This operation consists in fashioning a historically specific nationalfantasy: the axis around which an experience of nationality is woven. The life of this web— which in another language could just as easily be called a nation's Phantasiebildung—is best elucidated by reference to the peculiar attributes of the dream-work process itself "infinitely mixed lineage" of religious significations; their "multi-accentual character"; their nonlinear and noncausal relation to class ideologies; and their essentially imaginary operation, which is more real than the "real": "In a language literally inaccurate and untrue, many black people have been empowered to define for themselves, make sense of and interpret a historical experience of which their everyday 'language' did not, for many years, enable them to speak at all or which imposed on them alien categories" (294). Concurring with Hall, I would simply underline that because the "untrue" is, historically speaking, more real than the "real" does not mean it is any less untrue. 13. The intentionality of the language here is an unavoidable grammatological consequence, invoking an active voice but not meant to be taken at face value. Obviously, no society "selects*' its forms any more (or any less) than its forms "select" it.

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Freud was succinct on the nondiscursive nature of the dream-work, which, albeit contingent on the subject's unconscious thinking processes, nevertheless remained something fundamentally different. For Freud, the processes of the dream-work were essentially {cartographic, even when the dream material itself may have been verbal or discursive: "It is very noteworthy how little the dream-work keeps to the word-presentations; it is always ready to exchange one word for another till it finds the expression which is most handy for plastic representation. . . . For a dream all operations with words are no more than a preparation for a regression to things" (1984: 23637). What is especially striking in this assertion is the insistence on what Freud has called elsewhere "the dream-work's considerations of representability" (1965: 545). That is, the force exercised by the dream-work's main configurations of desire (displacement, condensation) can best be understood and interpreted as a condition of the dream's presentation and representability. Simply put, "the dream-work is not a language: it is the effect on language of the force exerted by the figural (as image or as form)'* (Lyotard 1983: 32). The point is crucial, for insofar as the emergence of a nation as a specific social-historical form is linked to society's general imaginary institution, it cannot be reduced merely to an ensemble of texts or specific discursive practices (though it undoubtedly partakes of them in numerous ways). A nation's actual socialhistorical emergence is the projection of a particular national imaginary, in the cinematic as well as the psychoanalytic sense of the term.14 This presupposes that we understand the dream-works presence not as the work of interpretation of the dream thoughts, or even as a figural transcription of them, but as an act of transgression of the dream space, as the institutional process of the dream thoughts. For insofar as the dream is a configuration of desire, it is not the content of the dream that serves as the expression of this desire. It is the act of dreaming itself, the particular path the dream-work forges through the territory of desire, that accounts for desire's signification. The apparent readability of the dream is pseudoreadability because the content of a dream is ultimately not a text but an object, whose textual intelligibility is but an affect made necessary by the demands of a thought-producing consciousness in its desire to emerge from sleep.15 In this 14. "A dream is, among other things, a projection: an externalization of an internal process" (Freud 1984: 231). 15. Herein lies the importance Freud attributed to secondary revision, whether this is considered a process belonging to dream-work or not, a point on which Freud never quite decided (see 1965: 528n). Indeed, secondary revision, in all its ambivalence as a dream process, may be a way to conceptualize and describe the relation between the writing of a national history and the nation as a dream form. We shall take this up in detail in Chapter 7 below.

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sense, the dream is an edifice, an affective^wre, which cannot be interpreted as such, although it can certainly be an object of interpretation, a figure upon which interpretation may be exerted, exercised: a project. Incidentally, we might say that it is precisely upon this exertion/exercise that the project of psychoanalysis is based epistemologically—that is, it rests upon the notion that interpretation is there and possible in the last instance. If this is true at all, it would be true only insofar as "from the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the 'last instance' never comes." One could well consider that this famous remark from Louis Althusser (1977: 113), crucial to his recasting of the Freudian notion of overdetermination, was an act of interpretation of the project of psychoanalysis as well as of the project of politics. Freud had wrestled with this chimera on his own, which led him to identify that one uninterpretable core he called "the navel of the dream," but the epistemological consequences for psychoanalysis of presupposing a forever unrealizable last instance of interpretation were not, for obvious reasons, fully addressed. In any case, this condition of a dreams permanently deferred interpretability, which is always invoked under the affectation of interpretation, is perfectly applicable to the nation as a social-imaginary form. As form, the Nation is fundamentally unintelligible. Or more precisely: a nation cannot be read as a text; even if it were to make seme, we would distrust it. This is why it is decisive to perceive the formal nature of the nation as akin to that of a dream. Attributing to the national imaginary the characteristics of an exclusively discursive formation is not fair to its complexity. The emphasis must shift from nation-as-text to nation-as-dream, which is to say that those texts bearing the nation's mark may ultimately be seen as descriptions of the nation's dream thoughts, thus figural transcriptions (prone to disguise and occultation—secondary revision) of the nation s dream-work. In this respect, I remain unconvinced by the explicit association—especially to the degree that it becomes exclusive—of the nation with narration, a point that remains the grounding of various arguments on the subject, Although no doubt there is something to what Timothy Brennan has named "the national longing for form," I would be reluctant to see in this form the prevalence of the novel, as he definitely goes on to argue: "The novel implicitly answers [the nation's] questions in its very form by objectifying the nation's composite nature" (1990: 51), The Nations fiction is narrative only partially and tentatively, and a nation is fictional only figuratively, which is to say, finally, that the Nation's narrative, theform that its fiction takes, is none other than the self-occultation of its dream-work turned into a narrative.16 16. This would not necessarily contradict Balzac's famous maxim "the novel is the private history of nations," which has much more to say about history than about the novel. To trespass

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Thus, if Neohellenisrn, for example, is characterized as a national discourse, it cannot be substituted directly for all those figures (images, icons, symbols) or words—so long as they are perceived as objects, as signs of idolatry— that signify a Neohellenic imaginary. Neohellenism is the language of the national dream-thoughts, or more precisely yet, the textualized thoughts of the nation's dream-work. As such, modern Greece itself, as an imaginary territory (which may or may not correspond to its actual political and geographical boundaries), can never be reduced to, and never be contained in, the sum of those texts, discourses, or, more generally, cultural practices that account for its historical record. That is to say, Greece (or any nation, for that matter) cannot be reduced to or contained in its history. It is something more, something else. Or, simultaneously with its being there (in history, in geography—in a narrative), it is elsewhere. This may be another way to recognize the simultaneous variability (historicity) and invariability (transhistoricity) of the Nation as a form that Regis Debray insists on (1977: 26). There is a crucial difference, however, which is why I have opted for the more difficult and elusive notion of "elsewhere" as opposed to "invariant" or "transhistorical" as others are wont to call it. In positing this double sense of the nation, Debray hopes to capture its dialectical nature, as it were, "the delimitation between what is inside and outside [an organism]," both of which are necessarily within that organism's being (28). But this is precisely what makes of the nation a transcendental entity, an organism with an invariant core, which places thus its boundless energy at the hands of both the nationalists and the internationalists in whom Debray recognizes himself. Debray here repeats Fanon's argument, yet sets it outside its dire historical predicament—in Paris, 1977. The implications can be read clearly in the retrospective of Debray's travels in theory (and practice). The important point is this: In being also an elsewhere, the Nation may in fact elude its strictly historicist characterization (which spelled out the disastrous incapacity of Marxist politics to understand the Nation and come to terms with its power), but it also eludes its becoming ontologized. For an elsewhere is neither inside nor outside, neither variable nor invariable. It is the way of a social-imaginary institution; that is, it is both instituted (by a specific society) and instituting (of this specific society) in a simultaneous, as it were, set of historical gestures. Again, the Nation as a form is historical through and through, both because it can be pinpointed somewhere within history (say for a nation's privacy by means of narrative is tantamount to beguiling its dream thoughts. It is to become part of the dream-work. The pinnacle of this narrative seduction of the figural is to be found in the writing of national history, a genre of literature that is as confessional as it is fantastic.

32

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argument's sake, in the range of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and its American colonies) and also because it does not hesitate to constitute itself by appropriating—and hence extending, revivifying—the histories of various modes of previous social organization (whether the nomadic tribe, the polls, the family, the religious community, the monarchy, the empire, etc.). This appropriation may account for the compulsive attachment to one's nation as the point of recognition of the inviolable particularity of one s community, by simultaneously affirming one's desired membership in that community and one's terror of the membership's being constantly open to question; this attachment grants nationalism its stunning irrational violence. The nation becomes, in a formal sense, the traumatic object (the NationThing, as Zizek calls it) that organizes not only a national community's enjoyment of itself (and enjoyment in itself) but also one s terror at the prospect of nation s violation by the Other. Hence the terror unleashed (often preemptively) upon all others who might be construed as threats. Preemptive annihilation of the Other is the signifying basis of every ideology of expansionism and of military discourse in general. Zizek is right to assert that "a nation exists only so long as its specific enjoyment continues to be materialized in certain social practices, and transmitted in national myths that structure those practices" and that "nationalism presents a privileged domain of the eruption of enjoyment into the social field" (ipQob: 53). However, this is so only if enjoyment is understood as a social-imaginary institution, therefore as an absolutely historical condition, and not as an entity subjected to the demands of some transhistorical Real, even if that is construed as the unsignifiable and chaotic domain of the psyche, as Zizek definitely implies (52-54). For the psyche, even as that unconquerable kernel of human imagination that makes the social-historical possible as such, is itself subjected to the demands of the social-historical—which in turn makes the psyche possible as such, that is, makes the psyche human (see Castoriadis 1982; 1987: 273-339). The Nation occupies precisely this socialhistorical elsewhere, and this social-historical elsewhere in turn constitutes the "ground" on which the national fantasy is created and represented, the "ground" that makes the experience of nationality possible. The Fantasy of Nationality In this respect—abyssal though its object may be—the inquiry into the "ground'* of the national fantasy is indeed topological. For what has to be determined lies not in the unconscious operations of nationality per se (the

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necessary self-occultation of every "national subject" in his or her experience of belonging to a defined community), but in the location (however indeterminate) of that allegedly homogeneous plurality, the we, within which a particular kind of I is instituted. Indeed, the characteristically murky process of "the nationalization of society" aspires to the exclusive encoding of this we, a phantasm (presup)posed continuously both as origin and as aim. Thus, to the degree that one can claim to experience a sense of nationality, one signifies in the name of (or as the property of) the individual citizen, the institution of a nationalized subject. This mode of signification is apparent in the official language of the national State apparatus regarding the citizenship of nonindigenous peoples. Although the policy addressing who is and who is not allowed the privilege of citizenship differs according to a nations particular laws, the terminology describing those who are finally allowed the privilege is quite revealing: they are naturalized citizens. That is, they become people whose subjectivity conforms to the nature of the society that grants them citizenship, a nature that allows for their subjectivity to be nationalized.17 Political naturalization may be obvious in the case of a nominally secular society such as the United States, whose nature is ideally instituted as an assimilative, nondifferential diversity: the melting pot. But it is also operative in societies whose national ideologies are predicated on a principle of metaphysical homogeneity, a nature a priori, whether this is in fact tribal/arch-cultural (e.g., Israel and Zionism) or ethnically/culturally homologous (e.g., Greece and Neohellenism). What differentiates these cases is that the secular (legal) attributions of nature to one s nationality are deemed secondary to those sanctioned by an ascendant essentialist identity, the property (of nature) bequeathed by ancestry. Consider, for example, Uri Eisenzweig s striking insight into this phenomenon in reference to the historical and conceptual problematic of Zionist discourse. Eisenzweig zeros in on two fundamental preconditions of this discourse. First is "the geographical concentration of that which is spatially dispersed" (1981: 261), meaning in effect that the Diaspora (and its entire framework of identity) is implicated in a process ofexchange for territory (and therefore for another framework of identity—indeed, national identity). Second is a territory that is "nothing but natural space, that is, a space devoid of 17. As far as I know, this notion of "naturalization" is employed throughout the Romance languages and in German (Natumlisiemng)—that is, wherever the Latin natura prevails over the Greekphysis. It is especially interesting to note that the modern Greek term for "naturalization" is politographesis, meaning literally "inscribing upon one the mark of a citizen." It is a word still bearing the revolutionary spirit that engendered its political grammar, while simultaneously evoking the ancient Athenian idiom that the French Revolution ultimately failed to master.

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7^£ Nation's Dream- Work

the Other" (267), in effect a purely natural space—or better yet, a space naturalized to its full extent, naturalized to the point of becoming Nature. It would take me far off course to examine Eisenzweig's grand network of historical sites that account for the break in Western discourse which engendered Zionism: the invention of printing and the semiotic disruption it entails, the expulsion of the Jewish people from European societies in the late fifteenth century, the consubstantial event of discovering the New World, the subsequent assimilation of Jews into the discourse of the West, and so on. At the same time, the similarity of Eisenzweig's mode of inquiry and argumentation to the one here cannot pass unnoticed. His conclusion that Palestine stands, in Zionist discourse and practice, as the imaginary territory where the Other is absent—the imaginary site of plenitude where Nature becomes one's property—captures acutely the profound problematic of the national imaginary; "The space of ethnocentric discourse can be conceived only in a context where the Other does not appear—in Nature. The positivist Zionist discourse must 'clean' the site of the future society, must not seethe Other. . . . It is precisely in order not to see the Palestinian that [Zionism is] obliged to form a vision that conceals him" (280, 282). Likewise, it is precisely the obliterating vision of this national imaginary (the vision of self-occultation) that made possible the punitive demolition of Arab homes in tandem with furthering Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. Moreover, the gunslinging mentality of the most radical settlers, the overwhelming majority of whom are American Jews, is not but a psychotic (because entirely uprooted and displaced) transference of an imaginary territory that is the epitome of empty space: the endless desert of the Wild West, the enchanting allure of the old American frontier, which was constituted as such—let us not forget—as a result of the genocidal obliteration of North American Indians. The same, however, must be said for the obliterating vision of Islamic fundamentalists, whose natural topos is the paradisal space that springs from the annihilation of the infidel. Perceiving the matter in this way makes clear that one is not a national subject because some hegemonic structure called "nation" or "national culture" imposes its reality upon him, that is, turns an individual into a national subject by conferring upon him a passport or identity card. Instead, one "becomes" a national subject insofar as one believes oneself to be a witness to this mysterious process or ritual called "a national community," insofar as one participates in (imagines, constructs, dreams) the fantasy of belonging to a national community. This may be another way to understand how the institution of a nation is not simply the work of a given ruling class or ideology —an action at the level of the State apparatus—but an imaginary institution of a given society in whosefantasy everyone is complidt.

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The "ideological moment" in this situation lies in the national subjects desperate unwillingness to believe that this dream is his own. That is, the citizen confers upon the national dream some ontological significance (perhaps as Freud might ultimately trust the dream's "truth" to be the inveterate meaning of an entity called psychoanalysis). But I would argue that the performance (the dream-work) is put together on the subject's behalf by the very fantasy it represents, in some kind of co-incidental fashion, if you will. Thus, there is no ground upon which we can differentiate the "fantasy" from the "reality" unless we were to embark on a new dream that would represent or be presented by the fantasy of such a difference, and so on ad infinitum.™ Here it might be helpful to return to Freud for a moment. What Freud has conceived as "the hallucinatory wishful psychosis of dreams'* may be a good way to understand the operations of a national fantasy. For " [the hallucinatory wishful psychosis of dreams] not only brings hidden or repressed wishes into consciousness; it also represents them, with the subject's entire belief, asfulfilled Hallucination brings belief in reality with it" (Freud 1984: 238, my emphasis). In other words, the perception of one's reality—of one's national community in this case—is a matter of constructing and representing an image of one's fulfilled desire, an act based entirely on the mobilization of one s belief. Yet insofar as one claims the experience of nationality, of being a national subject, the fulfillment of desire necessarily cannot be a private affair. Neither can one's belief be thus privatized; it must be generalized, made external, objectified. The national subject who believes in the nation experiences this belief as entering a conspiracy with an indefinite number of anonymous others. "Subjects supposed to believe are, in fact, the condition of belief," as de Certeau puts it quite succinctly (1985: 202, my emphasis). This is ultimately an ontologizing of belief itself. It is to believe in belief itself, to believe in a community of believers that embodies, in some fashion or other, the substance (ousia) of one's singular being, ones subjectification.19 18. Such co-incidence bears the great force of the mythistorical and often results in some exemplary efforts of national fiction. Lauren Berlant (1991), for instance, reads Hawthorne not as the famous American author but as an instructive experimental incarnation of the national subject, whose authorial output makes for an exemplary documentation of the nationalization of subjectivity: the national fantasy. For all practical purposes, what I call national imaginary is kin to what Berlant calls National Symbolic. To treat this divergent nomenclature as a theoretical discrepancy, however, would be to entrap ourselves within the Gordian knot of psychoanalytic terminologies, succumbing to what Freud aptly called "the narcissism of petty differences." 19. For a provocative discussion of the permutations of belief., see Barbara Herrnstein Smith's recent considerations (1991). She argues, convincingly, that one's beliefs are inevitably caught in the whirlwind of one's environment (conceived in the widest sense), which lends them a basic instability. Indeed, their apparent stability comes only from their symmetrical engagement with the environment (which represents, epistemologically, the evidence of things). I would add, however, with the admitted reservations of a skeptic, that Smith perhaps

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There is a perfect illustration of this process in a series of Greek jokes about the ways of psychotic patients, One of them, in fact, happens to be the one that Slavoj Zizek also recounts, about the fool who thought he was a kernel of corn (1989: 3 5).20 Another joke, however, that may in fact be seen as the inverse of this situation (but also supplemental to it) is even more exemplary of the conspiracy of belief: A fool is taken to a psychiatric clinic because he is seen walking the streets pulling his toothbrush behind him on a leash as though it were a dog. To all those who inquire or make fun of him for this, he replies enraged: "Can't you see I'm taking my dog for a walk?" But one day, the doctor's arduous and skillful efforts pay off, and the fool admits in the therapy session to be dragging behind him in fact his toothbrush on a leash, The doctor is convinced of the breakthrough and signs his release papers. The next day, the fool shows up at the gate still dragging his toothbrush behind him. When, befuddled, the doctor asks him, "What are you doing?" the fool answers, "Well, I'm certainly not going to leave my toothbrush behind." Content to have made certain that this is only an eccentricity, the doctor decides to let him go. Exuberant, the fool crosses the gate, looks around, turns conspiratorially to his toothbrush and whispers: "Ssshh! We really made a fool of him, didn't we?" There is a certain ingenuity in framing these jokes at the level of clinical therapy in its antithesis to madness (in other words, a context of normalization), to the point even where the punch line in the second joke constructs a scene in which the doctor is rendered, through the conspiracy of belief between a fool and his toothbrush/dog (his chimerical object), a bona fide fool himself. "We really made a fool of him" — "We kept him from having a share in our belief."21 For in a way, although the process of constituting a overestimates the resistance one s environment puts up against one's belief, and therefore imputes to belief a much greater plasticity than it actually has. To take the matter up in her terminology, a symmetricality between belief and the resistance of evidence (or one's environment) may figure just fine in the idiom of epistemology, but things become quite murky when we enter the realm of a society's imaginary (of which any framework of epistemology is but a part). In the case of the national fantasy, self-occultation comes first; its word carries the greatest weight. Thus, the belief that makes one a national subject is the evidence of one *s nationality, in a kind of tautological sense (but not the sense of sameness). In a community of believers, belief (in belief) itself is the environment, the evidence. 20. To facilitate the point, I recount the joke here the way I remember it from the Greek; A fool is taken to a psychiatric clinic for therapy because he believes he is a kernel of corn and is terrified he might be eaten by chickens. After long and skillful efforts by his doctor, the fool is finally cured; he recognizes that he is not in fact a kernel of corn. The doctor signs his release. Within an hour after the fool is out on the street, he returns to the clinic in utter panic and demands to be let in and be granted asylum. To his doctor s questions as to why, the fool answers in all earnest: "Well, /know I'm not a kernel of corn, but do the chickens know that?" 21. In using the phrase "having a share in" instead of simply "sharing," I am highlighting the

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fantasy is described perfectly in the fool's imaginary dialectic with the object, the actual experience of the fantasy is described by the position of the doctor (who is, from a particular point of view, quite a fool). Both sides exemplify Zizek's understanding of the reality /fantasy of ideology: namely, "a kind of reality whose very ontological consistency implies a certain non-knowledge of its participants" (1989: 21). Both the patient (obsessed with the dog) and the doctor (obsessed, we presume, with normalization) participate in the fantasy of ideology insofar as both posit the community of their own belief to be an ontological condition, insofar as they forget that both the form and the object of their belief are of their own creation. For Zizek this fantasy is not an illusion or a false consciousness masking the real state of things, but the force that structures reality itself. Zizek will go as far as to say that the fantasy lies not on the side of knowledge but on the side of reality itself, in the domain of what people are doing—the figures, the things they project onto, the objects of belief (1989: 30—49), In fact, the closest we get to this "mechanism of fantasy," to this reality, is in the work of the dream itself. In this respect, although he does not frame it as such, Zizek resolves Freud s ambivalence about whether the Phantasiebildung was the facade or the foundation of the dream by theorizing the possibility of the simultaneous presence of both. This double nature of fantasy also registers in the relation of the national fantasy to the nation's (self-) organizing operation, the nation's dream-work. The condition of nationality is precisely to be both facade and foundation to the constitution of the nationalized) subject. It is facade insofar as the claim to nationality is a retroactive attribute, which essentially acts out the presumption of a national community. It is foundation insofar as the institution of nationality serves as the historical inscription of this otherwise nonexistent entity—nonexistent because ontologically empty and presumed to be always already present. The national fantasy and, by implication, the entire discursive body that orchestrates and performs its articulation, its discipline (Neohellenism, Panturkism, Zionism, the American melting pot, British ancestry, Negritude, and so on), exists precisely in order to mask the fact that the nation "does not exist." For though the Nation as a social-imaginary signification most cerFrench rendition of Freud's Besetzung as investment, a psycho economic notion. But we must also take into account, as it were, the way Besetzung is translated in the English Standard Edition as cathexis—in fact, though more awkward, a more precise representation of the word's original nuances. For this word, from its Greek etymology, carries with it the spatial (and even military) notion of occupation—indeed, in the passive voice: being occupied (with desire). Thus, there is an alternative version of the equation I have drawn up, which is posed simultaneously: "We really made a fool of him" = "We have prevented him from occupying our territory (by sharing, or having a share in, our belief, etc.)."

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tainly exists, each particular nation, as a geopolitical structure, exists only insofar as its corresponding national fantasy is still at work. The moment this fantasy ceases to operate or is replaced by another, a nation, even geopolitically, collapses. Witness the current collapse of the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, whose termination seems stunning in its speed and violence only once we forget that it is nothing but an inverse replay of their very origin, of the composite nature of their institution as nations (invoked in fact under the fantasy of an internationalist ideology) and of the artificiality of their emergence. With this in mind, my engagement with the labyrinth of Neohellenic history in all its profound indeterminacy—the multitude of oblique shifts, elaborate intersections, dark corners, and blind turns that mark history's passage through a cultural territory—is predicated on nothing less than this positing/position of absence: the nation's fundamental nonexistence. To study Greece as a nation is to study a particular historical form or expression of the national fantasy, for the national essence of Greece as such, as Being, "does not exist." The nation of Greece "exists," and will only "exist," insofar as the Neohellenic national fantasy is still at work, a notion whose rippling effects as event are to be considered not merely within the bounds of Greece itself (the Neohellenic imaginary) but within the overall bounds of contemporary society—the global social order, the global social-imaginary that still comprehends itself in terms of national entities. To study the process of a national formation, then, means inevitably to confront a specific historical map of the national fantasy, to traverse the specific trajectory of a culture's Phantasiebildung. A Theoretical Interlude: "The Burrow" To ground this argument, as it were, let me intervene by invoking once again as a didactic summation a lesson from literature. This is one more foray into the order of the mythistorical, once again partaking of the world of Franz Kafka, only this time with an eye to illustrating the paradigm of the nationalized subject s predicament and the nation's dream-work. What I have in mind is Kafka's great story "The Burrow" (1924), in the context of recognizing that Kafka's entire corpus stands as a supreme theoretical moment in twentieth-century history. It is obvious that given its uncompromising mythical framework—its historical blankness—the burrow lends itself to a barrage of allegorical meanings: the home/hearth/Heiwatf; the inner sanctum; the secret fetish; the desire for the womb. What brings all of these allegories together is that the

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burrow becomes the topographical essence of the creature: in our historical terms, the nation; in psychic terms, the dream. The epistemological difficulty in dealing with this entity is borne out by the story's opening image: the posing of the question, how do we enter the burrow? Here lies the brilliance of the narrative entrance—it leads nowhere: "I have completed the construction of my burrow and it seems to be successful All that can be seen from outside is a big hole; that, however, really leads nowhere; if you take a few steps you strike against natural firm rock" (Kafka 1971: 325). The story opens with an image of failure, impossibility, or even error, This is the predicament of any theoretical analysis of the Nation. In presenting itself this way, the story (burrow) also guards itself against us, the readers, the intruders—which may be one reason why the story is so excruciating and practically unreadable. The creature, which is both the narrator and the architect of the burrow, is obviously linked to it by an obsessive-compulsive desire and a paranoid fantasy. The energy of the compulsion is drawn from the paranoid fantasy itself, much as the compulsion of the nationalized subject is drawn from the conflation of enjoyment and terror that keeps him attached to his belief. In both cases, the foes are essentially legendary; even when real they are invariably constructed and reconstructed, made legendary. In a profound likeness to the demands of a national imaginary, the price for building the burrow is one's own blood. Self-mutilation ensures self-envelopment: "So I had to run with my forehead thousands and thousands of times, for whole days and nights, against the ground, and I was glad when blood came, for that was proof that the walls were beginning to harden; and in that way, as everybody must admit, I richly paid for my Castle Keep" (328). But the sudden appearance of an intruder makes for the crucial shift in the story and provides its galvanizing theoretical instance. The original terms are now altered: the burrow itself is being threatened. The paranoid fantasy over one's own safety is perceived as foolish; it gives way to paranoia for the safety of one s object: The joy of possessing it has spoiled me, the vulnerability of the burrow has made me vulnerable; any wound to it hurts me as if I myself were hit. It is precisely this that I should have foreseen; instead of thinking only of my own defense—and how perfunctorily and vainly I have done even that—I should have thought of the defense of my burrow. (355)

The identity between subject and object becomes ineradicable, so much so that the creature, reflecting on his conviction of his burrow's invincibility, entertains the thought that he may in fact be in someone else's burrow (356). This psychotic breakdown could easily be reversed to another phantasm: that

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The Nation's Dream-Work

he is himself the intruder as well, and that the invasive sounds he is hearing may be due to "the beast digging in its own burrow" (358). Taking on the properties of one's chimerical object—which entails utter severing of the relation between subject and object—is the ultimate act within the logical range of the nationalized) subject, what fuels the psychotic violence of nationalism.22 Kafka seizes upon the complexity of this violence by presenting the intruder as an entity rising from within. The intruder is what the burrow ultimately gives birth to, and thus the burrow comes to be menaced by its own creation. The logic, persisting unabated, demands that the best defense of the burrow, which should have been programmed into the architectural design, would be the partial collapse of the burrow s walls by a series of congenitally engineered landslides so that the intruder would be entombed. The intruder would thus find his permanent residence—his tomb—in the burrow, since after all, much like the architect, he is a product of the logic of the burrow. The burrow, although the quintessential home, is also a tomb: the possession that forbids mobility, that possesses one away from one s resident access to life as a diasporic-nomadic force, that condemns one to the immobility of the "native." The Topographic Desire (To Dream Up the Native) To conclude by reflecting on the terms of the argument so far, I should reiterate that conferring upon the nation the mark of the dream does not at all mean that the nation/dream is not real or is any less real than a political scientist s description of it as the Nation-State. The nation is real insofar as it is a social-imaginary institution. This is not at all a paradoxical thought (although it does point to the limits of the rational). To take a classic image from the inventory of collective representation: we may recall the image of immigrants (or prisoners of war, refugees, exiles, etc.), upon their return after many years of absence from their native land, bending down to kiss their native ground. What is the meaning of this action? what motivates it? where does its energy come from? It is no doubt an act of worship—at least in posture, generally speaking—a performative act serving none other than the actors' relation to this entity they may possibly imagine as 22. This alerts me to a comment by the Greek historian Yerasimos Kaklamanis on the paroxysm of nationalist ideology, a comment typical of his style: "[Nationalists] remind us of those monkeys who have experienced such utter existential exhaustion that, when the gypsy stops playing the drum, they continue to dance and look at him straight in the eyes. When someone takes up being a 'nationalist/ he is always obliged to shout ever louder" (1989: 248n).

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4r

their nation, which is at this particular moment symbolized in the most typical and tangible of metaphors: the earth. But the effects of this performance, which takes place (gathers its meaning) in the realm of imaginary signification, are of course quite real: that is, the action, the (re)grounding, bears the actual traces of dirt on the actors' lips. If this illustration sounds extravagant, let us turn to a "genuinely" historical example, as was reported in a local newspaper in India in 1921.1 quote at length: An issue of Swadesh which announced [Gandhi's] arrival in the district also carried a report under the heading: "Gandhi in dream: Englishmen run away naked" A loco-driver—presumably an Anglo-Indian—who had dozed off while reading a newspaper at Kasganj railway station in Etah district woke up from a nightmare at 11 P.M. and ran towards a cluster of bungalows occupied by the English and some Indian railway officers shouting: "Man, run, man! Gandhi is marching at the head of several strong Indians decimating the English." This caused panic and all the local white population emerged from their bedrooms in a state of undress and ran towards the station. . . . In the morning Indians who heard of this incident in the city had a good laugh at this example of English selfconfidence. (Amin 1988: 312-13)

In all deference to Indian good humor, the terror of the English was most certainly called for. Shahid Amin's point, which he builds meticulously throughout his article, is that Gandhi became actually most effective when he was finally instituted (by the society's imaginary) as Mahatma. Only then did he become the embodiment of the national dream. The reality of this dream is documented precisely in the fact that it was experienced by the colonialists as a veritable nightmare. Neohellenism is a specific historical language that expresses just this kind of occasion: the occasion of a nation/dream—indeed, to be more precise to the history of the matter, the occasion of a dream nation. The secret of this dream is nothing less than its own history—if we consider it not as the nation's history, which, as narrative, is nothing but the film covering the actual process of this nation's institution, but rather as the history of its dream, the history of a society's national dream. Thus, in the case of Greece, Neohellenism comes to pose the problems of its own representation, its own dream-work, and as itself it problematics the ground of its own interpretation. There cannot be a place from which one can narrate/interpret this dream unless one succumbs to the totalizing seduction of writing a national history. Although we shall return to this matter in detail later in the book, it suffices to say here that national history itself, as a specific genre oftvriting, is the most elevated form of a national imaginary s self-occultation. It is a form of apologia that confesses to all those supposedly unique, unreproducible, and unprecedented transgres-

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slons that grant a nation's dream its comprehensive boundaries, that render it comprehensible. A national history is a nation's Reason; it is also, retroactively, its discursive raison d'etre. The inability to ground our interrogation, to hold fast to a resolute place of narration, reveals dramatically that the nation that happens to be the object of our investigation "does not exist" as such. What I mean is that a nation cannot be simply posited as a definite, fixed point on the (ever-elusive, after all) map of history. Were we so assured as to ascribe specific "reasons" or "causes" to this impossibility, we would point at two: first of all, that a nation bears from its very "foundations" the indelible mark of overdetermination, and second, that society's very institution belies an unresolvable intertwining of necessity and contingency, so much so that even the attempt to fix the domain of the one or the other is a lost cause. Nonetheless, although impossible to fix or place as a positivity, a nation does register, even by its impossibility, a particular site, a topos. While not quite determinable in the space of history, a nation still stubbornly adheres to a more or less specifiable geography. Or, to take the matter further, while the particular nation may itself, often voluntarily, keep its geographical identity unfixed and multivalent, it still operates within an inflexible—though to a large extent desired—global geographical logic. A nation is inevitably a site. The material for its dream-work arises precisely out of the desire to occupy this site—a topographic desire. The obvious manifestation of this desire (the manifest content of this dream) can be found in the vehemence with which emerging nations cling to a concretely delineated territorial image. This image may not necessarily cover the same territory, so to speak, as that existing within a national State's boundaries. The imagined territory often exceeds those boundaries, and we can safely say that the image never represents a territory less or other than the one politically sanctioned. No one is ready to concede willingly the designated terra patria, even if its very demarcation makes a mockery of the territory desired in the national fantasy. To be sure, Greece constitutes one such case in its first ninety-odd years of existence, which is why the national ideology during that time revolved explicitly around an obsession with autochthony and expressed itself in an expansionist dream.23 What is then the objective of this topographic desire? Or, to pose the question from the other direction, what is the object of this (desires) location? what is the object in this desire's location? For this implicates us in a 23. For an analysis of how territorial politics and the institution of autochthony bear upon the evolution of modern Greek national culture, see Leontis 1995.

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condition of substitutions, the ambivalently metonymic condition of all identity that Bhabha insists on, and implicates us all the more in the substitutive condition of national identity: the /within the we, but the /that represents the whole, not the part, the whole of nationality, the wholeness of the native. In effect, the recognition of one's self as national subject, the /within the we, is predicated on positing the we in the place of an /, in placing the Nation in the location of the subject, in making the Nation a subject. This is the object(ive) of the national fantasy. "An eye for an I," Bhabha insists, though I would add, "the Nation's eye for an I"—an equation in which the / then becomes precisely the colonial subject, in Bhabha's terms, the subject that casts a pall of ambivalence over the entire metonymic condition, the / perceived by colonialist Reason as "evil eye!'24 In this respect, the Nation may be said to colonize the subject, to colonize the site of the subject—which is precisely what I mean by the notion the nationalized) subject. Therefore, the experience of nationality figures as more or less analogous to a colonial experience, which is to say that the Nation is thus traversed by a topographic compulsion, by the desire to demarcate and occupy (cathect) an Other site of its own. Hence, from another angle, the nationalization of society. In other words, the form of the Nation entails the double citing of property, the co-articulation of ownership and idiom, which is why language is so integral to the discourse of nationalism and its invocation so explicit a sanctuary for a nation's cultural territorial claims.25 But there is a further dimension to this possession, which completes the work of nationalization: namely, the construction of the native. In many respects, the discourse of colonialism is the quintessential expression of the construction of the native, producing a category, a site, whose markings of 24. This argument presupposes a basic familiarity with.Homi Bhabha's work overall, to which my interpretation stands slightly askew. The essays deserving particular attention on this specific point are "Of Mimicry and Man" (1986) and "Interrogating Identity" (ipSpa: 8—n esp.), in which Bhabha argues for the doubling effect that colonial experience exercises on the subject, ultimately making a claim for a fundamental hybridity of all subject relations. Although essentially in agreement, I subscribe much more to the resilience of hegemonic structures in their exploitation of the subaltern's capacity for fostering ambivalence, a point I argue in detail at the end of the present book. I will return to the significance of Bhabha s theories of ambivalence in Chapter 4 and Excursus 3 below. 25. I am drawing here on the Greek etymology of the notion of property as the quality of a thing: idiotes, which itself forms the signifying ground for both "idiom" (idioma) and "private property" (idioktesia). Given that the underside of this semantic frame is the notion of idios ("same"), the matter is profoundly rich in its ramifications. A national idiom is instituted so as to codify the exclusive property of the national people and at the same time to carve out this people's boundaries of exclusion, to signify the territory of the "same." I am grateful to Shuhsi Kao for alerting me to the incisive nature of this semiotic intersection.

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definition are simply untenable. The key is the paradoxical inscription that the word "native" or "indigenous" has come to bear in colonialist discourse, where it carries the simultaneous mark of both inferiority and autochthony. Trinh Minh-ha has identified in this duplicitous characterization a split between we natives and them natives, in an attempt to expose the fundamental chasm that resides in this notion, the chasm that underlines the gamut of anthropological practice (1989: 47-76). For Trinh, the notion "native" breaks down finally to two homonyms, which themselves mark the disciplinary boundaries of anthropo-logical thought. The anthropologist is desperately confined within the limits of an / (the privileged surveying eye), as opposed to the native who remains confined within the ascribed compulsion to bolster his or her insufficient autochthony with an equally insufficient mimicry of the colonizing civilization. Hence, in the last instance, the impossibility of anthropology26 This same impossibility implicitly marks the colonial enterprise at the level of signification. In their duplicitous naming of the natives, the colonialists "by such language assign themselves, along with superiority, [a] 'notbelonging- there'" (Anderson 1983: 112). In other words, the colonialist's self-attribution of cultural superiority carries with it a necessary externality His daily confrontation with the native serves as an indelible reminder that he is in fact the native elsewhere, This is the other side of colonial mimicry. The colonialist must exercise enormous effort to hold on to this ever-fading elsewhere, the once native ground that has become evermore groundless—in other words, to resist the infiltration of his cultural territory by the colonized native's mimicry. This effort is none other than the effort of repression, and as Freud has pointed out repeatedly, it takes the force of one's entire being to enact an effective and successful repression, which is precisely why it springs back with such violence. Hence, Kurtz's agonizing cries in Conrad's Heart of Darkness or Adela's hysterical narrative in Forster's A Passage to India: in both cases, the somatic inscription of the colonialists resistance to being absorbed into the black hole of the native, into the traumatic core that Bhabha has named "the colonial nonsense" (ippoa). 26. Herein lies the dilemma of and impetus for what has been recently called "native anthropology" Trinh Minh-ha (1989) provides us with a dramatic picture of its epistemological and practical difficulties. In many respects, these are some of the same difficulties the present work faces as well, although admittedly I am engaged not in an anthropological inquiry but in a political-cultural and historiographical one. In this, I defer my insight to the work of Neni Panourgia (1995), who has demonstrated that an ethnography of one's own culture is possible (and indeed imperative) without effacing ones integral position in it, in antithesis to the epistemological autonomy of anthropology that still remains, for the majority of anthropologists, the most cherished of wish-fulfilment fantasies.

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The fear of succumbing to the "nonsense" of the native propels the need to construct the native ceaselessly, to give the native sense, as it were, which is also to say, more pointedly, to organize (and thus control) his senses. And while in anthropology this construction of the native focuses on what were at one time called "primitive peoples" in the discourse of the nation it is implicated in the signification of the territory of national culture, of what is indigenous as well as what is naturalized). The Nation, as a social-imaginary institution, exerts its force upon the entire range of signification in a given society and therefore upon the entire categorization of "native": upon the question what is native? This question marks the site where the Nation resides. It designates the archive of (self-) representation, the sacred inventory of idols that make a national history possible. This archive encloses all the place frames and time frames projected by a national imaginary. It is here that the cultural continuity so necessary to the institution of any nation is produced and safeguarded. It is the place upon which the history of a nation's various geographies, its geographical moments remembered and envisioned, is inscribed. It is the navel of a nation's dream, to invoke Freud once again—the very topos that enables the cultural omphaloskopisis (navel gazing) that fuels every nation's reproduction. The archive is thus ultimately uninterpretable, if only because it itself produces the "ground" of its interpretation. This is what I mean when I say we cannot read a nation—nor write it, of course. We can only traverse it, traverse its fantasy as (its) history, in the same way that history traverses us as thinking, reading, writing, living subjects. For although we do not live in a time and a place like Fanon's, we are in effect under similar historical pressures. The Nation refuses to disappear. It has produced and continues to guide and ground even the notion of transnationality. It is difficult to imagine what other topos might come to occupy this topographic desire—to reverse the order of things for a minute and take advantage of the ambivalence of a rather quotidian verb in the English language. For what stands ultimately in the way of the most incisive critical analysis is that the Nation is both there and elsewhere all the time. The Nation is both past and present, or to paraphrase Anderson, both irredeemable memory and limitless future. It is thus significantly both museum site and ground of oblivion. Or, from another angle and using another language, the Nation is the point where repression and the return of the repressed take place simultaneously. In these terms, I would agree with Eisenzweig that the Nation's site is where "one passes from Nature as absence (of the Other) to presence (of Self) as Nature" (1981: 283), which is to say, to the solipsism that makes a nation's

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history appear necessary, chosen, and unique. But I would add that, simultaneously, this site marks the passage from one's national presence (nationality as Nature) back into the whirlwind of history where all presences are overdetermined and thus negotiable: the contamination with otherness that makes a nation's history contingent. This is, in effect, to say that although every nation is undeniably Utopian at some level in its cultural and historical psyche, and although every nation does hold onto a veritable existence (if not as a geographical and politic entity then as a dream, as a revolutionary project), it is nonetheless also fundamentally heterotopic, in Foucault s sense of the term. And if indeed "brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia" (Foucault 1986: 27), then the Nation is both of these, exhibiting all of what Foucault outlines as their essential characteristics. Although it is Foucault s choice, the conflation of these two sites, succinctly captures the intertwining of enjoyment and oppression that forms the backbone and the interminable energy-source of nationalism. The Nation thus comes to command the domain of both the sacred and the profane. In occupying and exploiting the mysterious space of the sacred in our contemporary "secular" world, the Nation revitalizes the profane. In mobilizing a society with the signs of resurrection or eternal life, often to acts of unspeakable violence, the Nation lends to the profane a sacred status. Therein lies the sublime force of the Nations seduction. Therein lies also the formidable enactment of its dynastic violence.

CHAPTER 2

The Formal Imagination, I THE BACK ROADS OF DEVELOPMENT FROM ENLIGHTENMENT TO BUREAUCRACY

Usbek to Ibben, at Smyrna Western books shed hardly any light on ancient history. There is a gap at the beginning of time, and everyone has agreed to cover it over. Even the ruins have disappeared, yet the reconstruction has to be done. When history is missing, it is replaced by fables; it is like a poor country where virtually worthless coins have to be included in the currency. Poets are treated as serious writers, and inside their own territories they are paid as much attention as the most penetrating historians. This history is not about men, but about gods. These gods are transformed into heroes with the development of civilization; the children of the heroes are mere men, because children are seen from a shorter distance away than their fathers; and thus the period of myth comes to an end and historical times begin. This is how ancient history becomes modern. Having spent a few days in this new country, I am convinced that modern historians will one day express the prodigious inventiveness of the superstitious mind. The new Greece has been granted its very own monarch, although a mere child. Soon the search for the ancients will cease altogether and the ruins of their gods will prevail as convention. Already, historical marks are being perceived as old and irrelevant myths. They say here that by royal decree all palm trees in central locations will be cut down, for the city must be relieved of leftover Orientalia. From Athens, the last day of the moon ofMuhanam, 1248 [May 1832]

These would have been Usbek s thoughts in May of 1832, had Montesquieu extended his fable one hundred years of history forward and allowed his Persian hero to disengage himself finally from the confines of Paris.1 The i. The first three paragraphs are taken from one of Montesquieu's fragments, excluded from the original edition of his Persian Letters, which was not discovered until 1950. The last para-

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text s transposition in time and place, as well as my authorial intervention in the last paragraph, conform to the spirit of Montesquieu's own assessment that the revelations of his Persian travelers, Usbek and Rica, were after all "epigrammatic remarks made by men who were not really in a position to make them" and that "the whole effect [of the Persian Letters] was due to the perpetual contrast between the reality of things and the odd, naive, or strange way in which they were perceived" (1973: 284). Borges has left behind the legacy of his insight that "reality is always anachronous" (1975: 132). If we consider Montesquieu s comments in those terms, then we could say that the odd, naive, or strange way in which we perceive reality, and our doing so from a position that indeed does not entitle us to perceive reality or to remark on it, is actually what gives reality its place and, as such, its time. I underline this point in order to clarify that my restaging of a fictional text is not commanded so much by the nature of fiction as by the theatrical exigencies of history, or to be more precise, by history's insubordinate desire to mythify itself. In my version of Montesquieu s fable, the presence of a newly instituted (a modern) Greece strikes a critical blow at Usbek's internalized Enlightenment thinking, which must hold on to the fact that at some point in the development of humanity "myth comes to an end and historical times begin " Usbek's thesis underlies < exactly the self-perception of any national culture, especially during its initial moments of institution, and thus coordinates the course of its self-representation. In the case of Greece, however, this most typical of Enlightenment assertions is stripped of whatever might point to its historical character, its discursive grounding. The notion of history born out of the ashes of myth discards, in the overarching context of Greek independence, its allegiance to Enlightenment thought (the rupture of political selfdetermination) and appears as an always already present condition, an immanent and permanent historicity (although repressed under Ottoman rule) mapped by that unvanquishable mythical trace of the Hellenic. Such is the paradoxical metaphysics of national culture. Thus, while the new Greek State at the moment of its institution represents itself as a historical moment beginning and a myth finally brought to an end, the national imaginary that lends its energy to this representation does so by lending the myth a new beginning. It is not accidental that at this discurgraph is my own. As the actual letter continues, the argument shifts specifically to the problem of the origin of divinity, and although the logic is at times rather confounding, the passage, by means of a skepticist irony that sometimes makes Enlightenment texts remarkably self-reflexive, proclaims religion to be an essentially literary project, the work of poets and philosophers, of "mythologists" (see Montesquieu 1973: 296-97).

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sive and historical crossroads, which is philosophically inconceivable outside the epistemic structure of the Enlightenment, the life of what is known as "the Neohellenic Enlightenment" comes, for all practical purposes, to an end. At this end we locate the narrative. Toward a History of Discontinuity In May 1832, after the culmination of longtime feuding among its ruling ranks (namely, the assassination of elected governor loannis Kapodistrias) and the ensuing intervention of the major European "protectors," Greece could officially claim a piece of the European map as its own. Europe's intimate involvement with Greece, which had been cultivated in the last years of the previous century and had intensified during the years of the War of Independence (1821—30), now managed to procure on behalf of Greece, simultaneously, the blessing of both the Sultan (the official Ottoman recognition of the independent Greek State) and a new king (King Otto of the Wittelsbach family, Prince of Bavaria). This shift of monarchs, though on a certain level a mere shift of the Name of Power, initiated a significant new problematic: the sudden need to institute a language (and by implication, a culture) that would best represent the identity of the new nation. Neohellenism thus came to recognize its own identity; it delineated the ground from which it had emerged as the designated discursive vehicle of Greek national culture. This ground does not at all constitute a definitive point of origin, but it stands as an indelible point of reference, permanent witness to the fact that at some moment in any nation s history the problematic of culture emerges simultaneously as the problematic of history and, more specifically, as the problematic of power. But even at times when such intersections are not quite admitted into the field of historical perception, this ground nonetheless emerges as an obstacle to the historian's actual task, as a reference point that dislocates the historian's longing for comprehension. For although the thought of Greek independence is often left implicit (covered under the rubric of some miraculous regeneration of Culture—palingenesia), the actual event of Greek independence is in fact registered as a rupture. Or, as a Greek historian of philosophy has put it, Greek independence haunts the task of its interpretation by being always "the great event that severs our history in half" (Psimmenos 1988: i: 18). In other words, Greek independence marks the end of a certain historical entity, and although this may mean it signifies the beginning of another, this matter is of less concern—at least in light of History's obsessive attachment to a retrospective architecture, in light of its backward glance.

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In this respect, it is not an exaggeration to underline the obsession of cultural historians with endings, periods of decline,^ de siede narratives, and ultimately with cultural failure and the disappearance of historical entities. This is what lies implicit beneath all affirmations and celebrations of historical glory. For history practices the very science of discontinuity in the strictest sense: it seeks knowledge of the passage across realms of difference and dispersal. The point that all this knowledge is to be gained in the service of continuity, in order to defend the order of continuity, is doubtless a commonplace, the legacy of history as a profession instituted in the nineteenth century. Yet in this process, by its very operation as obstacle to the historian's task, discontinuity figures as the flesh and bones of history, constantly buried and exhumed of necessity but to no satisfactory end. For this reason Foucault called for an epistemological mutation of history into archaeology, into an archival process that transforms discontinuity from an obstacle into the work itself (Foucault 1972). Likewise, insofar as this text broaches a history of the institution of modern Greece—presents its speculative analysis as history—its point of inquiry, its archival site, is located in this discontinuous domain, in a trajectory framed by two gaps: first, a gap between a residual Byzantinism and an emerging Enlightenment, and second, a gap between the dissolution of the Enlightenment and the emergence of a nation. In other words, the tracing of a Neohellenic Enlightenment is bordered at both ends by conditions of rupture. These conditions, in conjunction with the conditions necessary for the apparent coexistence of continuity with discontinuity in the terrain of cultural practices, are the primary objects in need of elucidation. Such conditions are hardly exclusive to Greece. The advent of the Enlightenment ushered a problematic into the workings of social-imaginary signification that has left no society on the globe untouched. An overall assessment of the Enlightenment project, however, is a task arguably made impossible by the project s very nature, despite the many admirable efforts in the history of modern thought to disentangle its rule of enchantment (e.g., Horkheimer and Adorno s efforts to delineate its dialectic). My interest here is limited to the particular complicity of the Enlightenment in the socialimaginary operations of the nation, and more specifically the historical form these operations took in the interplay between Enlightenment thought and social-cultural practices in the Balkan and Eastern Mediterranean region of the Ottoman Empire during the late eighteenth century. This topographical selection becomes all the more crucial since at this specific juncture an imperial-communal organization of society, arguably going back millennia, was shattered into those ethnic and national singularities whose narcissism

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continues to reverberate with incurable violence to the present day. The resurgence of nationalism in the Balkans and the stunning massacres going on in what used to be Yugoslavia are inscribed with the return of the repressed (and now mutated) nationalist fanaticism originally cultivated, throughout the nineteenth century, in order to dissolve Ottoman imperial rule in the region. In recent years, historians have increasingly focused on the complex relations between the Enlightenment project (conceived in its widest sense) and the emergence of the Nation as a form. This is an attempt to look beyond the Enlightenment's apparent cosmopolitanism to the epistemic relations between Enlightenment thought and the political processes that led to the emergence of a national(ist) discourse in Europe. The historiographical locus of such efforts is the French Revolution and, subsequently, the Napoleonic era (this latter being the pathway by which the Enlightenment is also linked to the discourse of colonialism). Obviously, no categorical statement can be made regarding the Enlightenment's immanent relation to the Nation, any more than such a statement can be made about where the Enlightenment begins and where it ends. Consider, for instance, Antonio Gramsci's tracing of the substantive parameters of Italian nationhood to the admonitions of Machiavelli rather than to the proclamations of Mazzini, to take an example that makes its point convincingly (1971: 44—205). At the same time, however, it is becoming increasingly difficult to isolate the phenomenon of the nation as a purely nineteenth-century invention whose moment of consolidation, as a discourse at least, is said to be located in a post-Napoleonic world order and in the scriptures of romanticism. It is my contention, and we shall return to this over the process of this study, that the problematic of the Enlightenment, roughly speaking, is the problematic of the Nation—an equation that can only carry the full splendor of the Enlightenment projects ambivalence and contradiction.2 2. The matter is enormously complicated, and there is an equally enormous body of" work devoted to this specific complex of questions. Very briefly, for reasons of elementary orientation in this terrain, I must note the following: For one, the issue of the Enlightenment's relation to romanticism, as far as the form of the Nation is concerned, may hinge on the particular ramifications of the Enlightenment s philosophy of language and the operations necessary to put this philosophy into practice: in other words, whatever might link Humboldt to Condillac (see Aarsleff 1982: 146-209, 335-55). A somewhat different analysis is provided by Foucault's schema for the archaeology of the human sciences, in which the emergence of the nation (coincident with the rise of history as a discipline) bears the mark of the discontinuity that occurs at the very heart of the Enlightenment, in the latter years of the eighteenth century (Foucault 1970: esp. 217—302). Both genealogies and their intersections shall be discussed extensively in the next chapter. Note also the positions of certain historians who in various ways choose to blur the categorical differences between the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, again

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In this respect, the institution of a national culture in early-nineteenthcentury Europe could not but follow the course of certain epistemological obsessions that had already been forwarded into the social and political arena during the turbulent latter half of the previous century. At a most basic level, these obsessions were concentrated around the nature of language—philosophically, in terms of its function in the cognitive process, and politically, in terms of its role in the constitution of culture. In both cases, the discourse woven around the problem of language hinged upon a consistent demand for restructuring the ways of knowledge, a demand sometimes spectacular in its desire to clear the board, as it were, but at other times covert in its fanaticism (to a large extent for fear of political reprisals). Once we grant the crucial position of the Enlightenment's political legacy in the eighteenth century's revolutionary spirit, that legacy, at least its challenge to the nineteenth century, can be seen to be essentially pedagogical. For insofar as Enlightenment thought has made its mark as a distinct discourse on society—indeed, in that enormous temporal and epistemic span, say, between the first appearance of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and the initiation of the Prussian educational reforms (1809)—it has been most effective (which is to say, hegemonic) in its institution of pedagogical models, which in turn rise out of the Enlightenment's particular theorization of the operative nature of language, the trajectory from private linguistics to language as a communal affair (Hacking 1992). These models may be expressed in terms of either a pedagogy of the subject (as in Rousseau's Emile) or a pedagogy of the State (Humboldt's Bildung), but in all cases they are primarily concerned with that exercise of subjective or collective desire for knowledge which ultimately coordinates the history and nature of a given culture.3 Not surprisingly, then, a great number of those Greek texts produced from the 1770$ onward and said to constitute the output of the Neohellenic Enlightenment are often directed to the problematic of culture as education and to the exploration of the appropriate language that is to serve as the educational vehicle. These texts are widely recognized as the ideological instigators of the nationalist spirit that led to the Greek War of Independence. However, the very proclamation of Greece as an independent State and the with respect to the affinities between epistemology and national-cultural practice (notably, see Anderson 1983: 50-68; Berlin 1981: 1-24, 333-55; White 1978; I35~49; and in the French case, see esp. Chartier 1988; de Certeau 1988; de Certeau, Julia, and Revel 1975; Guiomar 1974)3. Discussing Rousseau's Emile, Josue Harari has identified pedagogy as "always a pedagogy of desire and not of knowledge" (1987: 105), since in the pedagogical relation, knowledge is mediated with respect to the (often antithetical) desires of teacher and pupil.

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subsequent prompt institution of a national educational mechanism signify in effect the Greek Enlightenment's ideological marginalization and its discursive effacement soon after, by the 18505. Thus, despite their inarguably formative cultural role, a whole set of writers and their works produced in the fifty years from the 17803 to the 18305 float about to this day uncertain of their status and forgotten by everyone but a handful of conscientious Greek historians. This exclusion carries not only a distinct sociopolitical dimension but also what I might call a textual one, that is, a dimension bearing directly upon the form of these writings. It shall become more evident below that in sociopolitical terms the Greek Enlightenment signaled much less of a rupture than one would expect, considering its radically modern expression. However, as a textual practice flanked by discontinuities in the sphere of cultural production itself, the Greek Enlightenment problematizes the trajectory of Neohellenic culture in a substantive sense. In effect, to read the Greek Enlightenment, in its co-incident and intertwined sociopolitical and textual moments, means precisely to read Greece's trajectory as a modern national culture. The Greek Enlightenment has left an indelible mark upon the full extent of Greece's development—upon both Greece's actual historical development and the history of the discourse on Greece's development. To say this is to take up "development" as a problematic notion, which, whatever its specific historical markings, bears within it a certain kind of theoretical preclusion. At the same time, to take up the case of Greece as an instance in the problematic of development is also to explore how the notion of "development" (along with the discourse that generates its authority) organizes the mapping of a certain historical terrain. Facing the Curse of "Underdevelopment": Communal Practices To consider this historical terrain, it is imperative first to consider, however briefly, the status of social-cultural organization during the eighteenth century in those Ottoman territories that were to embroil themselves in the adventures of both Enlightenment thought and nationalist fortune. Since the mid-1970s, scholars—primarily neo-Marxist Greek political economists and social theorists—have produced an extensive body of work addressing this domain, although they have approached the subject with interests nominally different from my own, interests, essentially, in comprehending the peculiar socioeconomic formations that mar Greece's development in the present. On an immediate level, my own interest may be said to lie elsewhere: the elucida-

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tion of the Greek Enlightenments social-imaginary conditions of production. The ultimate goal, however, is more than just simply contiguous, for Greece's present condition in the international market of both capital and culture cannot be very well understood outside the Greek Enlightenment s project, whether one chooses to engage it in the terms of its insurrection in the realm of theory or in light of its failure in the realm of practice. Thus, to comment on the work of those key figures in contemporary Greek social and political theory (notably Spyros Asdrahas, Nicos Mouzelis, Konstantinos Tsoukalas, and Kostas Vergopoulos) is far more than just a matter of proper scholarly procedure. Though necessarily cursory in nature, my discussion signals a critical dialogue initiated and propelled outward from the domain of social-cultural relations to socioeconomic relations and not the other way around. For whether the focus falls on the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas in a specific historical context or the division of labor within a specific mode of production, the engagement is with none other than the workings of social-imaginary institution. Neohellenic history is haunted through and through by the phantasm of continuity. After all, this is the path all nations share in the last instance: this peculiar nature of the national imaginary that institutes a new state of things by recourse to an allegedly always already existing condition. In the case of Greece, this is especially overdetermined in a fashion largely unparalleled, owing precisely to the universal phantasm of the ancients; hence Greece's explicit categorization as modern. I shall discuss this matter in detail in later chapters, as I take up the rhetoric of Philhellenism and national history For now, however, it is sufficient to underline the enormous pressure that the figure of continuity, even apart from its expressly cultural-ideological dimensions, exerts upon the discussion of Greece's national formation at the most basic social-historical level. For instance, the obsession with the notion of "development" that we encounter whenever Greek social theorists discuss strictly structural matters (State apparatus, economic conditions, class formation, political infrastructure, demographic divisions, legal framework, and so on) would be inconceivable outside the discourse of continuity. Although implicit, the evidence for this attachment of "development" to "continuity" resides in the attention these theorists give to the social rupture supposedly initiated with the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence. (In this regard these theorists stand opposed to critics who deal in explicitly literary affairs, where the emphasis on continuity per se sees no reason to conceal itself.)4 Consider, as an exam4. This contrast makes for a schematic but succinct representation of the chasm existing between the social sciences and literary/cultural studies in Greece: the former have produced a

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pie, Vergopoulos's remarks on the inner dynamic of the War of Independence, in which the phenomenon of social rupture is accounted for on two levels: first, on the level of the uprising itself as a historical event played out "in the new terms of the national and international circuit of the epoch: new ideas, new social operations, new social forces, new historical subjects, new historical goals" (1990: 90); and second, on the level of its end result, some ten years later, in light of which Vergopoulos concludes, "other forces planned the Revolution, others carried it out, and still others profited from it" (98). This double rupture, between the Revolution and its past and between the Revolution and its future, strikes quite a contrast with all those who insist on the metaphysical integrity of Hellenic culture through the ages. Yet, in this very contrast, the insistence on rupture at all costs bears, by negation, the burden of the discourse of continuity. Be that as it may, although the problem of continuity in the case of Greece cannot be ignored or abolished, to invoke it heuristically as a cognitive framework leads down a wayward path. What is of more immediate concern here is to map somehow the magma of social relations out of which the Greek Enlightenment arose and toward which it deployed itself. To do so entails the necessity of considering for a moment the state of affairs in the Balkan region of the Ottoman Empire during this fateful century, a task overburdened by the shortcomings of what is still, for the most part, a rather Eurocentric historiography, a social science still bearing the training marks of Orientalist discipline.5 According then to the standard interpretation, subscribed to in various degrees by Ottomanists and Neohellenists alike (not to mention general great many more insights into the Greek problematic than the latter, which are attached to the archaic cognitive armory of New Criticism. No one has taken up this disjimcture as a theoretical problem, which inactivity itself marks the state of things. Such a study could yield invaluable insights into the epistemological development of Greece, which is to say, its social history. For a possible precursor to this kind of project, regarding specifically the conditions of the study of Greek literature as a discipline, see Lambropoulos (1988: esp. chaps, T, 3, and 9). 5. Since the appearance of Edward Saids classic work, or to some extent because of its tremendous impact, we tend to perceive Orientalism as a purely ideological entity—as a kind of adhesive film wrapped around the practice of social science over the last 150 years, a film that we merely need to peel off so that we can go about our clean scientific business. However, what we forget in the process, overlooking its delineation in Said's work, is the fact that Orientalism emerged as a bona fide discipline with full institutional regalia along with the entire ensemble of disciplines that make up what we now call, without the least hesitation, the social sciences. In this sense, Orientalism is not an unfortunate deviation of the discipline of history (or archaeology, anthropology, etc.), an element contaminating history's scientificity with ideology, but a distinct epistemic discipline surging forth, co-inddentally with history (or archaeology, anthropology, etc.), from the same magma of social-imaginary significations that organizes the nineteenth-century episteme*

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historians regarding this period and this region), the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth century was embroiled in all kinds of excess and corruption, which brought it to the point of virtual collapse. This signifies the penultimate stages in a gradual process of nearly two centuries of decline after its stupendous though essentially brief moment of glory, which ultimately passed away with the magnificence of its legendary Sultan, Suleiman I (ruled 1520—66). The array of causes deemed responsible for the Ottoman decline ranges from the internal dissolution of a static society given over to the caprices of arbitrary power to its external disruption by a Europe given over to the ingenuity of an internally dynamic mercantalist expansion. The alleged legacy of this fatal decline is the abandonment of Ottoman society to the whims of clientelism, a curse that, I suppose, is epidemically passed onto modern Greek society itself, where it is then registered as a deep structural defect. I do not need to belabor the point that all this is nonsense, but I do feel encumbered to elaborate on how the nonsense came to be. Mainstream scholarship holds that Ottoman society was never organized along those lines recognized as typical of European feudalism, at least so long as the discussion concerns the period of Ottoman ascendancy. Disentangling the truths and untruths of this position is not a particularly useful task for the purposes here. The fact is that, whichever economic terminology one uses, there remains an indelible trace of a social structure consisting, in effect, of a smallholding peasantry mostly organized along familial-communal lines and a centralized urban class adhering to the mechanisms of imperial-military power. The connecting thread between them is taxation, usually taken in cash amounts proportional to the agricultural surplus-product. These taxes serve to transfer the accumulated agrarian capital to the essentially military needs of the State in exchange for the State's protection of peasants against the abuses of local power. The point of the arrangement here, from the States point of view, is to make sure that no local elite would accumulate enough wealth (and therefore power) to constitute a threat to the Sultan. This is safeguarded by the State's control over private ownership of the land, meaning that the State figures as the nominal landowner, or more precisely, as a central landholding agency that can attribute and abolish private ownership by decree. However, since the State, from the point of view of the peasant, remains essentially an owner just in name—an impersonal and in effect absent owner—the de facto owner becomes the peasant, who either may have been cultivating this particular piece of land in a familial-communal line going back for incalculable generations or may have come to "claim" it by contingent use over the course of his nomadic trajectory. It is in this sense that we can speak of the Ottoman

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peasantry as owning the means of production, a fact that even Marx, barring his curious theorization of an Asiatic mode of production, readily recognized.6 The importance of this particular organization of agrarian production resides in its contribution to the strengthening of communal social practices and to the prevalence of customary law over textual, administrative law in the everyday carrying forth of social relations. This communal organization not only lent itself well to the Islamic precepts for the treatment of conquered peoples but facilitated the very order of taxation and set the terms under which taxation was legally sanctioned under Sultanic law. As the eminent Greek legal historian Nikolaos Pantazopoulos has tirelessly documented regarding the Christian populations in the Balkans from the sixteenth century onward, taxes were collected by the local community's elected representatives. This maximized the efficiency of tax collection at the least expense to the State while minimizing, to the greatest degree possible, the meddling of Ottoman central power in communal affairs (Pantazopoulos 1967: 43—48). In fact, the local Ottoman power structure often found itself bound to the demands of communal authority to such an extent that when it was invited to intervene in a specific dispute it did so to the advantage of the particular communal status quo (Pantazopoulos 1967: 51). In other words, the community gradually instituted itself as a singular entity and thus came to represent (to take the place of) the tax-subject. It thus became commonplace that the community as a collective covered for the inability of a specific peasant to pay his share of the tax (see Pantazopoulos 1975: 39; Vergopoulos 1975: 61). "Under these circumstances" to quote Pantazopoulos, "a special collective 6. Witness Marx's and Engelss numerous writings on Turkey in regard to the so-called "Eastern Question," written as journalistic endeavors for the New York Tribune during the years 1853—55. Marx's views on what is specifically of interest here are also discussed in Vergopoulos (1975: 324-26). Indeed, the most articulate elaboration of Ottoman economic relations, in light of their subsequent effect upon the structure of modern Greek society, is to be found in Vergopoulos (1975: 50-103, 203-383) and Asdrahas (1978; 1979). Asdrahas's article (1979) presents the most cogent discussion of the matter in English and should be used as a corrective to Mouzelis's historical analysis, which is compromised by his rather inflexible thesis on Greece's underdevelopment (1978: 3—29, 155—69). For a review of Ottoman agrarian economy that is bibliographically exhaustive and, moreover, puts into question the discipline's standard assumptions, see Adanir (1984/85; 1989). For an incisive survey of the epistemologkal boundaries of Ottoman historiography, see Mitchell (1988; 1993). Both writers' inquiries and findings form the basis of my discussion below. In addition, the best overall account of social and political relations to institutional structures in Greece remains the work of John Petropulos (1968), a work of extraordinary scholarship and insight and a mine of relevant information, despite a significant difference in premise and orientation.

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legal conscience is gradually asserted and later codified in customary laws that antagonize both the law of the [Ottoman] State and the law of the [Orthodox] Church, which exercised Byzantine law according to the 'privileges' granted to it" (1975: 39). This arrangement of power served the interests of both the State and the peasants. It suited them both in the sense that it provided the appropriate institutional framework for both sides to pursue their best interests. This is not to be understood at all as a formation of compromise, except in an absolutely literal sense—com-pro-mise: joined in putting forth or pro-jecting jointly. For what actually bound the State and the peasantry together in this institutional arrangement was an inveterate—and thus, in a political sense, uncompromising—antagonism. Peasant communities held on to a relative autonomy over their everyday social relations by virtue of the fact that they customarily preempted the exercise of centralized power. The State in turn benefited from the lack of development of local foci of military power, which in the Western sense of feudal power-structure would constitute a threat to the wealth and the power of the Porte. In addition, the State benefited also by the relative marginalization of Orthodox central power, whose apparatus thus remained in the imperial site close at hand. At the same time, however, the Ottomans tried, with occasional success, to attract onto their side the various community representatives either by direct bribery or by extending various social privileges exclusively to their persons, a tactic meant to disrupt the autonomy of local communal authority (Pantazopoulos 1975: 40—41).7 This overall structure, however, hid within it a debilitating symbolic crisis. As Edward Mitchell's work demonstrates (1993), the primary force spurring this crisis on was the "nature" of the ruling class itself. Mitchell insists that this class—whose semiotic coherence resides in the mastery of military gestures and signs—aims above all at the institution of rule, that is, at its own (re)institution as a ruling class. Since rule is defined and recognized by access to and exhibition offeree, this constant (re)institution is managed by the accumulation of the means offeree: wealth and institutional recognition. It is a tautological process in which one discerns the double side offeree: its violence (confiscation of wealth) and its magnanimity (patronage). The mobilizing energy in this process is provided by the inevitable compulsion to invest in the signs of force, the access to which increases with each new mobilization of the peasantry for the next military campaign. Since investment in the signs offeree and rule is endemic to the social 7. To this should be added those cases in which the right of one to represent the community was revoked by communal decision when there was evidence of corruption and collaboration disadvantageous to the community (Pantazopoulos 1967: 46).

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form of the ruling class, there is little chance of divestment—return to the ranks (and the activity) of the peasants. Hence the phenomenon of discharged troops who roam the countryside as bandits, raising havoc with the State, as for example in the Celali revolts. The strictly socioeconomic parameters of this phenomenon have been a point of concern for many Ottomanists, but Mitchell goes further to elucidate the social-imaginary dimensions of the matter. For this massive reproduction of the signs offeree and rule ultimately entails its symbolic inflation, producing thus a crisis in its value. "The ruling class expands at a Malthusian rate," Mitchell concludes (1988: 43), in an aphorism that should be understood to refer not so much to the real numerical expansion of the ruling class but to the social-imaginary inflation of rule itself, hence to the devaluation of its signs and to the symbolic and, by extension, economic crisis that ensues. In this respect, the Ottoman policy of privileges granted to conquered peoples underwent constant transformation as the State attempted to maintain its institution. This did bring about certain arbitrary decisions and abuses of power meant to provide the expected results in the short run: more contingent revenue. In the long run, however, by disrupting the social fabric that guarantees the overall efficiency of production and distribution of wealth, these caprices of power led the peasantry to claim (and be granted) more privileges, and so on, in a self-propelled pattern that became institutionally all the more difficult to derail (Pantazopoulos 1989: 315-16). This mutually nurtured antagonism cultivated a remarkably fluid condition for the playing out of social, economic, and political relations, in which the nucleus of power in actuality remained bound not to some predetermined institutional nature but to the contingent nature of historical transformation. I quote from Pantazopoulos at length: This process would have been inconceivable to those who did not know the rules of this "hard" game played between rulers and ruled in the economic arena. The purpose of this complex and multi-dimensional game, which has a cultural content, is the act of securing, by all means available to both embattling parties, the maximum of advantages to the rulers and the minimum of disadvantages to the ruled. , , . Thus, "stable," "certain," and "permanent" situations result in unforeseeable or improbable rearrangements, while uncertain or unstable conditions chance upon stable resolutions. . . . This is due to the peculiar character of this cultural game, whose goal is the discovery of a modus vivendi that would serve and satisfy, within the range of these two extreme and contrary positions (maximum-minimum), the interests of both antagonistic parties. By necessity, then, their mutual relations are flexible and unstable, being dependent on those voluntary or involuntary transformations upon which they are instituted. (1975: 45, my emphasis)

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The eloquent tenacity of this passage, and its striking argument against the purely clientelist vision of Ottoman society to which so much of contemporary social history subscribes with a vengeance, should be measured against its lack of influence in Neohellenic social analysis. Whatever the various disputes on the details of this social configuration, the theoretical importance of Pantazopoulos's exhaustive research has been missed by most Neohellenists. Their neglect corresponds perfectly to that of their Ottomanist colleagues. Both have been dazzled by the spectacular story of the West's commercial plunge into the bustling Mediterranean sea.8 The ambition of Pantazopouloss enormous oeuvre is to document the content of customary relations, which are to be understood not as the permanent habitual way of things but as the fluid, constantly manipulated and negotiated handling of power to which the antagonistic poles bind each other. This schema certainly allows for the arbitrary abuse of power on both sides (e.g., the levying of extra-ordinary taxation by the State, the falsification of actual revenue by the tributaries). But it is precisely this arbitrariness that differentiates this system from the centralized mechanism fueling both liberalism and the national dream: self-regulation. The vision of self-regulation lies at the core of the liberal system itself, while in this antagonistic situation all operation and violation essentially take place in the margins, those same margins that delineate simultaneously the boundaries of radical difference and the ground of mutual complicity9 8. In what can only be a parenthetical observation, I note that commerce had always been integral to the organization of Ottoman society. That this remains unaddressed in most "Western" accounts of Ottoman society cannot but be attributed to a persistent Orientalist outlook that sees Islamic societies as static formations. Mahmood Ibrahim's work (1990) on the early economic development of Islamic society demonstrates quite the opposite. So does, from another point of emphasis, the work of Spyros Asdrahas, who has demonstrated repeatedly that mercantile relations are integral to feudal relations, and that the issue of their compatibility or antagonism is entirely contingent upon history's demands (1978; 1979; 1983: 27—40). 9. Again parenthetically, it is worth noting that parallel to Pantazopoulos's research stands Speros Vryonis s research on that other great transitional period in the region, the last centuries of the Byzantine Empire. Vryonis points to the profound syncretism that marked Ottoman society from the very outset of its contact with Byzantine society, whether in the domain of customary cultural practices, formal administrative institutions, or language use (1971: esp. 403-97). Regarding the latter, see especially his insightful discussion of the trajectory from early bilingualism (427-28) to the later widely observed phenomenon of karamanlidhes, i.e., the use by Turkophone Christians of an admittedly idiosyncratic Turkish written in the Greek alphabet (452-61). (A similar phenomenon occurred in the Armenian population of Anatolia and Arabic populations in the re-Hispanicized Iberian Peninsula; see 282, 459-60.) Vryonis's findings underscore the enormously complex cultural intersections and intertwinings encumbering the social history of the region and bear witness to the deep-seated force of long-term customary practices that hypostatize peasant societies and that are anything but static formations, being instead recirculated and refigured according to the dynamics of each particular epoch's conquering signs of civilization (Hellenization, Christianization, Islamization, etc.).

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This antagonistic schema bears witness to the fact that Ottoman society was organized not as a mere site of so-called primitive accumulation by an insatiable and corrupt military elite but as a site of ceaseless social antagonism between relatively "equivalent" forces: a steadily increasing military elite (based entirely on its members' access to the signs offeree) and an entrenched and "independent" peasantry (that is, a peasantry possessing both the means of production and, significantly, the means of its own reproduction),10 This equivalence in class antagonism recalls Ernesto Laclau's and Chantal Mouffe's theorizations regarding social-ideological relations in contemporary society. For Laclau and Mouffe, "equivalence exists only through the act of subverting the differential character of [antagonistic] terms" (1985: 128). In such terms, the antagonism between Ottoman peasants and elites constitutes an ensemble of social relations within which the actual characteristics of difference are prevented from being constituted fully. The two classes exist entirely by virtue of their mutual antagonism, by virtue of their mutual negation of each other's "content" The terms of this antagonistic relation are those of a symbolic negotiation, overdetermined by each side s institution (and continuous reinstitution) of the other, according to the turns of historical contingency. The result: each "side" can only posit itself socially as the other's symptom. Precisely this kind of mutuality constitutes (and reconstitutes through the centuries) the "boundaries" of Ottoman society, its horizon of possibility. As such—and this is the backbone of Mitchell's overall argument—the peasantry in the Ottoman Empire was never dispossessed of the means of its own reproduction, just as the imaginary signification of the Ottoman State was never seriously challenged, a circumstance granting the Porte ultimately legendary status (much as the Asiatic peasant was granted a timeless character). As Pantazopoulos observes, the ensemble of significations governing the field of social practices was lived "at times as a legend that never came to existence and at other times as a reality that took the form of the legend" (1975: 63). This social configuration was irreparably shaken by the European colonialist interference in Ottoman affairs after the Crimean War. As a result, the Sultanic reforms of the Haiti Hiimdyun (1856), leading the French philologist and traveler Victor Berard to observe caustically: "Europe wished that Turkey die a Veurop&enne, and Turkey obeyed" (1893: 165). In other words, the (Ottoman) State brought about its own demise by its forceful intervention in 10. Consider also the conclusions of Fikret Adanir: "Private large estates, even when the owner was a member of the ruling elite, could not attain predominance in [Ottoman] agricultural production, chiefly because the working force had to be won overfrom a relativelyfree peasant class, whereas the produce would be sold at low prices fixed by the mechanisms of a command economy" (1989: 155, my emphasis).

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established social practices in the name of liberal institutions. This is hardly a picture of the State as the signifier of Absolute Power brought down by its own corruption or its excessive oppression of the rural population. Regarding the latter especially, Fikret Adanir s research strikingly argues the irrelevance of the agrarian question in the building of the various Balkan national liberation programs in the late nineteenth century (1984/85; 1989). It was the Tanzimat reforms themselves (1839—76), demonstrating the effect of European ideological erosion, that prepared the ground for the Ottoman collapse and not some kind of coordinated insurrection based on agrarian demands. The Tanzimat program centered around tax reform, relieving the peasant population of the greatest portion of the tax burden and increasing the taxes of notables and local lords (both Muslim and Christian), while abolishing the notoriously corrupt local mechanisms of tax collecting (see Inalcik I 973)- That these reforms led to more and more local unrest is a complex phenomenon, whose economic components are subjugated in a distorted fashion to political demands, to the symbolic rule offeree itself. Halil Inalcik demonstrates that most cases of unrest were not due to peasant discontent, although this existed insofar as local power interests constantly subverted the implementation of tax relief. In fact those local power interests organized the incidents of unrest themselves, for they objected to the curtailing of their privileges. The Muslim agas expressed this attitude straightforwardly in their call for a return to the Ottoman "traditional" status quo, but the Christians grafted upon their insurrectionary action a nationalist signification. Broadly speaking, the reform was an affair of international politics and not of internal economics, an infusion of nationalist ideologies in the service of the wider colonialist enterprise of the West, audaciously dressed in the garb of liberalism, and taking advantage of Ottoman social organization by transcribing onto the millet unit the sign of the nation (see Davison 1977). Perhaps not so paradoxically, this rapidly infused "nationalization" of the Empire's Balkan dominions led to an enforced "traditionalization" in the ranks of the Ottoman social elite, an idealized turn toward a glorious Islamic past. Thus, what in the late nineteenth century was perceived as an inherent aspect of Ottoman society (a view still prevalent nearly a century later) was merely the Western mythology of "Oriental despotism" actualized in the historical sphere—the Ottoman State's retreat to a rigid autocratic position as a result of the colonialist ideological incursions of the West that forced a breach in its multicultural hegemonic order (see Skopetea 1992; Islamoglu-Inan 1987: 21-24). However, instead of pointing to the Tanzimat reforms as the final cause of the Ottoman Empire s social disintegration, many economic historians point to the institution of the fiftlik, the large landholding that operated on hired labor. But on this topic too the literature is at best contradictory. Ver-

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gopoulos's otherwise meticulous analysis is a case in point. For instance, on the one hand, he contends that $iftliks made their appearance relatively late in the history of Ottoman economy (seventeenth century), not rising to prominence until the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. Moreover, he quotes various sources claiming that pftlik production never occupied more than 15 to 18 percent of peasant labor in Greek territories and occupied as little as 5 percent in Bulgarian territories (1975: 64-68). On the other hand, however, he grants to the fiftlik the major role in the dismantling of the Ottoman socialeconomic fabric, to the point even of making it the main cause for peasant revolts as early as the sixteenth century (83)! To understand this contradiction, one should keep in mind that over the terrain of Vergopoulos's vision of Ottoman economic development presides his wholesale adoption of one tendency in Ottoman historiography that (presup)poses an inherently protocapitalist nature in the giftlik phenomenon. In this sense, although understandably driven by his desire to disavow the Orientalist characteristics habitually attributed to Ottoman society, Vergopoulos ultimately compromises his perceptive analysis, which otherwise breaks with Ottomanist orthodoxy. As Mitchell has shown, attributions of both feudalist and proto-capitalist properties to fiftlik economy are misguided attempts to recognize and reduplicate the European economy's superiority (1988: 51—58). In fact, as Adanir also documents, $iftlik production was set up in the least coveted lands of the Empire (salt-soaked Macedonian plains, for example) and was thus consistently plagued with low productivity (relative to smallholding familial peasant production) even as late as the nineteenth century, at a point where we would expect an international commercial economy to have damaged traditional peasant production significantly (1984/85: 45—52; 1989: 150-54). Following Adanir, Mitchell makes the crucial suggestion that the present high agricultural productivity in the Macedonian region of Greece and in the Aegean coast of Anatolia (which would include the systematic improvement of the land base) may in fact have resulted from the forced exchange of population between Greece and Turkey after the Asia Minor War in 1922 (1988: 56). This position has some serious implications. As Adanir's and Mitchell's analyses indicate, customary peasant ownership of the means of production (and reproduction) indeed poses the major obstacle to capitalist development (conceived in its classic form), and it is by virtue of the extraordinary, forcible dispossession of small peasant holdings, which inevitably leads to the free selling of one's labor according to market conditions, that capitalism makes inroads into fundamentally agricultural societies. On the face of it, this conclusion corresponds to Marx's thesis of the transformation of peasant production into wage-labor production. I would add, however, that the real impetus in this transformation is not land dispossession per se but

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the tearing of the communal fabric of social relations by the event of land dispossession; a social-cultural dislocation. This tearing results in the institution of a new set of social relations—a new means of reproduction, if you will— which, lacking its own social-historical grounding, cannot but organize itself on the basis of the new demands—the demands of the market, should those demands be present or possible. Facing the Curse of "Underdevelopment": Clientelist Theories This long detour into the socioeconomic conditions predominant at the time of Greece's emergence into national consciousness—which necessitates our entanglement with the many discourses of political economy addressing this period—aims above all at elucidating the social-historical and discursive context of the production and dissemination of the Neohellenic Enlightenment as a body of "new" social-imaginary significations. For this period signifies not only a historical but also an epistemological transition. Whether one posits the transition in terms of continuity versus rupture, customary social practices versus Western culture, or peasant economy versus capitalist economy, it all hinges upon the tricks of the Enlightenment—upon the magic of a logos stamped with the authority of the Age of Revolution both in the realm of "society" and in the realm of "culture." Central to the general framework of signification inaugurated by Enlightenment thought is the notion of "development." No society, after the advent of the Enlightenment, can escape the determining force exercised by this notion upon the very cognitive mechanisms of culture. Given that since at least the so-called "Industrial Revolution" development has come to be associated with colonialist and imperialist power, it is obvious that any use of the notion in the case of Greece will necessarily imply a lack. The formal characteristics of "development" are intimately tied to the signifying frameworks that organize and safeguard the meaning of "capitalism^" "technology," and even "rationality," as Castoriadis has succinctly observed (1991: 175— 218). Therefore, any lack of development will hinge upon the absence—or at the very least, the relative disfigurement—of those other characteristics. Hence, a "disfigured capitalism" as Vergopoulos would be prone to call it, or a "technological dependency" as numerous social theorists clamor about, or finally the "irrational social relations of clientelism" as Mouzelis is fond of conceiving them, which beyond being simply "irrational" also happen to be "pre-capitalist"—that is to say, "lacking class-consciousness" (Mouzelis 1978: 22,138). I shall have to leave unaddressed the requisite link of class consciousness

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to capitalism and to rationality no less. Since Lukacs at least, this issue has trapped a great many formidable minds. However, I cannot eschew the matter of clientelism, because it dominates most explanations of modern Greece's "inability" to perform at the level of civil society, the post-Enlightenment requirement for civilized political consciousness and social action. For clientelism is forwarded precisely as that social condition that might account for modern Greece's not being a resolutely modem society (endowing with yet another disclaimer this already ironic adjectival naming). Bracketing for now clientelism's significance to the discourse of the State and the institution of law (a discussion taken up in detail later in the book), let us review briefly the meaning of clientelism as a historical legacy and as a phenomenon intimately bound with the discourse of social development. Mouzelis has distinguished himself as the most articulate champion of the theory of clientelism, holding it up as the exegetical prism through which Greek society is best analyzed and understood. Mouzelis has defended his theory in a series of works that extend beyond the particularity of Greece to all those societies that exist in the "periphery" or "semi-periphery" and are thus marked by various facets of underdevelopment As his terminology makes clear, Mouzelis has absorbed—albeit not entirely uncritically—all the work that encompasses the socioeconomic and historiographical tenets of structural theory, from the Annales School and its offshoots to Immanuel Wallerstein and beyond. In this respect, as Laclau has argued (1990: 221-24), Mouzelis carries into every one of his historical inquiries the reduction of hegemonic agents or sources of political action to structural (and essentially class-defined) totalities, despite his declarations to the contrary (see, for example, his critique of structural causality, 1978: 43-55). Mouzelis conceives the history of modern Greek society as a series of exterior interventions and elements of "foreign" heritage. Thus, in his mind, Greece is marked by a procession of "underdeveloprnents"—from the initial inheritance of an already dismantled Ottoman agrarian economy due to the expansion of European merchant capital, to the subsequent annihilation of the Balkan cottage industry by the Industrial Revolution in England, to the post-18 50 colonialist expansion of capital and exploitation of the periphery, and finally to the present state of late capitalism in peripheral societies, namely, the imposed chasm between the production and use of high technology for the needs of foreign capital and an incurably cachectic internal economy still struggling with an antiquated mode of production (Mouzelis 1978: 28-29). Underlying this view is the dubious assumption that industrialized countries exhibit a great homogeneity in their relations of production (177). This

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assumption is dubious not so much in discounting, by contrast, the homogeneity of preindustrialized societies as in overlooking the heterogeneity inherent in all social relations at all historical moments—heterogeneity that every system of power has sought to annihilate in its efforts to survive. I need not dwell on the ideological underpinnings of this assumption, for it is obvious that in this immanent association of industrialization with homogeneity we are merely confronting the cornerstones of nineteenth-century social thought, in liberalism and Marxism alike: self-regulation and rationality The very presence of this assumption, however, might shed some light on Mouzelis's reasons for insisting on the notion of "underdevelopment" as the proper characterization of Greek social reality, as well as his reasons for invoking clientelism as the primary political framework for understanding Greek relations of power. Here I do not mean to reject the existence of clientelist structures in the course of Neohelienic history, or to disavow the charge of Greece's underdevelopment (although it is certain the term itself is of no particular use to this analysis here). My aim is rather to contest the very employment of these terms as conceptual frameworks, as well as to question their conceptual grounding, their obscurantist assumptions. In both cases, the particularity/ peculiarity of modern Greek society is relegated to exterior sources and causes, which are somehow assumed to possess immanent, transcriptive, and logical standards of evaluation. Clientelism, for Mouzelis, is inherently linked to alleged Ottoman social structures, whether metaphorically transcribed in the Weberian terms of the sultanism of contemporary Greek political leaders (Mouzelis igQOa) or recirculated in terms of the peasantry's effective disenfranchisement through local landlord terrorism in the second half of the nineteenth century (ipyob; 10710). Considering Mouzelis*s explicit association of clientelism with precapitalist social relations, the relevance of the concept to his schema of Greece's underdeveiopment is evident. Admittedly, Mouzelis is conscious of all those positivist values that the notion of "development" usually entails, especially in the discourse of post-1945 global social policy. He understands, first of all, that underdevelopment is not linked by rule to the lack of industrialization (1978: 37), At the same time, he is quick to dismiss the economic formalism of dependency theory, recognizing conditions of dependency in all kinds of different historical junctures and at various levels on the global socioeconomic ladder (45). Finally, he argues in favor of the heuristic usefulness of the concept of underdevelopment, disavowing its connotation of "backwardness" or of "being left behind," and defending it as the denotation of a substantively different social condition. In what is undoubtedly an intelligent

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maneuver, he discounts the importance of the word itself and demands that we focus on the context within which the notion of "development" is agonistically theorized—the arguments very framing (178—79).n But for all his intelligent negotiation of a position between Andre Gunder Frank and Louis Althusser (alternating between measured critiques of the two), Mouzelis fails to convince us that he does not in fact subscribe to a hierarchical conceptual system in which modernization and capitalist industrialization are both the theoretical core and the trajectory of political practice (despite whatever ultimate revolutionary fate might await them in some ceaselessly deferred redemptive future). Indeed, if we are to believe the Oxford English Dictionary., the usage of the term "development" in reference to economics goes back only to 1871, arguably the height of British colonialism.12 It is a notion inevitably intertwined with the trajectory of European supremacy, inherent in both the cunning of supremacy s ideology and the violence of its practice. There is simply no discursive ritual that would allow the notion of "development" to cleanse itself of its genealogy; the dramatic plunge of so many revolutionary anticolonialist movements into its epistemic abyss serves as a most glaring example. Indeed, the greatest weapon capitalism has wielded on a global basis over the longest period of time is its ability to instill into all those revolutionary movements that opposed it a conviction of the authority and epistemological superiority of "development," a conviction so deep that it achieves the level of libidinal desire. The magnitude of this contention merely reflects the magnitude of the ideological bankruptcy of so-called "anticapitalist" movements in our time, from the late Soviet Union to nearly all postcolonial independence movements. Admittedly, it is easy to prophesy in retrospect. The notion of development imposes, politically, upon all aspects of global capitalism a fundamental dilemma. Wallerstein, a long-standing negotiator of the concept, has recently taken a more critical stance, making in the process some decisive observa11. Unfortunately, this maneuver is compromised by a subsequent reply to those critics who perceive in the employment of the notion "development" an inherent essentialism. Mouzelis responds by refusing to accept the attribution of essentialism to any taxonomy (which is, he argues, by necessity context bound). He concludes, extraordinarily, by dismissing essentialism as the mere preoccupation of philosophers fighting off the ghost of Hegel, which is irrelevant to social theory! (1978: 179-81). 12. This dating of the geopolitical sense of "development" is corroborated by Raymond Williams. In his Keywords, the notion is given a much richer treatment, covering its discursive trajectory from its initial appearance in verb form according to the psychological-educational tenets of the English Enlightenment (Warburton, c.i75o) to the economic-evolutionary characteristics it came to bear a century later along with the triumph of economism. The term spans, in other words, the range of what Foucault would call the transition from the analysis of wealth to political economy. (See Williams 1976: 102-4; Foucault 1970: chaps. 6 and 8.)

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tions. He sets out by reminding us of the specific historical-conceptual taints that "development" has carried along since its discursive genesis: first, a biological-evolutionary dimension, harking back to the Enlightenments preferences for a vision of social progress toward material and social equality among people and among states; and second, an arithmetic-accumulative dimension, which is not just a linear progression but a "monotonic projection" driven by the desire for "more" (1991: 67-68, 106-7). As a result, the desire for development breaks down to a fundamental, though fundamentally unresolvable, dilemma: the desire for "more" and the desire for "more equal" (123-24). Wallerstein argues that the global capitalist order has managed to extricate itself from this dilemma by endlessly deferring one side of it—the desire for equality in development—to an always nearly achievable future. In this respect, this classic liberal stance toward underdevelopment is intertwined with the one toward racism, a coincidence underlined by the very historical conditions linking the two phenomena in the international sociopolitical arena (80-103). Wallerstein alerts us to what remains conspicuously absent from Mouzelis's analysis: namely, that the notion of "development" is necessarily subjected to a relative standard according to which there must always be a supreme value to be achieved or emulated in the course of time, a value at the core that renders all other components inevitably peripheral, always lacking. Once we discard this relative schema, a society's development or underdevelopment is meaningless. For Wallerstein, the notion of development actually achieves meaning only at the level of the world system. Only the world system can be said to "develop," although not as a whole but in partial ways, involving in its very "development" an "underdevelopment" internally within the system (160). No doubt, since this diagram is itself subjected to the relational field of history (a world system in the midst of a history of many "local" nonsystems), it does not quite escape the fundamental epistemological blockage that the notion of "development" suffers. Even if relieved of linear or progressivist logic, Wallerstein s view of capitalism and its "systemic development" will never escape its own immanent historical relativity. Whatever the allegedly absolute, systemic nature of development (its integrity qua system), the actual meaning of "development" within the historical and geographical borders of the world system will have always already been dispersed in as many directions as those variable loci of history whose very partiality allows the system to exist, allows it self-definition. There is, however, something to be gained by Waller stein's internal model. First of all, insofar as he perceives social processes as having taken place within a global framework since at least the fifteenth century, he has the insight to determine that clientelism, along with all those other conditions

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attributed to the curse of underdevelopment, is neither an anomaly nor a survival from some barbaric past, but the offspring of a capitalist mode of production (160). To this, I would add the significant proviso: clientelism is the offspring of the coupling between capitalist forms and precapitalist forms, a coupling as savage as it is amorous. In this respect, clientelism in Greece—to the degree that it exists at all—is not a remnant of Ottoman social relations but a "modern" condition instituted along with the influx of a capitalist mode of social relations in an adamantly precapitalist context. This is, of course, the story of all colonial societies. All the same, we should not forget that clientelist relations are abundant in the most advanced of capitalist societies. It may have become commonplace to perceive the great banking scandals in "underdeveloped" countries (such as the one in Greece in 1989, allegedly involving the socialist prime minister Andreas Papandreou) as exemplary symptoms of a clientelist State. But institutional objectivity, self-regulation, professionalism, and the like are capitalisms (or development's) greatest mystifications. It is practically an everyday affair to read somewhere in the world's most reputable dailies about the discovery of yet another scandal often in the highest levels of the economic and political arena. Capitalism is full of scandals. Next to the most impressive achievement in capital investment lies an equally impressive achievement in capital embezzlement. Indeed, if there is a mark distinguishing advanced ("developed") capitalist societies, it is that such scandals have ceased to be experienced as scandals. They merely become the way of things. Thus one has to go out of one's way to perceive clientelism as a characteristic of underdevelopment or to perceive in clientelist practices the character of underdeveloped societies. Were I to consider holding on to the notion of "development" at all—and this only because it might alert us to the kinetic character of all societies—I would insist on its being conceived always as uneven}* All societies are in this respect characterized by an uneven development. Of course this statement does not say much at all unless we look at each particular society as such, assured that we are, at some level, imposing a set of arbitrary borders. To evaluate a case of uneven development requires that the measure and scale of evaluation be integral to that society, eliminating in effect the baggage of core/periphery schemes. It is to evaluate an internal condition, an act that turns one's attention to each society's particular history of 13. I am aware of the weighted Marxist legacy of this notion, from Marx himself, to Lenin and Mao, and more recently to postcolonial Marxism (e.g., Samir Amin) and certainly Althusser. Nonetheless, I am convinced that it remains the most valid way to approach the issue, if one chooses to stay within the terminology of "development." Obviously, I do not share the unfortunate Marxist investment in the phantom of modernization, which has always haunted the notion of uneven development. I rely instead on the contiguity of this notion to the notion of overdetermination, both in its Althusserian expression and in its redeployment by Laclau and Mouffe to describe "the impossibility of the social" (see 1985: 93-148).

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contending forms and allows insight (incomplete though it always is) into the history of each society's overdeterminations—a history that can be neither predicted nor ideologically justified nor fully explained. The condition of uneven development describes by definition a contentious arena in which no singular mode or subject can ever be constituted fully an arena of social antagonism. This arena is marked inevitably by a geographical component, in the sense of Neil Smith's characterization of "uneven development as the geographical expression of the contradictions of capital" (1984: 152). But the geographical here should be understood as a factor arising within the field of internal contention, not international but intranational. Smith's seesaw theory of uneven development neutralizes the spatial differentiation between development and underdevelopment, positing an interminable flight of capital back and forth between them, each pole ultimately becoming tainted with the predicament of the other. This process inscribes a space in which fixed notions of "core" and "periphery" are just nonsensical: "To the extent that capital cannot find a spatial fix in the production of an immobile environment for production, it resorts to complete mobility as a spatial fix; spatial fixity and spacelessness are but prongs of the same fork" (149). The geography of uneven development hinges on the trajectory of capitals intrepid flight. Thus, the economic history of the urban/suburban landscape is now read quite differently: property and commodity value diminishes not because some dark-skinned people are invading the neighborhood but because white capital has moved out of town. The comparative economic condition of nations can be read likewise, despite Smith s own reservations as to the applicability of his theory on an international scale. Capitals circuitous flight in the compulsive search for profit is not limited in any systemic way, nor is it respectful of some kind of ancestral power. This is why nowadays England's lordly RollsRoyce is at the mercy of a plastic boom-box from Hong Kong or Singapore. If there is a difference in scale between the urban/suburban and the international, it concerns the order of the temporal; it simply takes a greater amount of historical time for capitalism to underdevelop the developed world than to underdevelop its own cities. Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Modernization Thesis The all too brief history of the Neohellenic Enlightenment serves as a perfect illustration of uneven development as an internal condition. Unfortunately with rare exceptions, this history tends to be perceived as the originary point of a tragedy: Greece's ever-receding position in the race toward modern civilization, its irredeemable belatedness in the formation and function of

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modern institutions, its ever more breathless anxiety for the international prestige of bourgeois regularity. This Greek tragedy is known under a colorful variety of names, all tantamount to "failure of modernization"—in fact, Greece's "failure" to catch up in the game of modernity, to modernize and remodernize (or postmodernize, as some would insist) along the lines set by those leading the race. This notion of failure hypostatizes the entire thesis on Greece's underdevelopment. Indeed, when Mouzelis castigates what he calls the political and cultural formalism in Greek social relations—a condition allegedly due to the severing of "organic links between native and imported institutions"—he is arguing convinced of the consubstantial, organic relation of social self-regulation and autonomy to capitalist institutions, a relation he perceives as the bearer of a modern state of things (1978:137—41). For Mouzelis, only capitalist relations of production can make possible the existence of autonomous workers' organizations. The undesirability of the first sanctifies the desirability of the second. This unfortunate equation is our modern fortune— everything else fades into a truly distasteful premodern arbitrariness. But it is far beyond my intentions to plunge into this well-oiled heteronomous dialectic unfolding under the mantle of the logic of progress. After all, this entire study is founded on the premise that social autonomy can never be achieved—can never develop—out of a heteronomous condition (even as a dialectical sublation) and, moreover, that history does not move forward in an incrementally measurable way—indeed, that history does not move as such. It speeds by in such a way that it may appear variously inverted, infinite, immobile, invisible, and so on. Be that as it may, for the purposes of the historical task at hand, it is worthwhile pondering the problem of (presup)posing Greece specifically to be a case of failed modernization, a problem that, if contemplated beyond its usual technocratic aspects, shows itself to be ultimately situated in the domain of culture. This is because what has been conceived as Greece's "belated" relation to Western post-Enlightenment institutions (the postcolonial condition par excellence) points to a disjuncture at the level of social-imaginary signification itself, and not merely to a malformation or disfigurement of a particular institutional history that is somehow taken as universally applicable. Although there is inevitable collusion between sock>economic theories of development and cultural-ideological theories of modernity (such that preference for one can never exclude the other), nonetheless, the modernization thesis reveals its inherent limitations much more if contemplated as a cultural, and not as an economic, thesis.14 14. Herein lies the importance ofJusdaniss recent work (1991), which traces the problematic modernization of Greece in relation to its peculiar development of aesthetic culture. But his

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This is all the more pertinent here since modern Greece is especially burdened-with the symbolic exigencies of post-Enlightenment culture, even beyond its supposed techno-economic handicap. Even before its existence as a nation, Greece found itself designated as the representation of civilization in a predetermined confrontation with (Ottoman) barbarism. This configuration signifies none other than the interplay between the twin metaphorical identities of the Enlightenment, which pervades its major political treatises (Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Hegel, to name some of the most explicit proponents) and can be said to cover the range of the Enlightenment spirit, from its precursory "mythical" manifestations to its more trenchant contemporary self-critiques. With the declaration of the Greek War of Independence in 1821 this metaphoric interplay (civilization/barbarism) passes concretely into the signifying structure of the Greek/Ottoman conflict (Skopetea 1988: 3031). Moreover, to this conflict of significations corresponds a socioeconomic configuration that substantiates the entry of the signifier of "modernization" into the realm of culture. Specifically, the mid-eighteenth-century consolidation of the Greek merchant class, which facilitated the dissemination of Greek Enlightenment texts, brought a cosmopolitan character to a body of Greek cultural production that began for the first time to develop outside the intellectual domain of the Orthodox Christian hierarchy. This lent to the cultural antagonism between Greeks and Ottomans something other than a mere religious or ethnic signification: the confrontation between the figures of "modernization" and "obscurantism" (Tsoukalas 1977: 42). Yet the burden of representing civilization in a war against a (for all practical purposes) more civilized opponent—that is, one who can claim a veritable cultural institution—is no doubt enormous. For once it wins, civilization—whether justifiably thus signified or not—must inevitably be "reduced" to culture. That is, it must specify itself within a set of concrete boundaries it recognizes as its own, within an exclusive historical particularity, This entails in turn that an indigenous means of expressing a collective identity must be created, which can no longer rely on its antithesis to a colonizing presence for its legitimation but must displace this antithesis onto an entirely symbolic domain. In other words, it must (re)invent an Other who constantly amasses its forces at the border. To assert itself in this new symbolic antithesis, to become national culture, this new identity must find (and found) valuable analysis is compromised by a rather Habermasian insistence that culture is a voluntarist formation, engineered by the deliberate actions of organized intellectual elites, who are the primary agents of both the public sphere and so-called "autonomous" art. (See Jusdanis I991, esp. chaps. 4 and 5.)

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a social homogeneity, a linguistic tradition, and a geographical continuity: in other words, a native past.,15 The "language" that would render a Neohellenic native past comprehensible sought a readily available model: a Europe still smoldering in the ashes of the French Revolution, a revolution, moreover, conducted in the vestments of an immortal Hellenism. Setting aside for now the enormous impact of the discourse of Philhelienism in the formation not only of Greece as a nation but of the entire epistemic space of nineteenth-century Europe, one could say simply enough that modern Greece in this sense emerged as a cultural construct before its political (statist) constitution. The point that, in the language of the "West," Greece's modernity was never articulated independently of its antiquity does not alter the fact that the energies for the cultural construction of Greece were elicited as a consequence, and on behalf, of Europe's own contemporary necessities. In other words, Europe's Philhelienism, although engaged in a struggle to comprehend the significance of ancient Greece, was actually a problematic of modernity, and it was precisely in this problematic that modern Greece was ultimately implicated. The problematic of modernity thus enveloped Greece before the explicit intervention of the discourse of modernization that characterized the initial institutional actions of the new State. What began as an internal Ottoman affair, an insurrection seeking ethnic autonomy riding on an initially rather nebulous ideology, was at once elevated to an international affair. Given the specific historical parameters of the period, to say that the Greek uprising became internationalized is tantamount to saying that it was Europeanized— that it became an affair internal to the wider geopolitical configuration of Europe, which was itself at the time being constantly redrawn. This is especially striking, considering that the previous uprising, at the instigation of Catherine the Great's Russian agents in 1770, drew the worst derision from the Europeans, making Greeks suddenly les pauvres poltrons du continent in Voltaire's words (Eisner 1991: 79). Thus, this particular displacement of the 1821 uprising from an event internal to Ottoman society to an event internal to Europe accounts for an insurrection's being (re)named a revolution, the 15. More than one hundred years later, in what is actually a postcolonial context, Frantz Fanon will theorize this same phenomenon as native exoticism (1968: 219-24). Speaking of intellectuals from colonized environments who have distinguished themselves by having assimilated the colonialist culture s most "civilized" achievements, and who now return to the fold to participate in anticolonialist struggle, Fanon recognizes in their return a process of selfnativization. And although this scandalous demise of Westernized natives strikes a considerable blow at the colonialist cultural system, Fanon argues that it ultimately reveals the process as "a banal search for exoticism" (221) and exposes these intellectuals before the peoples eyes as "latecomers" to their tradition, as opportunistic usurpers (224).

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only name it could have possibly come to bear during what had become by then, in Europe's consciousness, a dramatically revolutionary age. That this revolution was to be resignified as a war of independence was a matter of course. The Age of Revolution introduced a new type of insignia for class war: the sovereign nation. In this respect, Greece was hardly a vanguard case. Apart from the American Revolution, there is one other equally mythical and historically more decisive precedent, which in fact burst out directly from the heart of the French revolutionary process: the great slave revolt in San Domingo, which resulted in the national independence of Haiti (1803). There is much to learn in regard to Greece from this event, especially as it has been presented in C. L. R. James's classic theory-history, The Black Jacobins. Bringing a knowledge of the Greek case to the reading of this remarkable book results in an insightful confrontation with the entire complex of revolutionary signification of that period—that is, with the enormous force and profound seduction exercised by a radically emerging epistemic shift, by the Enlightenment as a different social imaginary. It is worth pausing for a moment to contemplate the magnitude of the impact that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen must have had upon the African slaves of the French colonies. This case is a striking demonstration of how the new signifying system came to adhere to the insurrectionary potential of an altogether different configuration of power. In this light, consider then the astonishing affect of the French Revolution, projected through the discourse of Philhellenism, upon a people who came to call itself "the enslaved Hellenes." In both cases, we are dealing with the splendorous force of the Enlightenment as an emancipatory project, and especially its capacity to inscribe its order of signification upon the many different sites of disenchantment with the various manifestations of the ancien regime during this period. The impact becomes even more dramatic in the Greek case, because the actual signifier of revolution—Hellenism—had at one time constituted the weft in the sociocultural fabric of the region, the very language of acculturation safeguarding the coordination of an enormously heterogeneous population. Indeed, precisely this position of Hellenism as the region's cultural catalyst through the ages makes Greece the most fertile ground for the cultivation of those ideas advocating national sovereignty Or to put it otherwise, the same historical legacy that at one time made of Hellenism the vehicle for an inter-Balkan culture now makes it a vehicle of national(ist) rupture (cf. Kitromihdis 1990: 67). On this site of inversion in the prevalent order of signification, which also happens to be a redoubling of signification, resides the ambivalent historical meaning of the Neohellenic Enlightenment. Throughout its trajectory, this

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"project" is marked by a double strand. I have already introduced its history as a path framed by two ruptures, in that the sociocultural ground for its reception was split by an antagonism between an official administrative culture and a local customary culture. The propositions of Greek Enlightenment thinkers, in a general sense, were to adopt this antagonism, waging a textual war against the mechanisms of oificial culture (the exclusive domain of the Orthodox Church) and mining the social conditions of local culture for a more efficient production and dissemination of their works. To this antagonistic situation I would add the Greek Enlightenment's simultaneous drive toward both a (re-)Hellenization of the region and an inter-Balkan autonomy. In terms of Greek history specifically, this particular dialectic proved to be the most untenable of all, since the Greek Enlightenment set the ground both for national independence in the name of regional emancipation, on the one hand, and for the Philhellenist domination that initiated and followed its demise, on the other. Thus, the political culmination of this interethnic, emancipatory "project" turned out to be a centralized, ethnically homogenized, national(ist) bureaucratic form of power. Considering then this deeply multivalent character, it is rather misguided to perceive the Neohellenic Enlightenment merely as the vehicle for the Westernization or the modernization of Greece. Certainly this phenomenon was absolutely crucial to the institution of Greece as a nation and, by implication, complicit in introducing Greek culture to the problematic of modernity, drawing upon the force of a revolutionary age that was characteristically European and modern. Yet the Greek Enlightenment, as an amalgam of texts that only retroactively could be said to constitute a project, hardly consists in a simple Western imposition of ideas, although it does involve the transposition of the currency of ideas prevalent during the late eighteenth century It is in the end a historically "indigenous" formation, marked by a long-term history of antagonism among social, cultural, and discursive practices in the region, whose contradictions are deeply inscribed in its trajectory and ultimately account for its complex and ambiguous consequences. Moreover, the Greek Enlightenment cannot be reduced to a set of programmatic actions taken at the level of elite decision, whether political-economic or intellectual. It arose during the late eighteenth century out of the magma of social and cultural practices in the Balkan and Eastern Mediterranean region of the Ottoman Empire (including the various diasporic elements in proximate territories— Vienna and Venice in particular), and as an overall "project," it operates at the level of social-imaginary signification. The Greek Enlightenment is thus as much accidental as it is anonymous and incidental to its own particular conditions of production. Greek Enlightenment thinkers do ultimately operate as

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an "anonymous corporation/' as Yerasimos Kaklamanis suggests (1989: 104). This is admittedly a wider phenomenon, and with more literal manifestations, considering the proliferation of (often secret) intellectual societies that characterize the Enlightenment in general—for example, the Society of Alethophiles, which formed the basis of the German Aujklarung, a group whose emblem was in fact a coin bearing the motto sapere aude ("dare to know"), Kant's Horatian answer to the question "What is Enlightenment?" (see Venturi 1972: 36-37). With this nonprogrammatic framework in mind, the remaining sections below focus particularly on this "indigenous" imaginary of the Greek Enlightenment, exploring its ambivalent strands and intangible characteristics, while delineating a trajectory along which continuity and rupture, success and failure, emergence and demise come to occupy the same historical moment. Against Administrative Culture: The Task of Reeducation The texts composing the body of the Greek Enlightenment were (as they still are) essentially traditionless; that is, they defy inclusion within the boundaries of what we have come to know as the modern Greek literary tradition. To begin with, they resist an organic scheme of cultural continuity For, on the one hand, they stand (sometimes reluctantly, other times irreverently) against the religious philosophy of Greek Orthodoxy and its Byzantine imaginary, and on the other, they keep a careful distance from the ancient Hellenic tradition—a tradition to which they relate critically, often by means of translation, both literally and figuratively (i.e., in the form of prolegomena or critical commentaries). losepos Moisiodax spearheaded this attitude when he identified the relation of his contemporaries to antiquity as a compulsive oscillation between "esteem and neglect": Today, Greece feeds and nurtures two defects.... It is altogether overtaken with the esteem and the neglect of antiquity. The first engenders this thriving prejudice that everything the ancients invented or cultivated is brave and accurate; the second brought about the scarcity, indeed the absence, of most of the old writings. . . . The prejudice has implanted an implacable hatred for everything new, while the scarcity has stripped us of the most important messages of the old.16 16. losepos Moisiodax (i725?-i8oo) was one of the most significant figures of the Greek Enlightenment. Though he wrote little, his Apologia (Vienna, 1780), which encapsulates both his theoretical writings and his struggle to implement them in an ideologically hostile environment, is no doubt one of the major documents of Greek Enlightenment thought. This passage is from the Preface to his translation of Ludovico Antonio Muratori's Filosojia Morale, published in Venice in 1761 (I cite it from its reprinting as an appendix in Kitromilidis 1985: 327).

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This signifies another instance in the victory of the Moderns, where the credibility of ancient Greek philosophy becomes itself an object of philosophical inquiry and reflection. Although the Greek Enlightenment is often forgotten, most of its writings actually address contemporary conditions and problems, whether social or linguistic, ethnogeographical or epistemological. This tendency cannot be perceived except within the context of dominant Orthodox thought, which had assimilated an Aristotelian language into its theological framework. For all its explicit turn to ethical-practical aspects of ancient Greek philosophy (of which Aristotle himself is an unmaneuverable pillar), the Greek Enlightenment's initial critical distance from the ancients expresses also the anxiety that proof of the philosophical authenticity of ancient Greek thought would entail submission to the theological hegemony of Aristotelian scholasticism (Kondylis 1988: 223). Precisely this concern led Moisiodax, for example, to publish, as part of his defiant Apologia of 1780, an extensive critique of Aristotle's Physics (1976: 125—58). It is perhaps symptomatic of these contextual pressures that so many Enlightenment texts are unambiguously symbiotic with other texts, either ancient Greek or contemporary European, against or on behalf of which they weave their own existence. More specifically, Greek Enlightenment thinkers saw as their task the transmission of a certain body of knowledge, explicitly inadmissible (and indeed inconceivable) within the epistemological boundaries delimited by a Greek language that was until then the primary domain of a tradition of Orthodox theological reflection. From the Orthodox point of view, the post-Cartesian empirical-theoretical framework, which with its emphasis on moral reflection and the contemplation of physical phenomena served as the scaffolding for the project of the Greek Enlightenment, was misapprehended, seen simply as an atheistic extension of a Western Aristotelian scholasticism that contradicted the Orthodox neo-Aristotelian philosophy developed by Theofilos Korydaleus during the mid-seventeenth century.17 The upshot of this uncanny equation is that the Greek Enlightenment 17. Since we cannot enter here into a discussion of the development of post-Byzantine philosophy in conjunction with its counterpart in Renaissance humanism, a brief clarification is in order. In the Ottoman period, Orthodox theology was marked by a pervasive Aristotelianism, which was instituted on two distinct and crucial occasions. The first occurred in 1460, soon after the fall of Constantinople, and was initiated by the Patriarchate's burning of Plethon's Laws—the major text of a (neo)Platonic oeuvre that, as is well known, spearheaded Marcilio Ficino's introduction of Plato into a hitherto predominantly Aristotelian West. The second instance was the revisionary neo-Aristotelianism of Theofilos Korydaleus (1570—1646), which introduced a direct hermeneutical reading of Aristotle's texts into Orthodox theology (in lieu of the previous readings of commentaries and summaries). But the real significance of this latter reform, whose revisionary character was too subtle to be resisted by the official theology, was that it became the hegemonic philosophical/ideological idiom against which Greek Enlighten-

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is characterized by two tendencies: The early tendency was to translate contemporary European works and to defend them via a critique of the ancients (which often served as an allegorical critique of Orthodox-Aristotelian hegemony, as in Moisiodax). The later tendency was to preface, edit, or translate ancient Greek works, surrounding them in the process with the ideas of contemporary Europe and consciously directing them toward the necessities of a modern Greek society in the fervor of national independence (a tendency spectacularly realized, as we shall see in the next chapter, in the enormous national-pedagogical project of Adamantios Korais). Central to both tendencies, however, was the explicit insistence on philosophy as that necessary alternative to theology that would set in motion and uphold the drive for ideological and political emancipation. Despite the aforementioned reservations, this vehement advocation of philosophy as an indispensable social force, as a secular praxis centered around a human-produced collective ethics, reinvokes philosophy's ancient Hellenic significance, its expressly political-pedagogical meaning. In this respect, both Moisiodax and Korais are exemplary in their outspoken and nonnegotiable advocation of philosophy as the means to a collective will and a society's knowledge, these being the necessary components of a revolutionary project. Both figures link their call for philosophy to an educational practice, to a lucid organization of cognitive reflection for public instruction.18 The secularism of these positions is evident in Moisiodax's initial definition of what he called "the sound Philosophy": "a total theory that explores the nature of things to its ultimate end, so as to introduce, to cultivate the real happiness that humans, as humans, are capable of enjoying on earth" (1976: 96). As if to underline the great distance separating "the sound Philosophy" from theological contemplation, Moisiodax argues that philosophy turns ones attention more to the pulse of things than to visionary impulses: "The ment thinkers rose with a vengeance. For the importance of Korydalism in Orthodox theology in relation to the Enlightenments challenge, see Psimmenos (1988: i; 40—41) and Henderson (1970: 12-19), 18. Kitromilidis contends with considerable credibility that Moisiodax is the first thinker in the Neohellenic tradition who consciously "skirmishes with the tradition's superego in seeking his identity" (1985: 233). Kitromilidis bases his argument on Moisiodax's inclusion of personal reflections and biographical problems in his philosophical inquiry, a tactic that infuses philosophy with the social site occupied by the psyche and produces a discourse that is at once political, philosophical, and psychographic. In this sense, Moisiodax might resemble Rousseau. However, in that his confessional style aims at lending to philosophical contemplation a personalized idiom, Moisiodax may also be the Neohellenic tradition's first essayist. In these formal terms, his precursor is Montaigne, and his contemporary Greek version, albeit occupying an entirely different hegemonic position, would have to be Seferis (see Chapter 6 below).

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sound Philosophy resembles that of the law prefect in ancient Egypt, who chooses to listen rather than see" (97). Following this spirit, Moisiodax s specifically pedagogical work— Treatise on the Education of Children, or Pedagogy (Venice, 1779)—although admittedly owing its overall conception to Locke, forges less of a program, in the formal sense of the word, and more of a concrete articulation of the heteronomous fate that haunts a society lacking in education. In this sense, Moisiodax formulates a theory of education that becomes in effect a critical delineation of social relations, thus turning pedagogical writing itself into an instance of social analysis.19 In light, then, of the persistently secular character of most Greek Enlightenment texts, the antithetical response of Orthodox hierarchy was bound to be dramatic. With the very first signs of the new thought, even at a time when it posed no threat to the stability of the Ottoman regime (and hence the Church's privileges), the hegemonic arm of Orthodox theology responded with a repressive force not seen since the era in which Plethon s Neoplatonic deviations were obliterated. The official authority of the Church expressed itself not only textually, by issuing theological counterarguments, but with outright violence, as any threatened administrative power would: with harassment, unemployment, prison, forced confession, or excommunication.20 In this context, Moisiodax s Apologia takes on a sharper meaning. Despite its title, this text is scarcely a confession. It is a polemical statement—but one that goes beyond the sort of self-proclaimed defense that would have been normal at the time. For the Apologia proclaims itself a priori to be an apology, not a defense, although assuredly it does defend the teachings for which Moisiodax was harassed. The Apologia is a preemptive strike, a defiant provocation of 19. For a succinct discussion of this text and its importance, see Kitromilidis (1985: 190208) and Henderson (1970: 87-105). 20. Consider this remarkable passage from the Encyclical issued by Patriarch Gregory V against the new forms of thought in 1819: "What is the advantage of having our young people glued to these lessons [i.e., in mathematics and the sciences] and learning about numbers, and algebras, and cubes, and cubes of cubes, and triangles, and triangulated squares, and logarithms, and calculations with symbols, and problems about ellipses, and atoms, and voids, and vortices, and forces and attractions and masses, and properties of light, and the aurora borealis, and bits of optics, and acoustics, and tens of thousands of similar things, and other prodigies, so that they may count up the grains of sand in the sea and the drops of the rain and may move the earth, provided only that, like Archimedes, they are given a fixed point on which to stand—and then have them barbarians in their speech, solecists in their writing, ignorant in matters of religion, in morals perverted and corrupt, irresponsible in affairs of state, and backward in patriotism and unworthy of their ancestral calling?" (quoted from Henderson 1970: 199, in his translation). That the Patriarch was executed by order of the Sultan two years later as primarily responsible for the rebellious actions of the Greeks, and that he was later honored by the Greek State as a national martyr, shows how distant the official sites of power remained from the actual historical meaning of the Greek Enlightenments project.

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official theology to match its philosophical acumen, going so far even as to declare itself a work in progress. By issuing his Apologia as a public philosophical statement, Moisiodax dismantled the mechanism of the Church's punitive demand for a confessional statement of retraction, a private apology addressed directly to the Church hierarchy, and entrusted himself to a more general collective interest outside the Church's control. Thus, the Apologia figures as a veritable social-pedagogical act in the strictest sense. By virtue of its very form and the context of its production, it introduces the public to both a new perception of things and a mode of defiance against the old theological order. The overall impact of this relatively early text in the development of Greek Enlightenment thought is incalculable. But it is safe to say that, formally, Moisiodax *s Apologia engendered a style of polemical writing that took on a more and more specifically insurrectionary character as social contradictions in Ottoman society grew sharper in the tumultuous shadow of Napoleonic Europe. This style of writing picked up on the pedagogical project that Moisiodax laid out and lent it a more directly activist philosophy, thus severing the new mode of inquiry from its initial tentatively theological context and pushing it toward an explicit discourse on social organization and political action. Most characteristic of this kind of writing is an anonymous tract published somewhere in Italy in 1806, titled Hellenike Nomarchia. This fiery text, which proclaimed itself "a discourse on Liberty," seems a natural apogone of Moisiodax s Apologia, honing the latter's confessional polemics into a public call to arms while pursuing a philosophical restructuring of Neohellenic thought even further. The text's very title presents us with a striking distillation of its argumentative essence. On the one hand, its philosophical object of inquiry (also forwarded as its pedagogical objective) is society's responsibility toward "the rule of law": nomarchia. On the other hand, this text displays consciously a radical exclusivity as to its audience, addressing itself to Greeks and Greeks only: "I do not write for allogenous readers," the anonymous author makes sure to inform us (213). His meditation on the virtues of a society structured according to the rule of law matters only in regard to a Greek society—hence the title, "the Greek rule of law." In this respect, this text embodies the fundamental contradiction of the Enlightenments political project insofar as it was implicated directly in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Europe's penchant for nation building. That is, we find here a text arguing simultaneously for both social autonomy and national(ist) sovereignty. In this latter sense, Hellenike Nomarchia is the crucial step that allows us to understand the passage from Moisiodax to Korais, which is to say, from philosophy as critique and defiance to philosophy as program and project.

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The notion ofnomarchia must be perceived as the subliminal complement to philosophy—the means by which philosophy becomes an activist agent, an agent of social (re) organization. The term was (and has remained) uncommon in Greek philosophical usage, and it is utilized by the author ofHellenike Nomarchia with conscious allusion to the more common terms that delineate forms of government (arche): anarchy monarchy, oligarchy. In this text, nomarchia is explicitly intended as an alternative to the notion of "democracy," which, according to the author, inheres a tendency toward social dissolution, toward anarchy. At the same time, it becomes difficult to dismiss the force that the term nomarchy bears as an anagram of monarchy, an association brought to mind by the suggestive proximity of the two antithetical notions in several places in the text: for example, "just as a tower may come to be a pile of ruins, so can nomarchy transform itself into monarchy, that is, tyranny" (109).21 The signifier in this anagrammatical act is the notion of liberty, whose logos, after all, is proclaimed to be this text's essence. The signification of Liberty is intimately associated with the signification of Law in this text. Indeed, the greatest achievement ofHellenike Nomarchia as a philosophical praxis resides in its uncompromising association of liberty with autonomy, and thus in its conceptualization of revolutionary action as the process by which a society grants itself its own law. This autonomous course of action hinges on a society's capacity for conscious thought; conversely, tyranny succeeds only when a people "loses its power of thought" (115). Considering that Hellenike Nomarchia on the one hand specifically locates the condition of a society's heteronomy within "theocracy" and "oligarchy" (115-26) and on the other hand explicitly attacks the Ottoman social structure as inveterate tyranny over the Greeks (127-42 passim), one can understand why its author chose to remain anonymous and kept the exact site of publication indeterminate. This text strikes at both centers of power in Ottoman society, deriding both the political state of things and the socio-ideological conditions, and is thus forced to attune itself with the entire range of social consequences. Obviously any course of action advocating social autonomy in a heteronomous context risks a direct confrontation with the law at some point. When one's text is engaged in clandestine discourse, as it were, one cannot but carry the political and penal burden of the law's authority— authority's actual name. Accordingly, in the widely insurrectionary conditions prevailing in the Ottoman Empire's Balkan territories during this period, the instances of authorial pseudonymity and anonymity are numerous enough to be striking. Behind these anonymous texts lie some of the most radical expressions of the Greek Enlightenment's social and political critique, bearing 21. See also Kitromilidis (1990: 126).

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in their authorial anonymity the distilled eloquence of the historical moment itself: Anonymous of 1789; Anonymous of 1796; Anonymous, the Hellene of 1806; and so on (see Kitromilidis 1990: i26-2j).22 The Predicament of Customary Culture: From Balkan Autonomy to National Bureaucracy The Greek historian of philosophy Panayiotis Kondylis is quick to point out that the importance of the Greek Enlightenment project resides not in its theoretical contribution but in its historically catalytic function. Seen in this context, his statement "the neohellenic Enlightenment did not create any original philosophical ideas" (1988: 9) takes on a very specific connotation. Within the discursive terms of the Enlightenment as a philosophical orientation, the Greek texts do not account for any new epistemological insights. They represent, in fact, a work of translation, an act of transposing a framework of knowledge (much more so than a content of knowledge) into a significantly different social and epistemological space. A dramatic example is Moisiodax's Treatise on the Education of Children, or Pedagogy, which consists of wholesale translation or paraphrasing of Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). This simple fact is not mentioned anywhere in Moisiodax's text. This is not because the author claims originality for the text's content or seeks to hide the text s actual source. It is because the text itself matters as such, and to render it into Greek is, in a very concrete sense, to give it originality. Translation into Greek is the encyclopedic project par excellence: if knowledge is indeed to be authorless, it is also, strictly speaking, unauthorized. In this transposition, Greek Enlightenment texts do act "originally"—if an original is to be conceived as a disruption and not as the starting line of a subsequent development. And the disruption doubles with the inappropriate inscription of a gloss, a "copy" (which conjures up notions of inauthenticity, of simulation) and thus may institute, by means of its alterity, an actual "origin." This condition lends to the Greek Enlightenment an allogenous (thus groundless) quality that, in conjunction with its sociohistoricai implications, condemns the Enlightenment ethos to exclusion from the Neohellenic 22. It is worth noting the vast history of anonymity entangled with Enlightenment history since at least the late seventeenth century in England, with Locke himself setting a prime example. The falsification of authorial data (including all data pertaining to a work's process of production) becomes in this sense an integral part of the writing process. Anonymity signifies none other than the material conditions of writing. For an intelligent reflection on this problem, as it pertains specifically to Locke, see Caffentzis (1989: 167-71).

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canon. No doubt, these texts—which do not constitute a corpus that would deserve even such a transitory generic designation—confront the Neohellenic imaginary by holding up to it a mirror of its own inescapable (but denied) "inauthenticity" or "artificiality": the national imaginary's radical historicity. The Greek Enlightenment is characterized by a parasitic condition and thus acts infectiously. It engages the otherness of the European Enlightenment, implants itself within it, and then transplants the entire condition to a context that is not only qualitatively different but also already in the process of destabilization within its own terms. The Greek Enlightenment thus creates a new context insofar as it opens the space for a seemingly alien body of knowledge. In short, the Greek Enlightenment is indeed traditionless, if only because it instigates, it creates (in Castoriadis s sense of social-imaginary creation) a new tradition. It institutes a new image of what Neohellenic culture is, or better yet, an image of Greek culture as neo-Hellenic, which does not at all mean that it is an extension of ancient Hellenism or Byzantine Hellenism, nor even a contemporary (modern) version of their spirit, but means instead that it is other to their spirit. This creation of tradition is to be distinguished from what Eric Hobsbawm has identified as the invention of tradition, which refers to a set of practices that "seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by means of repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past" (1983: I, my emphasis). That is, while a creation of tradition is marked by an imaginary act instituting a new way to express culture or to render a culture comprehensible (which in turn leaves a Nothingness in its wake), the invention of tradition seizes upon an element (which may or may not belong to the inventory of social custom but is, in any case, made to appear indigenous) and formalizes it into a ritual, thus "imposing [a] repetition" (Hobsbawm 1983: 4).23 It is this latter phenomenon that produces the tremendous obsession of Neohellenist discourse with tradition, an obsession that suggests a profound anxiety about the possibility of having been severed from the actual traditions. Insofar as the Greek Enlightenment carries within it a past that cannot fit into the terms of the present—an epistemological history that cannot be read from (or written onto) the position of what is considered Hellenic at the time—it appears from that position as arising literally out of nothing. This 23. Castoriadis alerts us to the political dimensions of this opposition between creation and repetition, which he sees as fundamental to Western epistemology: "the occultation of the imaginary and of the social-historical [is] always governed by the denial of creation, by the necessity to reduce history, at any cost, to repetition and to present this repetition itself as determinacy from a physical, logical or ontological 'elsewhere'" (1987: 198).

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position rests on a de facto inability to perceive the Greek Enlightenment texts as having a past, as reimagining (translating/transposing) another's present (the European). It thus lends to the Greek Enlightenment a cultural groundlessness, which is, in a fundamental sense, inaccurate but nonetheless an inevitable consequence of the Greek Enlightenment's own imagination. This constructed groundlessness facilitates the Greek Enlightenment's eventual virtual elimination by the folkloric imagination, which fashioned itself around the repetition of the folk song—literally, as folk songs were collected, classified, catalogued, and interpreted with remarkable vehemence from 1850 to 1920. This shift exemplifies what Hobsbawm describes as the movement from the customary to the national (1983: 6), and it is not accidental that this entire trajectory came into prominence when Greece became consolidated as a national-cultural entity in the 18505. Hobsbawm's thesis implies that national consolidation is achieved at the expense of customary practices. National culture undoes the framework wherein customary culture flourishes, if anything by reintroducing customary practices as folklore, by superimposing on custom its simulacrum. The Greek Enlightenment occupies the paradoxical position of representing an expression of customary social organization in the realm of ideas, even though the ideas themselves may be said to arrive from elsewhere. Pantazopoulos argues convincingly that the emphasis on local autonomy and communal action one finds especially in texts of political character is a manifestation of local-communal organization during late-eighteenth-century Ottoman rule: "In the communes, Enlightenment emanates from the base" (1989: 320). The point is well taken, at least insofar as some of the most groundbreaking efforts of the early Enlightenment—Moisiodax's philosophical queries, Rhigas s cartographic and constitutional imagination, or Filippidis and Konstantas's Modem Geography—are taken up by intellectuals who are directly linked, whether by personal history or professional activity, to local-communal structures. Certainly, Rhigas Velestinlis makes for an acute example, being the point of convergence between what Pantazopoulos sees as otherwise parallel currents: French revolutionary ideas and autonomous practices surging out of the space of communal organization in the Balkans (1989: 323).24 Pantazo24. Rhigas Velestinlis or Feraios (1757-98) is arguably the Greek Enlightenments greatest revolutionary figure. Poet, philosopher, cartographer, constitutionalist, and political activist, Rhigas envisioned a revolution in the Ottoman territories that would not undo its multiethnic character but would merely reform the millet system to adhere to decentered democratic rule. In an era of emerging nationalist consciousness, he was the last to articulate the vision of the Eastern Mediterranean and Balkan region as a hyperethnic or metanational cultural and political

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poulos credits Rhigas's vision to the coincidence of "his experiences in the avant-garde communes of the Pilion villages and in the cosmopolitan milieux of the Danubian principalities" with the impetus of French revolutionaryspirit (324). In Rhigas's actions, Pantazopoulos perceives the institution of opposition as a right, the production of a new constitutional discourse out of what Pantazopoulos calls "the general clauses of Greek Law," meaning those "permanent dispositions of law which emanate from the collective consciousness and which, during ordinary periods, cover the voluntary lacunae of legislation and, during extraordinary periods, the inertia or dysfunctionality of law resulting from the interruption of its normal course" (310-11). In other words, Rhigas's constitutional and cartographic experiments are textualizations of social-imaginary elements, even though they might seem to be radical innovations based on foreign models. This is also evident in Filippidis and Konstantas's Modern Geography (Vienna, 1791), which seems to draw as much from the entries in the Encyclopedic methodique or Nicolle de la Croix's Geographic moderne (Paris, 1748) as it does from the authors* own experience of local autonomy in their native Pilion community and in subsequent travels through the region. The latter element serves both as the work's primary organizing mode of geographical conception and as the basis for its historical approach to geographical material. This specific aspect of Modern Geography was immediately evident to French geographer Barbie du Bocage, who published a review along with a translated passage only six years after the books publication (in vol. 2 ofMagasin Encydopedique, I797).25 All this problematizes the often accepted view of the Greek Enlightenment as the agent of importation of Western liberal ideas, which in turn—in conjunction with the activities of the rising Greek merchant class—became the source for a new national identity, setting the stage for a nationalist uprising.26 But this is an unequivocal top-down view of social, cultural, and entity, taking into account a historical process going back millennia, a process in which the Ottoman Empire was merely a contemporary phase. Rhigas's Constitution (New Political Administration, Vienna 1797) multiplies the range and impact of The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the French revolutionary Constitution of 1792 to include local autonomy and collaborative rule between the region's various ethnic and religious orders. His internationalism drew attention to his clandestine activities, which led to his extradition by the Viennese police and eventual execution, by order of the Sultan, in Belgrade in 1798. 25. For details as to the history of Modern Geography see A. Koumarianou's excellent introduction (Filippidis and Konstantas 1988) and Henderson (1970: 170-82). 26. This position is exemplified by writers as varied in their theoretical and disciplinary approaches as Dimaras (19850), Herzfeld (i986),Kitromilidis (1983; 1989), andJusdanis (1991). Their conclusions are put into question by an equally varied range of work by writers such as Petropulos (1968), Tsoukalas (1977; 1991), Kaklamanis (1986), Skopetea (1988), and Pan-

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political formation, often articulated in terms of the will of an intellectual elite or the agents of dominant economic interests or the State apparatus itself commanding the entire process of social institution. This view underestimates the disfigurement of forms in the process of their institution, the fact that every institutional act seeks to adhere to already prevalent imaginary terms, unless we are talking of an absolutely radical abolition of the existing order of things, a radically new social-imaginary creation ex nihilo, which is hardly to be contemplated given the known history of human societies. Cultural and political forms are never willed in a strict sense, because even when they result from importation or imitation (or imposition by either hegemonic or dictatorial rule), they are always reinvented, reirnagined according to the historical or imaginary demands at hand. And certainly, intellectuals do not commodify themselves at will. At most, they may exploit the conditions of production, dissemination, and institution, that is, the conditions of the market. These conditions are themselves never ultimately masterable (in that they are, to begin with, never ultimately interpretable). The market's rules do not belong to the realm of rational will. Which is precisely why (and how) the market rules—the market here being understood, in conjunction to its capitalist sense, both as the agora and the bazaar (both indispensable elements in the economy of Neohellenic culture). Thus, insofar as all cultural economies are social-imaginary institutions, the State's or the intellectuals will that apparently grants culture an origin is the quintessential point of a culture's self-occultation. How are we then to understand the annihilation of the Greek Enlightenment by the very force that engendered it, by the realization of its very objective? If indeed we cannot speak of the failure of the Greek Enlightenment project (as the failure of modernization or even the failure of Westernization), how are we to account for its being outmaneuvered by a form that owes its structural makeup as much to "Western" models as to anything else? A possible answer may lie in the proliferation of the singular image of a new Hellas put into production before Greece existed as such. The force of this cultural preconstruction of Greece cannot be underestimated, considering especially that the sociopolitical conditions prevailing at the end of the War of Independence point to an irreducible social and cultural discontinuity, to a zero point in the operation of those significations that were conceivably to propel and uphold the images of a new national identity tazopoulos (1989), all of whom opt for a more indeterminate account of social transformation or cultural production, privileging the polyvalent and often slippery ways of social relations that elude the cognitive framework of institutional action.

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This is because the social, cultural, and economic heterogeneity generally characterizing the Ottoman Empire's Balkan communities became even greater in the new independent State, once the political infrastructure that gave it nominal coherence was disengaged. Moreover, the regional antagonism within the borders of Greece—fueled largely by the heritage of civil conflict during the War of Independence and by distinctly irreconcilable economies (peasant versus merchant), and complicated by the restless presence of a large Greek population still under Ottoman control at the northern border—exacerbated the matter by making any kind of quick, singular signification of nationality unfeasible. Thus, the recourse to the new image of Hellas (both as cultural construct and as social system) began immediately upon the brief rule of Governor Kapodistrias and became efficiently implemented with the takeover of the Bavarian monarchy and its explicit desire for centralization and Hellenization. In fact, the cultural image of a modern Greece was put into production with much greater urgency than was a political-economic infrastructure, despite the obvious importance of the latter in a newly constituted State. As Tsoukalas points out, this is manifested most clearly in the rapid expansion of the educational network in the provinces in contrast to the slow development of the productive forces there, even though we are dealing with an overwhelmingly agricultural economy and a largely illiterate population (1977: 25). This economic regression was to some extent the consequence of the fact that the Greek merchant class, which commanded a good deal of capital, did so entirely outside the social mechanisms to which it claimed to belong ethnically or culturally (Tsoukalas 1977: 19-21). Newly independent Greece was now politically and economically, as well as geographically, removed from the centers of Greek mercantile development (Istanbul, Bucharest, Jasi, loannina, to name only those within Ottoman boundaries). Thus, if Greeces productive forces can be said to have developed at all upon national independence, the major commodity produced and furiously speculated upon was the image of national identity. Suddenly, the national educational apparatus became the privileged site of economic production, drawing the biggest part of capital investment and the largest enrollment from those ranks making up the country's productive forces. Significantly, both the endowments and the people flocking to the educational apparatus carne from outside the national boundaries, offerings of the Greek diaspora. Thus, by the i88os, Greece exhibited the strangest phenomenon. It could claim, of any country in Europe, the highest percentage of its population in advanced education. This enigmatic disproportion in a country that was vastly illiterate and fundamentally precapitalist when it "selected" the

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nation as its new form is even more stunning considering that the greatest educational emphasis was placed on "unproductive disciplines" (Tsoukalas 1977: 26). The reference is obvious. It reflects an educational orientation not meant to correspond to the demands of capitalist development, an orientation resulting in a huge population of essentially unproductive citizens, who were in turn channeled into the corridors of civil service to feed the needs of an ever-expanding and for the most part idle bureaucracy. This parasitic socioeconomic condition is actually inscribed into the very "mechanisms" of the Neohellenic imaginary, reproducing within the domain of social exchange their symbolic cohesion.27 The phenomenon of overeducation (which is one agent of Halbbildung) is often cited as a perfect example of underdevelopment, characterizing a society that has fallen off the train of modernization, as it were. However, this common wisdom is not quite true. Education itself is no doubt an Enlightenment child, and mass education would have to be the Nation's effective and exploitive use of its own Enlightenment patrimony. Greece is no exception to this process, other than in exemplifying the paradoxical abolition of the Enlightenment by the Enlightenment's own institutions. If the Greek Enlightenment poured forth a new way of imagining Greece, a new way of conceiving the meaning of Hellenism, the Greek nation took up as its task to turn off the source in order to reproduce its self-image unimpeded. This was an act encapsulating the spirit of modernization, the kind of displacement that stands witness to the tremendous resistance of precapitalist forms to new conditions, and simultaneously to their resilience in adopting courses that dissimulate new forms of organization. Thus, the phenomenon of Greek peasants donating a significant percentage of their meager income to State education in the new nation over its first 5O-year span (Tsoukalas 1977: 483— 95) is hardly a case of forced (and thus failed) modernization. It is a virtual act of "modern" consciousness in a context where modernization is symbolically 27. Thus, "idleness" may have become the symbolic backbone of contemporary Greek civil society. For a Greek, "idleness" can be said to function symbolically in the same way that "entrepreneurial ingenuity" (or know-how) functions for an American: it provides both the security of the natively intrinsic characteristic and the desire of the [American] dream. The overall phenomenon is an illustration of what Adorno has termed Halbbildung (semi-education or partial culture), in that in both cases a specific social condition enters the nations symbolic order through the educational apparatus to appear both as the exclusive mark of native culture and as the sign of the desire for acculturation. The crucial point of Adorno's theorization for my purposes is that Halbbildung is an exemplary condition of heteronomy, a condition projected as a practice of self-mastery: "The semi-cultured man accedes to a self-maintenance without a self" (1975: 88). Moreover, the partiality of Halbbildung is not a cultural lack that can be potentially fulfilled. It is a qualitative antithesis to culture and indeed, so long as it prevails, the annihilation of culture as a source of social autonomy (84—85).

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absent. It is, in other words, an attempt by a peasant economy (and its imaginary) to absorb or expand itself into a merchant economy and State power. The process is similar to the Ottoman context I delineated above; it is still a matter of access to the signs of force—now, access to education and thus to a bureaucrat's uniform. If, then, as Skopetea points out, "the sudden polyphony within the Helladic domain [during the late eighteenth century] was tantamount to a resounding expression of discontinuity within Greek intellectual development, a discontinuity that was completed with the Revolution" (1988: 29), the completion of the Revolution (the establishment of a State apparatus, the institution of a national culture) enforced in turn the abolition of polyphony. Precisely by virtue of its discontinuity, the discourse of the Greek Enlightenment was no longer useful. Or, to put it another way, the production of a national culture, which presupposes the reproduction of a homogeneous image, rendered a polyphonous and discontinuous discourse irrelevant. To invoke Hobsbawm again, this does signify "the passage from the customary to the national/* Only, this passage is all the more dramatic, considering that the customary signifies in this case the diasporic, the hyperethnic, the autonomous-local. Rhigas s bold vision was thus to become a melancholic memory as the Greek Enlightenment texts were at once displaced from the national-cultural curriculum, which returned to the Orthodox pedagogy on its way to a revivification of Byzantium, the institution of folklore, and eventually a more relevant textual production: demoticist aesthetics.28 28. Greece has been characterized until recently by a fundamental diglossia between the spoken language of everyday (the demotic) and a constructed language (katharevousa}, which pretended to harken back to the classical idiom but was actually closer to Byzantine Greek, and which was inaugurated as the official language of the State in the 18 3 os and remained legally so until 1974. Demoticism is a literary movement that rose during the i88os and has essentially dominated the terrain of Greek letters ever since. This whole affair provoked fierce debates over the proper mode of Greek cultural expression (the so-called "language question"), which was, however, a rnetaphoric inscription of Neohellenism's contradictions as I delineate them throughout this book. For this reason I shall not take up a discussion of demoticism as such. For an excellent detailed study of this issue, however, see Tziovas (1986).

CHAPTER 3

The Formal Imagination, II NATURAL HISTORY AND NATIONAL PEDAGOGY —THE CASE OF KORAIS

While the Greek Enlightenment phenomenon raises a whole set of questions about the general historiographical map of late-eighteenth-century thought, there is one person in particular who may be said to encapsulate the problematic nature of this phenomenon. This person is Adamantios Korais (1748—1833), arguably the most erudite figure of Neohellenic thought, whose vision of a modern Hellenism was as grand as history's neglect of his prescriptions for it. Korais was educated as a doctor in the medical school of Montpellier but never practiced the profession, choosing instead to devote himself to a massive pedagogical project with an eye to a Greek nation independent of Ottoman rule. He assimilated the lessons of the early French Enlightenment and, having settled in Paris and worked there since 1788, participated in those discussions characterizing its later period through the end of the Napoleonic era. His eyewitness account of the events of the French Revolution and the accuracy with which he discerns and describes its various phases is exemplary. His on-the-spot analyses show how incisively he perceived the historical profundity of the social creation of a nation, an experience upon which his overall vision of Greek national independence remained forever anchored. Korais may be said to have extended Moisiodax's pedagogical project in a more activist or programmatic direction, engaging the counterrevolutionary leadership of the Orthodox Church with unfaltering rigor and abrasive irony. He could be seen as the cultural-philosophical complement to the insurrectionary politics of Rhigas, both men characterized by a restless activist vision. The nucleus of Korais s work consists of commentaries on various works of ancient Greek thought, which turn out to be disguised observations on the

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present condition of the Greek language and suggestions as to its most efficient deployment for the building of a truly Neohellenic culture. Korais advocated adjusting the spoken expression so that it could partake of certain aspects of ancient Greek, a method perceived as a mediating negotiation between learned and spoken language and thus dubbed "the middle way" The latter expression drew heaps of derision from his enemies, who, besides the Church, included a great number of fellow intellectuals. Korais's supporters diminished after his death, and by the i88os, with the advent of demoticism, his project was effectively buried. But this entire trajectory, as well as the various events and texts that mark it, can best be elucidated if retraced in the general trajectory of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century thought of which it is a significant part. That its significance has been neglected is due as much to the general marginality to which modern Greek letters has until recently been condemned as it is to the overall problematic nature of the Greek Enlightenment "project" within the historiographical boundaries of the period. Korais in Context First of all, the problematic relation of Greek Enlightenment texts in general to the instituted tradition that followed them, once a bona fide Greek nation had been created, had long-term repercussions within Greek culture itself. Not only were these texts effectively excluded from the national education curriculum, but they were also deemed unworthy objects of study by the burgeoning discipline of history itself. Simply put, national history—both as discipline and as ecriture—was constituted around the erasure of the Greek Enlightenment ethos. Consequently, the Greek Enlightenment texts could not claim to possess a historian all their own—not until the formidable K. Th. Dimaras appeared on the horizon with a flurry of essays on the subject during the 19405 and 19503. Not having thus the privilege of a long history of its rise and fall—and not having, moreover, the fortune to play a part in shaping Greece's national historiography—the Greek Enlightenment found itself forced to fit the periodization schema of European eighteenth-century literary histories. Exemplary in this particular sense is Dimaras himself He divides the Greek Enlightenment into three periods, spread out chronologically according to the traditional schema of the French Enlightenment, so that the Greek texts are classified in turn by association to Voltaire, the Encyclopedic, and the Ideologues (1985^ n). Dimaras's schema, however, belies the enterprise of a teleological literary history: to preserve the prevailing order of things that

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prescribes the rules and limits of historiography. The fact that a historiography of the Greek Enlightenment can exist only as a reproduction of the historiography of the French Enlightenment is as indicative of the dependency of modern Greek letters on the European (and especially French) paradigm as it is of the actual affinity between the two discourses in the eighteenth century. Moreover, that parasitical existence also reveals the inability of the national-cultural imagination to conceive the actual process of textual intersection, which operates less by, say, "an anxiety of influence" than by the co-incidence of (otherwise different and chronologically distinct) historical demands. The foundation of this problematic historiography rests on Dimaras's unequivocal association of Korais's work with that of the Ideologues Circle. To hinge the entire periodizing structure upon this correspondence means that, by a kind of chronological reversal all the way back to the beginnings of the Greek Enlightenment, Dimaras makes Moisiodax correspond to Voltaire for no other reason than that they share the role of the proclaimed initiator of an attitude (igSfb; 10), Although Koraiss personal association with the Ideologues Circle is well documented, nonetheless this use of the principle of fraternization as historiography's primary hermeneutical device escaped all critical reflection until recently, when Panayiotis Kondylis, a prominent Enlightenment historian in Germany, thought it appropriate to broach the curious subject of the Greek Enlightenment. Without de-emphasizing Korais's personal relation to the Ideologues Circle, Kondylis underlines the fact that historical positions are just as much discursive locations overdeter mined by an enormous complex of textual-symbolic forces. Thus, Korais's project can be shown to follow Encyclopedist directions, though with an idiosyncratic plan; and it is this tenuous association—insofar as it guides a specific textual (historical) practice—that brings him close to the Ideologues, who represent the rather ambivalent association of Encyclopedist thought with the French Revolution and its subsequent demise (see Kondylis 1988: 201-12).l The problematic nature of affinity seems to bear especially upon Enlightenment historiography. To venture on an explanation, this may be not so much because the Enlightenment carries forth a new epistemic order as because it is marked by its indisputable history as a revolutionary expression, a I. From Dimaras's text, on the other hand, historiography emerges as an elaboration of a mimetic desire: if Korais frequents the same salon as Destutt de Tracy or Volney, then Korais must think as Destutt or Volney. This precludes an interrogative assessment of Korais's philosophical adherence to the Ideologues' position by obscuring the problematic nature of "affinity" as a historiographical principle. The point is not to throw out Dimaras's schema but to subvert its affirmation, to use it interrogatively. A good example in this direction, regarding specifically Korais and the Ideologues Circle; is provided by Iliou (1978).

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legacy that subsequent thought—especially in a nineteenth century characterized by the drive to reconstitute political order—has sought to differentiate itself from. Hence Ernest Renan s insistence, for example, on philology's absolute break with the eighteenth-century linguistic project. A general discussion of this question lies beyond the boundaries of the present chapter. However, regarding the contextual assessment of Korais, it seems particularly useful to consider the problematic affinities between the Enlightenment and early-nineteenth-century thought precisely on the question of the philosophy of language. This raises the chimera of the fierce debates over primacy, influence, and consequence in the relationship between Condillac, Herder, and Humboldt, initiated in many respects by Hans AarslefFs heretic account in the history of linguistics (1982). The impact of this account lay in its demonstration of the close connections of Herder's theory of language to Condillac's epistemology and sign theory, including Condillac s well-known notion that "every language expresses the character of the people that speak it" (usually conceived as the Herderian principle par excellence), which Condillac had already put forth in his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746).2 Aarsleff contends that although Herders famous Essay on the Origin of Language (1772) purports to criticize Condillac, it actually treads similar territory vis-a-vis a theory of human reflection and the constitution of language, evident especially in Herders own choice of examples in which language inevitably signifies a cultural and historical particularity (1982: 194-99). Aarsleff's argument has crucial implications. It elucidates the fact that this principle of the immanent relation between language and linguistic community, passing via Herder into the general climate of German romanticism, eventually becomes HumboldtJs cornerstone not only in his linguistic analyses but in his national pedagogical project as well: "The mental individuality of a people and the shape of its language are so intimately fused with one another, that if one were given, the other would have to be completely derivable from it ... [so that] language is [the people's] spirit and the spirit their language" (Humboldt 1988: 46). And further on: "The intellectual merits of language rest exclusively upon the well-ordered, firm and clear mental organization of peoples in the epoch of making or remaking language, and are the image, indeed the direct copy, of this" (81). As such, Aarsleff s project has a twofold trajectory. First, it seeks to expose how "post-romantic scholarship has lent its enormous prestige to the truly silly belief that Condillac, among many others, was a mechanistic, materialist philosopher" (Aarsleff 1982: 198). Second, it 2. See Condillac (1971: 285), the facsimile edition of Thomas Nugent's 1756 English translation.

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shows how "both Herder and Humboldt drew on eighteenth-century sources that have generally been considered incompatible with romantic thought" (336), which among other things "suggests that the concept and history of romanticism may stand in need of revision" (347).3 Against this impassioned revisionary appeal stand a series of recent critical responses, which tend to mirror the vehemence of their object of critique. They are positions that come to uphold Isaiah Berlin's account of the exclusively German genealogy of Humboldt's language theory, namely its sources back in Herder and Hamann (Berlin 1976). Berlins tenacity in privileging German "originality'* figures thus as the implacable Other of Aarsleff's vehement defense of the French inheritors of Locke. In any case, the recent critiques—which support Berlin but amend his terms—focus on the figure of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who is thought to embody a critical assimilation of Herder s view of language against Condillac's (and thus against Aarsleff's insistence on the primacy of Condillac). Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (1989) points to Herder's shift of focus from the sign (Condillac) to the process of signification itself, which will then serve to ground Humboldt s assertion that inherent in the very structure of a language is the speakers entire perspective toward the world. Similarly, Martha Heifer (1990) bypasses the presence of Condillac in her analysis of Humboldt s thesis "On Thinking and Speaking" ("Uber Denken und Sprechen," 1795/96), discerning in Humboldt the strategy of engaging Herder's and Fichte's theories of cognition against each other in order to elaborate a distinct theory of reflection and signification. Paul R. Sweet (1988) also underscores the importance of Fichte to Humboldt s development, while the linguist Jiirgen Trabant (1990) situates Humboldt's holistic approach to national language within Herder's belief that the formation of language resides in humanity s phonographic encounter with the world. All these scholars deem Condillac's effect on Humboldt to be of lesser importance. Considering the significant epistemic gap between French and German thought in the late eighteenth century (Kant being unknown to the Ideologues, for example), a simple notion of "influence" in this case does make for a rather unyielding mode of analysis. However, Condillac's initial premises on sensation and reflection as the origin of language emerge as the 3. Incidentally, Derrida (1980) also points out how the traditional reading of Condillac in the French academy has been limited to the commonplace renditions of his "speechless statue" in its battle against the sensory experience of a rose. Derrida sees this corroborated by Condillac's own assessment of the university as a space disinclined for innovation or complexity even in his day: "The universities are old and have the flaws of age: I mean they have done litde to correct themselves. Can we presume the professors will renounce what they think they know in order to learn what they do not know?" (Condillac, Cours deludes: Histoire moderne, cited in Derrida 1980: 60).

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discursive axis of the entire debate. This is not to ascribe to him any primacy. But neither is it to rely on the inherited dismissal of his theory as mechanistic, considering that both Jacques Derrida (1980) and Jean Mosconi before him (1966) have gone a long way toward putting this matter to rest. For there is little doubt in my mind that Condillac's "metaphysics of reflection" is, as Derrida calls it, a "sensationalist metaphysics" (1980: 46) or "a metaphysics of fact" (39), characterized by sensation/reflection not as a passive (interpretive) condition but as a germinating force, as a creative force of signification. Now, it may be that the creativity of language in Condillac did not translate into language as social/communal creativity, as Ian Hacking argues (1992: 82) in what is an exceptional attempt to disentangle the entire mess; but then again even Hacking's lucidly mutant genealogy of the conception of language as a public entity bears out the remarkably overdetermined epistemic terrain in the period that concerns us. All in all, it does not seem too useful here to pursue a partisan argument. Whichever position one takes on this matter, the striking remainder is invariably the complex cognitive and cultural terrain covered by the intersection of three otherwise "incompatible" projects pertaining to the relation between an Enlightenment philosophy of language and the question of a national linguistics. The triangular configuration Condillac/Herder/Humboldt makes all those attempts to radically disengage the Enlightenment from romanticism appear baroque in their labored argumentation. But for my purposes, this intersection—especially by plunging the Enlightenment-versus-romanticism schema into muddy waters—emerges as an especially congenial means for reading Adamantios Korais's own heterogeneous, ambiguous, composite, yet epistemologically cohesive philosophical and linguistic project. Korais's long life spent weaving a circuitous path around the influential topoi of European thought testifies to the circuity and heterogeneity of the Greek Enlightenment itself, whose particular philosophical and political texture bears the markings of the social-historical conditions of its production.4 If Korais is to 4. I am not too interested in questions of ideological influence through personal contact, but of the three topoi I have drawn attention to, Korais makes contact with Condillac through Condillac's already assimilated presence in the Ideologues Circle—not unlike Humboldt, for that matter, as AarslefFargues (1982: 335-55). Humboldt and Korais are contemporaries engaged in highly analogous projects, especially regarding the role of language in a national Bildung. It seems unlikely that they ever met, considering that Korais's participation in the Ideologues Group became full-fledged about two years after Humboldt's departure from Paris in 1801, But it is the co-incidence of their projects that makes this historiographical entanglement most dramatic. The affinity of Korais's thought with Herder's is rather complicated by the adoption of Herderian principles by Korais's ideological enemies in the 18503-60$, a point I shall take up in the discussion of the ideology of Philhellenism in Chapter 4 below. A direct

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serve at all as the paradigmatic exponent of the discourse of the Greek Enlightenment—which nonetheless remains, in the last instance, multivalent and untotalizable—an exploration of his project could be encapsulated as the interrogation of two intersecting propositions: First is the suggestion of a distinct philosophy of language and the translation of this philosophy into an also distinct national pedagogical practice. Second is the theorization of the dynamic between a national language and a pedagogical practice via the metaphors of natural history. The history of Korais's project is largely inseparable from the history of his reception. Indeed, no other figure of the Greek Enlightenment has generated so much commentary, so much condemnation, and so much ideological confusion as Adamantios Korais. Dimaras places Korais at the center of his historical period, which he names "Korais's epoch" and which he deems "one of the most typical, most characteristic of Neohellenism" (ipSsb: 304) by claiming that Korais s most carefully drafted project (Prolegomena to Ancient Greek Authors) contains "the entire history of knowledge [paideia] of those years" (325). Generally, the reception of Korais seems to abound in such sweeping statements, regardless of sympathetic or antagonistic criticism. Filippos Iliou meticulously recounts the massive history of repressive readings of Korais's work, concluding, "150 years after his death, Korais continues to be confronted as a living opponent, whom neohellenic society must efface, if it ever wants to progress" (1984: I5o).5 Living during the culmination of French Enlightenment thought, witness to the Revolution and to the Jacobin and then Napoleonic overt Hellenization of political signifiers, Korais consciously cultivated—as was to be expected—the Hellenic ideal His articulation of this ideal, however, was entirely instrumentalist. The importance of ancient Greek texts for Korais lay in their utility to that as yet nationally unformed but organically self-compreinfluence of Herder on Korais is unlikely, as Dimaras convincingly documents (ipSsb: 510-11). On Korais and Condillac, see Rotolo (1984: 48—50). On Korais's circuitous politics, see Kitromilidis (1984: 102-12). 5. Iliou identifies three main currents of oppositional sentiment against Korais in Greek cultural and political history: (i) demoticist ideology, especially in its heyday (18805-1930$); (2) Neohellenic Marxism (until the 19505); (3) the recent populist wave of neo-Orthodoxy (19805). However, what actually binds these oppositional tendencies together is that in their path lies not Korais but "a phantasm: an artificial construction . . . the sterilized simulacrum of Korais, molded as such by the successive truncations and imperceptible distortions in the hands of official hellenic ideology" (Iliou 1984: 151-52). To translate Iliou s apt observation into the terms of this text: the danger of Korais lies in his work's ineradicable access to the nationalimaginary significations in relation to which it stands problematically, as both interrogation and phantasmic affirmation. For a study of Korais's opponents during his lifetime—the demoticists avant la lettre—see Moskhonas (1981).

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hensible body to which he gave the appropriate name genos. (In this way, Korais remains close to Moisiodax.) In order to carry out this task, Korais devoted himself, with a strict secular asceticism, to writing, translating, editing, and prefacing texts. It is for this reason more than any other (more, for instance, than for his advocacy of linguistic correction and purification, for which he was so vilified by his opponents) that the centrality of language in Korais's thought should be evaluated. Korais's self-ascribed "Improvisational Reflections," which make up a good part of his Prolegomena and which contain his instructions on how to perceive and use the modern Greek language, ultimately aspire to the formulation and expression—indeed, to the order—of the language and the knowledge of Neohellenism.6 Incidentally, it is quite interesting, I think, that Korais locates his "Improvisational Reflections" in the prefaces to his modern Greek editions of Plutarch's Lives, In light of the fact that Plutarch seems to be a canonical figure in the French Enlightenment, imbuing both Voltaire's historiographical method and certainly Rousseau's didactic construction of the subject through confession, Korais's selection bodes nothing extraordinary. But once we traverse the topos of canonicity, carrying along the added experience of Korais's marking of Plutarch with an "improvisational" preface toward a national pedagogy, Plutarch actually emerges as the originary narrative figuring of Bildung. Hence, the Enlightenment's profound seduction by Plutarch's Lives, which in turn emerges as the original blueprint for conducting a Bildungsroman on a national-cultural scale. Korais devotes himself to this national Bitdungsroman with the profound single-mindedness that honors the most distinct of ascetic projects. But this intellectual condition is altogether intertwined with his stubborn insistence on remaining in residence in Paris, away from the actual site of social struggle, which admittedly, because of his advanced age, he could only have experienced from behind the pen, not from behind the gun (Henderson 1970:151). This voluntary exile was used later by Korais's demoticist enemies as evidence of conservatism, of an ardent intellectualism that remained out of touch with the people's allegedly genuine revolutionary impulse. Yet, if there was something notable in that attack, it was the vulgar populism of its adherents. The fact of the matter is that the very form of Korais's oeuvre—editing, translat6. Foucault comes to mind here: "In the Classical age, knowing and speaking are interwoven in the same fabric; in the case of both knowledge and language, it is a question of providing representation with the signs by means of which it can unfold itself in obedience to a necessary and visible order. . . . Speaking, enlightening, and knowing are, in the strict sense of the term, of the same order" (1970: 88-89). Although Korais would not fit Foucault's schema in any historical sense, his project situates him in a prephilological attitude to language and culture. Hence his "classicism" and one more instance of scrambled historiography at work.

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ing, prefacing ancient texts meant for future national instruction—was inevitably intertwined with his diasporic experience. Korais s writing, the didactic obsession and the effluvient irony distinguishing this ecriture, could only emanate from a political/discursive location at a remove from the psychic dispersal of engaging in the building of a national politics.7 Philosophy, Language, and Revolution Korais explicitly identifies language as an "inalienable property of the nation," "a sacred property" by virtue of which "an entire nations character can be known" (1986: 48,52, my emphasis). Not only does this allude to the Condillacian premise and its repercussions, as discussed above, but it also echoes Diderot's significant passage from his article on the notion of "Encyclopedic": "The language of a people gives us its vocabulary, and its vocabulary is a sufficiently faithful and authoritative record of all the knowledge of that people; simply by comparing the different states of a nations vocabulary at different times one could form an idea of its progress" (cited in Foucault 1970: 87, my emphasis). What is later to be identified by the name nationality is at this point identified as the intersecting space between language and knowledge and signified by the word character (this nexus is exactly the same for Korais as for Humboldt), which in its classical etymology means none other than that (space) upon which a mark, an engraving, an inscription is made, is recorded. Thus, a nation s language is itself the means (the language) by which a nation's history can be read—or, a nations character decoded, described. Diderot's typically Enlightenment invocation of the progressive history 7. To this I would have to add the crucial presence of the Greek diaspora in the very conditions of production of most Greek Enlightenment texts. The catalytic force of capital generated by Greek diaspora merchants and then applied to the development and dissemination of Greek intellectual capital has been duly pointed out (Tsoukalas 1977: 267-378; Skopetea 1988: 68-70; and Kitromilidis 1989, among others). But what needs to be underlined is the shift in the conception of the writers themselves in relation to their work, their understanding that the innovative book had to institute a new means of life and survival; to reject its status as aristocratic object of culture and make the book a profitable commodity. The avid subscribing to Greek Enlightenment texts by potential readers before the writing was actually completed points to a significant shift (by both parties in the process, author and audience) in the perception of the historical arena where knowledge is played out. This shift may be said to embody some of the classic contradictions of capitalist relations: an act of autonomous production, in redrafting the rules of patronage, institutes a system of distribution of knowledge that will subsequently make the production of thought contingent on its commodification. For a categorical discussion of this process in general, see Robert Darnton's great work (1979). For a discussion pertinent to the Greek situation specifically, see Kitromilidis (1985: 140—41).

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of a nation's language, which for him is perceptible only in the various and distinct instances of its voyage (its progressive narrative), resurfaces in Korais's assessment of the function of grammar: "during different periods or epochs the same nation has a different Grammar, that is, a different way of speaking and writing its language" (1986: dp).8 Grammar for Korais (as vocabulary for Diderot) is a historically contingent affair. It has a narrative history, and at the same time, in its various synchronically ascertained instances, grammar also constitutes the narrative of history. For Korais, a grammatical moment is indeed a historical moment. It is an inscription of a national culture's condition, which is why Korais advocates a reorganization of modern Greek grammar, perceiving it to be in as paradigmatically impoverished, incapacitated, and inadequate a condition as modern Greek culture itself. Here, Humboldt inevitably comes to mind. Never quite subscribing to such progressivist notions, Humboldt might represent the vanguard understanding of grammar as a constitutive historical moment, as both chronicle and synchronic tomography of cultural formation. When Humboldt discerns in the structure of a language the very mode of cultural perception, the particular way in which a given society conceives itself and its others (in effect, its social imaginary), he does so by virtue of what he calls "formative grammatical principles.'* To study the "differences in grammatical outlook" means no less than to study the difference of culture, which is in effect to study the texture or the web of a nation's "language" in the widest sense of the word. In Humboldt's own words: "grammar, more than any other aspect of language, is contained invisibly in the modes of thinking of a speaker" (1963: 237-38), or again, "grammar is more closely related to the spiritual character of a nation than is the formation of words" (cited in Mueller-Vollmer 1989: 204). It suffices to say that a great distance lies between this conception and the notion of language as the live documentation of a Volkgeist, which would serve as the foundation of the disciplines of philology and folklore some fifty years later. Insofar as grammar is never static, its insight into a culture s makeup is profoundly historical. In these terms, Korais's desire to refashion the formal organization and the boundaries of modern Greek grammar can be seen, not just metaphorically but politically, as an act of (re)instituting the boundaries of Greece itself as a modem national culture. The writing of a grammar and the design of its rules is, as Gramsci has characteristically put it, "an act of national-cultural 8. This progressivist notion of grammar takes an interesting form in Herder; "Since every grammar is only a philosophy of language and a method for its use, it follows that the more primordial a language is, the less grammar must there be in it, and the oldest language is no more than [a] dictionary of nature" (1966: 159).

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politics/'9 Korais is highly conscious of the political significance of his project, especially in respect to the issue of lexical and grammatical innovation, an activity he recognizes as always being conducted within the historically specific manifestations of power. In this case, he borrows his metaphors from criminology: a neologism or an archaism may be determined as criminal given the status quo of the law (whether the law of grammar or the law of the State), but only within the set boundaries of the historical moment. At any other historical instant, the same innovation and the same acts may not be criminal at all but actually hegemonic (Korais 1986: 68—69). The intervention of intellectuals upon the body of a national language— intellectuals who, of course, as Korais insists (1986: 49-52), must never delude themselves that they have any right of ownership over the language—is marked by the underlying (the "unconscious") sign of the criminal metaphor: the Law. Thus, making a possible reference to Plato's Cratylus but also recirculating a common eighteenth-century phrase, Korais insists that it is the duty of "the intellectuals of the nation" (wherever they may reside) to act as "the legislators [nomothetes] of the language the nation speaks" (52). The reorganization of grammar and the correction of spoken and written words or expressions, which culminate in the practice of lexicography itself, represent indeed the (re)writing of a culture s Law. Again, this is not a point of mere metaphor, as this reorganized, corrected, and "cleansed" language (katharevousa) will eventually become the actual language of the State (the constitutional and penal codes). It is not accidental that Korais perceives this linguistic activity literally as technological, as an intervention upon "the technology of the adverb" "the technology of the pronoun," and so on (1986: 89). In this way, his understanding of language belongs within Enlightenment semiology whose overall project consists of and functions within the necessity of a no longer divine but now "arbitrary" (i.e., historically contingent) language, in relation to which the philosopher's position or activity is that of techne, or as Foucault determines it, fabrication.10 The politics of the "legislator" aspires to the establish9. Gramsci is explicit about grammar as history—what he calls a "photograph" of a determined phase of a national language. Indeed, he sees the heightened concern with grammar as coinciding with moments of national-cultural formation and identifies the overall complex of factors that determine the form and the rules of a grammar as an essential force in the homogenization of national language and the consolidation of a national State apparatus (what he calls alternatively "grammatical" or "linguistic conformism"). (See Gramsci 1950: 197-205.) 10. "It is no longer the task of knowledge to dig out the ancient Word from the unknown places it may be hidden; its job now is to fabricate language, and to fabricate it well—so that, as an instrument of analysis and combination, it will really be the language of calculation" (Foucault 1970: 62—63).

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ment of an order, not of things of course, but of words: "because before [one] conceives the ideas of things, he must learn first how the things are named;... because when words become commonly understood within the nation, the number of those who pay attention to things increases" (Korais 1986: 494).u For Korais, order consists of precision both in the understanding and in the use of words: "for indeterminate words engender disorderly ideas, and then in turn disorderly acts" (496), or "a nation can never distort its language without simultaneously distorting its culture [paideia]; the ill-order [asyntaxia] of language accompanies always the ill-order of meanings" (126). Korais's very language of order (taxis) and legislation (nomothesia) yields none other than Foucault's taxinomia, the key—the syntax—to the articulation of the play of identities and differences that make a specific culture comprehensible and comprehensive within itself: that signify, in other words, as inscriptions, a culture's character, its nationality12 The taxonomic activity is itself the ideology of lexicography, following the initial impulse of the collector of those neglected word-artifacts and of the rarefied and obscure histories of their use.13 The collecting and taxonomizing of words within the determined boundaries of a text—the lexicon—signifies the aspiration to bring the national knowledge (the ensemble of cultural significations) literally to order. It is possible to say that, within the epistemic boundaries of the Enlightenment, lexicography stands as the first instance of a national history. Moreover, as a representation of the national imaginary, the lexicon (like the grammar) provides not only the history but the law; it figures as no less than a 11. Here, Korais transcribes almost verbatim the words of J. D. Michaelis from his Of the Influence of Opinions on Language and of Language on Opinions (published in French translation in 1762), a work which Korais refers to often. But the shadow of Condillac looms large behind them both. It is also interesting to note Rotolo's observation that, although Korais borrows heavily from Michaelis, he remains more conservative, insisting on the fact that the guardians of the integrity of a nation's language are the intellectuals, not the people themselves (Rotolo 1984: 54)12. Though Foucault's strict periodization in his theory of the Classical episteme does not recognize it, this taxonomic activity hid the germ of what would later become the most dominant industry in the speculation of language(s): philology. It is true that philologists found the Enlightenment's preoccupation with the infinite self-containment of language preposterous, since they sought to establish language as a precise historical science. But they reproduced the same desire. In their hands, entire cultures were reduced to syllables and their histories to the developmental relations and differences between prefixes and suffixes. The embodiment of this intersection and transition from Enlightenment linguistics to philology is to be found, as Edward Said has documented, in the example of Sylvestre de Sacy—but given my argument so far, I would have to add Humboldt and, of course, Korais himself. See Foucault (1970: 78-165) and Said (1979: 123-48). 13. For the chiasmic relation between lexicography and ideology and the form it took in a mid-nineteenth-century Greek context, see Ditsa (1988: 15—37).

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secular, though still imaginary, Scripture. Paraphrasing Volney, Korais will state expressly: "The premier book of every nation is the lexicon of its language, that is, the collection of and research on those symbols with which it expresses its ideas. If this collection does not take place, the nation not only will fail in forming an education [paideia] or furthering the one it has but will be in danger of losing it altogether" (1986: 496). For Korais then, the work of philosophy is etymology, a practice that is, by definition, intertextual and in his case predicated on the belief that the nature of a nation's knowledge is cumulative, exponential, and ultimately teleological (1986: 526—27). The philosophers responsibility is in this sense consciously political, and with his exemplary lexicon, Korais wants to strike a blow at the grammarian tradition, which does not see language as a changing element, indicative of its various historical phases—a tradition, in other words, that lacks a philosophy of language. In this concern perhaps more than any other, Korais draws extensively from his direct experience of the French Revolution. As Philippe Roger has demonstrated, the most crucial battle lines of the Revolution were drawn overtly, from the very beginning, over the control of signification, over the construction and definition of what was named la langue revolutionnaire: "Across the most extreme formulations, it is always that which was put to question: revolutionary language, as the game and the stakes of a political struggle that mobilizes a (modern) knowledge of language against an (archaic) imaginary of the powers of Speech" (Roger 1988: 158). In this confrontation, lexicography emerges as the battleground, vehemently pursued by both sides in what Roger calls "the war of dictionaries." This is a veritable war, not merely a metaphoric one, to echo what Brian Singer has observed in his study of the French revolutionary imaginary: namely, that "a revolution is not so much a struggle between classes within society as a struggle over society, over the definitions of what society is and should be" (1986: 68). Singer hits the nail right on the head. This is a confrontation indicative of a revolutionary crisis at the level of social-imaginary signification, where the antithetical forces end up in fact borrowing each other's signifiers: thus, the Republicans proclaim the revolutionary language as sacred and any violation of it a sacrilege, while the Monarchists, in perfect Enlightenment style, proclaim that the royalist cause could best be served by the superior use of words and even resort to Voltaire for substantiation. While much has been made of the metaphysics of revolutionary power, it is the Enlightenment style of the counter-Enlightenment, present in the proliferation of "anti-dictionaries," that is most striking. True, 'Tordre alphabetique est le gout du jour," as Dom

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Louis-Mayeul Chaudon, author of the very Dictionnaire anti-philosophique (1767), quipped with bitter anger, but the conviction that the monarchist cause will best be defended on the terrain of the order of words is not a fanciful matter (see Roger 1990). The lexicographical operation institutes a new genre of writing. The arbitrariness of an alphabetical order constitutes a style so powerful as to paralyze all the nerve endings of an heretofore causal narrative, the perfect etiology of the sign God/King. A volcanic force is unleashed. The very neologist power of "revolutionary language" will end up perceived as the Revolution s greatest threat. And simultaneously, the attempt to debunk the abusive neologisms of the Revolution will result in an apotheosis of lexicographical production. For "to speak of the revolutionary language is to already speak it" (Roger 1990: 81). However, beyond this significational confusion—the obedience to "the same religion of the sign" (Roger 1988: 161)—there is a unifying element amidst the inflationary circulation of mutually exclusive dictionaries, which cannot be ignored. The motivation behind lexicography during the Revolution went beyond the mere impulse to collect and taxonornize. Here, the basic tendencies in lexicography were supplemented by the focus on correction and neology. As the confrontation increasingly took shape around the question of which ideological position represented the most extensive debasement (impoverishment) of the national language—much as what Foucault would call "the discourse of wealth" subsumes all sides and dominates the metaphoric/epistemic space—the work of lexicography became explicitly polemical. Thus, when King Louis XVI decided in June 1789 to stigmatize publicly the phrase les classes privilegiees as a neologism that was deliberately divisive and inappropriate, he had already, unwittingly, slipped into the discourse of his enemies: slipped from his role as sovereign embodiment of language to the role of its legislator and critic—its representative. Indeed, the same gesture of correction eventually would be used against him, and the consequences would be fatal. The critique of the monarch s inadequate use of the French language in front of the Assembly would in a stroke first strip him of his sacredness and then of course, by figuration, of his head (Roger 1988: 162-67). I have elaborated on this scene because it testifies most dramatically to the implication (immediate but no less implicit) of the energies of neology and linguistic correction in the formation of national identity—or, in the terms of this text, in the imaginary institution of the nation. In this sense, Korais's project and his philosophy of language are already implied in the very signification of neology, in its very institution as a practice that arose exclusively

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within the epistemic context of the late Enlightenment and its nascent national-cultural imagination.14 But let us return for a moment to Roger s paradigm. The epistemological demands of the Revolution vis-a-vis the problem of language (encapsulated in Abbe Gregoire's perfectly laconic proposition "Revolutionner la langue") mobilize a series of four orders, according to Roger: "uniformity, enrichment, rectification, regeneration" (1988: 176). These orders also map precisely the boundaries of Koraiss own philosophy of language, with enrichment and regeneration being granted the front line so as to "guarantee" the balanced interdependence between neology and correction: "By correction of language I mean not only the transformation of certain words and phrases of barbaric form, but also the safeguarding of others that have been deemed barbarian and are about to be ostracized by those who have not carefully studied the nature of language" (Korais 1986: 36). Korais's experience of the language debate during the years of the French Revolution, as well as his observation of the increasing appearance of foreign words in modern Greek as a result of the proliferation of translations from European texts (1986: 39), makes him very cautious about the process of putting the language in order. Although he recognizes the inevitable importance of the act of nomination in this process,15 he remains distant from those revolutionary advocations of an absolute neology, the radical Cratylism that enriches the language with "ideal money" (Roger 1988: 178). Correction is instead the key, the very expression of regeneration. But neither can correction be absolute. It may aspire to a purification of the present, but this cannot be tantamount to a representation of the past, to a rearticulation of the original (ancient) language. Korais's ultimately historicist view of the development of languages does not allow him to make such an equation (Rotolo 1984: 52). His project aims at pinpointing a word's rendition between its ancient Greek form and its currently colloquial usage—thus, his notorious "middle way" This is simultaneously an 14. Marianna Ditsa argues similarly that the concern with neologisms in nineteenthcentury Greece was a necessary consequence of the desire to homogenize the modern Greek language, which is itself the prerequisite action for the consolidation of the State apparatus (1988: 39). Moreover, she points out the intersection of Louis-Sebastien Mercier's Neologie (i 801) with the lexicography of S. A. Koumanoudis nearly a century later (1900)—his collection of modern Greek neologisms since the fall of Byzantium in 1453—011 an identical metaphoric ground: neologisms enrich the cultural armory of a nation in defense against its (literally military) enemies (Ditsa 1988: 32-35). This is all the more a propos since Koumanoudis was an inveterate advocate of Korais's positions in a period fraught with demoticist anti-Koraism. 15. The obsession with neology arises out of the ontological status that the Enlightenment granted to the act of nomination: "The fundamental task of Classical 'discourse* is to ascribe a name to things, and in that name to name their being" (Foucault 1970: 120).

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archival and a technological project: It is archival in the sense that all phases in the history of the Greek language must be accounted for, and especially those instances where revision and correction were practiced—and here the Hellenistic corrections of the Homeric epics are key instances (Rotolo 1984: 51). It is technological in the sense that a precise technique and a programmatic method had to be applied, so that the choice between the "barbaric" and the "authentic" rendition of a word would be correct.16 Here, Condillac's (and by implication Humboldt's) notion that the formation of language corresponds directly and precisely to an epistemology— which is to say that language as such is knowledge and its study a scienceforms the hypostasis of Korais's convictions: namely, the work on language is merely the practice of philosophy, and insofar as its purpose is the national pedagogy, a philosophy of language is as well an ethical practice. Korais's Enlightenment is characterized by a profound disdain for metaphysics, not so much because it is so adamantly secular as because it is philosophical, which in his mind is ethical-practical or, strictly speaking, critical. In fact, a modern reader would now discern in Korais a metaphysical desire—philosophy taking the position of God. Nonetheless, Korais's activist ethics, especially in his didactic relation to language, reveals an acute sense of the Enlightenment s political energies (see Kondylis 1988: 37-40, 206-11). Philosophy as Pharmacology Even though Condillac's fundamental notion of le genie de la langue (which, given his identification of language with a nation's knowledge, essentially translates into le genie de la nation) does not find its way explicitly into Korais's writings, the entire infrastructure of Korais s linguistic project rests most definitely upon it.17 Condillac may have identified the mark of genius in 16. The traditional criticism of Korais on this point is that he lacks any system. Dimaras's conclusions reveal that he perceives Korais's "middle way" as an ultimately Utopian venturethat is, literally, in no determinate place—so that only Korais himself could put his theory into practice (1985: 387), In later years, Korais's enemies would celebrate their victory with more style. Yiannis Psicharis, as ideological leader of the demoticists (but also, I suspect, as worthy student of Ernest Renan) also dismisses Korais as unsystematic, concluding in characteristically systematic Orientalist French: "Coray, ne a Smyrne, est oriental d'education. Paris ne 1'a pas beaucoup change" (cited in Iliou 1984: 166). Psicharis, nk h Odessa, shows us here how much indeed Paris has changed him: he knows his own. 17. Rotolo points out that Condillac's phrase does appear in the writings of Dimitrios Katartzis, another significant figure in the Greek Enlightenment whose refusal to publish his works in his lifetime minimized his significance for many years. Rotolo also quotes from one of Korais's letters the statement "Language is the nation itself" (Rotoio 1984: 48-49). But Con-

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"naturally induced" invention—"[a genius is] a simple mind who finds what no one knew how to find before it" (cited in Derrida 1980: 63)—but his account of nature's work consistently reveals a historical implication. The emergence of genius is determined according to the particular point in the history of a language: "the success of geniuses who have had the happiness even of the best organization, depends entirely on the progress of the language in regard to the age in which they live" (Condillac 1971: 288).18 This particularity of a language (the genius of a language) confronts and is confronted by the individual mind that seeks "new combinations" (the "simple mind" that knows), which in turn must partake of the language in order to deviate from it and to bring such deviation, such recombination, upon it. These notions of recombination and deviation in Condillac—as well as those of correction, neology, and regeneration in Korais—are all subject to a semiological organization whose nature is the history of its development, or as Derrida puts it precisely, whose "history is the development of natural order" itself (1980: 67). It is in this sense that language and nation are bound in an irrevocable co-incidence—not by virtue of a transcendental nature (Volkgeist, etc.) but by virtue of a historical nature. This notion of the natural history of a nation's language provides the epistemic matrix that generates Koraiss ethico-pedagogical and philosophical politics. Korais's ethical philosophy and the identification of the very activity of linguistic correction with an ethical impulse has been duly pointed out (Rotolo 1984: 51-52). But what has not been explored is Korais's metaphoric insistence on using medical discourse as an illustration of his desired project. In these terms, linguistic correction means an ethical purification, a purging of the disease of linguistic (hence cultural) decadence, with the agents of correction emerging as the therapists of civilization. The classical text is the key to this process once again—this time to the event of a modern Renaissance.19 But the classical texts Korais edits and prefaces with his Prolegomena dillacs presence was substantial in Greek Enlightenment thought, judging also by references in Filippidis and Konstantas's Modem Geography and most obviously by Filippidis's translation of Condillac's Logique (Vienna, 1801), an effort Korais praised and advertised to his Ideologues friends as an example of the rising Neohellenic passion for philosophy. Not surprisingly, in his Preface, Filippidis stresses "analysis" as the mode upon which to found an educational methodology, for only this way can the study of language open itself to an understanding of difference, which is to say, to the practice of philosophy. For a thorough reading of Filippidis's Preface to Condillac, see Henderson (1970: 172—76). 18. Appropriately enough, Humboldt remarks: "For works of genius exert their effect only through the manner in which nations conceive them" (1988: 173), 19. Bypassing the French Revolution here, Korais likens the situation of nineteenth-century Greece to that of fifteenth-century Italy (1986: 250). He goes on, however, to point out that this first Renaissance was achieved on the loan of (ancient) Greek knowledge, and that its only

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are presented not as models for imitation but as heuristic models, as catalysts. Therefore, it is only appropriate that his central metaphor for them is the pharmakon. He identifies the Neohellenic cultural "enslavement" generally as "darkness" and, more specifically, as "wound" (1986: 250) or as "an illness whose most horrible symptom is anaesthesia, for even in somatic diseases the danger of a patient is judged greater when he ceases to sense his pain" (486).20 Anaesthesia is tantamount, in its darkness, to the furthest point of cultural decay, to the absence of sense—and indeed, by implication, to the absence of philosophy: "that the anaesthesia of the nation [^mos] has ceased leaves no doubt that Greece has begun to understand its illness, which means that it has begun to philosophize" (1986: 488). In this way, philosophy, in conjunction with its etymological function, signifies a carefully delineated paideia that accounts for the historical and linguistic particularity of the culture it sets out to cure, to bring back into its senses, to bring to light. Enlightenment is thus a pharmaceutical enterprise, and Korais concludes that in those early stages of the illness, the philosophers are as indispensable to those "as yet unborn legislators of language as druggists [pharmakopolai] are to doctors" (1986: 490). As is to be expected, here too the pharmakon is language, and the techne of philosophy is to bequeath the gift of language to culture, although significantly in this case, the specific reference is to the philosopher who provides the pharmakon for the Revolution. But this would have to resound with a great and inevitable irony after Derrida's famous visit to Plato s Pharmacy21 For here, Plato's fear is definitely realized. Language—indeed, the very materiality of language, its writing—has contaminated the actual activity of (idealist) philosophy; it has plunged phiredeeming quality was that it thus safeguarded the treasures of Hellenic civilization, which otherwise, in the hands of the Greeks, would have been lost (251). This is none other than the logic of the British Museum—indeed, colonialist logic par excellence. Korais's desire is merely to nationalize it. His proposal to found a library for the housing of ancient manuscripts, baptized accordingly Hellenic Museum (1986: 257), is a concrete manifestation of the imaginary signification that guides his work; his translation of the ancient cultural reliquary. 20. Although Korais, of all the Greek Enlightenment figures, distinguished himself by his engagement in this metaphorics of illness, by the 18605 the discourse had proliferated acutely, resounding frequently and with alarm throughout the pages of the daily and periodical press. It is worth noting that the most common renditions of the illness metaphor at this time were variations on an anesthetized condition: immobility, apathy, cachexia, lethargy, debility, negligence, indolence, numbness (see Skopetea 1988: 234-38), 21. "The pharmakon would be a substance—with all that this word can connote in terms of matter with occult virtues, cryptic deaths refusing to submit their ambivalence to analysis—if we didn't have eventually to come to recognize it as antisubstance itself: that which resists any philosopheme, indefinitely exceeding its bounds as nonidentity, nonsubstance; granting philosophy by that very fact the inexhaustible adversity of what funds it and the infinite absence of what founds it" (Derrida 1981: 70).

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losophy back into the dis-ease of the polls. The philosopher is no longer "free" to engage in the contemplation of the Idea, for if the Idea is the ousla (substance) of philosophy, the language of the polls, unhinged in its revolution, takes over as par[a]ousia, as a supplementary and contaminating presence. So the philosopher now inevitably becomes the pharmakeus, implicated into the politics of culture, engaged in the ambivalent enterprise of history, the ambiguous turns of revolution. In Korais's case, being the pharmakeus incurs the fate of the infectious and scapegoated outsider: both his person and his practice (philosophy itself) are blighted all over with their corrupted and corruptive exteriority (the promulgation of European atheism) and subjected to the ritual necessity of expulsion: [When] Philosophy mercifully returns to its old homeland, so as to cure [thempeusei] Greece's prolonged wounds.. . there are those Greeks who, having filled their arms with stones and having climbed upon the highest rock of Religion (as they call it), release the stones upon Philosophy in the most inhumane way, so as to impede its entrance into Greece. It is on behalf of such stone-throwers that I have praised Philosophy so much, and it is to them that I need to return the word, so that perhaps I may convince them to let the stones drop from their hands. (Korais 1986: 181, my emphasis)

This parody of biblical language, of the punishment that always escorts the exigencies of prophecy and revelation, may amuse in its extravagance, but in the process the exchange of antagonistic signifies has become once again the mode of operation. We have returned to the significational confusion and logomachy of the French Revolution—itself once remarkably conceived by Korais as the most thorough manifestation of the word: "for the first time since the world was created philosophy showed the entirety of its power" (cited in Kondylis 1988: 38). And here, the "return of the word" reaches talismanic proportions, so much so that Korais actually asks the reader "not to be annoyed by the frequent repetition of the name of philosophy. Since its enemies shamelessly call it Philozophia [literally, 'love of darkness'], it is necessary for its defenders to continuously shout that nothing good is possible without it" (1986: 326). But Korais, let us not forget, whether by virtue of his medical training (for a profession he never practiced) or by virtue of the physiocratic epistemology that prevailed in his time, always conceived of language in a biological sense (Rotolo 1984: 55). He always saw it in the trajectory between sublimity and decay. In this trajectory—identified as inherent in the nature of language, but comprehensible only as the voyage of its history—the nation and the part of civilization it laid claim to were subjected to an identical illness. It was to this condition that Korais dedicated his famous lecture in 1803 before the

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Societe des Observateurs de THomme (of which he was the only foreignborn member). As the tide, "Memoire sur 1'etat actuel de la civilisation dans la Grece" ("Report on the Present State of Civilization in Greece"), apdy suggests, this lecture was to serve as the memory—thus, by implication, the history—of this national illness and the prescribed history of its therapy.22 The lecture opens with a reflection upon the very activity of observing the development of Civilization, which could easily serve as a thesis for the institution of the Societe itself: If the state of the nation is to be fruitfully observed, it is mainly in the period when this nation degenerates from the virtues of its ancestors, as well as in the period when it is in the process of regeneration. The observer in both cases is placed at a vantage point which, by placing before him the succession of causes which lead to civilization being fostered or destroyed, affords him lessons useful for humanity (Korais 1970: 153)

This is a diagnostic reflection as much as a reflection upon the diagnosis of cultures. The philosopher/therapist reveals himself as an observer of the nature of things—indeed, the observer of the nature of things human. It is an anthropological reflection, since the observation of the interplay between civilization and barbarism is made possible by the translation of the logic of natural history into the logic of (national) culture. Ultimately, the text of the "Memoire" is no less than the history of the nature of modern Greece. Though hardly unusual in its intention or its rhetoric, this lecture must be confronted as the first account of the modern Greek anthropos. A new collective sensibility, situated strictly within contemporary social-historical boundaries, is shown here to provide the link—the exegesis—between the force of certain historical events and those transhistorical elements proposed as testament to a community's character. The lecture is a masterful negotiation between the history of the local and the nature of the cultural, between a political necessity and a rational morality—ultimately a report revealing the constitution of "a national vanity, ridiculous in its motives, but salutary in its effects" (Korais 1970: 158). It is an ideological coup. 22. The first appearance of this text was in French; thus, "Memoire sur 1'etat actuel de la civilisation dans la Grece" is its original title. The English translation of "Memoire" as "Report" lacks the double meaning of the French (which means both "memory" and "account"). However, the Greek translation, "Hypomnema," is the most revealing and worth a momentary reflection. Etymologically, hypomnema stands to memory (mneme) as its subtext, or its "subject" (hypo-keimenori), and thus acts as memory's insignium, as its archival and accounting inscription. It is a supplementary duplication in other words, a re-minding or re-membering of the ground of memory. It denotes a historical writing of memory—indeed, the writing of history itself. As hypomnema, memory has partaken of the pharmakon; it is no longer truth but history. (See chapters 5 and 7 below, and also Derrida 1981: 107-12.)

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As such, it reflects and conforms perfectly to the orientation of the Societe, itself marked by the shadow of the Ideologues cast all over the physiocratic epistemological terrain. For the Societe was in many ways the first anthropological institution, applying itself to a study of culture and society in the name of nature (see Stocking 1964). "Ideology is a part of zoology" would have been Destutt de Tracy's assertion (cited in Foucault 1970: 241), and the Societe is its epitome. Similarly, when the rather anti-Platonic Korais adopts the notion ofzoon logikon as the characterization ofanthropos (literally creating the fictional character Z.L.), he is engaged less in a philosophical homage to Reason than in a naturalization of Reason through its irrevocable attachment to the definition of a life form (an animality). This anthropological desire animating the activities of the Societe des Observateurs de THornine is traceable directly to the Ideologues Circle, which after all constituted most of the Societe s membership. A look at the official membership records would reveal a select company (Cuvier, Destutt de Tracy, Volney, Cabanis, Lamarck, Degerando, and Sylvestre de Sacy among them), as well as a distinct taxonomic order, led by naturalists and linguists and including explorers and archaeologists, all of them finally united in the great project of establishing "The Natural History of Man" (Stocking 1964: 135; Koumarianou 1984: 137). In other words, inks very composition, the Societe marks, archaeologically, the site of the transition—hence, intersection—between natural history and philology: "the mutation of Order into History" (Foucault 1970: 220), which would draw a straight line—as straight and incisive as the very instruments of anatomy—between Cuvier and Renan. This interwoven epistemic space situates most precisely and encapsulates above all the boundaries of Korais's otherwise idiosyncratic work. The discursive subtext of the "Memoire"—the shared physiocratic language that constitutes the Societe—is thus the metaphoric consolidation of language/nation/civilization as physiological bodies. Politically, this discourse inhabited the initial years of Napoleonic mythification, which would eventually lead first to the baptismal identification/condemnation of Ideologic and then to an altogether annihilating attack on its proponents, accounting ultimately for the rapid demise of the Societe itself by 1804. Only roughly a decade before, the imaginary body of the king from which ensued all orders of signification had been replaced by a body of a designated language, an idiomatic body, delineating a contentious political space that would eventually be named the Nation (de Certeau et al. 1975: 160—69). At the time of Korais's lecture, this national body, as it was circumscribed during the Revolution, was reinstituting itself into another singular, and now secular, imaginary body: the Napoleonic Code. "The writing was the figure of the

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Revolution; the written, the figure of the Nation" (de Certeau et al. 1975: 165). The prediction circulating at the time was one of regeneration, of health. The pharmakon had succeeded, and Korais could only have felt the urgency to pass it on.23 After all, the successful Napoleonic expedition in Egypt, so appropriately predicated on the Societe's Orientalist intellectual capital (for example, the writings of Volney or the teachings of Sylvestre de Sacy), had already shown the pharmaceutical maneuvers of French postrevolutionary ideology in action. Edward Said has seized upon this event and its designers to unravel the foundations of the Orientalist laboratory (1979: 80—89), The Napoleonic expedition emerges as the first occasion when a colonialist invasion took place prior to its military occurrence, already prefigured discursively by the mobilization of the entire intellectual capital of the colonialist power. Textual order preceded imperial action, and Napoleon himself conceded to this hierarchy when he decreed that military command was to be shared with the cultural mapping of the object of conquest. Certainly, the nation's law (the Napoleonic Code) and the nation's army were the co-incident pillars of the Napoleonic imagination, both testimonies to the revolutionary legacy that lent to the Napoleonic signifiers their indisputable magic. Indeed, besides the new legal order, perhaps the most significant institution created from the ashes of the French Revolution was the constitution of Europe's first national army: the quintessential condition of internalized State power at the level of subjective imagination—that is, every citizen's immanent right to serve the State as a soldier for its desires. Thus, although the Napoleonic army was renowned for its capacity to swell its ranks as it marched through conquered territory, the impetus of recruitment was actually the national liberation envisioned in the act of Napoleonic conquest. Recruitment to the Napoleonic army succeeded only insofar as it was really recruitment to the ranks of the Nation. Much like the discursive prefiguration of the Egyptian expedition, the manifest internationalism of the Napoleonic army hides a highly refined and prefigured act of nationalization in military history. Although Korais s nationalist project stands politically in direct opposi23. Some eighteen years later, a few months after the War of Independence had begun in Greece (1821), Korais put forward in his Prolegomena to Aristotle's Politics a metaphorics of pleasure (hedone) as a substitute for the metaphorics of illness (1988: 688-95). His object of reflection had then shifted to the issue of Greek postrevolutionary society—the truly national body—in an attempt to dispel the already forming European belief "in the inability [of the Greeks] to govern themselves autonomously with just laws" (690). Nevertheless, even at this moment, Korais did not cease to remain the Nation s pharmakeus, providing a body of writings upon which the Nation can retrace itself, hedomstically, as a cultural and literally textual continuity: "The falsehood of fiction comes to an end with the hedone of the reader" (1986: 24).

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tion to Napoleonic colonialism, both belong finally to the same epistemic order. When Korais stands in front of his fellow Observateurs de I'Homnie to report on the state of Greece, he is weaving a memoire (a history) of a nation that does not yet exist, an observation made compulsory precisely because the observed entity does not exist. But this is not merely an act of nomination, although it is undoubtedly also that. Neither is it merely the passing on of abstract knowledge about the genotype (neo)Hellene, a didactic anthropology of a civilization yet to emerge from barbarism, although it is undoubtedly that as well. The "Memoire" is an activist, perhaps invasive, prefiguration of a cultural institution—which is to say, the institution of a national audience, or better yet, beyond the halls of the Parisian Societe, the induction of one's audience to the formal ranks of the Nation. This audience is by necessity imaginary. Despite Koraiss prolific personal involvement with the various individuals affecting one way or another the development of the Greek caserns voluminous correspondence being the prime example—his writings have an imaginary interlocutor, a collective subject, whom they construct as they instruct. Korais thus embodies the culmination and finality of the Greek Enlightenment. He attempts to institute the representational framework upon which Neohellenic nature and history could be articulated and displayed in a coincident and symbiotic fashion, This framework may serve either as scaffolding or as museum—which is, in Korais s case, an internal scaffolding for the proper exhibition of a people's historical nature. Indeed, it seems perfectly appropriate to readopt Korais s nomination and consider the sum of his enormous oeuvre under the name The Hellenic Museum. In this museum, Korais's linguistic exhortations stand as the most treasured of archaeological artifacts. For the new Hellenic idiom purported to guide the national Bildung is to contain (in Condillacian terms) the analysis of the^enos, the blueprint for a Neohellenic genie—which is in effect to say, riding the torrent of language itself, that the Neohellenic idiom is to contain the emerging nation's genetic code. The work of Korais seals thus the fact that the articulation of a national culture, partaking always of the antagonism between civilization and barbarism while aspiring toward the institution of a national-pedagogical methodology, hinges upon the invocation of language as the intersecting topos of nature and history.

EXCURSUS I

Subversive Affinities: Enlightenment /Fracture

"The history of human diseases could easily be written by following that of civil Societies" says Rousseau, invoking characteristically the pharmacological method by which Nature could be read (or "written") as History through a metaphorical deference to the history of social order (1986: 145). Here, Rousseau himself pays deference to Plato, in an attempt to construct a nature in which to flee from the pharmakon and its figurative grounding, the illness of social order. It is a paradoxical turn, because the further his construction of an unimpeded nature, the further his immersion in a dissimulating society—fleeing being one thing, escaping quite another. Rousseau's much discussed fascination with the topos of I*enfant sawvage, an outcome of the obsessive insistence on the sentient source of knowledge (itself an often acknowledged inheritance from Condillac), is an attempt to come to terms with nature as an organizing and training ground of human experience, as society. As such, the model for the potentiality of a "healthy" or "natural" civilization becomes none other than the savage: the quintessentially uncivilized, the barbarian of Greco-Western Enlightenment thought. True, Rousseau's savage was by all accounts a rather short-lived creature. As if to atone for its paradoxical conceptual framework, the trajectory of the Enlightenment project demanded an eventual reincarnation of the savage that would adhere to the Enlightenment's own technological reinvention of itself, a savage according to the vision stored in the early anthropological prism of craniometry or osteology But these paradoxical turns are merely a part of the course. Like Rousseau's work, Diderot's two famous early texts, "Lettre sur les aveugles" ("Letter on the Blind," 1749) and "Lettre sur les sourds et muets"

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("Letter on the Deaf and Dumb," 1751), present a paradigmatic charting of both the course of the Enlightenment's inquiry and its deployment of paradoxical metaphors. These Letters, built on an elaborate self-reflective structure, engage themselves with the entire terrain of their contemporary epistemology. What soon becomes apparent in reading them is that, although knowledge is conceived and represented abstractly as a totality—possible only through the complete, the total, sentient being (Condillac)—the investigation of what constitutes knowledge can only be completed by the observation, the specula(riza)twn, of those entities whose senses are lacking: the blind, the deafmute. Enlightenment becomes, in other words, an exo-tic matter, as the actual object of epistemology is found to be grounded on the contemplation of an exteriority, which is nonetheless conceptualized as internal to Enlightenment "nature." The two Letters work as each other's supplements. Just as the blind will allow us to understand symmetry, physiognomy, and the value of beauty (the totality of the visual), so will the deaf-mute allow us to obtain a veritable notion of the formation of language (the totality of the phonetic order). The first Letter begins on the premise that the concrete is negated in the blind. For the blind, abstract thought exists in-itself, but it will never be known as such, deciphered: writing is (within) the property of sight (Diderot 1969: 178-81). Here lies a definitive Enlightenment limit. Blindness is metaphorically linked to darkness, and although capable of great philosophical and mathematical insight, it falls inevitably short of the paradoxical project of the Enlightenment: to see abstractly. This is most apparent in Diderot's fictionalized scenario of Saunderson's confession upon his deathbed, when blindness is exalted in a fashion that anticipates Arthur Rimbaud's voyance (or even William Blake's). Here, blindness is presented as the most elaborate fracturing of knowledge. Its power lies in radical ignorance, in Saunderson s uncompromising skepticism, his atheism: "What is this world . . . [but] a rapid succession of beings that appear one by one, flourish and disappear; a transitory symmetry, a momentary order?" (1969: 119). In invoking Saunderson—as he says, "substituting a geometrician for a metaphysician, Saunderson for Locke" (216)—Diderot actually invokes that which escapes his encyclopedic desire. This is a fractured knowledge, an Enlightenment without light, without order—indeed, a transient order that finds its permanence in the repetition of touch, having no use for the rational assurance that as things venture out of the field of vision they do not cease to exist. But the fractured can only operate metaphorically; otherwise it has no access to totality Diderot returns, in his second Letter, to this problematic metaphor: the translation (metaphora) of Condillac s "language of action"

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(touch., gesture) into the Enlightenment's language of rational abstraction (vision, speech). But in this case, the deployed metaphor (le davendn occulaire) does not translate the real. On the contrary, it leads away from it; it is a different thing, a differing thing, a phantasmic artifice; The purpose of the machine was as incomprehensible to [the deaf-mute] as the use to which we put our organs of speech. . . . [But he] imagined that this ingenious inventor was also deaf and dumb; that his harpsichord served as the instrument by which he communicated with other men; that each nuance of color on the keyboard represented a letter of the alphabet; and that with the help of his sense of touch, the agility of his fingers, he combined these letters, forming words, phrases, and, in the end, a whole discourse of colors. (Diderot 1969: 530)

In the form of this imaginary activity, Diderot recognizes the work of philosophy, thus linking philosophy directly to metaphor, so that knowledge itself becomes a figure of the imaginary, an outcome of figuration, of gesture—a theatrical language. Rousseau grants figurative language an explicitly natural precedence as well (1986: 246-47), forwarding an epistemology similarly by way of the fractured or the lacking—although he reverses the names. In Rousseau's thought, the savage is totality while civilization is lacking. This is the axiomatic conception of the matter, however, as his discourse does not cease to describe the savage in terms of lack, that is, in terms of what the savage does wot possess in his nature, the sum of which is, naturally, European civilization, Thus, Rousseau's savage emerges as the reincarnation of Usbek, Montesquieu's Persian, who is himself but a photo-negative of the great travelers and explorers who trace the history of the eighteenth century: one's subjection— subjugation—to the experiment of civilization and culture.1 No doubt, this experiment belongs to a social imaginary much before it i. It is noteworthy, if only as a document of history's affinity for the order of co-incidence, that while Montesquieu was publishing (anonymously and in Holland) his audacious Persian Letters (1721), the royal court of Paris was enjoying the embassy of £elebi Mehmet Efendi, dispatched by order of the Ottoman Sultan Ahmed III, in what was the first Oriental embassy to the Occident with the singular and explicit purpose of observing and reporting on an alien culture. With the freedom that such historical co-incidence affords, we could attribute to the imaginary of Montesquieu's two Persians (in defiance of his own allegorical strategies) Mehmet Efendi's characteristic summation of his impressions from the West (in a phrase he incorrectly attributes to the Koran, thus just as audaciously endowing tradition with his own imaginary imprint): "The world is the prison of the faithful and the paradise of the infidel" (see Gocek 1987). I presume that an attentive ear could easily tune itself to the sound of history beckoning that one daring archivist fated to trace the conceptual path of this suggestive aphorism and rescue from oblivion Mehmet Efendi's voluminous correspondence concerning the order of his harem during his year-long stay in a dazzling alien land.

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becomes a social convention with a documentary history. Josue Harari argues, "Montesquieu is undoubtedly the first writer to have staged an eroticopolitical fiction to demonstrate that all political systems gain in strength and stability as the imaginary realm increases at the expense of the reality principle" (1987: 80—81). In this staging, a series of devices are constructed so that the world that defines Usbek as an exotic subject—a world he takes with him phantasmically but leaves behind politically—signifies, by means of a series of homologies, the world in which he is written. Hence the seraglio reveals the machinery of politics; the eunuchs stand as the simulacra of authority; the harem as the harnessing of political desire into desire for submission; the writing of letters as sublimated social order; and Usbek himself—or rather his (absent) body—as the imaginary institution of the State. In other words, the narrative device that Montesquieu employs allows him to present the European social conventions as fabular. It opens the way for a social critique by returning society to myth. All the same, the narrative's progress entails a reversal: namely, the increasing subjugation of the foreign to the familiar, of the exotic to the esoteric, of the figurative to the rational. Thus, the very critique of European society, which is the form of the Persian Letters, is simultaneously the exaltation of European society, its content. The narrative corroborates this point, as the collapse of the order of the harem (the quintessential sign for the Islamic Orient in Western literature) engenders the collapse of Usbek's own untilthen carefully constructed, cultivated, and enlightened reason. Although Harari's conclusion, "Usbek's ultimate blunder derives from his misconception that a letter can stand in the place of a body, that authority can be forever exercised in absentia" (1987: 89), may be accurate, the very misconception is inconceivable outside "Western" thought. To put it perhaps another way: although the despotic body (whether it be the singular body of the monarch or the representational body of the assembly) is indeed the imaginary of the State, the depiction of despotism as inherently corrupt and symbolically organized around castration and the unrequited desire for submission does not cease to be an elaborate Orientalist fantasy As such, the "West" remains an allegory that gains in self-knowledge, and the Persian remains a Persian, although his world is destroyed in the process.2 2. After tracing the course of the notion of despotism from its ancient Greek use within the domestic space to its Orientalist cliche and then on to its categorical use as "a code-word for the oppression of society," Brian Singer notes that despotism "can be considered less a type of order than a sort of anti-type that produces, and not without paradox, a sort of disorder . . . [being] always on the brink of some imminent cataclysm" (1986: 83). Despotism thus comes to signify the operations of power as unboundable, as hyper rational, since despotism renders the practice of reason irrelevant. Hence, "the coupling of reason with power in the form of enlightened or

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This allegorical nature of the Persian Letters exemplifies the Enlightenment's cultural-pedagogical dilemma. Kant opens his famous essay "What Is Enlightenment?" with the following motto: "Enlightenment is mans release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another" (1985: 85). This is, on one level, an unreserved call for autonomy, an initiation to the potentiality of selfknowledge. It is Usbek's and Rica's calling as well, as Montesquieu's opening Letter suggests: Rica and I are perhaps the first Persians to have left our country for love of knowledge, to have abandoned the attractions of a quiet life in order to pursue the laborious search for wisdom. . . . The kingdom in which we were born is prosperous, but we did not think it right that our knowledge should be limited to its boundaries, and that we should see by the light of the East alone. (1973:41)

There is an inarguable implication here that the desire to know (the very hypostasis of the pedagogical relation) signifies at the same time a transgression of one's boundaries, a release from one's traditional bind, a liberation from tutelage. In this case, tutelage is defined not as the pedagogical control of one person by another but as the hegemonic control of one's own culture ("the East alone"). The Persians' journey, as it is anticipated here, is not merely an act of liberation or escape, but it is tantamount to a change of nature: "Tutelage has become almost [one's] nature" says Kant (1985: 86). All this may be well and good, again if we take Kant at his word: "if only freedom is granted, enlightenment is sure to follow" (86), a position that Korais would, by the way, subscribe to wholeheartedly3 But the fate of the Persians—as the fate of all those traveling the "Western" orbits—suggests that "freedom" and "enlightenment" may in fact be incompatible. The narrative demonstrates the institution of a cultural-pedagogical model that, although on the surface emphasizing a process of self-knowledge "without direction by another," ultimately reveals the pedagogy of the Enlightenment to be a pedagogy of heteronomy. That is, it involves a shift from the heteronomy of external (religious) law—predicated, as it were, on the perceived "inherent legal despotism was [eventually] considered a contradiction in terms, a monstrous hybrid soon abandoned even by its advocates" (Singer 1986: 84). Here it is worth quoting from Mirabeau a passage that is surely aimed at Montesquieu's hegemonic imagination: "Republics, perhaps the most despotic of all forms of confederation . . . carefully maintain their independence and ardently increase their power, wealth, and force for the sole purpose of subjugation" (Essai sur le despotisms, cited in Singer 1986: 215). 3. It should not be surprising, given the argument here, that Korais would go so far as to inscribe in the condition of political freedom a different physiology, a different nature: "The fever of a slave, or similarly his soul, resemble neither the soul nor the fever of a free man" (1988: 3 59— 60).

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depravity of human beings" (Dolar 1991: 47)—to an internal(ized) heteronomy that accounts for Kant s split-subject imperative: the division between the power of obedience in the private sphere and the power of (rational) knowledge in the public sphere. This is a heteronomy disguised as freedom—or better yet, a freedom predicated on an internal heteronomy, considering Kant's belief that "private obedience is the inner condition of the public freedom of reasoning" (Dolar 1991: 48). This Kantian paradox bears perfectly the terms of the pedagogical voyage of civilization across the ways of culture(s). Hence, Usbek's "laborious search for wisdom," which is to supplement "the light of the East," turns out to be the appropriation of the imaginary of the "East," just as Rousseau's pedagogical model entails the appropriation-of the pupil's imaginary so that the pupil unwittingly imagines what the tutor desires.4 The slogan "to seize the imagination" is not, therefore, the property of May '68; it is Rousseau's gift to the French Revolution and to the hegemony of the Republic (Harari 1987: 112). But "to seize the imagination" is also the command encapsulating the process of instituting a national culture, which entails a remythification of society according to the imaginary of a different form of social organization: the Nation. Korais's project of national-cultural pedagogy is just this kind of remythification, as it is predicated on a visionary (an imaginative and imagemaking) conception of a culture that does not yet exist and thus literally has to be made. His demoticist enemies accused him of artificiality in his language theory, and in this sense their perception was crucial (no more crucial, however, than their misperception of themselves as authentic). Korais as the enlightened national pedagogue is positioned in relation to an emerging Neohellenic culture as Rousseau is toward the orphan child in Emile. In both cases, the seekers of self-knowledge are themselves the objects of knowledge in a pedagogical field initiated and controlled by the commanding imagination of the master pedagogue (Harari 1987: 106—7). This is also what sustains the very structure of the Persian Letters and what might make it even more profoundly Orientalist: a description of heteronomy as self-knowledge and of mastery as nature—the dialectic of Enlightenment par excellence: 4. This is precisely how Harari exposes the delusion in Rousseau's traditional portrayal as a liberal (liberating) pedagogue, concluding that Rousseau's "redistribution of the pedagogical field [is] only revolutionary in so far as [it] implies the impossibility of all pedagogy" (1987: 1067). Similarly, Horkheimer and Adorno will rearticulate Kant's pedagogical proposition as a Sadist enterprise: "The work of the Marquis de Sade portrays 'understanding without the guidance of another person': that is, the bourgeois individual freed from tutelage" (1972: 86).

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The conceptual apparatus determines the senses, even before perception occurs; a priori, the citizen sees the world as the matter from which he himself manufactures it. Intuitively, Kant foretold what Hollywood consciously put into practice: in the very process of production, images are pre-censored according to the norm of the understanding which will later govern their apprehension. (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972; 84)

This a priori to perception is what the national imaginary commands and where the cunning of a national pedagogy resides. National pedagogy is an Odyssean pedagogy, granting a culture the means by which it may institute itself as unique: its own poetic nature. It is thus a pedagogy indistinguishable from the exercise of the bourgeois spirit; it is knowledge sought in the uniqueness of one's individuality: "every nation, quite apart from its external situation, can and must be regarded as a human individuality, which pursues an inner spiritual path of its own" (Humboldt 1988: 41).5 And just as Usbek's Enlightenment signifies a change in his "individual" nature by means of a remythification., so does the enlightenment of the national path imply a change in the nature of culture. Hence, the nature of national pedagogy may be said to be constitutively mythopoetic. Here we reach the boundary where reason is co-incidental to imagination and where the Enlightenment proves merciless in both its interrogative and myth-making capacity. The myth lies in the proposed mastery over the totality of knowledge, which can only be achieved, however, through the interrogation of the fractured, the lacking: Diderot s blind and deaf-mutes, Condillacs sentient but speechless statue, Rousseau's savages, Montesquieu's Persians, Humboldts Malaysians, and (why not?) Koraiss Neohellenes. But how is this lack, this fracture, to be accounted for within the perfect mastery of a mythology that itself springs from the exorcism of enchantment, from the disenchantment of and with myth? "What 1*5 the imagination of a blind man?" asks Diderot with an evident incapacity to provide an answer (1969: 230)— and we must emphasize the verb, because it is this ontological ambivalence of nature within history that permanently displaces the integrity of natural history, this irreducible arche of the project of the European Enlightenment: "Man, according to Diderot, should he desire to plumb the infinite ambivalence of 5. My intention is surely not to minimize the radicalism of the Greek Enlightenment s pedagogical critique. It is important to remember Moisiodax's unabashed condemnation of religious education, later elaborated by Korais to show its direct complicity with corporal punishment and misogyny (Korais 1986: 156-58), But we should also concurrently remember Korais s hymn to the middle class in his preface to Aristotle's Politics (1988: 742-43). Beyond its political signification, this invocation must be understood in an ethical sense as well: the middle class is the prudent, the moderate class—the prudent, controlled way, "the middle way."

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all that lives, will have to become blind or deaf, being unable to become a woman" (de Fontenay 1982: 137-38). For, to continue, what Elizabeth de Fontenay has so precisely identified as "the strange complicity of colonial politics and natural history" (1982: 93) marks the ground upon which an exemplary language of national culture is formed. Of this complicity, no image is more revealing than the zoological treatment of a South African woman scientifically baptized the "Hottentot Venus," whose plaster cast and skeleton have remained on display at the Musee de THornine in Paris since 1816. Though "the Hottentots—need we mention it?—[have] disappeared from the face of the earth, . . . there exists still today in the Musee de l'Homme a department devoted to the 'anthropology of soft parts/ a section in which the logic of classification administers buttocks, breasts and other flesh, and in which a Western male fantasy— periodically unleashed with particular vigor by the Hottentot women—was to find its institutional form" (de Fontenay 1982: 98-99). In this "strange" epistemic space that renders the "complicitous" interstices of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European history imaginable, a series of homological images provides the map of this text's boundaries. These images could have an indefinite number of names. But in keeping with the particular complicity that de Fontenay recovers by reweaving Diderot s problematic, I feel obliged to read these names within the narrative extending from the Hottentot Venus in the glass case at the Musee de PHornme to those ancient Hellenic ghosts parading in the exclusive halls of the Humboldtian university, and all the way back to those sun-drenched Levantine olive groves where Neohellenes strive to gain from the Ottomans the signs of cultural exclusion. And thus the narrative of Philhellenism rises on the horizon. But there may yet be a last word. As Foucault s answer to Kant reveals, to continue negotiating the Enlightenment's civilizing and barbarous trends (which are after all the two moments of the Same) may be historically imprecise. Instead, Foucault suggests that we turn our attention to the Enlightenment's initiation of a philosophical ethos, which, although quickly buried in the Enlightenment's own laboratory of progressive history and technological redemption, does actually entail a mode of reflective relation to the present, an engagement of critical thought within the pressing limits of contemporary necessity (Foucault 1984: 43—44). And thus, the very notion of the natural history of a national culture emerges in a different, a refracted, light. In this light, the images of that ethnogeographical space of which Greece is but one component become the actual images of polyphony, heterogeneity, ethnic co-incidence and co-habitation, racial and religious impurity, linguistic multiplicity, alternative subjectivity, and hyperethnic culture that were suppressed

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with the dawn of the nineteenth century precisely in the name of the myths of nationality and freedom. Of these two myths—or mythical names—there is something further to be said. Responding to what may now appear as our contemporary historical condition, the demands of a present necessity (however necessarily fleeting or transitory), make it possible to articulate the question of the Nation within the terminology of natural history. In this, I am not merely advocating a return to an Enlightenment discipline, the natural history that bequeaths comprehensibility to the vision of the Observateurs de 1'Homme. I am reinvoking Foucault's calling for a return to an Enlightenment ethos, a calling that may be understood as a historical fine-tuning of Horkheimer and Adorno s dialectic. Indeed, Foucault's own trajectory may be said not only to return to the dialectic of Enlightenment its deserved due but to return to it the mark of its historical contingency. It elicits from Horkheimer and Adorno's conclusion that the Enlightenment is totalitarian its necessarily suppressed historical nature, the fact that the dialectic of Enlightenment could only be articulated in the face of totalitarian vision. For the universal vision of the Enlightenment is not but a profound historical condition, the condition of one s historical present establishing itself unavoidably as philosophical event. Thus, the history of the dialectic of Enlightenment through the ages may be said to be totalitarian, but the nature of its dialectic—or better yet, the dialectic as its nature—may be said to reside in its historical ethos, an ethos that is profoundly philosophical which is to say, critical, secular, and democratic: an ethos of ihe polls. Not as paradoxically as it might seem, this infusion of the dialectic of Enlightenment with the ethos of the polls returns to Adorno s own conception of the logic of natural history as the ground for a critical praxis. This is what I mean finally when I say that the mythology of the Nation emerges as a technology of natural history—that is, only if, in Adorno s words, "It is possible to comprehend historical being in its most extreme historical determinacy, where it is most historical as natural being} or if it were possible to comprehend nature as historical being where it seems to rest most deeply in itself as nature" (Adorno 1984!): ny).6 As far as the other mythical name—"freedom" (both as mythos and as techne)— is concerned, I cannot but defer to the most untamable strain of Enlightenment ethos: Nietzsche's looming shadow, still there to remind us that the conception of freedom is, after all, nothing but the invention of the ruling classes. 6. For an excellent discussion of Adorno's idea of "natural history" and the nonidentitary dialectics that grant nature and history the use of each other's bodies, see Buck-Morss (1977: 4-3-62).

CHAPTER 4

The Punishment of Philhellenism

When, finally, on the afternoon after our arrival, I stood upon the Acropolis and cast my eyes around upon the landscape, a remarkable thought suddenly entered my mind: "So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school!" To describe the situation more accurately, the person who gave expression to the remark was divided, far more sharply than was usually observable, from another person who took cognizance of the remark; and both were astonished, though not by the same thing. The first behaved as though he were obliged, under the impact of unequivocal observation, to believe in something the reality of which had hitherto seemed doubtful. If I may make a slight exaggeration, it was as if someone, walking beside Loch Ness, suddenly caught sight of the form of the famous Monster stranded upon the shore and found himself driven to the admission: "So it really does exist—the sea-serpent we always disbelieved in!" The second person, on the other hand, was justifiably astonished, because he had been unaware that the real existence of Athens, the Acropolis, and the landscape around it had ever been objects of doubt. What he had been expecting was rather some expression of delight or admiration. (Freud, "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis" [1936], in 1950: 304)

The Disturbance of "Bildung" So, it really does exist, Hellas, this "famous Monster"! Isn't it quite astonishing? For certainly its traces are real, considering that their mere sight procures "a disturbance of memory"—indeed of this particular man's memory, this well-trained and sinuous order of things whose own biographical history had long been both instrument and object of precise dissection (though of wild speculation no less), eventually to stand as the singular foundation of an imaginatively compulsive discipline.

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But let us mark the time. The "disturbance of memory" occurs with the dawn of the century and in Freud's mid-life (1904). Greece is not yet a hundred years old. The memory of the disturbance—its writing (1936)— nears Freud's end (1939); the Third Reich is in foil blossom. In this trajectory, in this historical passage (just as in the one above), neatly unfolds the astonishing fantasy ofPhilhellenism. "Just as we learnt at school!" With this remark, betraying a childlike exclamatory innocence, Freud returns to his Humboldtian playground. The substantiation of the classical educations promised truth could only have been remarked by the sight of a "reality . . . which had hitherto seemed doubtful." Or, to put it more precisely, the classical Bildung could only have been affirmed by the visual representation of the nonexistent reality—the ideal—upon which it is based. Humboldt spells it out in an astonishing passage of his own: Our study of Greek history is a matter quite different from our other historical studies. For us, the Greeks step out of the circle of history. Even if their destinies belong to the general chain of events, yet in this respect they matter least to us. We fail entirely to recognize our relationship to them if we dare apply the standards to them that we apply to the rest of world history Knowledge of the Greeks is not merely pleasant, useful, or necessary for us—no, in the Greeks alone we find the ideal of that which we ourselves should like to be and produce. If every other part of history enriches us with its human wisdom and human experience then from the Greeks we take something more than earthly—something almost godlike. (Geschichte des Verfalls und Unterganges der griechischen Freistaaten [1807], in 1963: 79)

Humboldt s description accurately frames the cultural conditions underlying Freud's disbelief by positing Hellas as a reality that is necessarily, constitutively, ideal. Thus, its visual presence can only produce a "derealization" (Freud 1950: 308)—a term signifying simultaneously both the unreality of the experience in light of the preconception and the evident unreality of the preconception in view of the experience. For Humboldt, this ambivalence becomes the very play of cultural definition, the negotiation of identities from the position of historical mastery. Granting the ancient Greeks the privilege of historical ex-centricity is only significant in the relation between the historicity of "us" and the ideality of "them"—the ideality of "them" ensuring the historicity of "us." Humboldt: "They move us, not with compulsion to be more like them, but with inspiration to be more ourselves. They attract us because they heighten our independence" (1963: 81, my emphasis). This observation might involve a figure akin to the excess, observed by Homi Bhabha, that results from the mimicry characteriz-

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ing colonial discourse—with the crucial distinction, however, that in this case both the promulgation and the practice of mimicry are solely exercised by the colonizing culture.1 In other words, mimicry here is fundamentally autoscopic, as its primary objective is not the subjugation of an Other—at least, not in an obvious, immediate sense—but the expansion of self-identity, the sublimation of "independence." But there is, necessarily an object at hand—or better yet, in view. This object is the Hellenic ideal, upon which the German national character—to use a favorite Humboldtian phrase—hinges. A classical Bildung is thus not merely the appropriation of ancient Greek culture; it is, in effect, its sublimation, which is to say, its reinscription with new social meaning, its resocialization.2 Insofar as this sublimation partakes of the ambivalent exercise of mimicry—here, an autoscopic mimicry grounded in the ideal—the classical Bildung is no less than an explicit and programmatic colonization of the ideal. In this way, the ideal becomes a matter of historical mastery, the mastery of "reality" that is in turn encoded as the uninhibited play of nature: "The positing of any ideal or type requires conscientious observation of reality For an ideal or a type is nothing other than nature extended in all directions, freed from all limitations" (Humboldt 1963: no). Once again, colonial mastery hinges on an ambivalence: the (colonized) ideal is unveiled as the site of unhinged nature only within the confines of a strictly controlled (and controlling) scopic economy. Freuds arrival at this site signals the impossible confrontation between the discourse of the Hellenic ideal, internalized as part of the very process of Bildung, and its visual presentation as (the) real. Hence, the experience of "derealization" or disbelief, which is to say, an actual experience of colonial ambivalence. Freud is very much aware of the relational condition of this experience, even though he might be unconscious of its historical content. Thus, he recognizes that "derealization" is marked by a fundamental displace1. "Colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference" (Bhabha 1986: 199). 2. " 'Sublimation' is nothing other than the psychogenetic or idiogenetic aspect of socialization" (Castoriadis 1987: 311). In the philosophical idiom that served as the foundation of the German Bildung, it is possible to envision society itself entering the Hegelian process ofaujheben, making its own sublation a moment in the logic of the Sublime. This etymological transgression might be illustrated in the discourse of chemistry, in which "sublimation" describes the process of a solid body's passing directly into a gaseous state. But certainly none of this excludes any of the word's traditional psychoanalytic references to sexuality. After all, what better examples of the sublimated sexuality of the Hellenic ideal than two of its most avid proponents, Winckelmann and Holderlin.

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ment: the transposition of the real from one's relation with the object on to the object itself— "from my relation to the Acropolis on to the very existence of the Acropolis" (1950: 307). For Freud then, the unraveling of this displacement can only point to an analysis of his own relation to the object of desire /repression (the Acropolis, or metonymically, Hellenic civilization), rather than to an analysis of the object itself. He perceives his doubt of the existence of Athens as a projection of an earlier doubt^the very possibility of his ever having an experience of Athens: "I only doubted whether I should ever see Athens. It seemed to me beyond the realm of possibility that I should travel so far—that I should 'go such a long way' " (310). But what does this mean? Freud's text is actually quite revealing. "Going such a long way" is but the euphemistic designation of the bourgeois desire for success—of "upward mobility" if you will—whose quintessential signifier may be less the accumulation of capital or the rise on the social ladder than the ability to travel, the fortune of coming into contact with societies other than one's own from a privileged position of surveillance. Success—or better yet, the typically bourgeois sense of the liberation inherent in success— is measured ultimately by the extent of one's geographical mobility. In our day, this notion of travel as bourgeois desire is perfectly illustrated in the canny designs of the tourist industry (Buck-Morss 1987).3 Since, therefore, bourgeois success can only be measured in relational terms, being in effect a condition of mobility, "going such a long way" must entail that something is being left far behind. And for Freud specifically, this remnant could have been only one thing—his father. Thus, he burdens the pleasure of his success with the guilt of having superseded the father, the father's authority: "It seems as though the essence of success were to have got further than one s father, and as though to excel one's father were still something forbidden" (1950: 311). An exemplary articulation of the contradictions of bourgeois morality. But the significance actually lies elsewhere—in the very sign chosen to represent this superiority over the father: "The very theme of Athens and the Acropolis in itself contained evidence of the son's superiority. Our father had been in business, he had no secondary education, and Athens could not have meant much to him. Thus, what interfered with our enjoyment of the journey to Athens was a feeling of piety" (312). The national-cultural underpin3. Furthermore, since at least its Odyssean days, travel has been itself the trope of one's struggle to prevail—whether by hunting or by escaping one's fortune—in the disenchanting world of civilization. In this sense, travel is implicated in the exercise of cunning and in the fear of failure: "Odysseus lives by the original constitutive principle of civil society: one had the choice between deceit or failure" (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972: 62).

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nings of this statement, although unacknowledged by Freud, are striking. Freud's guilt stems not so much from having surpassed the father s authority by achieving a more respectable social position; this is merely a symptom. Instead, his guilt is generated ultimately by a feeling of cultural betrayal. Freud's social advancement—indeed, his success as a scientist—is the expression of an educational program whose epistemic center is a particular kind of cultural vision baptized "the Hellenic world," which, insofar as it is inescapably linked to the constitution of the German national character, marks a definite betrayal of the world of the Father—"the Hebraic world." (This is, of course, in large part the political motivation—whether conscious or unconscious—behind the sudden remembrance of this disturbance of memory in 1936.) Consequently, this "feeling of piety" engenders actually a disturbance of pleasure, which is indeed the source of "derealization/* as the (Hebraic) Father returns to punish the Hellenized son.4 At this point, Freud's analysis cannot but discover its limit. Because for Freud, the significance of culture lay always in its capacity to reveal the externalized manifestations of one's psychopathology In a rather simplified but not inaccurate sense, culture served as the psyche's mirror. The materiality of culture, its status as object (which is to say, its ideological operation), thus remains stubbornly unaddressed. Reading Freud s essay as a cultural and not as a psychoanalytic enunciation makes the truly astonishing thing not the analysis (Freud's self-diagnosis of his particular neurosis in relation to the sign "Acropolis") but the symptom: Freud's "disturbance" at the presence of the Acropolis, which is to say, his disbelief, his conviction of the absence of the Acropolis. Moreover, if we are to believe Lacan, the symptom gathers itself together as a trace (i.e., becomes known) only once the analysis has "gone a long way," as it were. The symptom is the wake of the analysis; it is what psychoanalysis leaves behind (and this should be understood both in its metaphorical and in its literal sense, even though the connotations are contradictory) . This is precisely why there is no logic to the symptom, meaning that if symptoms are to be deemed traces of a particular psychopathology, they are not at all determined by the nature of this pathology—at least not in any kind 4. Here, we have an upturning of the aims of Bildung as it winds down into the fierce nationalist violence that comes with European modernity. Matthew Arnold's dictum "Hellenism may actually serve to further the designs of Hebraism" (1961: 159), by which he declares Culture the safeguard of the social and moral order, has become for Freud a transgression of that order. Vassilis Lambropoulos has some very interesting things to say on this matter and this text. Specifically, he points out that the Hellenic signifier is fundamentally ambivalent vis-a-vis the Hebraic; that is, the Hellenic may exercise Culture as Order, but it may just as well exercise Culture as Anarchy (1989: 188-89). It is in this latter sense that the Hellenic invokes the wrath and the punishment of the Father.

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of discernible, predictable sense. To any given pathology corresponds an infinite or indeterminate possibility of symptoms, as infinite or indeterminate as is history itself. For if there is a logic to the symptom at all, it is none other than the logic of co-incidence (symptosis). Still, Freud wraps up his self-analysis neatly (by returning, of course, to the Father) and never returns to the symptom. The point, I assume, would be that this is not a very successful analysis, since by the end of Freud's narrative the symptom has vanished.5 Shall we say that it has been repressed?—but it does not matter, as the Acropolis has ceased (to matter). This, perhaps, would be more of a concern to psychoanalysts. For the purposes of this text, the importance lies in the cultural predicament described in this narrative, the Hellenic signifier as a structuring ideological force. It may be perhaps evident that Freud's own predicament is an illustration of an ideological fantasy. That is, the entire authority of his national-cultural makeup (his Hebraic progeny notwithstanding—indeed, included) is predicated on an idealized image of Civilization of which a set of half-broken marble columns is the most illustrious (and actual) trace. As fantasy, Philhellenism always constitutes a desire—the desire for civilization, and particularly for civilization as the anthropocentric dissolution of myth, which the Enlightenment retroactively discovered to be its historical project. In this sense, there is nothing astonishing about Humboldt's assertion, "for us, the Greeks step out of the circle of history" Because in this way "they" grant "us" their place in history. "We are all Greeks" Shelley would declare in his famous Preface to Hellas (1822), encapsulating perhaps the displacement of Hellenes from a historical entity to an ontological condition. It is precisely this displacement, so prevalent and ingrained on a nationalcultural level, that is enacted in Freud's case. As a nineteenth-century Germanic subject, a long-term object of Bildung, Freud learns to fantasize from early on about the Hellenic world, indeed to desire to know it, to see it. And as object of desire instituted on a cultural scale, the Hellenic becomes a primary signifier organizing the ensemble of those other significations that constitute one's social place (notions of nationality, history, culture, knowledge, etc.). However, as object of desire, the Hellenic cannot exist, or rather it can only "exist" as a phantasmic projection retroactively posed once the desire has been articulated. Its actual sighting would then immediately produce a condition of disbelief. For how does one see a phantasm? How does one confront one's social imaginary? It is no doubt a monstrous experience, and in this 5. Throughout this section, I am drawing on Slavoj Zizek's reformulation of the Lacanian notion of the symptom (and sinthome), as it pertains to the ideological function (1989: 11-84).

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sense Freud's metaphoric invocation of the Acropolis as the Loch Ness Monster is right on mark. There is certainly a great ambivalence in the discovery of a monster: on the one hand, the astonishment that it is real and not mythical (or ideal), and on the other, its repudiation for precisely this same reason, for realizing the ideal, for exposing the ideal as an illusion. In this illusion resides precisely the energy of the ideological fantasy; it is what constitutes ideological fantasy as a reality. Slavoj Zizek, in his exceptional reading of Marx's thesis on commodity fetishism, points out that the ideological element of social relations (the operational mechanism of fantasy) is to be found not in the activity of social consciousness but in the social order of things themselves: "The illusion is not on the side of knowledge; it is clearly on the side of reality itself, of what people are doing" (1989: 32). In this sense, Freud's final response after the initial disbelief and the subsequent analysis (i.e., the elevation of the event into the realm of knowledge) is, in a cultural sense, to continue to harbor the illusion. Though now a veritable monster, the Acropolis, however silently, remains a fetishized commodity whose immediate sight deserves, as Freud concludes, "rather some expression of delight or admiration." Freud's account is a wonderfully revealing confirmation of Philhellenism as a social-imaginary institution, replete with all the realities that constitute the operation of ideological fantasy, the seductions and punishments of the sublimated object. Freuds derealization becomes in this sense a perfect realization, a mise-en-scene, of the Philhellenic desire, exposing its profound, its monstrous spell, which captures Philhellenes and (neo)Hellenes alike. For, operatively at least, Philhellenism is like a practice of sorcery, a sort of secular magic. Which is to say, it is a trick of history and indeed perhaps one of the most audacious tricks of nineteenth-century European history, drawing extensively (but also furtively) upon the most characteristic ideological industries of the period (Orientalism and philology) to constitute its discursive order.

Travelers and Philologists With the gleeful arrogance that characterizes him, Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand relates the following remarkable conversation, which he had with his dinner host, an eminent Turkish Bey of Mistra, at one point during his travels through Greece (1806): "He wanted to know why I was traveling, since I was neither a merchant nor a doctor. I replied that I was traveling in order to look at people, and certainly at the Greeks who were dead." And he adds: "This Turk couldn't understand that I would quit my country out of a simple motive, curiosity" (1969: 808).

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I have already spoken of how colonial mastery is implicated within a scopic economy, wherein the colonialist relationship itself is bound to a prescribed hierarchy in the exchange of glances. In this sense, the Bey's incredulity about his guest's status may not be so unjustified, since Chateaubriand's curiosity might turn out to be not quite so simple a motive after all. Certainly, Chateaubriand's presence in the Ottoman territories is not related to a socially useful function: "I went in search of images, that's all" (701). It should be evident why this is so incomprehensible to the Bey, who is still much too secure within his own social structure to feel himself an object of the European gaze. But in any case, the allegedly simple motive for this gaze is complicated by the fact that Chateaubriand's travels to the Orient are a profound exercise of egocentrism. This is made explicit in Chateaubriand's Preface to his famous Itinemire de Paris a Jerusalem et de Jerusalem a Paris: "Je parle eternellement de rnoi" (702). So his purpose in writing about his travels consists, as Tzvetan Todorov has put it, merely in "describing a year of his own life, not the life of Greeks, Egyptians, or Palestinians" (1989: 336). This egocentric focus in Chateaubriand belies the shift in the form of the travel narrative from the rational-didactic framework of eighteenth-century imagination to its romantic idealized gaze (Eisner 1991: 67—69). So far as Greece is concerned, as the coveted object of a travel narrative, this shift becomes more comprehensible if we consider that the absolute best-seller in France during this period was Abbe Barthelemy's seven-volume Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grece, published in 1788 and republished in five editions during the revolutionary period (1792—96) and a dozen more between 1796 and 1821, the year of the Greek uprising (Dimaras 1989: 40). Translations into several languages were also rapidly issued, including a complete translation into modern Greek by 1819 (Egger 1869: 2: 310). The significant fact about Barthelemy's work was that it chronicled a perfectly imaginary voyage, the tales of a fictional character (a young Scythian in Alexander's time) through a country that existed only in the pages of that illustrious antique tourist-guide, Pausanias. Suddenly, while still insisting on remaining didactic, the travel narrative becomes novelistic. The pedagogical impetus is thus multiplied tenfold, as the reader s eye, beguiled by the imaginary landscape that materializes on the page, is seduced into an identification with the latter-day ephebe who conducts the scenario. So it is understandable, besides the amusement the thought procures, why Saint-Beuve recognized in Chateaubriand's impressions the ocular talents of Barthelemy's young Scythian tourist (Egger 1869: 2: 304). Barthelemy puts the voyager in the place of the voyage: from now on, the reader shall travel in the footsteps of the narrator, whose voyage is none other than the peregrinations of his own self. Moreover, while exhortations about

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the landscape of ancient Greece were not uncommon, the distinction this voyage gains as mass-cultural commodity suggests something further. Anacharsis, the young Scythian philosophe, lends to his imaginary antiquity (as does his sibling, Usbek, from Montesquieu's Persian Letters) a modernity that is resolutely Levantine. The Hellenic ideal and the Oriental exotic, which is the new way to conceptualize the ancient and the modern, meet in the person of Young Anacharsis and form in the popular imagination an impetuous quotidian mode—in the French sense of the word: both a mode (a manner) of traveling through the ancients and a style (a fashion) of imagining one's modernity, an overall style that harnesses the diffused revolutionary delirium into an imaginary singularity. Young Anacharsis thus supplements perfectly the Napoleonic spirit of his time and does deserve to be called "the modern 'evangelist' of antiquity" (Droulia 1989: 52). Barthelemy may be said to have sought to fashion an imaginary reality out of the textual erudition of his time, including material for all manner of books about Greek antiquity, as well as availing himself of the modern technologies of the geographical maps of Barbie du Bocage, which escorted the text, In contrast, Chateaubriand may be said to have extended this textual geography into the field of personal experience itself. His is a description in which things, but not people, emerge as the primary objects of attention, of reference. Or to put it in a more obvious way, the people that Chateaubriand claims to want to see are actually of interest only as objects, as mere images captured by the pen exactly in the same way they were eventually to be captured by the tourist camera. Todorov indeed claims, "Chateaubriand has invented a new persona; in place of the ancient traveler in his book appears the modern tourist" (1989: 337). I am not quite prepared to accept such a clear-cut dichotomy, although the first appearance of the word "tourist" does seem to occur around this time (Eisner 1991: 89). There is something to be said, in any case, about Chateaubriand's delineation of himself as the central axis of the narrative gaze— that is, the position that sees the travel narrative through. The discourse of the Itineraire is a self-referential surveillance of all those other things whose own lives become as such irrelevant, whose otherness is thus completely disregarded, unseen. In fact, the life of others, persistently present, becomes a nuisance, which is why Chateaubriand's main attraction on this trip is the Greeks "who are dead." This is a perfect expression of tourist desire (while also shedding some light on Andre Breton's curious formulation, "Chateaubriand is Surrealist in exoticism"). Tourism hinges on the desire for lifeless traces, for inert things. It does not then matter that Chateaubriand's "dead Greeks" may actually signify those ancient peoples who have left us a

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few marble and terra-cotta traces. For in Chateaubriand's hands, whatever life the modern Greeks may have had becomes invisible; the traveler's pen (or camera) will rub them off. Yet travel writing does not monopolize the discourse of dead peoples. Some decades later, while established as one of the most learned men of his time, Ernest Renan would introduce his famous lecture "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?" ("What Is a Nation?," 1882) with an equally astonishing statement: "What we are to do is delicate; it is almost a vivisection. We are to treat the living as we ordinarily treat the dead. We will set upon this with a cold indifference [unfioideur], with the most absolute impartiality" (1922: 278). That the egocentric traveler and the dispassionate philologist engage in kindred obsessions should come as no surprise; together, after all, they constitute the discursive practices of the Orientalist industry. Inherent in both is a contempt for bodies as they exist and function in themselves. As Edward Said has noted, "according to Renan, a philologist ought to prefer bonheur to jouissance; the preference expresses a choice of elevated, if sterile, happiness over sexual pleasure" (1979: 147), Philology is a discursive sibling to anatomy, as many have argued, most notably Foucault. Kenan's "delicate" instructions above reveal the philological enterprise as an anatomical praxis that, since it has no use for the irregularity of the living, must in the process turn its object of knowledge into a corpse. If for Renan "philology is the exact science of mental objects," then one might as well add, via Chateaubriand and a host of travel writing describing the very same cultures dissected by philologists in their linguistic laboratories, that as anatomical praxis, philology must enact the autopsy of the culture in view—that is, it must first deprive the culture it surveys of life. This is why the initial or primary object of philology, its constitutive historical task, involves the investigation and categorization of those cultures whose heyday belongs to the very ancient past.6 Philology is a characteristically European episteme whose explicit object of knowledge, however, is not Europe itself but rather some foreign element upon which philology inscribes a signification integral to its very own constitution. Herein lies, in my opinion, the significance of Said's insight into philology as an immanently Orientalist practice. Orientalism thus takes on a much more profound mean6. "Philology takes the linguistic phenomenon and re disposes it from the past to the present, reorganizes it within its Veritable terrain,' that is, la conscience creatrice that functions in the present and also in the future. The philologist's job must be to connect that postlapsarian moment just after language s birth with the present, then to show how the dense web of relationships between language users is a secular reality from which the future will emerge" (Said 1983: 278— 79)-

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ing: the reification of that which cannot submit to the logic of identity, and which, precisely because of its resistance, must be forced to submit by being construed as hopelessly condemned to eternal exclusion. But there is a specific reason why I have insisted on outlining the compulsion of the philological practice, apart from its significant implication in instituting a cadaverous approach to culture or its undeniable Orientalist longing (though we shall inadvertently return to both). Approximately a halfcentury before Freud, Renan would face the ruins of the Acropolis and, similarly awed and disoriented, would exclaim: "It was at Athens, in 1865, that I first felt a strong backward impulse, the effect being that of a fresh and bracing breeze coming from afar" (1929: 50). This is no doubt the exuberant confession of a philological psyche yearning for the concreteness of the past, but what is crucial is that once again the shadow of the "postlapsarian moment" hovers amidst the ruins of Athens. Athens becomes again the site of memory, the site of the backward glance imposing its present-past as a governing matrix over one's psyche and one's culture. Renan s "Prayer on the Acropolis" documents an instigation of the originary memory that propels "Western" culture, which might just as well be the originary disturbance, for Freud and Renan both travel the orbit of a similar Bildung. But in this game of origins the orbit's launching is located in that remarkable moment in early-nineteenth-century Prussian imagination that is the Humboldtian university This is when Philologie, or Altertumswissenschaft (Science of Antiquity), emerges as the new discipline soon to take over as the model discipline for research in the human sciences. It is a crucial moment in the formation of what may be called "the discourse of the West," since its significance goes far beyond the present concerns regarding the operations of Philhellenism (or even, for example, Martin Bernal's concern with the demise of the Ancient Model of Classical Civilization), touching instead on the general structural makeup of Western societies.7 Much of the academic system as we know it today reflects the influence of the Humboldtian university, preserving the Humboldtian ideal ofBildung against the wear and tear of technological time. However, what is often ignored, especially under the rubric of technological advancement, is the simple fact that this systematization of knowledge, instituted by the Prussian reforms after the Napoleonic victory in Jena in 1806, was predicated on an institutional discipline itself made possible by the philological imagination. 7. "[Altertumswissenschaft] was the first to establish clear-cut meritocratic networks of student-teacher relationships, Seminars or departments capable of manoeuvering to secure as large a portion of state funding as possible, and journals written in a professional jargon designed to maintain barriers between the practitioners of the discipline and the lay public" (Bernal 1987: 281).

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What is more, the initial investment of this discipline lay in its mastery of the language of antiquity, of which Hellenic civilization was the most proximate and palpable trace. The promotion of Altertumswssenschaft in Germany (like its correlative, Classics, in England) at this historical juncture could not but carry an explicit political designation: an institutional safeguard against the corrosive advancements of the French revolutionary spirit. This is especially interesting in light of the Revolution's ambiguous relation to its own Hellenization, since the revolutionary fascination with the Roman Republic continued even into the Napoleonic period more or less unabated. In fact, Hellenism in France owes its fate to the formidable presence of Mme de Stael, whose avid cosmopolitanism the Napoleonic authorities interpreted as a treacherous Germanism, ultimately ordering the confiscation and obliteration of her massive De VAllemagne (On Germany, 1810) on the charges that the work was not French. As characteristic of the stupidity endemic to nationalism as these charges were, there is no doubt as to Mme de Stael s Germanophilia—after all, Wilhelm von Humboldt was nurtured in her salon. Yet what is all the more remarkable is the fact that this Germanophilia found expression in a genuine Philhellenism, one more testament (this time refracted through a French sensibility) to the incorporation of Hellenism into the foundation of German national culture. What does emerge as the core of Altertumswissenschaft in Germany is precisely the Humboldtian thesis that the ancient Greeks are the transcendental cultural body that can be reinscribed into German modernity and thus used to dissolve its social and political fragmentation. In terms of the development of Western philosophy in the early nineteenth century, a curious and paradoxical equation arises: in the search for the universal human, the Enlightenment ultimately discovers humanity's social particularity in the Hellenic universal. For Humboldt, the final manifestation of this equation (Hellene = anthropos) becomes, naturally, German = anthropos by virtue of privileged access to the Hellenic, a privilege he sees as fundamentally German.8 The key premise in Humboldt's ideal is that Hellenic civilization as8. Although nothing in European history can quite compare to the adhesion between what is German and what is Hellenic as it developed during this crucial period of German national development, the all-around effect of this idealization of the Hellenic is inestimable. Consider the words of Victor Berard, French traveler and philologist, nearly a century later, reflecting on the Greek population still under Ottoman rule: "In effect, Hellenism is neither a material construction nor a product of nature. Other nations have been created almost in spite of them, by chance, by virtue of climate, by force of an exterior order whether of humans or of things. Hellenism creates itself; it is the work of the spirit, the least material of human works. . . . A Greek bears no sign that makes his nationality apparent; his only criterion is the response 'I am Greek.' . . . The Bulgar or the Serb founds his nation upon theories of race or religion. The foundation of a Greek is his free-willed adherence [sa libre adhfaion]" (1893: 237-39).

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sumed a transcendental significance because it testified to a cultural and linguistic purity. This claim was historically absurd and even antithetical to the paradigm of comparative linguistics, which was the core of philological inquiry. The effacement of this absurdity perfectly evinces the ideological force of this position. In practical terms, however, the historical absurdity of declaring Hellenic civilization the expression of a culture uncontaminated by foreign elements can be explained by a simple fact that usually tends to be disregarded—namely, that Hellenic civilization as we know it was in effect the invention of the "Science of Antiquity," of Classics. As such, it could have been (and was) endowed with whatever signification the discipline found useful. The invention of Hellenic civilization shows the profound power of philology as a method to cultural knowledge—indeed, as knowledge. "In order to compare, we must know" says Renan in another one of his famous lectures, whose subject is precisely the usefulness of philology to the historical sciences (1904: 221). He goes on to argue, of course, that the science of Comparative Linguistics (philology's institutional denomination) owes its existence to the discovery of Sanskrit during the late eighteenth century (223). But it is evident—and this is the most useful point of Bernal's Black Athena, a point already elucidated by Foucault's and Said's work—that the discovery of Sanskrit could not have taken place without certain shifts in the perceptual relation of certain European peoples to their own cultures, and by extension, to the cultures of others. Consequently, Renan s actual statement might be read as follows: "in order to compare languages [cultures, histories], we must know Sanskrit," a statement whose simultaneous and implicit other signification could only be: "in order to know Sanskrit, we must know how [what it means] to compare languages" For Sanskrit has no meaning and no use as a language in late-eighteenth-century Europe, other than to serve as the linguistic matrix by which all other cultures are measured. As such, the culmination of the archaeological obsession that characterizes the crossroads of lateeighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Europe is inherent in its very moment of origin: its pursued object of knowledge is not merely found but founded.9 When the discovery of an object of knowledge is also its foundation, its 9. Edward Said has made it clear that both Semitic as a language family and the Semites as a culture were creations of Orientalist philology, and that creation was a word Renan himself used (in a highly polyvalent way, as Said shows) to refer precisely to the Semitic presence within Orientalist structures (1979: 140-41). In light of this, one of the most puzzling aspects of the reception of Orientalism is the profound inability of its Zionist critics to understand that antiSemitism was one of the central mobilizing forces of the Orientalist industry.

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eventual abandonment as an object worthy of knowledge becomes a mere next step in the process. This is a key notion in understanding the overall development of Philhellenism. But it also marks the territory that travelers and philologists ultimately co-inhabit. Perhaps no better illustration of this territory can be found than the story of Gustave Flaubert's two remarkable creatures, Bouvard and Pecuchet. Said has already pointed out that these characters "move through fields of learning like travellers in time and knowledge" (1979: 113); one might add, following Flaubert himself: like traveling merchants who speculate in received ideas. They do so, of course, only to fail grievously. For if the Dictionnaire des idees revues (Dictionary of Received Ideas) in Flaubert's vision is the Bible of nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, it is so because it already includes any attempt to dismiss or amend its content. If, moreover, the madness for knowledge is a classic commonplace in "Western" culture, as Horkheimer and Adorno seem to suggest, then its futility is characteristically bourgeois. In Bouvard et Pecuchet, we reach the point where instrumental reason has botched its own instrumentality; whether speculative or empirical, all activity of thought is reduced to a fanatical skepticism. Paradoxically, however, the skepticism motivating Bouvard and Pecuchet and guaranteeing their failure is itself une idee re$ue. Bourgeois thought cultivates this kind of fanatical skepticism in order to avoid examining things fully, ensuring thus the essential distance from the object and from the inquiring activity itself that is a crucial aspect in the philological and Orientalist enterprise. This condition constitutes the essential power of philology, which must be both fanatical (i.e., driven toward total control) and disinterested (i.e., immune to the infectious qualities of its object). Bouvard and Pecuchet, in this sense, always remain involved in a narcissistic enterprise. They consistently pursue the same activity; only the objects change. All the scholarly disciplines they practice (agriculture, chemistry, literature, metaphysics, geology, anthropology, archaeology, etc.) constitute in effect the various partial faces of an unyielding, totalizing logic. This logic exercises its power (of failure) over all its objects, even when the object entails the dissolution of the subjects themselves; Bouvard and Pecuchet cannot even succeed in their empirical exploration of suicide. Likewise, the same futile recycling of a self-centered gaze, which characterizes the fanatical skepticism of Flaubert's characters, shadows all those European travelers crossing the regions of the Other during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Theophile Gautier, who was a well-seasoned traveler, would have had a perfect answer for Chateaubriand's Turkish host: "A

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traveler is like a doctor, he can say anything ," he notes in his Constantinople (1865). The implication is clearly that the traveler is involved above all in the diagnosis of culture, an arbitrary activity whose aim is merely its own repetitive practice. Therein lies the traveler's fanaticism, his obsession with describing the other culture, which effort, by virtue of the necessary skeptical distance he keeps from the culture, results merely in the obsessive description of himself. Though Bouvard and Pecuchet are the quintessential discourse travelers, no actual travelers are, practically speaking, any different. When Napoleon, moved by the treasured experience of the Egyptian expedition, commissioned what became the Tableau historique de V eruditionfrangaise (1802), he was expressing institutionally the form and the project of the travel narrative. Here, the Persian Letters find their formal bureaucratic arrangement. In the Tableau, "consciousness is dramatic: learning can be arranged on a stage set, as it were, where its totality can be readily surveyed" (Said 1979: 126). The survey of a culture can therefore take place instantly, or technologically as a montage—that is, become part of the gaze that is implicated within the order of commodities: "the dramatic form of a tableau historiquehas its use-equivalent in the arcades and the counters of a modern department store" (Said 1979: 127). If we were to mine this Benjaminian moment in Said, we could see that the tableau historique was the philological rendition of the panoramic device. Benjamin himself perceived that "the preparation of panoramas coincides with the appearance of arcades" (1978: 149). The impulse in the construction of panoramas is to reproduce technologically the experience of the surveying gaze as it is cast over the scene of nature or of culture, which, in the process, becomes landscape: "in the panoramas the city dilates to become landscape, as it does in a subtler way for thejMnewr" (Benjamin 1978: 150). Often enough, the panoramic landscape depicted a foreign city, and it is no surprise that in Paris, during the early years of the Greek War of Independence (1821-22), "The Panorama of Athens" commanded great popularity.10 In the panoramic consciousness, the image of Athens was speculated upon as a commodity even as it elicited, within the boundaries of theater, a projected experience of travel. The theatrical form of this experience articulates very well the fantasy of 10. Loukia Droulia, addressing precisely the context of this performance, recognizes that in the use of antiquity as a commercial image, the formal academic discipline of Hellenism is implicated in "a palindromic relation" with Philhellenism (1978: 34-35). In other words, Le Panorama d'Ath£nes is an instance when philology becomes obviously partisan, when it is explicitly politicized.

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travel. Similarly, the commodification of cultural observation becomes the central characteristic of the travel narrative, the conceptual matrix of the travelling experience itself. All travelers are flaneurs—"looking at all objects with a wild and vacant stare " as Benjamin has put it (1973: 54), abandoned to the intoxication of an Other cultural landscape, and writing of their adventures through personas possessed by an autoscopic presence. Indeed, the Orientalist experience, of which Philhellenism is but a specific expression, is a most extravagant kind of fldnerie. It is not difficult to see why Chateaubriand preferred his Greeks dead. He could wander through their traces as through the aisles of a department store.11 This is, in short, the trajectory delineated by the discourse of the tableau historique. In this trajectory, the flaneur emerges as the metaphoric co-incidence of the dispassionate philologist and the egocentric traveler. Fldnerie, as cultural logic, is fundamental to Philhellenism, and its most distilled expression would have to be the inimitable presence of Lord Byron. This may sound commonplace, but if we ask why indeed Byron is celebrated as the most illustrious Philhellene, we would confront just that composite image of melancholy and irony attributed by Benjamin to the Parisian^rcewr. Byron is the true precursor of the Baudelairean dandy. He strolls through the landscape of Ottomans, Albanians, and Greeks with the same intoxication that Benjamin s type elicits out of the dazzling display in the arcade. But Byron—whose own precursor would have to be that imaginary Levantine, Young Anacharsis himself—is more "advanced" than Chateaubriand, because he gradually undoes the boundaries that would still assure him of the self-centeredness, the ownership, of his gaze. Inevitably, he eventually becomes himself the Phil11. Incidentally, it is worth remarking that travel to Greece during the early nineteenth century was prevalent among the French and the English but not the Germans, who were then at the height of their Philhellenic obsession. Although there are concrete political and economic reasons why considerably fewer Germans undertook this endeavor (reasons similar to those that might account for the superiority of the English and French colonial apparatuses), the discursive differences cannot be ignored. Namely, the Germans were the superior philologists, the theoreticians of the traveling gaze, if you will. German Philhellenism was a Philhellenism of the laboratory, an imaginary and textual geography. Interestingly, Renan, though not German (but nonetheless attuned to similar impulses), was of all travelers the closest to this sensibility. As Yiannis Psicharis—the leader of the Greek demoticist movement, a linguist, and son-in-law to Renan—says of Renan s Philhellenist impulse: "It is always the archaeologist, always the historian who enters the scene. Never the Hellenist. He is passionately interested in Homer, not because of the parting scene between Hector and Andromache but because of Friedrich-August Wolf's theories on the genesis of epic poetry" (Psichari 1925: 296). Though Psicharis is speaking here rather venomously, driven by an explicitly nationalist spirit, his point is well taken. (For the question of German Hellenists and travel, see Constantine 1984. For a comparative assessment of philology among the hegemonic European powers, see Said 1983.)

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Hellenic commodity; as Benjamin would say: the flaneur, in his abandonment, "shares the situation of the commodity" (1973: 54). In a psychoanalytic sense, we could say that Byron becomes himself the object of the gaze—as if the gaze flies through the air like a boomerang—which is tantamount to saying that he falls right into the abyss of his own field of vision. In these terms, it is perfectiy understandable why Byron is bound to become, literally, one more of those "dead Greeks." Byron succumbed to this fate gradually, completing the process in appropriate style by the dramatic narrative of his death. Byron s initial transgression of the boundaries of the travelers gaze, namely the description of Greece in his notes to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812), provides a most elaborate illustration of colonialist ambivalence. A brief selection from numerous quotable instances will bear the point: The Greeks will never be independent; they will never be sovereigns as heretofore, and God forbid they ever should! but they may be subjects without being slaves. Our colonies are not independent, but they are free and industrious, and such may be Greece hereafter. (1986: 95) Where is the human being that ever conferred a benefit on a Greek or Greeks? They are to be grateful to the Turks for their fetters, and the Franks for their broken promises and lying counsels: they are to be grateful to the artist who engraves their ruins, and to the antiquary who carries them away; to the traveller whose janissary flogs them, and to the scribbler whose journal abuses them! This is the amount of their obligations to foreigners. . . . But instead of considering what they have been, and speculating on what they may be, let us look at them as they are. (95-96) Ancient history and modern politics instruct us that something more than physical perfection is necessary to preserve a state in vigour and independence; and the Greeks, in particular, are a melancholy example of the near connection between moral degradation and national decay. (100)

Similar pronouncements may be found elsewhere, in many of the travel narratives that grace the the colonialist world, but rarely do we find such a cohesive and condensed account of the traveler's implicitly ambivalent relationship to the surveyed culture. Such thorough and precisely articulated ambivalence could only lead to the dissolution of boundaries between the gaze and the speculated culture/commodity Byron's death at Messolonghi in 1824 is a spectacular instance of this dissolution. That it also becomes a spectacular instance of the Philhellenic commodity itself is a matter of course. But what does make Byron such an exceptional expression of the Philhellenic imaginary? This seems to me to bear a direct connection with Byron's investment in the logic offldnerie. Byron is an exotic figure, marking

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perhaps the most excessive territory of English romanticism, linking the mystery of Scotland with the mystery of the Orient. His writings engage in the same exotic seduction, constituting in all a formidable image. In this dramatically exotic terrain, Byron privileges the image of Greece, an image that, although phantasmic, is resolutely modem.12vThis unbounded commitment to a Neohellenic modernity, to a conception of Greek culture as a Modern Greek culture, makes Byron's case exceptional in the discourse of Philhellenism. Philological Philhellenism—initiated by the Altertumswissenschaft of Humboldt and Winckelmann and later exercised by a host of scholars and travelers, including Renan with his archaeological impulse—never quite succeeded in endowing Neohellenic reality either with modernity or with exoticism, Byron may have been enraged by Lord Elgin's pillaging of the Parthenon, but ultimately he had little use for the ancients. His is a Philhellenism of modernity, a Philhellenism of the Orient one might say, and thus a perfect illustration as well of the astonishing relation between exoticism, Orientalism, zndfldnerie. I have insisted all along on highlighting this co-incidence between Philhellenism and Orientalism because, beyond their proximate signification within the same imaginary geography, I find their intersection historically and theoretically revealing. Certainly, the implicit political meaning of the conspicuous absence of any such connection between Philhellenism and Orientalism in Neohellenic scholarship seems obvious. After all, the love of Greece is the love of the West—as such, entirely incompatible with the Orient. But this is another trick of nineteenth-century European history, and a sly one at that. For, precisely in dissociating itself from the Orient, Philhellenism reveals its ultimate discomfort with modern Greece, at least with modern Greece as a cultural reality In this way, we can speak of two moments in Philhellenism, two moments whose inherent antithesis will eventually display overtly the "anti-Hellenic" essence of its discourse: First, we can speak of a Philhellenism of ancient traces, which seeks and enjoys its intoxication amidst ruins and legends—this constitutes Philhellenism's explicit utterance. Second, we can speak of a Philhellenism of a contemporary resurrection of ancient traces, if you will. Byron exemplifies this second site, which is inextricably interwoven with the Oriental. In both cases, however, we have to do with "dead Greeks." This is 12. Tzvetan Todorov conceives the paradoxical situation of the exotic projection, which may indeed propel its phantasmic force, in the following way: "Knowledge is incompatible with exoticism, but misapprehension is in its own way irreconcilable with the favorable praise of others; well, this is precisely what exoticism strives to be: a praise within a misapprehension. This is its constitutive paradox" (1989: 298).

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because Philhellenism—being, I would argue, an Orientalism in the most profound sense—engages in the like activity of representing the other culture, which in effect means replacing the other culture with those self-generated, projected images of otherness that Western culture needs to see itself in: the mirrors of itself,13 This is to return to the identification of Philhellenism in Humboldt as a particular kind of colonial mimicry inherent in the colonization of the ideal, an intercourse that can only be autoscopic. Were we, like good philologists, to unearth from the word autoscopic its etymological presence, we would have to add to its meaning of "looking at one's self" its other meaning: aiming at one's self, making the self one's own teleology. From this identitary archaeological terrain, it is but a step to the death of the Other, to the philological autopsy, to Chateaubriand's idealist necrophilia. Hence, from the point of view now of Neohellenic reality, the inevitability of what I have named "the punishment of Philhellenism." Fallmemyer, or the Misfortunes of Ancestry Greeks have condemned all the world but themselves of barbarism, the world as such vilifies them now. —Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)

Theodor Adorno begins his famous radio address "On the Question: What Is German?" by alerting us to the fact that "the question itself is burdened by those smug definitions which assume as the specifically German not what actually is German but rather what one wishes it were" (1985: 121). That is, he recognizes right off that the experience of nationality is gauged upon the fulfillment of a wish, and that the relation to one's nation takes place, as it were, in a dream state. Although he does go on to assure us, "it is uncertain whether there even is such a thing as the German person or a specifically German quality or anything analogous in other nations" (121), Adorno nonetheless guides his thoughts toward the center of this oneiric relation in order to elucidate, in his usual negational manner, the point at 13. Here I am drawing on Michael Harbsmeier's insight into Marx's famous reference to nineteenth-century French peasantry in The i8th Brumatre, "They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented/' which Said, for one, has made a motto for Orientalist practices. Harbsmeier returns to Marx's vertreten ("to represent") its other signification: "to replace, to act as substitute." Thus, he concludes that Europe's vision of all its Others entails "a mode of writing which not only denies the other the right as well as the ability to speak (and write) for themselves, but also intends both to represent and to replace precisely those qualities of the other which are the very reason for their being denied the right and the ability to present themselves" (1985:72).

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which an historical experience (nationality) is construed as ontological. The center of this dream, is language—or, to do more justice to Adorno's precision, the space "where whatever was most specifically mine was mediated to the core" (126). This type of phrasing, the subjective configuration of nationality as radical mediation and wish fulfillment, is an appropriate ground for an interrogation of the overall impact of Philhellenism upon the development of Neohellenic national culture. There is no doubt that the indigenous reception of the Philhellenist sentiment, which is concretely invoked in the direct intervention of European powers in the War of Independence and the subsequent political formation of a new Greek State, played an active hand in Neohellenism's own discursive foundations. As an internalized system of representation, Philhellenism provided the coordinates that mediated the experience of "Greekness": the projected (wishful) self-image and the possession (property) of a unique idiom. But what granted this blissful national dream-state a definitive reality—which is to say, what both shattered its idealist self-containment and yet extended its ideological control—was actually the event of a text's interrogating of the ancestral purity of Neohellenes, a text written by an otherwise obscure nineteenth-century Tyrolean historian, who was himself no less the ideological product of Philhellenism. This historian was Jacob Philipp Fallmerayer (1790-1861), and the text was a lecture on the origin of modern Greeks, presented before the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 1835. Considering the unequaled impact of this work upon the development of Neohellenic national culture, the fact that it was not translated into Greek for 150 years testifies in itself to the practically hysterical resistance that greeted it. Indeed, within the traditional domain of modern Greek letters, the name Fallmerayer has achieved a virtually Satanic signification. This is not merely a metaphoric point. Given that the imaginary institution of a national culture presupposes a signifying process that is operatively akin to religion, the presence of Fallmerayer *s text does emerge, within the terms of modern Greek national culture, as the quintessential infidel logos. Fallmerayer contended quite simply that all ancient Greek traces, both racial and cultural, had become extinct by virtue of the Slavic invasions of mainland Greece, and especially the Attic peninsula, during the fifth century A,D. It is evident why Fallmerayer came to be perceived as the embodiment of anti-Hellenism. But this simple formulation of Fallmerayer s contention, while literally accurate, fails to consider the specific historical context that propelled his thesis, a context that makes matters much more complex. Fallmerayer is certainly not a major figure in the German canon, but this is less a result of authorial incapacity than of political configuration. As Yior-

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gos Veloudis convincingly argues, Fallmerayer was "one of the most prominent bearers of his epoch's antinomies" (1982: 27). Indeed, though he was the product of a classical education, he devoted himself to medieval, Byzantine, and Oriental studies; "in Classicist Bavaria he became a Romantic" (Veloudis 1982: 28). He was also ambivalent, to say the least, toward monarchical rule, a sentiment that cost him his university chair after the monarchical backlash to the events of 1848. Already by 1830, two years before Philhellenism was overtly institutionalized with the turning over of the Greek State to the Bavarian monarchy, Fallmerayer had launched his first attack on Philhellenism's neoclassicist presumptions. He pointed out that for all their rapture over things Hellenic, the Philhellenist Europeans exhibited utter disregard for the contemporary inhabitants of the country. This critique marks both the first instance of Fallmerayer s unceasing battle with his Philhellenist enemies and the theoretical point of departure for his eventual belief in the nonHellenic character of modern Greeks. Fallmerayer's thesis is most often received as an example of the general racist conceptions that dominated the discourse of nineteenth-century colonialist Europe, more or less akin to the racist philosophical musings of Arthur Gobineau. Though there is an undeniable discursive affinity between Fallmerayer and the racist-colonialist spirit of his time, it is important to understand that Fallmerayer s specific pronouncements about Greece are essentially tied to a wider political framework, the international balance of power in midnineteenth-century Europe. As Veloudis points out (1982: 39—42), Fallmerayer was the first historian among his contemporaries to forward an uncompromising Realpolitik on the so-called "Eastern Question," namely, the concern of Western European powers over the apparent dissolution of the Ottoman State and the expansionist visions of czarist Russia. In this context, Fallmerayer s contention that Greece was in effect a de-Hellenized culture was meant to thwart the ideology of those European politicians who, as a result of their Philhellenism, actively promoted the dismantling of Ottoman control over the Balkans. He argued vehemently that only a strong Ottoman State could prevent Russian expansion into Western Europe. In this respect, although refining certain tendencies in Western European political thought that harken back to Rousseau, Fallmerayer certainly stood in the vanguard. But he was not the only one who promoted these ideas, which indeed soon became the prevalent policy of Western Europe more or less until the First World War. In a series of newspaper articles for the New York Daily Tribune (March 1854), Karl Marx meticulously retraced this same problematic with respect to the posturing of English foreign policy,

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using Fallmerayer as a trustworthy reference.14 Marx's contiguity to Fallmerayer in this case is not surprising. As a wider reading of Marx's work on the European political situation would testify, Marx was, like many of his contemporaries, Slavophobic, Certainly Fallmerayer shared this prejudice, even though ironically he was perceived by the entire Neohellenic intelligentsia as a Slavophilic enemy. This misapprehension is crucial in understanding the profound effect of Philhellenism as an internalized condition of the modern Greek national-cultural psyche. Fallmerayer's appearance on the modern Greek scene is one more forceful reminder that modern Greek culture had been, since its inception, a culture under surveillance. As a result, the construction of a nationalist ideology, which as a rule escorts the institution of a new State, was characterized from the start not only with the usual production of self-images for internal consumption, but also with the grave task of producing the right set of images for export. In this sense, Philhellenism proved to be as voracious a discourse as it was unforgiving. Although Fallmerayer was perceived as a definite sign of Philhellenism's decline, he elicited the same desire on the part of the Greeks to appease the unceasing European watch. This is because the internalized presence of Philhellenism, even after evidence of its being merely a political expediency came to light, instituted the complete coincidence between the process of Neohellenic self-knowledge and the task of persuading the European overseer. In this coincidence, the text of Philhellenism reveals a double strand: it presupposes in modern Greece both a guardian of the origins of European civilization and a modern State whose development is entirely subjugated to contemporary European interests. In other words, Philhellenism treats the origin of modern Greeks both as symbolic capital and as a contemporary political investment.15 Consequently, the crux of Fallmerayer's challenge concerns not just the matter of origin but, more importantly, the matter of cultural continuity. Indeed, as signifiers within the discursive matrix of Neohellenism, these two 14. I am referring particularly to two articles by Marx, "The Greek Insurrection" and "On the History of the Eastern Question.5' These articles deserve attention also because they expose as an insidious policy-making hand the English government's concern with the allegedly oppressed status of Greek Orthodox Christians in Ottoman territories, and what is more, they demonstrate that English foreign policy was based on the preposterous demand for the legal rearrangement of the Islamic social-imaginary. (See specifically Marx and Engels 1980: 70—72, 102-4.) 15. The capitalist interests of European colonialism in the Orient (the Suez Canal project, the new railways and factories in Turkey, etc.) suggested ultimately a far preferable investment. Thus, Philhellenism soon disengaged itself from the option of Neohellenic modernization and merely kept its symbolic allegiance to Hellenic antiquity. (See Skopetea 1988: 163-74.)

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notions—continuity and origin—come to hold substantially the same meaning. For origin is said to be untraceable without continuity, and continuity is said to be invisible without origin; and within this untenable format, these two notions move beyond their mutual interdependence, collapsing into an absolutely interchangeable state, a state of identity, of sameness. A certain irony may be found in Fallmerayer's position. Fallmerayer ultimately contends that the contemporary population of southern Greece (especially in the Attic peninsula) consisted primarily ofArvanites, owing to the influx of Albanian clans during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, who went on to displace the medieval "Slavohellenes." Reproducing a rather commonplace philological belief, Fallmerayer conceives these Arvanites as offspring of the ancient Illyrians—thus, in effect, the Pelasgians, who were allegedly the initial ancient inhabitants of the pre-Dorian Helladic space (1984: 71—76). Ironically, he therefore comes to attribute to contemporary Greeks—under the signifying framework "Arvanites"—an Ur-Hellenic character, a character of the ancient origin itself. This particular dissimulation of Fallmerayer s discourse is altogether ignored by Greek responses to his infamous treatise. Everyone seizes upon the calamity of the Slavic invasions in fifth century A.D. that allegedly wiped out the ancient Hellenic traces. This is a significant misapprehension. It reveals in no uncertain terms that the battle over the identity of the Greek nation, the identity of the Neohellenes, was not fought on modern ground but on the ancient one. It was fighting over the identity of ancient Greeks that would determine the identity of the moderns. Such was the paradigmatic power of Philhellenism, which made sure that everyone cast the dice over none but the ancient garments, since only the ancient garments could fashion the authenticity of everyone's civilized modernity. Fallmerayer s contention thus galvanized what had already been broached ideologically by both the imaginary content and the philological form of Philhellenism: the discursive formation of academic disciplines immanent to the nineteenth-century conception of the nation—in this case, history, archaeology, and folklore. Of these disciplines, history addressed the issue of cultural continuity most overtly. The textual production of a national history, initiating what would prove to be a seminal shift in the self-representation of the Neohellenic imaginary, took as its main thrust the reinscription of Byzantine culture into the ancestral narrative of modern Greece.16 This shift involves 16. The main proponent of this tendency was the historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos (1815—91), whose six-volume History of the Hellenic Nation remains to this day, discursively, the definitive national history. Paparrigopoulos's career began with a treatise directly addressing Fallmerayers argument. The antithetical ideological lines are thus clearly drawn, but what has

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what Elli Skopetea has named "the elusion of the present," that is, the constitution of Greece's modernity as a transitional phase to an indeterminate but definite future, so that national history takes on "in conjunction with a didactic character, an explicitly quietist one" (Skopetea 1988: 190). At the same time, the revival of Byzantium signifies an indisputable linear link between Greek modernity and antiquity—in other words, the revival of a hitherto lost medieval Hellenism. The effect of this project cannot be underestimated. The neo-Byzantinism that characterized the response of Greek historians to Fallmerayer signaled a total subjugation to the European sense of history. The advent of Byzantium, both as the missing middle (the direct link with antiquity) and as the bearer of a transitional present, not only assured Greece the coveted mark of a continuous culture but also, much more importantly, legitimized Greece as a modem culture—which is to say, metonymically, as a European culture. Moreover, the tropological significance of discovering the missing link in the chain was that it reinforced a series of irredentist obsessions in the contemporary political, idiom regarding the territories still under Ottoman control—namely, the desire for unification, annexation, incorporation, return, and so on,'all unified under the code name "the Grand Idea." In the briefest terms, the Grand Idea revolved around the vision of a sovereign Greece that would extend its boundaries and exercise its State rule over all those territories where Hellenic culture still flourished. In the 18508, these territories included the Asia Minor coast with Smyrne as its center; all the Aegean islands not yet part of the new Greek nation; Crete, Thessaly, and Epirus (including parts of Albania); Macedonia and Thrace (extending well into what is now Serbian and Bulgarian territories); and, of course, the land strip that constitutes now the "continental" part of Turkey, namely Eastern Thrace with its crowning jewel, Constantinople itself, the quintessential signifier of Byzantine Hellenism. Dimaras locates the origin of this notion in a speech given in the Greek Parliament in 1844 by loannis Kolettis, one of the major figures in Greek politics after Independence (Dimaras I985a: 405-18). But the essence of this notion reverberates in the entire terrain of Greek letters at the time, culminating in Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos's History of the Hellenic Nation. not been given adequate attention is that both writers converge on the notion that Neohellenic civilization "began" with the Byzantine colonization of Athens in the tenth century, which Fallmerayer sees naturally as a re-Hellenization of an already Slavified population and Paparrigopoulos as the intractable dominance of Hellenic culture. The latter position testifies to the grand claims that the discipline of history in the nineteenth century came to hold: that a historical demonstration of cultural integrity guarantees the physiologically undemonstrable case of racial integrity. See Chapter 7 below.

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Obviously, however, the Grand Idea is not an inherently Greek invention, being rather the necessary inflection of every nationalist idiom. The Panslavism of the Russians or the notion of "the Empire" for the English are similar grand ideas—expressions of an expansionist politics. The "Grand Idea" is a commonplace topos in the geography of nineteenth-century European politics, part and parcel of colonialist logic. In this respect, Kaklamanis speaks very credibly when he observes the inappropriate nature of the Grand Idea in the polycentric political arid cultural configuration of the Eastern Mediterranean world. The fact that the Greek nation began to revisualize itself according to this imaginary shows how deeply Greece had already been severed from the social and cultural space that had engendered it. Kaklamanis recognizes that this Grand Idea provided the mobilizing energy for the Eastern Question, concocted in the corridors of the Parliament in London rather than the one in Athens. The background of this affair is the political ferment that led to the Crimean War, which brought the Great Powers into alignment with the warnings of Fallmerayer, as it were—the Slavic menace—and left Greece with the decrepit phantasm of an opportunist expansionist vision, Philhellenisms empty shell.17 The ideological impact of this phantasm was tremendous, stamping the eventual fate of the Greek nation with the effective annihilation of Hellenic culture as the prevalent cultural idiom of the Balkan and Aegean region. The ultimate practical application of the Grand Idea—after its initial trial in the failed Cretan uprising (1866)—was the debacle of the Asia Minor expedition (1922), catastrophic not only in determining Greece's final restriction to its present national borders but in instituting simultaneously another nation, Turkey, whose birth would forever co-incide with the idea of defense against Greek cultural imperialism.. Insofar as it is a child of a nineteenth-century linear conception of history, the Asia Minor expedition is indeed Greece's first act as a full-fledged modern nation, a nation with a continuous history and hence, like all European nations, a right to claim the grounds of its historicalcultural integrity. But Greece's ultimate failure—a failure facilitated by the 17. The literature on the "Grand Idea" in Greek letters is vast. A succinct overview of the politics involved can be found in Dimaras (198 5a: 408-27). This history is then elaborated, with an expert eye to its complexity, in Skopetea (1988: 257—360) and Liakos (1985) in specific reference to its organic relation to the Italian Risorgimento. Kaklamanis, however, makes a formidable argument for the Grand Idea as an expression of a specific social imaginary external to the Eastern Mediterranean way of conceiving things (1986: 81—94). He is right to point out that Rhigas Velestinlis, in his great plans for Balkan autonomy, underestimated the development of ethnic and then nationalist consciousness in the region, a development fomented by the imperialist designs of the Great Powers over the Ottoman territories. The Grand Idea figures thus as the eventual, albeit perverse, outcome of Rhigass ideals (Kaklamanis 1986: 93—94).

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major European powers—put the matter to rest once and for all. In the market of international politics, modern Greece had become by 1923 a euphemism and its modernity counterfeit money, the stamp of a sublime phantasm (Hellas) on valueless currency. This necessary projection of modernity, however, carried along with its external political failure a significant internal burden. This was the burden of the present itself, a present posited as a transition precisely because it remained, in relation to the glorious past that granted its signification, inadequate. A systematic effort was undertaken in the i86os, parallel to the writing of a national history, to displace any possibility of an immanent meaning in Greek modernity: "This displacement of the present was not characterized so much by a simple sentimental escape as by a many-sided intervention, whose symptom was also the largely programmatic distortion of the image of reality" (Skopetea 1988: 191). Neohellenism is thus an immanently antiquarian discourse, which is why during the nineteenth century its most elaborate proponents were, besides history, the most refined of philological disciplines: folklore and archaeology. The exigency of archaeology is, I think, rather evident in light of the impact of Philhellenism. Paradoxically, the ancient traces were for the Philhellenist Europeans the very testimony of modern Greece's decline: "The romantic love of ruins converts into visual images the sense of a Hellas irrevocably fallen beyond any hope of redemption" (Herzfeld 1987: 21). This was because to Europeans the ancient Greek ruins were only symbolic capital; they were legendary marks, without a present life whatsoever. For Greeks, on the other hand, the ancient ruins, being construed as ancestral monuments, delineated a symbolic present, inscribed intimately into the political project of the new State: "From the point of view of the State, the ancient monuments were the only ready-made national symbols it could use" (Skopetea 1988: 197). This twofold significance of ancient ruins passes into the twofold (and occasionally antithetical) archaeological exploitation of ancient sites: on the one side, the various European excavation projects under the corresponding archaeological schools, which carried for identification purposes their national names (British, German, and later American, Swedish, etc.), and on the other, the sanctioning of archaeology as an academic discipline under State funding, all the while merely seeking to capitalize upon the European excavation projects.18 18. However, "the foundation of the new State and mainly the transferring of the capital city to Athens was the source not only of spectacular archaeological discoveries but also of an unprecedented mass destruction of monuments—whether by private individuals or government agents—that had been left untouched for centuries" (Skopetea 1988: 199). This remarkable

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But the most prominent discipline to emerge as a result of Fallmerayer s challenge, and the one that explicitly sought as its task his theoretical annihilation, was folklore. As an academic practice, folklore is constitutively philological. It is, as Renan points out, the practical consequence of the intimate link between comparative linguistics and comparative mythology, its inquiry specifically directed at the self-perpetuation of a people's "primitive laws" (1904: 249—50); Folklores object of study is the implicit and anonymous coherence of customary culture, conceived as a kind of naturally preserved, but contemporary, expression of myth. The specifically mythifying character of so-called "oral tradition," embodied best in the customary practices of peasant populations, becomes in this sense the privileged cultural object. Folklore often builds its discourse on the extraction of certain practices from their integral place in the everyday life of certain communities and their subsequent nomination as cultural practices—indeed, as marks of cultural inheritance. Folkloric elements are then granted a textual status that sets them apart from the social-historical frame within which they are inadvertently practiced. Folk songs, in other words, may reflect the spirit of, say the Greek people in themselves, but they are actually studied for (and as) inscriptions of the development of this spirit through the ages. In this particular sense, the Greek word for "folklore" (laogmphia, i.e., "description of the people") is, I think, quite revealing. In the discourse of the nation, oral culture is interesting (or indeed, is) only as testament—Scripture—of the nations legacy.19 Thus, unlike archaeology, folklore garners its antiquarian character not merely from the discovery of the past as relic but from the evidence of the past as present. It has been amply pointed out how much the methodological articulation of Greek folklore owes to the Herderian conception of civilization, to the uniqueness and permanence of the Volkgeist.20 This clearly precourse of events, in which antiquities were perceived at large as no more than a nuisance, shows the artificiality of the relation between the new Greek State and Hellenic culture as it manifested itself in the realm of the everyday, an artificiality more radical than the one under Ottoman rule. In this particular sense, Greece had certainly achieved full-fledged modernity. 19, Laogmphia has this particularly ironic etymological legacy (which actually stresses its scriptural dimension) in its Hellenistic signification as the activity of census taking for taxation purposes (Alexiou 1984/85: 15). This was so in Ptolemaic Egypt, arguably the most philological society in antiquity. The word laos has a much more elaborate and perhaps more illustrious history, starting in Homeric times. In nineteenth-century Greece, however, it was reinscribed often in its biblical terms: "the chosen people1' (Dimaras I985a: 374). Although nationalism always partakes of the discourse of "the chosen people" this Hebraic signifier passed into Neohellenism at this juncture by the prominence of a Judeo-Christian conception of national history, inherent in the acute resurgence of Byzantinism and Greek Orthodoxy in the nationalcultural deliberation during the i86os. 20. See especially Herzfeld (1986) and Kyriakidou-Nestoros (1978). But, interestingly, what

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supposes a metaphoric privilege of the organic over the technological that is often used to illustrate folklore's allegiance to romanticism rather than to the Enlightenment (Kyriakidou-Nestoros 1978: 15-47). The dubious nature of this kind of dichotomous historiography in regard to the Neohellenic Enlightenment has already been pointed out. But what is especially dubious here is the claim to the hierarchy of the organic over the technological as the legitimation of folklore; it may turn out to be merely another occasion of the ghost in the machine. The organic paradigm orients one toward the identification of those elements in a diachronic narrative that, whether intact or mutated, guarantee by their very presence the transhistorical integrity of the narrative. This presence stands as the actual utterance of the past to which this narrative is constitutively linked, no matter how discursively incompatible this past may seem. To dramatize the point: were we to subscribe to an organic vision of culture, then psychoanalysis would be a neurotic expression of the incest taboo. In the terms of the national-cultural narrative, the organic paradigm posits continuity as the teleology of identity. Fallmerayer himself bases his argument on an organic paradigm, citing as evidence for the Slavic character of modern Greece the surviving number of Slavic place-names strewn throughout the country. But no organic conception of culture can exist as a disinterested claim. There always has to be a moment when the organic paradigm sets itself in antithesis to an undesirable, because artificial (technological), tampering with the organic order of things. This was exactly what Fallmerayer signified for those Greek historians and folklorists who took him to task. Indeed, the discourses of Fallmerayer and his opponents testify to a remarkably mirrored relation. For instance, Greek philologists were to prove that Fallmerayer's Slavic toponymies were often based on an outrageously imaginative etymology, but Fallmerayer himself correctly pointed out that the inhabitants of rural Greece learned many of the ancient Greek place-names from European travelers (1984: 82). It is certainly unlikely that before the infiltration of European Philhellenism the inhabitants of Kastri knew (or cared much, for that matter) that they were indeed the inhabitants of Delphi. Terence Spencer too relates a wonderful anecdote from an eighteenthcentury travel narrative, in which an illiterate Greek boatman exhibits voluntarily a full knowledge of the ancient traditions to titillate what we would have to identify as the European traveler's classicist sensibilities (1954: 217). This conscious performance, whose data the boatman no doubt gleaned from has not been pointed out is that the theories of Fallmerayer himself are based on this same Herderian construct.

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some previous encounter with an earlier traveler, shows that the gathering of evidence for an organically continuous Hellenic culture is a rather in-credible enterprise. Much like anthropological and ethnographic subjects interrogated since the invasion of these disciplines, the inhabitants of modern Greece were subjected to so much discursive bombardment about the nature of their being as to learn to respond in accordance with the expectations of their questioners. If conscious playacting for the amusement of travelers seems harmless enough, surely the reproduction of scholarly knowledge that the unwitting ethnographer accepts as testimony of unadulterated ancient traditions is a much more insidious problem. In a significant article about the problematic position of Greek folklore studies in our time, Margaret Alexiou provides ample evidence of this phenomenon—what she calls "radiophonic orality" (1984/85: 10). She shows that this is not merely a recent consequence of a mass-media technological interference with oral culture, for the very discourse of folklorists itself signifies, by definition, a technological intervention: the collection, classification, and analytic documentation of an otherwise anonymous and nonscriptural practice. Like all philological practices, the constitutive paradox of folklore is that its professed object of study is annihilated from the very start. In the very investigation of folk lore, a. folk is constructed that has nothing to do with the social-historical process of a community. Folklore, both as a nineteenthcentury academic practice and as contemporary tourist logic, is in this sense especially contiguous to a society's national imaginary, and is in any case inexorably implicated in nationalist politics (Alexiou 1984/85: 9).21 In the Greek case, the examples abound. But I need only cite one here, a particularly illustrative instance in terms of Fallmerayer's challenge: the programmatic reinscription of the figure of Alexander the Great into nationalcultural ideology from the 18505 onward. The symbolic investment here is multifold. On the one hand, Alexander signified the quintessential symbol of Macedonia, the most coveted territory still in Ottoman control. On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, he served as the cohesive sign for the Oriental underpinnings of Neohellenism, a pre-Byzantine (archaic) version of a post-Ottoman (Neohellenic) sensibility, which is meant to resist the 21. It is crucial to note, however, that the discipline of folklore in Greece (including the ranks of those Philhellenist Europeans given over to the hobby of this practice) was instituted on the basis of collection and classification of folk songs, not of folktales. Alexiou's current workin-progress, an in-depth study of the form and context of reproduction of the Greek folktale, has amassed inarguable evidence showing that folktales were shunned by the archival impulse of Greek folklore precisely because they are formally heterogeneous and ambivalent, thus unyielding to the demands of a national(ist) project hinging on images of ethnic homogeneity and cultural singularity.

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subjugating projections of European PhilheUenism (see Dimaras ipSsa: 36669). Moreover, Alexander stands as the sign that safeguards Hellenicity in the Balkans, the embodiment of the boundary that separates the (neo)Hellenes from the Slavs.22 The "discovery" of Alexander in certain folk songs was thus significant in the i86os obviously not because it testified to some kind of ancient memory but because it represented the political fantasies of the modern State. That it continues to do so now—and not only for the Greek State but for the rival neighbor to the North—shows the tremendous force of this fantasy. For the Greeks, Alexander invokes the vision of Hellenism as indigenous-imperial culture, the Ur-mission dvilisatrice; for the "Macedonians," Alexander contains the grammar of an expansionist dream. The entire affair, for all its political ramifications, which are of the gravest nature, signals the ultimate revenge of the Ottoman Empire, revenge against all those forces that advocated its dissolution into a whole slew of basically artificial nations. I have outlined the projects of these three disciplines in order to chart the other side of PhilheUenism s historical exigency, the transposition of European traveling jZ&iewrs onto indigenous, native philologists. The Fallmerayer phenomenon best illustrates this other side. Contrary to the canonical views of Fallmerayer as the most vicious anti-Hellene, my contention is that Fallmerayer was the furthest logical extension, the most explicit utterance, of PhilheUenism. In saying this, I do not mean to efface the literal anti-Hellenism of Fallmerayer's political position. On the contrary, my contention is meant to reveal that Fallmerayer was not idiosyncratic or eccentric. European PhilheUenism itself, insofar as it constructed a HeUenic world exclusively for its own consumption, was, historically speaking, an immanently anti-Hellenic expression. The Humboldtian Bildung, if not as a philosophy then as a historical force, may have been the most refined example of this expression. We have already seen how Bildung mobilized the HeUenic for its semiotic coherence. But, history being our witness, the project of Bildung was administrative in essence: it set ,out to codify and organize bourgeois power in Germany, leading eventually to a unified national culture (see Hohendahl 1989), Thus, I would argue, it needed the HeUenic element in order to disguise this intent. By accentuating the democratic, the egalitarian, the harmonious (the inte22. This nationalist figure was also used extensively as anticommunist propaganda. What is remarkable, however, is that the perception of "communistic'* as anti-Hellenic ("individualistic") goes as far back as the writings of folklorist Dora d'Istria on Slavic populations in the 186os (Herzfeld 1986: 137-41). Significantly, this internal logic within Neohellenism reached its most violent and tragic point in the course of the Greek Civil War (1944-49), when, in an unconscious return of Fallmerayer (this time as hero), Greek communists were officially de-Hellenized: renamed "Bulgarians."

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gration of the individual with society, etc.), the social-imaginary that made the notion of Bildung possible managed to displace the significance of the actual project, which was centralization of ideology and class appropriation of culture. All of this was unconscious and inevitable—idealization par excellence. Therefore, Bildung's Hellenism is not Hellenic, philosophically speaking: it is a construction of the Hellenic, a conjuring. It is an Odyssean project, built on a series of idealizations of ultimately imaginary forms in order to institute a heteronomous configuration of power. All this was naturally lost on the Greeks themselves, who, tricked by the ultimate alliance of the Europeans in the war against the Ottomans, projected upon Philhellenism the desired image of their modem selves. This imaginary order sustained itself even when, after the impact of Fallmerayer and the obvious shift in European colonialist policy to Oriental investment, Neohellenism reverted to a nativist ideology. Since Philhellenism never quite surrendered its idealist colonization of the ancient traces, the nativist attempts to articulate an independent national-cultural discourse, themselves inexorably given over to the ancestral belief, never succeeded in disengaging the internalized circuit of Philhellenic desire. Philhellenism s punishment thus consists precisely in imbuing the Neohellenic imaginary with the presence of an irretrievable, but permanent, ancestry.23 The implications of this ancestral burden are tremendous and difficult to determine exactly. For instance, what would the alphabet of modern Greek look like had the English Benthamites—the London Greek Committee that had entrusted Lord Byron with the loan to the War of Independence while holding the entire country for collateral—not provided Greece with printing facilities geared naturally to the ancient Greek script? Would Italian orthography, so prevalent in the literature of the sixteenth-century Cretan Renaissance, have been otherwise pronounced "nationally incorrect" and prohibited from any kind of sensible utility? (see Eisner 1991: 115—16; Herzfeld 1987: 218). Would there ever have been a political practice based on the irredentist ideal and the re-Hellenization of the Orient from the shores of a modern Byzantium? Would Prince Otto of the Bavarian Wittelsbachs ever have been hailed as the reincarnation of the "Marble King"?24 Indeed, would 23. This is a concrete example of the absurdity of the notion of national sovereignty. What we have here is none other than a perfectly colonial condition. We need only remember Fanon's words; "Colonialism is not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and the future of a dominated country.... By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it" (1968: 210). 24. The reference is to an example of what Herzfeld has called "allegories of the impossible" (1986: 129). Folk legend has it that during the siege of Constantinople the last of the Byzantine emperors, Konstantinos Paleologos, whose body was never found, did not die but turned into a

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it ever have been possible to institute a monarchy in Greece without the Philhellenist invocation and imposition of ancestry as the phantasmic object of national desire? Skopetea has documented with commendable precision that the institution of monarchy in modern Greece resulted, in essence, from a philological scheme—Greece was (re)constructed as the model kingdom. The Bavarians, as was becoming customary for the dynastic families in mid-nineteenthcentury Europe, quickly appropriated the signs of their adopted nationality and conformed resolutely to their model rule. Within the confines of the logic of royalty, this would have to strike us as absurd. Nonetheless, the Bavarians were indeed excessive in their Hellenization, with the queen rising to the vanguard of Neohellenic fashion and their splendorous public appearances in national holidays becoming worthy even of the illustrious gaze of that "painter of modern life," Constantin Guys.25 In fact, the Bavarian court was Neohellenic enough to immerse itself in the most urgent nationalist discourse of the day. The anti-Fallmerayer spirit of the times contributed directly to the excessive classicism of the Bavarian rule, especially in matters of art and education (Veloudis 1982: 84). However, as Benedict Anderson shows to be widely the case (1983: 80-82), this kind of simulation of nativism made it possible eventually to identify the Bavarian king as. a traitor to the Hellenes, which led, after the constitutional revolt (1843), to his actual banishment (1862). However, Otto's banishment did not annihilate the institution of monarchy in Greece (for this would signify the institution of a new national imaginary), and so a Danish line of kings ascended to the throne in order to fill the empty signifying space of ancestry The wheel of the national assimilation of foreign rule thus resumed its turning, having since then essentially never stopped, for although Greece has been officially a democratic State without the burden of a king since 1974, the ancestral presence of the monarch has remained intact. Zizek has put forth an eloquent theory of this paradox by positing the monarch as "the point of madness of the social fabric" (i990c: 38), as the very core of the sublime Object of national-cultural fanmarble figure, frozen in time for as long as it would take to reclaim the fallen city. This figure is itself a Neohellenic marvel in the inclusivity of its references. By turning into a statue, the immortal king is, as it were, inscribed ceremonially as an immortal hero (much like those statues adorning the boulevards and the squares), securing in the process both the blessings of the Orthodox God and the grace of the Olympians. 25, "The king's waist is belted like the most elegant ofpalikars, and his kilt spreads out with all the exaggeration prescribed by the national school of dandyism." These are the words of Baudelaire in his description of Guys's painting, Independence-day in the Cathedral at Athens (1986: 22-23).

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tasy. The Greek case is a perfect illustration of this paradox. The last king of Greece, Constantine II, was deposed by an overwhelming majority in the plebiscite of 1974. The immediate consequence of this affair was the complete loss of royal privilege, which instantly transformed King Constantine II into Citizen Gliicksburg. No doubt, the switch from the royal Byzantine first name to the Danish surname marks an attempt by a modern democratic society to inscribe its imaginary order upon the very body (the name) of the king. It is also meant to signify dramatically the ex-ethnicity of the king, to deny him, in other words, the privileged means to (neo)Hellenic ancestry But this renomination cannot but be striking. I, for one, despite all my constitutionally sanctioned claims to Greek citizenship, will never be identified as Citizen Gourgouris. And neither will any other Greek anywhere in the universe. For in the newly instituted democratic imaginary of a State inaugurated as the model kingdom, there can only be one Citizen, the king. The nomination of Citizen Gliicksburg thus follows in the great tradition of political name-changes since Citizen Capet, and his constant reinvocation on national television merely keeps his (empty) place intact. This elaborate example of the inveterate mechanism of the Neohellenic national-cultural fantasy demonstrates the misfortunes of ancestry As its historical narrative, ancestry grants this fantasy a natural status, much like Edmund Burke's counterplot to the audacity of French revolutionary politics: namely, his proclaiming the inevitable transmission of ancestral rule as the rule of political economy The narrative of the (absent) king is, in other words, a narrative in which the right of ancestry is merely the (phantasmic) right of property. As such, this narrative should also provide a cinematic glimpse of the chimerical face of Philhellenism. For since Humboldt's invitation to colonize the ideal, this face has graced substantially "the discourse of the West," of which Greece, whether modern or antique, forms the inevitable pretext. The structural consequence of this relation between a dogmatically idealized state and its hopelessly inadequate historical rendition could only have been a double discourse, which from the point of view of its Object could only have been duplicitous. This situation, as Terence Spencer had the sensitivity to perceive at a time when the alleged ideological immunity of our postmodern consciousness had yet to be declared, accounts for nineteenth-century Philhellenism s being inevitably a cynicism (1954: 186). This characterization is only appropriate, for Philhellenism was from the start a refined child of the Enlightenment, managing its inheritance with a style befitting the grand Bourse of the nineteenth century.

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Of Modern Hellenes in Europe The State is impersonal; the Argentine can think only in terms of a personal relationship. Therefore, he does not consider stealing public funds a crime. —Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, 1952

In November 1990, the Parisian newspaper Le Monde organized a symposium among a group of Frances leading intellectuals with the title "The Greeks, the Romans, and Ourselves." The overall impetus of the symposium was an interrogation (with an inkling toward revision) of Greece's traditional status as the political-philosophical ancestor of modern European civilization; the generally proposed alternative ancestor was Rome (see Droit 1991). A quick look at the names involved—Francois Hartog, Cornelius Castoriadis, Michel Deguy, Paul Veyne, Edgar Morin, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Nicole Loraux among others—reveals that the discussion took place not merely among "experts" but among thinkers known to have consistently forwarded visionary and often radical refigurations of both the ancient and the contemporary world. The focus of the topic thus becomes more crucial and its significance more revealing. For this symposium is not just some politically expedient interrogation of Greece's relation to Europe by a handful of State intellectuals who may be orchestrating a revision of "official ideology" with an eye to policy making. It is a representative instance of what is at stake in the current refiguration of Europe under the institution of the European Community: the refiguration of its origins, the recasting of the originary myth into real history. In this respect, the contemporary refiguration of "Europe"—even if it concludes by positing Rome as its historical origin—nonetheless concerns the point of convergence of the notions of "European" and "(neo) Hellene." The ground of this convergence is inevitably contested—both in the realm of contemporary politics (Greece's notorious unreliability regarding the European Community's project) and in the realm of social-imaginary signification

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(Greece's status as a determinant fantasy in the history of Europe's self-conceptualization). This attempted refiguration points to an inescapable discursive contiguity between Europe and Greece, whether we identity them as two sociopolitical cornmunities in the process of (re) signifying themselves or as the primary imaginary institutions in which (and in the interrelation of which) both these communities have invested their (re) signification. That is, in light of Europe s imminent communal consolidation and in the face of a world whose national populations are rapidly transgressing their boundaries, the Europeans* obsession with their own originary—imaginary—boundaries returns them to the contemplation of their own "Heilenicity" (or perhaps, lately, lack of it), whereas the masses who represent Europe's actual otherness—the postcolonial immigrant population—are efficiently turned over to the repressive mechanisms of its judicial and administrative infrastructure (see Webber 1991). At this precise juncture, at the point where resistance to the otherness of the new migrant "barbarians" leads to a reevaluation of Europe's sanctioned Hellenes, lies the odd and not easily signifiable figure of the Neohellene. Perhaps there is no better indication of this disruptive oddity than the persistent absence of Greece from recent discussions concerning the various aspects of the European Community. One finds a remarkably extensive cultivation of silence, reproduced even in discussions or texts that go a long way toward intelligent critical investigations of the Community's premises.1 We are dealing here with a lacuna of major proportions, and one cannot help but recall the acerbic maxim, characteristic of the writings of Yerasimos Kaklamanis: "Greece [is] that scandalous 'secret' of modern history that no one wants to talk about" (1986: 222). However we may want to assess the historical disjunctures at play in this condition of absence, there is a strong sense that Greece's exclusion is a decisive instance of Europe's exclusivity This much said, I contend that the (re) constitution of Europe in the last decade of the twentieth century hinges on a crucial confrontation with its Heilenicity—that is to say, with the legacy of nineteenth-century "Western" history, which marked co-incidentally both the nascent conceptualization of a consolidated European logos and the institution of this especially problematic entity, the discourse of Neohellenism. i. See for example, the otherwise excellent issue of Race and Class 32 (Jan.-Mar. 1991) on "Europe: Variations on a Theme of Racism." The only other country in the European Community to confront an equally consistent silence is Ireland. Indeed, a double (co-incidental) reading of what kinds of significations Ireland and Greece might elicit from the European imaginary would be particularly fruitful. For an assessment of Ireland that would figure agreeably next to my assessment of Greece, see Cairns and Richards 1988 and Lloyd 1993.

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In this sense, "modern Greece," the historical brainchild of nineteenthcentury Philhellenist Europe, may be said to stand as that traumatic kernel in "Europe's" very heart. What in the nineteenth century was the realization (the mise-en-scene) of the European Enlightenment's constitutive fantasy (the Bildung of an ideal society, the modernization of the ancient polls) has been revealed, in the face of modern Greece, as an insurmountable lack. Today, Greece stands in the heart of the European Community as an indelible reminder of the impossibility of Europe's Enlightenmentfantasy. In this one sense, it is understandable that all mention of Greece is lacking from the discussion concerning the European Community's future. However, this absence of Greece from the proceedings, this void, may be construed as the very sign of Europe's attempt at its phantasmic re constitution; for "fantasy is precisely a construction the function of which is to hide this void" (Zizek 1988: 102). In reinstituting itself while its Hellenicity remains traumatically integral to its historical configuration, Europe must silence its own "modern Greekness" in order to weave its future post-national (post-modern) dreams. To carry out this self-occultation in order to effect its own reimagination, the European Community must re-dream itself, which is also to say it must re-dream the position of its Hellenes. So far, I have juxtaposed "Europe" to "Greece" on a nominally equivalent ground, despite the hierarchical actualities that historically mark this relation. I have insisted on adopting this form despite the obvious risks of apparently advocating a social and epistemic homogeneity, because, although Europe fashions itself as a post-national formation, in effect it tends to signify itself in the social-imaginary terms that actually befit a nation. After all, the history of the notion of "Europe" co-incides with the history of European national sovereignty, the word itself having come into colloquial usage in mid-seventeenth-century England, Holland, and France, while the consolidation of a space of Europe emerged directly out of the fierce territorial struggle among European national states (see Morin 1987: 44—59). We risk quite a misapprehension in heeding the often underlined assurances that the official consolidation of Europe into a federation of states will manage to leave intact the particularities of each nationality while sublating the antagonism of national differences—as if Hegel's ultimate dream (however one chooses to interpret it) will have finally returned in a continental performance. All things considered, it is precisely this magic act that the European Community promises to entertain us with, pulling out of the hat of history the carrot-chasing rabbit of "common interest." The most succinct articulation of this act has been recently forwarded by Jacques Deiors himself, the initial president of the European Commission. He spells things out concretely: "the first criterion [in determining the new Europe] is to decide who

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shares these essential common interests" (1990: 23). Who decides on whose behalf and to share what exactly is the decisive question, one might say in turn. Indeed, if there is anything outright decisive here, it is that discrimination and consensus attest once more to their interdependence and mutual compatibility. For the cultivation of "common interest" is one of the primary operations of a social-imaginary that substantiates the institution of a national community Consider, for example, how the slogan "common good against privilege" encapsulated the essential signification of nationhood during the American Revolution (Hobsbawm 1990: 20). Given then the demands of the signifier "common interest" the current problem confronting Europe is how to make the people who are already considered members of its community (re)produce or (re)institute themselves as Europeans. This is the crucial question, and there is an immediate socioeconomic level upon which this calling for "Europeanness" is founded: "There is a European model of society that is accepted by the vast majority in the Community and that is considered worth defending. This European model of society is distinct from—not necessarily better than but different from—the American and Japanese models" (Delors 1990: 24). Delors goes on to give a name to this unique model, albeit a German one: Sozialmarktwirtschaft, "the social market economy."2 By virtue of its vehement differentiation—which is not exactly warranted economically, since all three aforementioned models share much more of a common ground than not—Delors s ploy reveals the predicament of developing a new European hegemony Europe's newest vanguard ambition may be to emerge beyond the current order of things into a post-national era, yet it can only manifest itself along the lines of a strict terminology of exclusion, the language of drawing up boundaries meant to safeguard an unadulterated difference, an identity. But beyond even this mark of identitary logic, Delors s exposition reinvokes and strengthens a global status quo that was the unfortunate inheritance of colonialism: namely, the perfect division of the 2. Interestingly enough, it was Germany, one of the major international market brokers and the premier economic power in the European Economic Community, that demonstrated a definite reluctance to go along with the Gulf War operations, which may perhaps qualify as a possible act of political-economic independence. This generated irate responses from the American side of things for obvious reasons. But it also disrupted the supposed cohesion of the EEC, exposing thus the contingent "nature" (and by extension, "artificiality") of this cohesion. After all, Germany has been consistently pursuing an independent monetary policy, and the Bundesbank has emerged as a formidable institution, internal to the space of the EEC while continuing to represent a somehow autonomous force. The most recent debacle in European financial markets over Germany's unwillingness to lower its interest rates (so as to keep contained its own dangers of inflation as a result of German unification) is a case in point.

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world's territory, so that nothing can escape a concretely delineated geographical and political—that is, fwtfofw/—determination. Postcolonial Africa is an almost vulgar example of this totalizing dissection; most of the continent's map is a veritable Cartesian tableau of "nations" divided along straight lines, often along the longitudinal and latitudinal markings that the European colonial powers used to balance their geographical accounts (see Castoriadis 1991: 214). In short, Europe may be merely reinstituting itself as a nation. Or, one might also say, more precisely, that Europe is reinstituting the elements characteristic of a national imaginary on a transnational scale. In these terms, we may indeed be facing a slightly different social-historical development, although it would be difficult to determine quite what this would be, since the new Europe advances the equal possibility of either extending the authority of the nation as a significational matrix onto a wider transcultural terrain or breaking up this authority precisely by stretching it too thin. One way to proceed would be to wait and see. But such fatalism goes against the grain of thought, and it most certainly goes against the vision and work of policy intellectuals such as Delors. Whichever way we assess the matter, the key issue facing Delors and all those who share in his vision in outlining Europe's ambitions is a programmatic one: the aim is to imagine (to dream) another Europe. To put it plainly, the crucial question that places a hurdle in the path of European hegemony is, how can the people of the nations that form the European Community stop dreaming of themselves as "nationals" and start dreaming of themselves as Europeans? Thus, the discourse of the European Community may be construed as the means by which the emerging (trans)national fantasy gets to mask precisely the fact that in an undeniable sense "Europe" is a mere phantasm. Hence Delors's appeal to an "essential common interest," which reveals above all the primordial fear of the impossibility of Europe's unified signification on account of perhaps insurmountable national differences and antagonisms. It might be useful here, insofar as the point of contention is a definition of a new international order, to interject one of Antonio Gramsci's key insights. Gramsci made a point of perceiving international order not simply in terms ofRealpolitik but as an extension of "internal" social processes: in other words, to perceive the inter-national (what goes on between nations) as an immanent dimension of the national, as internal to it (1971: 84). This Gramscian insight has frequently been invoked in discussions of subaltern cultures that have internalized the perceptions of the dominant culture. Yet the real kernel of Gramsci s idea may be tested more rigorously vis-a-vis the dominant culture itself. What I suggest then is to consider the notion of "Europe"

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—a prevalent signifier of contemporary international order—as that socialhistorical entity that is itself subjected to the internalized domination of the geopolitical order it represents. In these terms, "Greece" can be examined in. turn not as an external entity on the scale of some essentialized differences, a clearly delineated Other somewhere out there in a different land, but as an entity internal to the body of "Europe." The historical trajectory of this internalization may be traced back to the late eighteenth century and the rise of Philhellenism, although there is enough evidence to argue for an earlier status, co-incident with all those other forces guiding the passage from "Europe's" antiquity to its modernity (the significational unreliability of both terms notwithstanding). Certainly nowadays—and speaking in concrete political terms—the negotiation over Greece in the European Community's drawing up of the new boundaries of inclusion/exclusion does not take place between Europe and a possibly convertible Other across the way It takes place entirely within, as an internal (ized) condition, with Greece as a symptom of an as-yet uncompleted catharsis.3 This discrepancy that relegates Greece to the symptomatic status of the organism s malfunction revolves around a set of fundamental antagonisms between "Europe's" and "GreeceV* social imaginaries. These antagonisms are marked by both historical and geographical exigencies, the range of which would cover the major part of the history of civilization in this region. Obviously, I cannot address this range here, even schematically. I will touch, however, on two particular dimensions in this antagonism, which are immediately pertinent to processes crucial in the codification of the idea of a unified Europe. What renders Greece inherently problematic to the project of Europeanization is Greek society's particular (and peculiar in European terms) imaginary relation to the institutions of law and the State. Much has been made of the importance of a critical reassessment of the theory of jurisprudence concerning specifically the social and political future of a European Community. In fact, in prefacing their recent presentation of a 1944 lecture by Carl Schmitt on the predicament of European jurisprudence, Paul Piccone and Gary Ulmen go so far as to suggest that the future of Europe hinges entirely on a reinvocation of the jus publicum Europoeum, which, in 3. What I am sketching out here is exemplified concretely and dramatically by the internal political predicament of present Germany. As Balibar has pointed out (i99ib: 11), Germany can be seen as the crystallization of the overall predicament of Europe, as the nodal point upon which Europe's contradictions (all the permutations of difference—the ethnic and social antagonisms arising out of the ceaseless migration of boundaries) are most condensed and accelerated. (See also Huyssen 1992.)

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conjunction with a readjustment of the imaginary of the respublica Christiana, will serve not only as a safeguard of a European identity but as the generative basis for other similar geopolitical entities (1990: 13). The claim is vast, and vastly problematic, not only in light of the indisputable present sociocultural "impurity" of Europe but in terms of Schmitt s framework itself. Being, as is well known, a staunch political conservative (in what one might say is a Burkean tradition—rapidly vanishing under the explicit political expediency of today's conservatism), Schmitt is here implicitly concerned with the circumstances that brought the Nazi party into power legally, and by extension with the ensuing reapplication of perhaps a similar condition of legality that would soon follow the end of the war and the renegotiation of world order. The target of his critique is the legal positivism characterizing the institution of law in the nineteenth century, namely the subjugation of legal decisions to legislative and executive bodies and thus to political expediency—what he calls "the split of law into legality and legitimacy" (Schmitt 1990: 63). Instead, he proposes that European nations return to "the manifest community of European jurisprudence" (44), which is a code phrase for advocating the tradition of legal thought and practice that goes back to the institutions of Roman law. For Schmitt, Roman law stands as the prototype of a common language that binds the social-geographical space identified as Europe, a language arising (and this is the key) out of the various histories of application and interpretation of law over the centuries. In other words, it is according to the practice (the reception) and not the text (the letter) of the law that Europe comes to signify itself as such—as the aggregate history of social relations in the region. This aggregate history is itself the domain of jurisprudence, and "jurisprudence is itself the true source of law" (Schmitt 1990: 57). Schmitt s indictment of positivism has a great deal of merit, and his conclusion that "European jurisprudence is the first-born child of the modern European spirit, of the 'occidental rationalism' of the modern age" (65) leaves little room for disagreement—although the value attributed to the terms of his statement, within the confines of this text, is marked by an entirely different historical contingency. Piccone and Ulmen (presumably placed within this same approximate contingency) seize upon Schmitt s declaration of jurisprudence as the deep structure of Europeanness in order, however, to posit a new federalist agenda. They go on to argue that Europe's only hope for (a federalist) autonomy lies in the combination of "Western metaphysics, which first prefigured free rational subjectivity as a cultural telos, and European jurisprudence, which was primarily a system of laws between sovereign states" (1990: 13). But, as Castoriadis would argue, federalism and

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social autonomy are rather antithetical projects. For the notion of "free subjectivity" (or "individual freedom." as it is more widely disseminated), whose greatest political legacy arguably resides in the Constitution of the United States, was something neither discovered by nor, strictly speaking, fought for in the country of its official institution. In the United States, this notion was set from the beginning as a constitutional given, that is, not something one freely selected as such and practiced, but something one legally conformed to, The notion of "individual freedom" is thus a revealing historical example of a heteronomous social imaginary This much said, what furthermore sanctifies such language of rationalist metaphysics is no other law than "the law of the market," which is itself, as Castoriadis has repeatedly pointed out, predicated on the most hegemonic social-imaginary,signification in our time: namely, the idea that "the rationally self-regulated . . . and unlimited growth of production and of the productive forces is in fact the central purpose of human life, . . . [and that] henceforth what counts is whatever can be counted" (Castoriadis 1991: 184). This is an idea most definitely not programmed into the structure of DNA, no matter what some of the great minds of Western culture would have us believe.4 The crucial question posed by this advocation of Roman law as the guardian of European identity remains remarkably unaddressed: namely, how is this "new" European identity going to contend with all those social forces —in huge numbers amidst Europe's population—which do not share this particular legal legacy? If Roman law were to be posited as the safeguard of European identity, it would have to confront and contend with the tradition of Islamic and Byzantine law, for example (in all their various manifestations, developments, and multiple histories), since these traditions are now socially an integral part of the European order. To this we would have to add the more often acknowledged contention between the European Community and English common law, which many argue is perhaps more insistent in its tradition than Greek customary law (see Kozyris 1993). In other words, there cannot 4. It should suffice to quote the opinion of a late-nineteenth-century Turkish governor, as reported to the French traveler and philologist Victor Berard: "If we followed Europe in all its caprices, our life would pass in building roads, then in transforming them into railroads, and transforming those in turn into electrical vehicles. Better to wait and not decide, until we will have learned of progress' final word" (Berard 1893: 13). I can think of no more eloquent dissolution of the teleological nature of progress, whose ultimate impossibility entails precisely the pointless sacrifice of one s life. In antithesis to this fatalist practice emerges the notion that one's life becomes precious in the indefinite waitingfor knowledge to come. We are talking here of an epistemic chasm.

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be a "strictly European jurisprudence" without the elimination of those other traditions (and their imaginaries) existing in Europe's midst. The essence of Piccone and Ulmen's Schmittian federalism is predicated on a clever reversal of the old universalist imaginary ushered in with the Enlightenment: namely, a switch from the notion of the European as the ultimate development/civilization ofanthropos to the notion ofanthropos as European.5 Yet the social reality of Europe at present registers a fundamental disruption to any universalist desire, since European societies are no longer conceivable (either socially or economically) without "their" postcolonial populations. This is experienced as a cataclysmic internal disruption, the condition of Uberfremdung, as the Germans have coined it—"aliens taking over" (Rathzel 1991: 37). Perhaps Europe may be finding itself now before the "same" ideological problem that confronted the United States in the midst of mass immigration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If so, it may be no exaggeration to presume that Europe—especially in its own invocations of liberalism—is now desperately seeking an American Dream of its own to disseminate along with residence papers. Where does Greece fit in with all this? In the most general terms, Greece represents the elevation of this internal sociopolitical problematic onto a wider geographical level. It is well known—and explicitly uttered to the point of becoming a daily matter for Athenian newspapers—that European Community officials are despondent over Greece's performance, having reached the limits of their patience and their ingenuity as to how they might deal with the situation. Their only consolation seems to be that—in their usual prudent aptness to learn from previous mistakes—they are rethinking very carefully the conditions for expanding the Community to other members. I do not know what consolation or compliment resides in the fact that Neohellenes have managed once again to distinguish themselves as a problematic experiment. In any case, there are some formidable historical problems here that put the whole project of Europeanness into question. Permit me to engage for a moment in some amateur Greek ethnography. Consider the following scenario: A small-scale entrepreneur in tourism 5. But any signification of universality denotes a political situation, a battlefield over the institution of certain particular meanings over others. Indeed, it is the access to universalization that grants a culture hegemonic powers. Arguing in quite another context, Monique Wittig has given us an apt illustration of this idea, commenting on an issue that might otherwise slip right by. Specifically, she reminds us that Proust rose instantly to the ranks of the classics because "throughout Remembrance of Things Past he made 'homosexual* the axis of categorization from which to generalize" (1983: 65). I thank Marilyn Manners for bringing this text to my atten-

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(hotels, tours, travel services, etc.), based somewhere in the provinces (an island), is faced with the yearly tax report. The local tax official may not be quite a friend in the most intimate sense, but is a friendly acquaintance who often stops by for coffee—a friend by virtue of business, we might say. Why? Because he is a preferred customer of the tourist agency, which has been furnishing him with double receipts on his travels, lodgings, and recreational activities that are connected to his job (supervision of the regional tax collection). As a result, the entrepreneur and the tax official are a good team—they do business in an easy and friendly way, and together they manage rather nicely to keep the State in the dark as to their real earnings (no matter that one of the two is officially employed by the State). We would surmise that this transaction falls far ofFRousseau s great vision of social contract. Were one to conceive this at all as a form obeying a contractual law, that could only be the law of the bazaar. For any notion here of "the common good" is simply preposterous, although a refined notion of goodwill toward one's neighbor is no doubt present—a distinction that must not be underestimated. The most significant point in all this, however—and this simply baffles any sort of rational-liberal order—is that no unlawful activity is ever done illegally. The papers are always in perfect order. Often, such scenarios are analyzed by relegating them to the various categories that go under the rubric of "underdevelopment." I have already elaborated above (Chapter 2) on the problematic nature of developmental thinking in its general application to the life of societies. With those previous thoughts in the background, I shall continue with the concrete question at hand. The first explanation forwarded in such cases is the charge of corruption among officials, due to the allegedly vital relationship of bureaucracy to State in "underdeveloped" societies. If I may continue my amateur ethnography, I can only point to the astounding mass revolt in 1990 in Nea Kallikrateia (a village in Northern Greece) against the new director of the local police. This was not a revolt against oppression—at least, not in the way it might usually be conceived. The entire village (in an astonishing violation of strict party loyalty and class antagonism) rose up and demanded the arrest and removal of the new deputy chief of police because he refused offers to participate in the network that fed the local para-economy: namely, the systematic deforestation of the land and subsequent building of unlicensed property. Clearly, if we do speak of corruption, we would have to speak of a total collapse of social ethics. The reporting of this affair revealed a fantastically complex division of labor among the ranks of those constituting this para-economic structure. There was even a job at 15—20,000 drachmas (equivalent to $125 at the time)

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for two hours of standing guard at the construction site, and the contracts included special statutes such as "danger fee for possible legal complications" (in effect, a malpractice clause). The Athens newspapers reported these findings in detail. The classic thesis of "underdevelopment theory" about corrupt officials and a "weak" State apparatus keeping the country from implementing the "rational" and "self-regulated" infrastructure that signals "modernization" is simply inadequate here, faced with such complex paralegal formations throughout the ranks of the population (and I presume that this is not a unique case). For Greek society's relation to law has never quite shown favor to the notion of "public interest" which is the cornerstone of liberalism's social vision and which is predicated on the significations of "honesty" (in the "free market") and "virtue" (in civil society). Although the text of the law (like most of the Greek social institutions that were constitutionally drafted under the prompting of the vision of a "modern" State) reflects the positivist spirit prevalent in Europe during the nineteenth century, the practice of law, as the aggregate of mediations throughout the history of social relations in the region, is quite another matter. There, one finds the heritage of an amalgam of legal practices that reached its culmination in the extremely complex system prevailing during the Ottoman rule of the entire Eastern Mediterranean region: namely, the cohabitation of a range of legal practices, from Islamic law (which was not necessarily the same as its political/statist dimension, Sultanic law),6 to the remnants of Byzantine law (passing through the domain of the Orthodox Church to affect primarily family law), to the various overlapping customary laws that in fact formed the backbone of social practices for centuries. The positivist European legal vision (primarily French and German) was essentially imported into Greece upon Independence (1832) in order to dissolve precisely this polymorphous development, in order to streamline the States regulation of social practices. This may have given a nominal hypostasis to the State (which was anyway the "purpose" of the importation), but it has not altered Greek society's symbolic cohesion in terms of its reciprocal negotiation with the institution of law, and would not do so unless socially instituted.7 6. This is only to affirm the counter-Orientalist thesis that Islam is hardly a monolithic or homogeneous institution. As Mahmood Ibrahim informs us (1990: 193), the "duplication" of Islamic law into sacred and political law is practically as old as Islamic history itself. Ibrahim's book, in fact, demonstrates that Islam—as a set of practices that may be construed ideologically—has been variously interpreted and utilized to sanction and implement all kinds of different (and often formally incompatible) modes of social and economic organization in the history of Arab societies. 7. The Greek bibliography on this matter is vast. I would particularly insist on the work of

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A society that, because of its long history of polymorphous, heterogeneous, and overlapping social and cultural relations, has resisted en masse a symbolic investment in the codes of normativity and systemic self-regulation upon which modern European societies are founded could hardly relate to the suprasocial moral abstraction of "human rights" that characterizes postEnlightenment law. As Tsoukalas has aptly put it, in a process of economic exchange, for a Greek "the 'others* are not seen as antagonistic homines economid. They are basically friends, foes, or strangers" (1991: 14). Tsoukalas exposes the severe structural inflexibility that liberalism manifests when faced with the concentrically circular organization of social practices in precapitalist modes of social organization, which are resilient enough to sustain themselves even under the nominal instigation of capitalist development. This has been the case in Greece since its inception, and the resistance of the "traditional" mode of organization against the one that passes under the rubric of "modernization" is formidable. Tsoukalas is correct when he concludes, "to a large extent, dishonesty and corruption may have contributed to the social cohesion of a traditional culture threatened by an externally imposed depersonalization of social relations" (1991: 15). Consistent with the presuppositions of development theory, most explanations of Neohellenic society's incompatibility with modern European social institutions opt for a formalist analysis, built on an a priori acceptance of a strict core/periphery scheme, whose terms are weighed in a worldwide binary structure according to the always definitely centered site of capital accumulation. In such terms, Greece cannot but be examined as an alwaysalready peripheral entity, and the discussion of the contemporary problematic cannot ever escape the confining and sterile dilemma of "modernization versus marginalization." Yet were we to speak at ail of a world system at present, it would have to be articulated in terms of the co-incident (and to a certain extent consubstantial) phenomenon of mass communications and mass migrations. At this level, the core/periphery or development/underdevelopment dichotomy cannot be counted on to represent a certain designated place, a definite axis that might give it a grounding and a basis for elaboration. The dichotomy has itself become peripheral, in the modern Greek sense of the term (peripheromai: to the eminent legal historian Nikolaos Pantazopoulos (esp. 1968; 1989), and also on Petropulos (1968), Tsoukalas (1977; 1991—this latter is in English), Skopetea (1988), Kaklamanis (1986). The Bavarian counsel Gustav Geib's account (1835) of the attempt to implement a "modern" legal system in Greece is especially revealing. The same can be said for Jeremy Bentham's writings on the new Greek Constitution, written in 1823 (1990). For a concise account many of these issues, in English, see Kozyris (1993) and Chouliaras (1993).

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move about—not necessarily around a center, not necessarily with an aim). That is, the core/periphery model is itself continuously moving about, realigning its components, redrawing its boundaries. Indeed, it has become internal to every society on the globe, no matter how its performance is assessed on the "development" scale. In other words, exclusive boundaries are no longer centered: "Exclusion takes the form of internal exclusion at world level" (Balibar i99ib: i4).8 This experience of internal(ized) exclusion shifts the problem's focus to the peculiar internal relations of each society, especially the rules that govern the imaginary relations between civil society and the State. Greek society's relation to the State is not necessarily unique in that it might entail an everyday negotiation with a ubiquitous yet legendary entity. The crucial characteristic of the Neohellenic political imaginary, however, is that both the conceptualization of established social practices and the imaginary signification of the State are underscored by an almost explicit belief in their fundamental duplicity. In this light, it may seem commonplace or incurably ethnocentric to attribute to Greek culture and society an inveterate anarchism. I am certainly not proposing anything of the kind. Yet I cannot ignore the fact that, structurally, contemporary Greece—given the dominant standards defined by "Western" societies—has a propensity for disorder (I mean this literally, not at all pejoratively). Everyone who is put into a transactive position with the Greek State (and that means everyone^ from the ordinary citizen to the occasional tourist or accidental traveler) knows very well that she or he embarks on a totally self-consuming task because the State apparatus is ubiquitous in Greek social life, its ambiguous function notwithstanding, Such day-to-day existence presupposes on everyone's part a remarkable social flexibility; it orients the process of one's living toward cooperatively outsmarting the mechanisms of power, in whichever way one chooses to perceive them. It is no exaggeration to say that a Greek citizen s thinking time is spent primarily in devising ways to better carry out this already highly refined con game. All humor aside, it is undeniable that the undercurrent of this desire is the conviction that the State apparatus represents the con game par excellence. Permit me again to fudge the rules of analytic scholarship with a point of departure that is in many ways a case of urban folklore: The notorious leftist"terrorist" group November!1?, in the equally notorious leaflets with which it 8. This transfiguration of geographical boundaries (and their consequent reinstitution as internalized figures) has become the focus of a great deal of reflection, especially in postcolonial theory. See particularly Said (1990), Bhabha (ipSpb), Appadurai (1990). and Mazrui (1990) among others.

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likes to escort its military actions, is not off the mark when it contends (with considerable socioecononiic analytical skills, I might add) that Greece's ruling capitalist class is a fake. The group claims that this class consists of a relatively small number of family dynasties who have been programmatically robbing the national economy much as a bunch of brigands, without ever bothering to develop and reinvest in the very infrastructure that is, after all, the source of their political-economic existence. Whether this is actually so or not, it is no wonder that a majority of Greeks find the groups leaflets endearing (though they may not necessarily condone the groups actions). In looking at the actions of Greece's ruling capitalists in this light (the "lumpen haute-bourgeoisie," as November ij is fond of calling them), a great number of Greek citizens find there the simulacrum of their own selves, of their "class" antipathy fueled by the impotent rage that stems from their having to play the smaller-stakes con game.9 Therein lies a long historical legacy propelling the population's distrust of the State and its conviction (not always implicit) that Neohellenic society is but an inventory of thieving transactions. The history of Eastern Mediterranean societies, primarily by virtue of a polymorphous population whose heterogeneity remained more or less unchallenged by the two major imperial regimes (Byzantine and Ottoman), testifies to the remarkable persistence of semiautonomous local administration at all levels of the social structure. This leads, if not to a distrust, then to a discounting of the State's real power, since the mechanisms of local power remain de facto more palpable. Or to put it more precisely, what takes place is essentially a forgetting, a resignification of society that relegates the State to a figure of absence (see Kaklarnanis 1984: 151—57; 1986: 58—62). What is it then that resides in the place of the State? The institution of a new Greek State apparatus upon Independence, given as it was to the phantasmic aim of reproducing a European centralized State and sanctioned by Europe's overall political actions, saw its primary and immediate task as the dismantling of the foundations of what was, for all practical purposes, a form of ancient social organization. The alternative institution was the deliberate cultivation of a vast society of civil servants, a mammoth bureaucracy meant 9. Insofar as no members of November ij have been positively identified or caught since it began operations in 1974—that is, insofar as the group remains the mystery of mysteries—its words have achieved sacred status. These "terrorists" are the State s shadow and as such the nation's spiritual conscience. In less religious and more petty-bourgeois terms, they are much like Alexander Dumas's heroes, like an indefinite (and perhaps infinite) number of Count Montecristos, as Gramsci would put it. In this respect, however, these self-appointed avengers of justice end up acting in the nationalist) interest, a point corroborated by their recent forays into targeting Turkish diplomatic officials.

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to reign over what was a politically expedient geographic appendage to the map of an increasingly dominant Europe: this minuscule strip of land preposterously named "the Kingdom of Greece" (Skopetea 1988: 41—63). This bureaucracy was organized in strict hierarchy, and no matter how insignificant might be its particular task, it has always been perceived as the State's body The organic metaphor is deliberate, for every bureaucrat—though more or less permanently employed—follows a rather indeterminate path; his mode of life is determined by the various shifts in the mode of power. According to Cornelius Castoriadis's and Claude Lefort's seminal studies on the history and "nature" of bureaucracy, there seem to be two prevalent and co-incidental tendencies in the formation of bureaucracy. On the one hand, bureaucracy is intimately linked to the formation of the State apparatus, while on the other hand, its determinacy shifts according to the particularities and traditions of each society. In other words, though it seems everywhere to be the same, paradoxically the constitution of bureaucracy hinges on a particular way of forming a particular kind of community around a particular kind of social practice (Lefort 1979: 303-6). In the modern era, this historical specificity of bureaucracy resides in its inevitable complicity with national formation.10 This is substantiated by the national history of Greece and the turns in the discourse of Neohellenism. There is an indisputable link between the proliferation of bureaucracy in Greece after the official constitution of the national State and the very institutions that have been indispensible to the State from the start: law, the military, and national education. It should not be taken for granted that the Bavarian aristocracy, which took over the fate of the Kingdom of Greece with the graces of the major European powers in 1832, presided over the organization of those institutions. The Bavarian administration instituted an infrastructure that placed Greece (in antithesis to its historically self-instituted social practices) on the course drawn up by the principles of State and culture dictated by the Prussian educational reforms. Thus the creation of bureaucracy, via an overburdened national-educational mechanism, served as the primary basis of the State's function, so much so that sooner or later bureaucracy inevitably became the State's hypostasis and relegated the State to—functionally speaking—a rather ceremonial figure (see Petropulos 1968; Pantazopoulos 1968; Skopetea 1988; Tsoukalas 1977). Tsoukalas has sketched out the trajectory of this process, pointing out 10. "The bureaucratic apparatus presents itself to the indigenous masses as the authority which is going to 'create for them' as well as 'give to them' a nation and which embodies this nation as well as guarantees its existence. This is also how the mass struggle against oppression slips into being a 'national' struggle, that is to say, a struggle for the creation of a 'national' State, with all that the creation of a State implies" (Castoriadis 1991: 215).

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that a mechanism of "overeducation" was eventually to serve as the means by which Greece circumvented the impossibility of capitalist development (i91T 569-71). A crucial factor in this (un)development is the peculiar configuration of Neohellenic diaspora culture—a wide, wealthy, and politically active network of Greek merchants spanning a geographical range from Odessa to Paris and developing particular strongholds in the northern Balkan principalities of the Ottoman Empire and in Vienna during much of the eighteenth century. The enormous political influence that the Neohellenic diaspora exercised on the enterprise of national independence was counterbalanced by two specific developments, after Independence, which brought about its virtual elimination: First, the diaspora was cut offeconomically from Greek territory once the nation was instituted. Second, as a reaction to that, much of the diaspora transplanted itself into the new territory, not in an economic domain—for no such infrastructure existed to support it—but directly into the corridors of State power, where its members filled out, by virtue of being educated, the seats of all burgeoning State institutions. This went on until the 18505, when, in an attempt to curtail this development, the State passed a law against the State employment of so-called "heterochthonous Hellenes" (Petropulos 1968; Skopetea 1988; Demakis 1991). But the "overeducation" that Tsoukalas directly links to the peculiar historical configuration of the Neohellenic diaspora continues unabated. This itself becomes the substance of the Neohellenic State: "From a certain point of view, the role of Greek education exhausts itself in the role of a machine for the production of civil servants; the simple fact that their semi-education is taken as a given renders them not so much conscious national subjects or devoted servants, but in a sense accomplices to the State apparatus" (Skopetea 1988: 144).n This enormous army of civil servants, whose existence is legally sanctioned by the State (they are tenured by decree), acts reciprocally by ensuring the State's relegation to an ideal existence. It also ensures the preservation (albeit in reified form) of the "traditional" mode of social practices. Let us take the crucial point I raised earlier regarding Greek society's relationship to the institution of law, namely that "no unlawful activity is done illegally." If 11. An overturning of this situation cannot be envisaged within the present framework of Greek society, no matter what mode of persuasion the European Community might devise in order to enforce it. The dismantling of bureaucracy cannot take place outside the "abolition" of the conditions of bureaucracy; however we may want to put it, such dismantling is tantamount to a revolutionary act. Let us keep in mind Marx's reminder that the Paris Communes first revolutionary act was to "abolish" bureaucracy not by firing all civil servants but by decreasing their salaries to the level of the average worker's.

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this sounds paradoxical, then this is precisely the paradox that implicates "Europe" and "Greece" in a profoundly antagonistic condition. On a basic level, this paradox names the population's persistence in acting according to customary legal formations, according to this instituted set of practices intimately interwoven with a decentralized social structure (the prevalent mode of social organization during Ottoman times). In such conditions, the legitimacy of centralized power was never quite to take hold—certainly not on the level of primary social-imaginary signification. The "legality of unlawful activity"—the crucial importance placed on papers being in order—is thus an inevitable consequence, an adjustment on the part of the population to the bureaucratic need for paper-feeding. Yet this vast quantity of official papers and official stamps serves also as the material enactment of the State's omnipresence, thereby further sanctioning its hold on the society's imaginary. Although Greek citizens on the whole, by virtue of pursuing the law of customary practices, have rendered the functioning of the State obsolete, they cannot but attribute every social mishap either to the State's inability to perform its function or to its deliberate (politically motivated) incapacity, thereby continuing to feed—albeit by negation—the State's imaginary institution (see Chouliaras 1993). In many ways, this is a remarkably balanced structure, but for the fact that the international order is balanced on quite different discursive accounts. This dissimilar signification of law (with all its ramifications regarding one's relation to the State, to order, to "rationality," to "common interest," to "development," etc.) is the primary contradiction between "Greece" and "Europe"—or more precisely, between what they both construe as their respective identities. To attempt to comprehend the Greek situation from the point of view of either of these identities (whether the Greek identity as construed in Schmitt s and his advocates' notion of Roman law and "free rational subjectivity" or the European identity as construed in the EEC's measure of limitless growth and progress), means to confront nothing less than Kafka's universe. But "in Kafka's universe, the court is above all lawless in a formal sense: as if the chain of 'normal' connections between causes and effects is suspended, put in parentheses" (Zizek I99oa: 257). Any attempt to read such a situation rationally reveals it to be total nonsense; this is exactly what the officials in the European Community are facing on a very pragmatic level. We may presume their conclusion to be that they are confronting barbarity once more, blowing from the land that spawned civilization—the dialectic of Enlightenment once more taking its revenge, Some brief concluding remarks are in order. Over the vast number of details and particularities that aggravate the antagonistic relation between

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"Europe" and "Greece," as I have presented them so far, two all-encumbering notions preside, which may very well be considered fundamental socialimaginary significations: the dream of difference and the seduction of globality. "Europe" and "Greece" have at this point in history invested their identities, their social imaginaries, in both these significations and their mutual antagonism. Greece has insisted and continues to insist on its uniqueness, which (however it might be perceived) translates into a notion of uncompromising difference. This insistence—bracketing the obvious energy that nationalism lends to it—may be understood as the result of the suspicion with which a country finding itself in the political and economic margins responds to the demands placed upon it by the conditions of international order. Crucial to the cultivation of this suspicion is also the tremendous cultural wear and tear that a society whose primary economic source is the tourist industry inevitably undergoes. This overall condition has become the primary component in the increasing cultural insularity that has characterized Greece in the last ten years.12 On the other hand, the notion of Greek uniqueness translates quite easily also—by virtue of the omnipresent signifier of Hellenism—to an aspiration for universality, if only an ascendant universality, the patrimony of culture. In these terms, Greece—as a social-imaginary institution—has never located itself outside the sphere of Europe, despite the various nativist efforts over the years to map out an indigenous trajectory to and from the "East." The resulting interplay between xenophobia and xenomania has ultimately led, above all, to a more efficient consumerist society, in which the very role of the commodity (especially dress fashion and high-tech equipment) is to alternately hypostatize these two poles as the veritable social desire, the point of excess and the point of lack, if you will, around which the everyday function of this society is constituted. This, as Yiorgos Chouliaras points out, does not necessarily lead to a disintegration of "traditional" social practices, precisely because the latter both absorb and adjust themselves to the influx of the always "foreign" commodity. Hence "the large increase in the number of cars in Greece in recent decades has helped strengthen rather than sever the ties of urban dwellers to the countryside" (Chouliaras 1993: 89). 12. The Socialist Party's first administration, spanning the first decade after Greece's induction into the European Community (1981-90), with its overtly Third Worldist ideology and a nationalist-populist rhetoric, has much to do with the cultivation of this insularity. But to take this up would steer us far from this text's argument, which seeks explanations for such phenomena in the very institution of the nation and what is, in almost all cases, a nineteenthcentury epistemic framework.

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The imaginary investment of "Europe" in both the dream of difference and the seduction of globality is more than adequately represented—and in concrete political terms—in Delors's delineation of "Europe's ambitions" as we saw above, The history of the terms of this imaginary investment is the very history of the inter-European struggle for national sovereignty on the one hand and the subsequent history of colonialism and imperialism on the other. In this sense it is possible to agree with Morin that "Europe became a geographical notion because it became a historical notion" (1987: 60). However, the geographical conjunctures drawn up by the imminent mise-enscene of Europe's dream come increasingly into play. Etienne Balibar is especially on mark when he contends that simultaneously with the rise of a European complex offerees emerges a (re)constitution of an analogous Mediterranean complex, both being intimately linked and interdependent (i99ib: 9). He perceives Europe as "an open aggregation with several concentric circles of supranational institutions in unstable equilibrium," an entity of aggregates "not juxtaposed to one another but largely superimposed" (10). From this viewpoint, that the Euro-American aggregate will have to contend with a Euro-ex-Soviet aggregate or with a Euro-Mediterranean aggregate (the terms are Balibar's) is no trifling matter. On the contrary, it may be said to lie at the heart of the question of the new European imaginary institution. It is a concrete, though often distorted, matter of history that "Europe" would have been inconceivable beyond the exigencies of what we have to call, for lack of a better word, "Mediterranean civilization"—not the Mediterranean "discovered" as a commercial venture sometime in the 14005, as characterized by Fernand Braudel, but the Mediterranean of a much earlier configuration, from the Islamic era back to the Hellenistic years and beyond. We can discuss this inconceivability either, as Jacqueline Kaye suggests (1984), in reference to Europe's formative experience as a colonized population or, as Kaklarnanis indicates, in reference to an Islamic world that first understood and exercised the range of ancient Hellenic thought: "Hellenic culture comes to the West after centuries of elaboration and historical wear in the domains of the Eastern Mediterranean, in a tremendously extensive composite nature. The West does not inherit solely the ancient Greeks; along with the ancients it inherits the spirit of the Byzantine quarrels about them, as well as the Arab problematization of their texts" (Kaklarnanis 1984: 208).13 Approaching the 13. It is crucial to remember that in addition to importing Hellenic thought into Europe, the Arabs left an even more indelible mark on the continent: their numeric system, and even more importantly, the digital conceptualization of the notion of zero. This momentous invention has increasingly emerged as the backbone of modern "Western" civilization, insofar as so-

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social creation of the West in these terms avoids the stalemate of the antagonism between the dream of difference and the desire for globality (which the "plan" of the European Commission ultimately seems to entail) by absorbing the antagonism into a different signification of Europe that privileges its historio-geographical present as an enormous complex of invisible, internal, and restless frontiers. Only in this way can we credit Morin's rather forgiving contention that "Europe cannot be itself except in an eco-organizational anarchy, for it has never existed as Organization superior to its constituents" (1987: 67). Greece has a great potential for contributing to this possible turn of events as an active force within the European Community. However, such a contribution would require that "Greece" itself be resignified as an entity that exceeds both its national denomination and the nominal grounds of its EC membership. Indeed, Greece is the point at which the Euro-Mediterranean aggregate in the EC finds its most complex manifestation—by virtue, at the very least, of its geographical and sociocultural proximity to the Islamic world. This resignification of Greece, however, must take place both on the level of the European Community, which cannot expect that by divine order Greece will suddenly take the road to technological rationality, and on the level of Greek society itself, which cannot expect to continue interminably mining the pockets of the European Community, as it has done so far with the naive provincial conviction that it is pulling another Odyssean trick, In other words, if Greece is to ameliorate its marginalized position within the international order, it can only adopt for itself Constantine Cavafy's personal motto: be not (neo)Hellene, but Hellenic. Cavafy was arguably the first in Neohellenic culture to delineate a decentered vision of its history, pointing to the absolutely confining predicament that any culture's significational reliance on "the barbarians" (of one kind or another) guarantees.14 In this Cavafian sense, Greece must externalize and exceed itself, as it were, beyond its geographical boundaries to its historical ones—which is to be understood not at all as a neo-Byzantinist imperialist fantasy but as an internal upturning of what is a basically nationalist insularity. called "high technology" (in its sublime integration of horror and seduction) is, ironically, inconceivable without it. 14. I have in mind Cavafy's famous poem "Waiting for the Barbarians," specifically the poem's conclusion: "Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians?/They were, those people, a kind of a solution" (Cavafy 1992: 18).

CHAPTER 5

The Phantasms of Writing, I M A K R I Y I A N N I S AND THE MIRACLES OF NATIONAL MEMORY

Every history organizes vestiges into a coherent picture. It veils a fiction. And even at those times when the history is blatantly called a story—"my story" (to storikon mou, as Makriyiannis tirelessly reminds us)—the veil is stubbornly held up intact. For beyond whatever significance Makriyiannis s writings might have as writing, they are indivisible from that vast and allpervasive text that is the kanon (the Law) of every literary history, the fiction of national culture. Yiannis Makriyiannis was born into a disenfranchised peasant family in 1797 and died a both maligned and deified national figure in Athens in 1864. He was born in Roumeli, the part of central Greece identified de facto by the Ottomans as most "Hellenic" (Rum = Rome). The Ottoman investment in the name may not have been so trivial, as is attested by Makriyiannis s own most stubborn regionalism (Simopoulos 1986: 51). By the time of his death, Makriyiannis had actually distinguished himself in many, often contradictory, capacities: as fighter in the Greek War of Independence (1821—30), during which he rose from a young self-armed petty-merchant and moneylender to the rank of general in the Greek army; as spokesman for the plight of disenfranchised fighters and peasants after the institution of the new Greek State; as a friend of the monarchy and the enthronement (via European will) of King Otto, Prince ofBavaria (1833); as leader of the conspiracy and counterroyalist coup that brought Greece its first "republican" Constitution (1843). After the constitutional victory, Makriyiannis was closely watched by many political enemies in a government that feared him, and perhaps with good reason, since he was apparently fond of conspiratorial activity (Simopoulos 1986: 84-85). This eventually led to his arrest and later to his

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conviction and imprisonment (1852—54), despite his ill health, for allegedly plotting against the king. By that time (since the 18405 in fact), Makriyiannis had become immersed in religious mysticism, having eventually withdrawn to a cave on his property, which he had turned into a shrine. There, he subjected himself to an extraordinary ascetic discipline that would often render him incapacitated and delirious, his body already being an inventory of wounds from several years of war and subsequent poor medical care. After his release from prison, he faced the scorn and contempt of many who, while passing by, "threw stones and human excrement in my yard, saying 'eat some of these now, Makriyiannis, to satisfy yourself that you even wanted a Constitution' " (Memoirs, xviii). But eventually, in a popular outburst after King Ottos dethronement (1862), Makriyiannis, by now near death, was proclaimed a folk hero. In this rather typical reversal of public sentiment, the discourse of martyrdom employed the full range of its conventions. All this, however, would have been only a quaint point of Neohellenic nineteenth-century trivia if it were not for the fact that Makriyiannis—for all practical purposes an illiterate man—left behind a body of writing that has emerged as perhaps the most significant component of the Neohellenic literary canon. In that sense, even a straightforward presentation of Makriyiannis's writings, as a point of introduction and familiarization, cannot take place outside the domain of the history of his reception and the presentation of all the parasitic discourse that coordinates his canonization. Makriyiannis ostensibly left us two unspecified manuscripts, which were given their titles as we know them—Memoirs and Visions and Miracles—by their editors. The fact that these manuscripts are even considered as two separate works is almost exclusively a result of their different histories of decipherment and publication, themselves determined by the particular politics of making culture. Despite the apparently different orientation of the two manuscripts, the affinity between their discourses, as well as their identical conditions of production, suggests that both belong ideologically and grammatologically to a single text, of which they are but two adjacent columns, or in the temporal terms of history, two distinct but interlocked moments. Obviously, the singularity of Makriyiannis's text does not exist as such. But neither does its fissure, except in behalf of the critical discourse that exists because of it. The singularity I am proposing includes—indeed, highlights— the heterogeneity of Makriyiannis s discourse; it recognizes the mark of history, including the histories of reception, upon the text's continuous (re)inception. More specifically, the writings published under the title Memoirs were written in irregular intervals between 1829 and 1850, though they were not

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brought to light until 1904, when they were serialized in. an Athenian newspaper. Then, in 1907, they were published in book form with extensive editing and commentary by Yiannis Vlahoyiannis, a significant figure in demoticist intellectual circles.1 The second manuscript, Visions and Miracles, not published until 1983, was written between 1851 and 1852 but left unfinished, most likely because a few weeks after the last entry Makriyiannis was taken to jail under charges of treason. The delay in the second manuscripts decipherment and publication was largely due to Vlahoyiannis's immediate dismissal of it as secondary to the Memoirs and unworthy of study—in his own words "the work of a madman," Here we have a prime example of the tremendous hegemonical control of the critical apparatus in Greek literary history. Both publications are shadowed by a plethora of editorial commentary, resembling annotations to an obscure medieval text. Indeed, the texts do arise out of the Dark Ages—certainly an apt figure for the history of their production, but also for their painful objects of reflection: the ruthless ideological and class conflict among Greeks during and after the War of Independence in the Memoirs', the disgust with political action and Makriyiannis s subsequent psychic breakdown in Visions and Miracles. The manuscripts themselves, idiosyncratic phonetic transcriptions primarily of the Roumeli pronunciation mixed with a variety of stock formal phrasing, scripted at times with makeshift letters bearing little or no resemblance to the conventional Greek alphabet, written without paragraphs or punctuation and with words or phrases running together, were kept for a time (during most of the Bavarian reign) in the bottom of a bucket for fear of their discovery by the government. Neither manuscript comes to any conclusion, the first breaking off suddenly sometime during 1850, and the second—started a few months later on January 1851—ending abruptly in mid-sentence. The Salvaging of Discourse and the Profits of Salvation I find it fitting to begin by relating an anecdote I read a few years ago in the Athenian journal O Politis: The writer remembers an incident from some years past when he hapi. Note that since the "second" manuscript seems to contain a larger number of formal (katharevousa) phrasings than the "first" (the Memoirs) it is almost certain that Vlahoyiannis adjusted Makriyiannis!s language in the latter work to fit demoticist standards. See the editor's comments in Visions and Miracles (Makriyiannis 1984: 294), as well as the comments of Simopoulos (1986: 112) and Strouggari (1979). For the politics of demoticist aesthetics, see Tziovas (1986).

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pened to be in a movie theater at Hafteia, a neighborhood in the old city of Athens near the Central Market, which to this day remains the best equipped and most advanced center for the production of popular culture, and where the 24-hour movie theaters offer films ranging from the latest imported pornographic achievements to that characteristic genre of 19605 mass-produced glosses of the Herculean Tasks with the appropriate Italian stamp. On this occasion, the writer saw a film exhibiting the great talents of Massistas—a notorious Superman figure, whose approximate contemporary analogue in American culture would have to be The Incredible Hulk.2 In any case, in this film Massistas was shown "saving an entire populace by removing a mountain that stood as a barrier to its [collective] happiness. Having completed his heroic deed, Massistas then packed his bags, in spite of the desperate hordes pleading for him to remain forever in their midst. Upon his declaration that he had no choice but to leave because there were so many other peoples out there waiting to be saved [and we must envision this as the final line spoken in the film], the movie audience burst into the rhythmic chant: 'Save Greece! Save Greece! Save Greece!' " (Kavouriaris 1988: 9). I recount this anecdote because I believe its conclusion to be most appropriate for an exploration of Makriyiannis. Indeed the entire history of the reception of Makriyiannis's writing is best articulated within a discourse of salvation, a discourse dedicated from its outset to salvaging an "authentic" Neohellenic voice, and culminating in the second discovery of Makriyiannis in 1983—the publication of Visions and Miracles, which was quickly declared both the manifesto and the long-sought redemption of neo-Orthodoxy.3 Vlahoyiannis's obsession with Makriyiannis's memoirs cannot be dismissed as the behavioral antics of an eccentric, although his persistent efforts to uncover a rumored manuscript in the basement of the Makriyiannis home partakes of the same archaeological intoxication that typified those famous fellow excavators of Hellenic culture, Heinrich Schliemann and Arthur Evans. His insistence that Makriyiannis's memoirs must be found and brought to light reflects the political value, already established by that time, of autobiographies and memoirs from the War of Independence and subsequent early years of the new Hellenic State. The publication of memoirs by participants in the revolutionary period had become by the 18505 a most conimer2. "Massistas" is the Hellenization of the Italian "Maciste." The Maciste films were "spaghetti strong-men epics" coveting the European markets leftovers of the Hercules movies. I am grateful to David J. Russell for elucidating this rather obscure moment of my teenage years. 3. Neo-Orthodoxy is the Greek analogue of the French nouveaux philosophes. Its discourse rests on a simple trope, a metonymic substitution ("the [Westernized] East" for "the West"), preposterously presented as an epistemological break: as the rejection of foreign (Marxist) metaphysics in favor of the "indigenous" metaphysics of "Hellenic Christianity." For the public chronicle of this affair, see Xydias (1984).

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cially viable enterprise, posing, as Kaklamanis acutely observes, an immediate question: "Isn't it odd that so many men, generally lacking in grammatical training, take up at an advanced age and without any kind of electronic facilities the writing of sizable 'memoirs'? What pushes them so maniacally to make these memoirs the oeuvre of their life's remainder?" (1989: 16-17). Bracketing for a moment the specific politics of authorial motivation in these circumstances, I must underline the pains taken by the State to bless these highly subjective and contradictory testimonies with historical authenticity, raising them to the status of historical documents of crucial national importance (Kaklamanis 1989: 17). The initial discovery of Makriyiannis is in this context simply one more instance of the cultural conventions of the period. These conventions, after 1880, were manipulated entirely by demoticist ideology and its essentially folklorist intentions: Neohellenic culture was recognized foremost as folk culture, whose formal culmination was by definition the confessional or testimonial narrative. Thus, as an executor of Makriyiannis s testament, Vlahoyiannis merely executed the national cultural will. Hence his total investment in the manuscript of the Memoirs and his adamant rejection of the manuscript of Visions and Miracles, which is, after all, not a memoir as such, not a chronicle of someone's direct participation in the making of national history, but instead a chronogram of what we could call (the unmaking of) personal history—although it would be more to the point (even if somewhat opaque) to call it the psychical unfurling of the nationdream. But there is no place for the language of dreams in nineteenth-century Greek discourse. Or again, "the dream" is so precisely delineated—the remaking of Greece as a (new) ideal—that it excludes everything else. Consequently, Visions and Miracles remained buried until 1983, having passed from a bucket in the basement of a house to the well-stocked drawer of a modern philologist. The Memoirs, on the other hand, had become public by 1907. Yet its significance remained buried until 1943, when Yiorgos Seferis delivered his now historic lecture on Makriyiannis in Cairo and effectively marked the moment of Makriyiannis's literary canonization.4 That day Seferis spoke, consciously, as a cultural heresiarch, a man in possession of the mystery of national 4. Yiorgos Seferis (1900-1971) is arguably the most dominant figure in Greek letters in this century. Though it may seem that he has gained this position because of his internationally known and Nobel-winning poetic oeuvre, I would insist that his prominence and influence is due instead to his meticulous and programmatic output of two large volumes of literary essays, written steadily throughout his life, which have profoundly monopolized the signs of Neohellenic aesthetics. I discuss this issue in detail in the following chapter. Here I will only address the problematic of Seferis in its pertinence to Makriyiannis. Unless otherwise indicated, all page references to Seferis are to volume i of his Essays.

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culture, as "the initial witness to an unknown affair" (1981: 229). In this, he was guided by the modernist aesthetics of his European intellectual circles, reflecting both their claim to being the hypothecaries of the transcendental power of culture and their crisis in seeing this same culture becoming—as Walter Benjamin had said three years earlier—the very "documents of barbarism." Therefore, in his presentation of Makriyiannis, Seferis did not fail to stress the ominous, yet beckoning, presence of history at that moment (experiencing it like most European intellectuals, on both sides of the war, as the moment prior to redemption), and he did so with the characteristic urgency and rhetorical sophistication so typical of him and so typical of a man conscious of presiding over the creation of a monument. Indeed, Seferis made it perfectly clear from the second paragraph of his lecture that "Makriyiannis," this mystery he was about to unveil, had already been (in) the property of the period's literary vanguard (of which he certainly fashioned himself the spokesman), which saw as its task during these difficult historical times to cultivate, to preserve, and to give new voice to the artifacts of the past. This characteristically modernist idealization of things primitive, which the "Generation of the 303" had belatedly embraced, was very much at work in Seferis's bringing Makriyiannis to the attention of the public. Seferis insisted that Makriyiannis "could not read anything other than his own writings" (1981: 233), a manipulative phrase, for although it is impossible to establish exactly what and how much Makriyiannis could read, his own text proves beyond a doubt that he possessed a wide range of "textualized" knowledge. His writing partakes of both scripted and oral mythography and engages in constant juxtapositions of formal and popular elements.5 For Seferis, Makriyiannis's illiteracy is an ideological necessity, an. a priori position in an argument over aesthetic theory, and specifically over the aesthetics proper (in the sense of both propriety and property) to Neohellenic culture. Seferis goes so far as to say that if Makriyiannis had suffered the great accident of literacy, he would have been an insignificant figure (1981: 236). Though illiterate, however, "he was not at all an uncultivated barbarian from the mountain ranges. He was the exact opposite: one of the most refined souls of Hellenism" (237). If we could slip for a moment beyond this remark5. "Speeches, harangues, newspapers, letters, reports, proclamations, and conversations all played a part in shaping [Makriyiannis's] political vocabulary and his ideology" (Holton 1984/85: 159). Vlahoyiannis (1977), Asdrahas (1957), Strouggari (1979), Holton (1984/85), Simopoulos (1986), Svoronos (1984), and Papakostas, the editor of Visions and Miracles, all have pointed out the direct affinities of certain of Makriyiannis's phrasings with those of such texts as St. John's Revelation, The Chronicle of Galaxidi (written in 1703, although not published until 1865), Hellenike Nomarchia (1806), and the apocalyptic "prophecies" of "Agathangelos" (pseudo-author of a text published in 1837), to name the works most commonly mentioned.

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able language, we would find the typical Seferian populist rendition of the Platonic paideia, with all its newfangled twentieth-century accoutrements. As Michel de Certeau has shown, Western culture includes a significant legacy of canonical uses of "the enlightened illiterate."6 For de Certeau, such uses fall inevitably within the politics of tradition, especially during historical moments when the tradition is in danger of showing its social inadequacy, its irrelevance to that anonymous popular spirit that gives it its purpose. At such moments, "these Magi [of Culture] go among the 'little people' to hear that which still speaks. A field of knowledge takes leave of its textual 'authorities' to turn to the exegesis of'wild' voices. . . . In these writings, a tradition, humiliated after having functioned as the court of reason, awaits and receives from its other the certitudes that escape it" (de Certeau 1986: 87). In this sense, Seferis's choice of time (1943) and site (Cairo) for initiating Greek culture into the mysteries of "Makriyiannis" is certainly not accidental and goes beyond the mere neoromantic infatuation of modernist intellectuals with the primitive. As Cairo, site of a cosmopolitan and "civilized" Orient, plays host to the entire Greek State apparatus (in exile and hopelessly out of touch with the burgeoning leftist resistance in the mountains of Greece), the question of defining national culture becomes obviously and acutely political. The invocation of the ghost of Makriyiannis, given especially his image as revolutionary and man of the people, simultaneously sanctifies his figure and declares ownership of his logos.7 Here, perhaps more than on any other occasion in his very active life, including his many years in the diplomatic corps, Seferis lends his valuable services to the State willfully and without restraint. Only a few months later (1944), in the liberated zones of mainland Greece, Aris Velouhiotis delivered a speech (which is, incidentally, rather Makriyiannean in form—although no more so than Seferis's lecture) intended precisely to alert the people to the ongoing political antagonism over the significations of national culture and to the necessity for waging the struggle on the terrain of texts as well as of cities and mountains.8 Needless to 6. "The 'illiterate' who lends his word the support of what his body has experienced and adds to it no 'interpretation' has been around since the fourteenth century, in the form of the (anti-theological and mystical) figure of the Idiotus" (de Certeau 1986: 74). For a more specific and detailed discussion of this phenomenon, see also de Certeau *s early article "Ulllettre eclaire" (1968). 7. "The illumination, the sublime, and the miraculous change sides. To the folk, only the strangeness remains" (de Certeau 1968: 406). 8. Aris Velouhiotis was undoubtedly the most famous guerrilla leader of the Communist Resistance during the German occupation, a sort of Guevarist figure avant la lettre. Here, I mention him only to provide historical context and round out the catalog of political strategies in using and making culture. Thus I will not venture into a discussion of how he functions semiotically within the discourse of the Greek Left and of national culture in general. Suffice it

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say, Velouhiotis was right in his assessment but very wrong in his prediction of who would emerge victorious. The victory was signified in the terms Seferis had articulated. Makriyiannis represented "the most basically Hellenic idea," "the sentiment kneaded into every Hellenic temperament since those very distant times when Oedipus abolished the Sphinx and her nightmarish world by uttering the single word: anthropos" (1981: 256). In comparison to this dramatic and ceremonial aesthetic sanctification of Makriyiannis, the explicit presentation of Makriyiannis as "saint," which escorted the publication of his long-suppressed "visionary" manuscript (1983), was indeed a farce. But as Marx has taught us, were we to look beyond the often-repeated phrase that opens his i8th Brumaire, it is the signs constituting a farce that reveal, in their inversion, the actual signs of history.9 So I suggest that the reappropriation of Makriyiannis in the "socialist"-populist 19808, his absorption by the Spectacle (the hit songs, the television specials, the journalistic homages, the endless allusions and quotations in the daily press) reveals the profound significance of the literary project of the "Generation of the 305" and its hegemonic stranglehold on Greek letters. For to find oneself between these two events—the two discoveries of Makriyiannis—is to confront the entire range of Neohellenic discourse. In the first instance (the humanist/bourgeois/high-culture demoticism), Makriyiannis, the "illiterate Everyman," signals the Hellenic essence: Man, In the second instance (the mystical/populist/mass-culture neo-Byzantinism), Makriyiannis, the "devoted sinner" signals the Christian essence: Saint. To observe that these two ideological strains were inscribed into each other as the forces that inform Makriyiannis's discoveries well before their historical expressions—even well before the folklorist Spyridon Zanibelios textualized the term hellenochristianikos (1852) in order to define the essence of Neohellenism against both ancient Hellenism and European Hellenism—is not to make a great revelation. Indeed, these two strains have repeated themselves tirelessly in the course of Neohellenic culture, adapting themselves like chameleons to changing historical circumstances, demonstrating the resilience of the dream. The case of Makriyiannis, both the texts themselves and their reception, is crucial because it seems to contain all the permutations of the code, all the explicit manifestations of the nation as institution-in-the-making, all of the to say that my use of Che Guevara as an analogous sign points to a profoundly developed mythification of Velouhiotis, not unlike that of Makriyiannis himself. I owe this insight to an inspired conversation with Yiannis Patilis some years ago. 9. "Only theft can still save property; only perjury, religion; bastardy, the family; disorder, order!" (Marx 1978: 134).

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workings of the (neo)Hellenic social imaginary. Here the illiterate peasant meets the Western-educated, multilingual poet; the peasant bandit .(kleftis) meets the perennial imperialist; the Ottoman-in-the-Greek meets the Greek from Paris; the lay, antihierarchical Christian meets God; the humble man meets the Pythic woman; the indecipherable script meets the babbling of the newspapers and the drone of the lecture hall; the delirium of a madman meets the delirium of Reason; indeed the cultural Memory meets the national Dream. The Politics of Memory Oblivion, indeed I would even go as far as to say historical error, is a most essential factor in the creation of a nation. —Ernest Renan, "What Is a Nation?" (1882)

It has often been said that memory is the essential mechanism behind the preservation of national identity. The truth of this statement is of less concern than is the question of what kinds of significations its utterance mobilizes. Immediately, other questions arise: within what signifying framework does the very process of cultural memory, whether collective or individual, take place? And how does this framework of memory—the pictorial and lexical images, the implicit and explicit utterances that constitute the signifying boundaries of the national—operate within the various particular socialhistorical structures? And finally, how might we articulate—or perhaps, to be more precise, how might we approach from within our utterance, our discursive location—the actual process of the institution of memory as social practice, its relation to the social imaginary or in a word (which emerges as much more complex than it might initially seem), its politics? These questions are themselves the markings of this specific meditation on the relation of memory to writing and, by extension, to the making of national culture. They are not posed to elicit answers as such. To put it another way, they are not posed to re-mind us of anything, to reveal a truth. This is a crucial point, for within the Greco-Western epistemological frame, memory is etymologically directly linked to truth: aletheia, the ancient Greek word for truth (fundamental to Plato as well as Heidegger) literally means "non-oblivion." This is all the more crucial for our particular purposes. Makriyiannis opens and closes his Memoirs with recourse to "the naked truth": "I will mark the truth naked and dispassionately" (4); "I wrote the truth naked, so that all Greeks will see it" (320). By implication then, Makriyiannis deploys his memory naked, that is, unveiled, unhampered by the exigencies of

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subjective intention: "If I am an honest man, I want to write the truth, as the writing occurred the way I will mark it" (3).10 But, although unhampered as such, truth cannot escape being seen (by "all Greeks"), being a point of spectacle and speculation; it is, after all, unveiled before us for us, rendered naked on our behalf. As history, in the case of Makriyiannis, truth/memory is articulated with a significant twist: a narrative that takes place in the interstices of those subjectivities that "see it"— "make it." (It is, remember, history as "my story," yet, significantly, as "my story" directly linked to truth, not at all as fiction.) At an initial level, this is a noteworthy tampering with the conventional notions of history, fiction, truth, subject, story, and so on. But it is nevertheless a fairly "traditional" articulation of the notion of memory because it underlines the supremacy of memory as the unhampered vantage point upon which history relies. So the question becomes, can there be such a thing ultimately as memory unhampered, a memory that is free? In her disruptive reading of Plato's cave, Luce Irigaray has shown that the actual situation of memory or reminiscence, and its mobilizing principle (truth), is the very site of restriction, of binding: the enforced specula(riza)tion of images, whose utmost development is the enforced contemplation of the Idea: "For has reminiscence not always already engaged in rapturous contemplation of the Idea?" (1985: 255). To Irigaray, idea is theoria, pure and simple. And the theorizing subject is he who sees and makes (the Other) visible and therefore true. But Irigaray disrupts the metaphysical bliss of this identification, its "autistic completeness," by revealing its repressed topography—that is, by returning to the procession of Ideas their predicate (proteron) body, their images, their repressed imaginary. Whether the Idea encapsulates the demands of philosophy or the demands of the nation does not matter; it always submits to the demands of identification with aletheia (memory). And insofar as the operation of national memory is linked to the making of truth, it mobilizes an active process of forgetting: the selective activity of lending certain clear (or unclear) images to certain things, certain revealed (or repressed) utterances to certain beliefs. But it is not enough to say simply that the experience and articulation of national memory involves a necessary act of repression, via its intrinsic activity of selective censorship. More important in interrogating the making of national culture is to explore the specific parameters that designate and regu10. In my translations of Makriyiannis, I have tried to keep as close as possible to the unorthodox and ungrammatical phrasing, risking awkwardness and confusion in exchange for communicating a more precise sense of this most particular materiality of writing, this difference of a language that does not quite understand the notion of convention.

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late the direction of repression (forgetting/remembering), the imaginary and social-historical context within which, and by which, the points of censorship are selected. In these terms, the memoir becomes a type of writing that lends itself without hesitation to the instrumentality of memory, especially in the way that memory is utilized in the construction of individual or collective identity. As Asdrahas has pointed out, the memoir is fundamentally differentiated from historical writing and chronicle in that it disregards the substantiation of its content and shuns completely any empirical evidence, being driven instead by "the passion for personal justification" (1957: 11—12). As such, a memoir is structured so as to focus primarily on the writer and the deployment of the writer's "personal" memory implicating the writer in a process of self-representation as the object of writing, and even further, as the very condition of memory: "For an experienced event is finite—at any rate, confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered event is infinite, because it is only a key to everything that happened before it or after it" (Benjamin 1969: 202). Thus, we have the paradoxical experience of "a distanced immediacy": a distance from the events the memoir narrates and a proximity to the subjective experience of those events (Asdrahas 1957: 14-15). The distance accounts for the narrative's being a parade of shadows invoked, retrospectively, in order to represent the conditions of a present. In the case of Makriyiannis, this representation is resolutely didactic: "I am a simple citizen and a gardener, and I wrote all this without passion so it can be seen You, then, readers, and all citizens who will be living here, must become attentive critics, to discern the truthful from the false" (Memoirs, 319). In other words, the readers are, for all practical purposes, recruited into the truth-seeking process the memoir has set in motion. The writer's present to the readers is not his memoirs as events, as the sort of reminders that mean to generate a guilty conscience, but the parameters of his memory—both the remembered images and their imagined contexts. Makriyiannis s constant invocation of the reader must be examined beyond both its literary conventionality and its psychological cause (Makriyiannis's sense of inadequacy as an illiterate writer). It is a necessary component in the signifying structure of his work, lending his memory an always accessible present and an always present plurality. Therefore, his appeal to his readers for recognition is never desperate. He only calls on them to remind them why he—such an inappropriate agency—is actually writing. He calls on them just as he calls on his remembered experiences; he calls on them because he already represents them.11 ii. Makriyiannis's sense of his reception is remarkably astute. Not only does he guard the

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The implications of this retrospective projection of representations are laid out in Irigaray's reading of "the Platonic cave" (in effect, an unveiling of the Western world s first cinematic experience) as the West's most celebrated site of the logic of identity: the process of identification with the representation of/as the Same. Memory, being inevitably an hystera, is only played out on "the backcloth of representation" (Irigaray 1985: 249). In the discourse of the national, this means that the canvas of memory has inevitably the appropriate (proper) national texture. Or, in other words, as "personal'* memory seeks to instruct, to (in)form, the national, it aligns itself with the same images that constitute it as an "element" of a national "community"; it constructs itself along the lines of the same. In Makriyiannis's case, this alignment facilitates the subsequent reproduction of his text, or his memory, or better yet, his presence, and it does so with a highly cultivated act of forgetting.12 The cultivation of forgetting must be understood in Umberto Eco's sense of "forgetting not by producing absences but by multiplying presences" (1988: 260). Makriyiannis must be reinvoked, rediscovered, reproduced again and again, and each time reintroduced as a more and more expansive signifier of national culture. The proliferation of glosses, of interpretations, of attributions of archetypal ethnic characteristics—in short, the excessive (reproduction of the images of the national—signifies at the operative level what Castoriadis has called "the self-occultation of society" (1982: 129). Thus, this will to oblivion (as Kenan would call it), although important in that it lends itself profusely to hegemonical practice, is even more crucial in that it constitutes one of the foundations of national-cultural fiction at the level of discourse and the imaginary, which is the will to oblivions inextricable link to what is signified as tradition (see Zumthor 1988: 106—7). fate of the manuscripts with enormous attentiveness and secrecy, ensuring their preservation for a more "appropriate" time of reception (making for a wonderful irony in light of the desperate attempts of critics to receive him properly), but he even lays out instructions to future readers on how to research and substantiate the truth of his story. At one point, he refers to specific Athenian newspapers of the day, including date and issue number (Visions and Miracles, 171-73). This is a far cry from Seferis's naturally (i.e., traditionally) enlightened primitives, a point made also by Kaklamanis, who identifies in the famous series of paintings commissioned by Makriyiannis (hailed as the apotheosis of Hellenic folk art) a passionately topographic and cartographic mentality (1989: 20). 12. "The representation designated as presence, or the presence making an appearance as representation, makes men forget, in an other or like act of forgetting, the foundation it rises out of" (Irigaray 1985: 24.7). Regarding Makriyiannis, the forgotten foundation would be the conditions of the production of memoirs in the 18505; the demand on the part of Neohellenism for a written history that demonstrates its semantic link to an invariable, eternal site. See also Zumthor: "We forget the present before our knowledge of a memorious past, in order to project upon the future a figure of eternity" (1988: 112).

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Visions and Miracles of Writing Nowhere in Neohellenic cultural history is this national-cultural fiction, this idolatry of tradition, revealed as extensively as in the way that salvational signs like "Makriyiannis" become incorporated in the operations of the masscultural spectacle by which nationalist hegemonies generally sustain themselves. This is as much a consequence of Makriyiannis's own idolatrous moments—inherent in the writing of anyone who would be obsessed with confessing the national truth—as it is of the ideological mechanism instituted with every national imaginary that guarantees the proper (truthful) confessions of those individuals it recognizes as its voice. In this sense, the writing of Visions and Miracles, as Makriyiannis shifts his attention from writing the truthful history (memoir) to writing the magic of truth itself, is inevitably the writing of idolatry. It is idols writing: Today I was saying it with tears—if it be his good will—that he enlighten me as to what to do, to write all this, as I am illiterate; and I was crying and begging him, and just when I was doing my penance, I see in front of me, I see his omnipotence, Christ and the Mother of God, each holding a cross in their hands, each cross shining, and underneath them the letters said: Write. (Visions and Miracles, 194)

History ("my story") is no longer the exigency of memory—or again, the memoir is now, desublimated, the dream itself. And thus, being (the document of) a dream, Visions and Miracles poses a great challenge to the canonical classification of the Neohellenic tradition, especially in juxtaposition with its glorious predecessor. It is not surprising then that beyond its initial splash as an event of major archaeological importance and its subsequent assimilation into the language of neo-Orthodoxy and the populism of the mass media, this manuscript, as a work, was already, six years after its publication, casually being pushed to the margins, In the most intelligent response of the Greek intelligentsia, Nikos Svoronos argues that we must see Visions and Miracles as a metatext, as "the metaphysical exegesis of the corresponding [historical] narratives in the Memoirs" and, in addition, as the manifestation of "the deeper intellectual mechanisms that create and express the popular ideology of an epoch" (1984: 28—29). He sees in the text a reflection of the "general atmosphere" of the period as experienced and interpreted by the nonpropertied peasantry and disaffected urban lower classes, which constituted the main fighting force during the War of Independence. For most of them, after twenty years of Bavarian rule and internal politics of petty private interests fed on the leftovers of imperialist

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powers, the political act now expresses not heroism but decadence. Svoronos concludes that at this stage Makriyiannis turns to an impulsive "theorization" of the events of the early 18505, "a sort of apology for his personal and public life " and that the hallucinatory discourse of Visions and Miracles forwards the interpretive key of the Memoirs, "provided one cracks the code of the dreams, the visions, and the miracles" (30). Thus, Visions and Miracles is an immanently imaginary discourse, whose religious expression is not the cause of it but the outcome. At the same time, it is simply indicative of the obsessive atmosphere of the period. Makriyiannis wrote in the very period in which Greece was codifying its culture—that is, literally textualizing it (whether constitutionally, judicially, academically, or publicly via the daily press)—in order to set the wheels of an official national education in motion. The role of Christian Orthodoxy was at this time highly debated and its power challenged, on the one hand, by the increasing secularism of an educated ruling class seeking its legitimacy in the paternal arms of European institutions, and, on the other, by the Bavarian monarchy s typically colonialist misapprehension of Neohellenic religious significations (Kokosalakis 1987). It is crucial here to underline the profound ideological confusion in Greece from the 18405 through the 186os, which is no doubt the inherited legacy of the multiaccentual ideological character of the Greek Revolution itself, with the prominent presence of a mercenary mentality and a rather confounded pursuit of class interest (Simopoulos 1986: 24—25, 44—45). All this makes for a definite social and economic heterogeneity in early postIndependence Greece, which is, of course, contradicted by the explicitly stated ambition of both the revolutionary discourse and the newly constituted State to construct a European-style centralized governmental structure. As I have already mentioned in previous chapters, the most glorious achievement of this ambition was the creation of an enormous civil bureaucratic mechanism, built and initially controlled by Greeks born and raised abroad, which survives to this day almost intact and employs nearly half of the urban population (Skopetea 1988: 26-27, 49-52). In this ruthlessly polemical atmosphere, where private political and economic interest usually undersigns the authorial presence, Makriyiannis moves from his famous didactic aphorism "we are in the we, not in the /" (Memoirs, 320)—the displacement of the individual topos of subjectivity onto the imaginary communal topos—to the interrogation of the very authorial subject itself: "But can I write you all this?" (Visions and Miracles, 211). This interrogation, although articulated as a problem of capacity, is more the problem of position, of a site designated and burdened by a divine command, a position articulated

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and occupied only in apposition to the heteronomous verb: "Write." In Visions and Miracles, Makriyiannis is shown gradually to lose hold of the didactic instrumentality he had injected into the Memoirs. Writing becomes itself the work; it becomes itself, in its scriptural process, the experience of apocalyptic contemplation. Taken—as they are—to their utmost extent, the memoirs (to storikon mou), "the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer," become the construction of what is (what is imagined).13 "My story" becomes the mystery, so to speak, and certainly Makriyiannis s text emerges as the first mystic text of the Neohellenic tradition. At the same time, it is also most certainly to be the last, given the present boundaries of the national discourse. This rather intrinsic incompatibility between the "mystic text" and the national discourse lends Makriyiannis's text a very particular significance apart from the usual permutations of the canonical process. Assessing Catholic mysticism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, de Certeau identifies it as "a historical trope for loss" (1986: 80). He sees it as an activity co-incident with the dawning of the Enlightenment, and he reminds us that its very name bears the mark of the Enlightenment, to which mysticism remained, as thought (and indeed, as writing), a mystery. The topography of mystic writing, de Certeau argues, reveals it to be the practice of the suddenly socially disenfranchised and disaffected, making mysticism profoundly antibourgeois in at least two ways: socially, as the activity of a displaced, or better yet, a placeless noblesse; and epistemologically, as the property of divided personalities, placeless culture, unproductive or parasitic economy, and equally "unproductive" sexuality (84—85). 14 The issue of loca13. The actual quotation—"History is the representation, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer"—is taken from Pierre Nora's Preface to his massive work on "the sites of memory" in French history (Nora 1989: 8). It is followed by this remarkable statement: "History's goal and ambition is not to exalt but to annihilate what has, in reality, taken place" (9), The latter statement establishes historical writing as—speaking in Borges's Tlonian language—"a branch of fantastic literature." The claim that history and memory are in this way each others hypostasis cannot be so easily dismissed, and thus neither can the structural significance of Makriyiannis's naming his memoirs /visions ''to storikon mou" That historical writing annihilates its object and then (mis)represents the nothing it has created in its object's place is intricately bound, in the case of national history, with its immanent, constitutive condition of apology/ confession. 14. Let us not forget that Irigaray identifies the space of mystic discourse as "female" (the quotation marks—hers—are crucial here), as the abandonment of knowledge for jouissance, and therefore, as the very abandonment of the "subject" (which, for Irigaray, is irreversibly linked to knowledge, or the male—i.e., to the identitary logic of "self-as-same"): "La mysterique: this is how one might refer to what, within a still theological onto-logical perspective, is called mystic language or discourse. . . . This is the only place in the history of the West in which woman speaks and acts so publicly. What is more, it is for/by woman that man dares to enter the place, to descend to it, condescend to it, even if he gets burned in the process" (1985: 191).

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tion, of the position from which one speaks, is thus inherent in the problematic of mystic writing. This is an issue of fundamentally political significance: the mystic /is "a 'siteless site' related to the fragility of social position or the uncertainty of institutional referents" (de Certeau 1986: 90). Makriyiannis extends this "sitelessness," metonymically, to Greek culture in its entirety—"us, the lost ones, for so many centuries erased from the catalogue of the world" (Visions and Miracles, 64)—being inevitably unable to conceive of his voice (or, even more so, of his dreams) as his own. This inability is carried through to all levels, including certainly the very technical process of writing, the very work of representation: "this shining cannot be represented" (196), or "its one thing for a man to see it, and another to write it" (88). But the significance of "sitelessness" or incapacity becomes more revealing if seen, politically, as the characteristic of a discourse that aspires to be national—that is, to speak in the name of Greece—but is not allowed to do so by what is already in place as national discourse: the rationalist hegemony of nineteenth-century European bourgeoisie. In this sense, Vlahoyiannis's assessment of Visions and Miracles as "the work of a madman" is in effect anteceded by the actual discourse surrounding Makriyiannis s activities during the early 18505, a discourse subscribed to by both Makriyiannis and his adversaries and articulated interchangeably as divination or witchcraft, vision or madness, history or magic. Svoronos argues that Makriyiannis, employing a common folk practice, turns to "divine providence" in order to underline a "rational" point. Certain visions or dreams are thus to be understood as imaginary excursions with specific meaning, controlled and reproduced, often consciously, as coded messages: "As in the logos of the folk, in Makriyiannis s texts, parable and simile are transformed into vision and become images with real existence. The immediate instigation of a statement is often displaced by the signifying forewarning dream. Hopes and longings are transformed into prophecies" (Svoronos 1984: 33). This seems especially true of certain dream-parables that Makriyiannis recites in the Memoirs, the symbology of which he then deciphers in our behalf to illustrate specific political points.15 However, Svoronos does not seem to notice that as Makriyiannis gradually moves away from 15. Two examples come to mind, both aimed at illustrating the language of power and political control. The passages are too long to cite here, but, synopses may suffice. The first one describes a "pious" bishop fond offish, who became king and then told his deacon to throw away the fishnet since "the fish has finally been caught" (Memoirs, 159), The second one describes the alliance of man and horse to overcome the dynasty of a common enemy ("the beast of the fields") and the subsequent enslavement of the horse to the master rider (Memoirs, 172).

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recording a memory toward recording a vision, he also gradually abandons the point of decipherment. Although for some time he regards the dreams as coded messages (that is, he conceives them instrumentally), eventually he presents them as uninterpretable rituals. I cite the incident in which Makriyiannis kills a monster upon the Virgin's command: So she gives me a whip with three prongs and an iron end, and I hit [the monster] on the head three times and stunned it; and I was wearing clogs [tsarouhia] and I gave it a good kick and finished it off, and kicked it again out to the yard. And her grace told me to light a large fire and throw the monster in and my clogs, and everything turned to ash, and she told me to gather it all up and throw it in a ditch nearby, (Visions and Miracles, 67)

An inadvertent comic element suffuses this scene, owing mostly to the caricature quality that Makriyiannis lends both to himself and to the Mother of God, a quality that reminds one of the stock characters of traditional Greek shadow-theater. But in no way can this comedy compete with the ludicrousness of Makriyiannis s adversaries in the Greek government (men who had reaped the benefits of the highest levels of European education), who hired "a Turkish man and a Jewish woman from Halkida" to counter-whammy what they saw as Makriyiannis's magical practices (Visions and Miracles, 66).16 No doubt, these events assume the aspect ofcomedie only as a consequence of the professed rationalism of Neohellenism as an aspiring modern national culture. Outside this context, the role of the supernatural is perfectly integrated into contemporary bourgeois hegemony and often, in fact, not hidden at all, Indeed, as Charles Stewart has shown, the status of the "supernatural" may change historically in relation to Neohellenic ruling ideology, but it always remains within the hegemonical sphere: "In the nineteenth century, supernatural beliefs among the peasantry were a sign of ignorance; among the twentieth-century bourgeoisie they are a sign of consciousness. The relation between the middle and lower classes has remained more or less constant, only the markers which claim superiority seem to alter, and these in a way which has reversed their prior associations" (1989: 98). The operation of faith remains constant as well, articulated with that "relation between the middle and lower classes," which nurtures, in its ambivalence, the hegemonic presence of the Nation. In this sense, faith—in reason or in God, in nature or in the supernatural, in history or in magic—becomes the constitutive opera16. I do not think I need to comment any further on the ethnicity of these two stateemployed "magicians." The case is just too revealing of national ideology to warrant anything but mere mention. But as far as the equation of Hellenicity with rationality goes, one can only wonder.

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tional component of national culture. Faith is what enlightens the national path, from the vantage point of the State, and what enlightens the psychic sense of belonging to the community, of imagining it, from the vantage point of the citizen. No doubt, the metaphoric affinity of faith to light is established from the very first theological texts. However, Horkheimer and Adorno have pointed out, consistently with their overall project, that the operation of faith is the operation of the Enlightenment itself (1972: 19-20).17 Although Makriyiannis himself is a staunch enemy of Enlightenment ideas, certainly his text exhibits the inevitable metaphorical confounding of the "rational" and the "divine" inherent in any recourse to the metaphor of light. Thus, while he pronounces that "man makes the lights; the lights don't make the man" (the plural being here a transcription of the French term les Lumieres, common to the discourse of the time), his entire project of memory-as-history is predicated on the divine shining, which "cannot be represented." Similarly, while on the one hand he boasts, "our Constitution is without breeches [sansculottes]," on the other hand he names the Constitution "God's Gospel" What must be underlined here, however, is that these ambi-valences are not the ideological tricks of a masterful State propagandist but the genuine beliefs of a Neohellene peasant caught in the whirlwind of discursive confusion in Greece in the 18405-18605. In either case, for Makriyiannis, faith is knowledge, and indeed the exercises of faith (the endless penance and prayer, the bouts of self-admonition and celibacy, the fasting, the weeping in rapture, the visions, and certainly the writing itself) take place, often explicitly, in a desperate search for knowledge (enlightenment/inspiration).18 Both Makriyiannis's self-description and his accounts of certain occurrences followed by "miraculous" resolutions (his wife's many severe illnesses and recoveries, stories about spiritual possession and subsequent healing encounters with saints) suggest the intimate relationship between religious faith and hysteria in a culture that has yet to be subjugated to the discourse of science (let alone psychoanalysis). Interestingly, Makriyiannis often identifies himself as a "hypochondriac"—the formality of this specialist term, so obtru17. In conjunction with this observation, we should definitely keep in mind the epistemological ramifications of the metaphor of light/vision as an instrument and property of identitary logic in its production of images and its determination of time, crucial to the imaginary institution of any national culture. See Irigaray (esp. 1985: 278—303) and Castoriadis (1987: 167-272). 18. Regarding specifically Makriyiannis*s celibacy, however, we should keep in mind that it is a condition overwritten by another prominent discourse as well. As Herzfeld points out, sexual abstinence is conventionally linked to the preservation of the hero's military prowess, a convention to which Makriyiannis would be especially susceptible (1987: 176—79).

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sive in Makriyiannis's overall vocabulary, should not go unnoticed—and admonishes himself for being so, for he sees this condition as the consequence of his inadequate faith. From the inventory of his own and others' illnesses, Makriyiannis weaves a narrative of confessions that continues for at least the first half of Visions and Miracles, mixing personal tales and dreams about psychically adverse situations, with Makriyiannis acting both as storyteller and as priestly confessor and dream interpreter to people around him. The dreams and confessions function here as cathartic prerequisites for the divine visions that take up the latter half of the manuscript. The catharsis is coordinated by the sacred agents themselves, often under the direct supervision of the Virgin; hence, excrement becomes sacrament (Visions and Miracles, 69), and a menstruating woman is designated as holy messenger (76-77).19 The unclean, the "rotten," has always been linked to mystical practice (de Certeau 1986: 36-40), and as much as it is a path toward spiritual redemption, it is also a memory (a memoir?) of irredeemable sensuality, the painful trace of writing left upon the penitent light. So, we return. Writing—one way or another—is itself the work, and the work is conceived in its concreteness, materiality, and irrevocable intervention: "I tell him: let me show you which is the work. I take a nail and I hammer on it; it's in the wall. Then, I take it out and I tell him: this, my most learned man, is called a work, for it ruined the wall" (Visions and Miracles, 98). And Makriyiannis's writing intervenes in the discourse of national culture by uncompromisingly defying, indeed denigrating, ruining, its own authority— not, however, as the deliberate and instrumental gesture of "the humble art" (Seferis) but as the unthinkable, unwitted dream of documenting the truth of history, as the direct confrontation—painful in its impossibility—with the imaginary: "I cannot, brothers, write for you, neither knowledge do I have nor guts, nor can my eyes see now from the tears, and my head is throbbing" (Visions and Miracles, 195). 19. This woman figures significantly in Makriyiannis s visionary obsessions and fuels greatly his already highly developed religiosity by convincing him of her direct contact with the divine. Her presence seems to be connected with Makriyiannis's occasional fits of sexual denial and compulsive physical separation from his wife, for which, amazingly, he incurs a reprimand from the Virgin, who charges him with violating his marital duties (Visions and Miracles, 77, 107,125). This reprimand is no doubt a peculiar construction of a Superego, but it does reveal the prominent position that Makriyiannis reserves for the Mother of God (unusual in canonical Greek Orthodox practice but quite common in the folk imaginary), who is in fact inscribed simultaneously as a powerful negotiator of divine power, a bearer of the word, a compassionate mother, and an unabashed sexual figure (often dressed in red), as Makriyiannis's first encounter with her reveals: "she had under her vestments a large candle, and she raised it up and it went aflame" (Visions and Miracles, 47).

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Yet the truth of history is no longer the mere remembrance of its events, the "naked" memory of its occurrence; it is now the sense of its impossibility and the (co-incident) sacred task of writing it nevertheless. Thus, Makriyiannis desperately demands our attention and our belief (credibility): "Readers, readers, readers: please read carefully all this which is marked down by the worst of God's creatures, the illiterate. These are not the tales of Halima; they are God's rage and guidance to all us sinners, of whatever religion" (Visions and Miracles, 198).20 "God's rage" is most definitely, metonymically, Makriyiannis's rage. "Gods guidance," a lexical convention of folk culture, here undergirds an illiterate man attempting a political intervention through writing. The consequence of such an attempt is a daily delirious vision, the records of which take up the latter part of the manuscript (written soon before Makriyianniss arrest), in which Makriyiannis, once again painstakingly, describes (his) writing's divine origin. It is worth quoting the passage at length: And as this grand shining in the night passed, of the Lord and his kingdom, which I cannot represent, between our Lord and Christ a cross appeared; Christ took it in hand, and suddenly someone comes out with a big trumpet, puts it over his mouth and sounded first left then right, and immediately two riders with banners moved, and the cross at the same time, and following behind them, armies; then came a sea, full of ships, large and proud, with various flags, a crowd of them, the sea choking full of them—they all passed; then armies like ants, red and black. And as they passed by for a long while, a whirl happened, lots of smoke, and a huge river of blood; and when that ended, turkish letters began [appearing]; the turn21 first, ahead, and then the letters. And when they ended, our letters passed, saying "it has come to an end." Then lots of digits, a crowd of numbers. Again I see, "the kingdom has come to an end " I fell into darkness, from within my mind and from within all my insides, and this was all I could make out. I lie down to rest, I stand with the pen, I don't know what to write. As I've turned aside, I see on the ground black letters; I look up, I beg, I see everything white. Finally, I made this out: "Divine justice brings insolence to an end " Then I see other digits, the letter p often, and something in front of it 20* Two things need to be explained and elaborated on here: First, "the tales of Halima," meaning literally in Turkish "the tales of the Patient and/or Gentle One," is the Greek way of referring to The Thousand and One Nights. In common folk usage, the phrase is a euphemism for something considered quintessentially fictional. I have not as yet found an explanation anywhere for this peculiar naming. Second, Makriyiannis often makes no religious differentiations when he speaks of faith. This is especially true regarding Islam: even in the midst of describing a battle scene, he will remark reverently "he's a Turk; he's fighting for his faith" (Memoirs, 69). On the other hand, he is extremely suspicious of "Western" Christianity, which he repeatedly calls a deception. (See Visions and Miracles, 178—92.) 21. The turn is the Sultan's Great Seal, his signature.

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confusing me, I begged, I cried, I didn't see anything else; and, of course, I burdened God, I understood it myself, I'm not God's friend for him to tell me his secrets, to forgive my madness. (Visions and Miracles, 198-99)

This "mad" text is broadcast, then, as a sacred text. It renders its script sacred, if only by irrevocably linking itself to a cosmic order, the order of creation, which, as Castoriadis reminds us, is the radical imaginary within which and by which history is transformed.22 As sacred script, this is pure script, the revelation of all and nothing: "all these letters are above me the abyss of the sea, from the beginning [arche] to this day, with all the numbers and all the orders" (Visions and Miracles, 201). In no way does this writing invoke that single, unique language that defines a cultural community. Indeed, although the semiotics of the scene (constituted as they are within and by their historical moment) may suggest the Greek/Ottoman conflict, the scene actually underlines Makriyiannis s own anxiety about his legitimacy as authorial subject. And lacking the Enlightenment rationale to defend his authorial presence by recourse to the freedom of the individual mind, Makriyiannis-assubject is dissolved: "Once the writing was written on my chest, my head turning to the skies, I see that same Makriyiannis there blessing this other one here" (Visions and Miracles, 211). This image reveals the cost of participating in the battlefield where ideology is reproduced: the demands of "the print market," which was at this time in the process of reifying (legislating, historicizing, marketing) not only the national language but the institution of political power and the magma of national identity. This cost is in some ways the cost of the class struggle itself: the illiterate peasant seeking his voice in a world that now belongs to lexicographers, philologists, folklorists, grammarians—the imagination of the bourgeoisie. "An illiterate bourgeoisie is scarcely imaginable" (Anderson 1983:74)But of course while Makriyiannis confronts the social imaginary itself in his struggle to document the Truth of History, bourgeois history trudges onward in its great rational course: Makriyiannis becomes text and is presumably decoded, analyzed—aestheticized. This is partly facilitated by the very 22. Though God is a prominent character in this scenario, we cannot claim a theological status for this description. God and the Christian symbols—and certainly the Ottoman ones— are the idols through which Makriyiannis attempts to imagine the significance (and signification) of writing. The imaginary at work is not, in this sense, a theological imaginary. Makriyiannis is not preaching here; he is not advocating a religious law. His sense of creation is thus not of theological creation; it is of ontological creation—for him, the creation of a new form. For, "theological 'creation' is just a word; philosophically speaking, it is a misnomer for what is in truth only production, fabrication, or construction" (Castoriadis I984.b: 146).

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accident that makes Makriyiannis s writing specifically his.23 Insofar as it is a phonetic transcription that does not reproduce any syntactical or grammatical rules, Makriyiannis's writing is, one could say, scriptural, ideographic—or, strictly speaking, hieroglyphic. As such, it is immanently linked to the language of dream interpretation, especially in its pre-Freudian moment, as Derrida (reading Warburton) reminds us: When all is said and done [oneirocriticism] was only a science of writing in priestly hands. God, the Egyptians believed, had made man a gift of writingjust as he inspired dreams.. . . The hieroglyphic code itself served as a Traumbuch. An alleged gift of God, in fact constructed historically, it had become the common source from which was drawn oneiric discourse: the setting and the text for the dream's mise-en-scene. (1978: 208)

In other words, the writing writes the dream, insofar as it provides—as sacred representation, as hieroglyph—the code of the dream's interpretation. By extension, one could say that Makriyiannis dreams the nation in writing and by writing it, which is to say that Makriyiannis's writing is a confessional of the Nation-aS'Chaos, and hence a glimpse of the national imaginary. The Aesthetic Technology of the National This anastasts will cause him pain. —Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974)

But it is one thing for a dream to be written, and another for it to be narrated—to be read, interpreted. And a national culture is, if nothing else, certainly a community of interpreters and an inventory of carefully delineated interpretations. As Vassilis Lambropoulos has shown, the Neohellenic national-cultural narrative is specifically an aesthetic enterprise—or, more precisely, the enterprise of aesthetics itself: "Greece, like an accomplished artwork, is portrayed and envisioned as an independent entity of organic unity, which establishes and governs itself according to its own intrinsic laws, without any reference to external conditions or in glorious transcendence of adverse circumstances" (1987: 20). The manuscripts of Makriyiannis are an extremely valuable commodity in this enterprise because their very exis23. His writing is particular to itself and thus unreproducible as such. This does not mean that it is unique or unprecedented. Indeed, Asdrahas has insightfully recognized in Makriyiannis s writing both a formal and a psychic affinity with the epistlography of the barely literate Greek merchant class during the Ottoman years (1957: 23-25). But an imitation of Makriyiannis's writing, as Odysseas Elytis cultivated in his Nobel-winning Axion Esti (1959), flashes out as an unmistakable simulation.

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tence, apart even from what they contain, implies the primary aesthetic transcendental value: the organic order of timelessness/presence. From this perspective, although most definitely an oral expression, Makriyiannis s language is a "dead language"; it is pure script, identifiable as such, and traditionally used and recognized without explicit reference. Thus, it lends itself perfectly to Neohellenisms yearning for an Urtext, and this was Seferis s rationale when he took it upon himself to introduce Makriyiannis into the Pantheon of Neohellenic literary fathers. Seferis laid his hands on the traces of the national past frozen in a lexical artifact, much as an archaeologist fondles his first find at a new excavation site. If we are to subscribe to Anderson's thesis that "print-language is what invents nationalism, not a language per $e" (1983: 122), then we will have to say that the Makriyiannis text, in having its oral expression frozen, in being printed, must have appeared to the avatars of demoticism, who by the turn of the century had seized the terms of national hegemony (never to relinquish them since), as a gift from God. Indeed, Vlahoyiannis would say in 1907 that Makriyiannis s writing was "the most precise orthography" (literally: the correct writing), "because he wrote as he spoke," and "if [his] example were to be followed by all, then a new orthography of the Greek language would have been created, truer than this present dead one, which .. . castrates all authorial and poetic originality" (1977: 30, my emphasis). Makriyiannis s text, then, is a sacred text not because it was handed over by God but because in it the national dream discovers, preserved and intact, its grammar.24 In other words, in Greek national history, Makriyiannis is not the Judeo-Christian Moses; he is the Egyptian Moses—the Freudian one, the creator of national-cultural identity (Freud 1985: 353), who is simultaneously, however, created as such, becoming the name, the text, the image, the idol—or the totem, if you will—of a national imaginary.25 From here on, the subsequent aesthetic fetishism of Makriyiannis (making his illiteracy the foundation of his literary essence) was in someone like Seferis's hands a mere rhetorical game. Seferis's desire to Hellenize Makriyi24. This scene is informed by two statements that I will post here uncommented: "The dreamer invents his own grammar" (Derrida 1978: 209); "Grammar is 'history': a 'photograph' of a determined phase of a (collective) national language, historically formed and in continuous development" (Gramsci 1950: 197). 25. In privileging monotheistic cultures for the ability to rise "to the heights of sublime abstraction," and as a consequence placing the other (totemic?) cultures in a more primitive state of development, Freud avoids confronting the obvious and unceasing desire of monotheistic peoples to pictorialize, to imagine—to totemize—their abstract divinity and his agents, a point especially crucial here, given that the imagination of monotheistic cultures is expended primarily in and by writing scriptures. See Freud's Moses and Monotheism (1985: 256—57).

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annis (i.e., to discover in him the essence ofanthropos) can only articulate itself aesthetically, as the yearning for the sanctification of the artist. Thus Seferis gives us that remarkable passage in which he literally, devotionally, places his hands on Makriyiannis s relic: It has not been many years since, while searching in the Ethnological Museum for memorabilia of Makriyiannis, I saw the plaster cast of his lifeless head. It was like a dried apple, or a pebble from the shore, worn deeply by the restless waves, a little bit larger than a fist. This wretched thing was all that remained at the moment of death from the beautiful and gentle figure of this magnanimous man. (1981: 253)

Anthropos has'triumphed and in his triumph he has become saint. It is the triumph of Order once again (to reinvoke Marx's iSth Bmmaire), the repression of Makriyiannis s greatest achievement: the contemplation/revelation of chaos (whether social or psychic) and the restless struggle against the social imaginary from which no individual emerges victorious. The abolition of "the Sphinx and her nightmarish world" does not end with Oedipus. It starts there and repeats itself endlessly, (presup) posing every institution of social order. In 1943 in Cairo, Makriyiannis was abolished and Seferis emerged as the anthropos.26 Once the fetish had been established, the extension to the commodity Makriyiannis was but an eventuality. The decipherment of the second manuscript fueled the production further, and the "accident" of its religious discourse could not have been more historically appropriate. Suddenly, Makriyiannis's published "national memory," which had given anonymous folk expression its long-sought name, was now even encompassing divine order. The nation was irrevocably confronted with its own imaginary. The effect could only have been stunning, especially for a Left that had never put its own phantasms into question and had found itself swept by one more—this time "socialist"—wave in the one-hundred-year history of modern Greek populisms. In this climate, the reactions to the new Makriyiannis were incoherently disparate. What prevailed was either the typical Enlightenment tendency to perceive the work as "the work of a madman" (going even further in true scientific spirit to suggest that Makriyiannis's old head wounds from the war had damaged his ability to reason), or the neo-Byzantinist tendency to see in Makriyiannis's text a new—that is, Neohellenic—Scripture. Those who fa26. It would be playful, but not outrageous, to say that in a Neohellenic national sense Makriyiannis is the abolished Sphinx—or the Sphinx insofar as he is abolished—and that one point of this text among others is to return to Makriyiannis's writing its Sphinx-like materiality, its enigma.

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vored the latter unwittingly made the right assessment. Considering the aesthetic nature of their judgment, one could only add, rewriting Adorno, that in every perception of God there is actually present the whole of society In the case of Greece, since at least its inauguration as a State (1832), the perception of God has always reflected back the image of a homogeneous social body This obviously phantasmic assertion could only have been possible under the protection of the kind of transhistorical signifier designating an eternal Orthodoxy. Religious discourse carried thus the most formative signifiers of Neohellenic national culture, instituting this formation less by law than by an anonymous, unwritten mythology Makriyiannis s dreams and confessions render this religious mythology personal. For this reason, and given the historical moment of his exhumation (resurrection), he becomes a perfect candidate for national folk hero, and from saint (both politically and aesthetically) he is cast as savior. As Gramsci has pointed out, the experience of the savior (the Superman) rising from our midst is an essentially populist ideology, following the illustrious legacy of Alexandre Dumas—-"the ideology of the musketeer" (Gramsci 1950: 122). For Gramsci (who here is concerned with a secular, not a religious, discourse), the popular savior is signified in romantic stock characters of pulp fiction who are constantly resurrected from one book (or movie) to the next. Such figures are the ones provoking that extraordinary dream, "the dream with eyes open . . . , the great imaginary inkling toward revenge and punishment of those guilty for one's hardships" (Gramsci 1950: 108). This dream is then projected in the quintessentially petty-bourgeois wish "if only I had control of the State for even one day" (Gramsci 123), the very same wish implied in the desperate evocation of Massistas in the drudgery of a dark Athens movie theater. It is what mobilizes the audience s projection of salvation onto the flickering figure on the screen. And it is the same wish or projection that subjugates to the demands of marketing its fulfillment even a historical figure like Makriyiannis. To go on in Gramsci's terms then, this market generates the popular novel Makriyiannis, whose protagonist may indeed be a real person, but who becomes actually historical only by being fictionalized (mythistovidzed). This novel narrates Makriyiannis s feats (his "Herculean tasks"), a narrative spanning the duration of Greek culture, from its initial moment of national institution to the present: "The entire life [of popular heroes] is interesting, from, birth to death, and this explains the success of the serial, even if here continuity is entirely a matter of technique: that is, the initial creator can write of the hero s death, and his 'successor' of resurrecting the hero, much to the great delight of the audience, whose passion is itself resurrected, renewing

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and prolonging the form according the new material it is offered" (Gramsci 1950: 128). The serial form demands this kind of co-production, presupposing the conspiratorial affinity between the production and the consumption of culture; its order of continuity hinges on a collaboration, in the most literal and political sense of the term. Thus the novel Makriyiannis has been interminably serialized, from the commentary of the first editor (Vlahoyiannis in 1907) to the references in the editorials of today's Athenian dailies, drawing larger and larger audiences as its time progresses, and being reproduced in more and more modernized segments—from the exclusive circles of bourgeois intellectuals of the 19205 and 19305 to the omnipresent channels of privatized television in the 19805 and 1990s.27 The novel's reception soon blurs the differentiation between the historical and the fictional—or between memory and vision, if you will— constituting a mythical plot in which the protagonist is condemned to periodical resurrection as the national(ist) discourse sees fit. It is a spectacular resurrection: the (re) constitution of national culture in a constant flow of segments: a technological continuity speculated as an ethnological continuity (in order, indeed, to anesthetize the very pain of resurrection, ofanastasis, to recall Irigaray). Thus, the savior is kept present. For a savior is always needed for a national culture to be (re) constituted, which is why the "discourse of salvation" is, after all, the discourse of the national institution. 27. Note that Makriyiannis *s Memoirs first appeared in serialized segments in the Athenian newspaper Akropolis, starting on June 28, 1904.

CHAPTER 6

The Phantasms of Writing, II NOSTALGIA FOR UTOPIA —THE IDOLATRIES OF SEFERIS

Ernst Bloch, that indefatigable thinker of Utopias, pointed out once that "one can read the Arabian Nights in many places as a manual for inventions" (1988: 5), implying that something more can be found here than artistic craftsmanship or a technology of the imagination. Bloch establishes a direct association between fairy tales (especially the Oriental tale), Utopia, and,technology (163—66), an association that I find particularly relevant to the workings of a national imaginary. We have already seen the final coincidence of these three domains in the contemporary refiguration of Makriyiannis's presence; the dream-tales from the Utopia of the "folk psyche" are retold as televisual glimpses of the national aesthetic. We have also seen how Seferis s careful delineation of Neohellenism s aesthetic as the spirit ofanthropos on the body (and text) of Makriyiannis initiated this textual-technological process by which the national dream is recirculated. In this sense, Makriyiannis and Seferis, as historical events, cannot be disengaged from each other. Singling out one man (Seferis) and one occasion (his lecture on Makriyiannis in 1943) as the instance of a formidable hegemonical practice may indeed run the risk of rendering history as an individual act. However, I insist on this subjectification, if you will, precisely because Seferis is not merely an individual presence with a specific biography Like Makriyiannis, within the particular historical terms of Neohellenic national culture, Seferis stands as an ideological object, indeed as the ideological object of twentieth-century Greek culture, the Sublime Object, as Slavoj Zizek would say, constituted as such by a deliberately cultivated absenting of so-called subjective features, It is this particular cultivation of one's self as Sublime Object, which chronicles in turn a whole set of social-historical processes, that I would like to explore here,

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Since his arrival on the Greek literary scene during the 19305 with his first volume of poems (Turning Point, 1931), Yiorgos Seferis (1900—1971) has had an incalculable impact on Greek literary practice. Seferis was born in Smyrna, Asia Minor, into an educated, Europeanized family; both his father and his brother wrote verse, though either by circumstance or by idiosyncrasy nothing came of it.1 The defeat of Greece in the Asia Minor expedition (1922), the destruction of Smyrna, and the subsequent exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey made an indelible mark upon Seferis's psychical world, a mark integrated into his political and aesthetic project as the primary semiotics of his nostalgia. Seferis made his living in various capacities associated with the Greek Foreign Ministry, serving as press secretary during the Second World War (in exile along with the Greek government in Egypt, Palestine, and South Africa) and as a diplomat in various sites in Europe and the Middle East after the war. Thus, he was circumstantially linked with the Greek State apparatus in such a way as to be consistently implicated in its various maneuvers, an issue with which he was unceasingly preoccupied, detesting it and yet using it as a foil to his vocation as a poet. We know all this because of the meticulous personal notebooks he kept throughout his life—published under the title Days—notebooks that in themselves constitute, I would argue, a formidable national history of the period, marked explicitly by a highly refined confessional expression. Seferis's official status as the master poet of Greece was not established until late in his life, after his Nobel Prize in 1963. He left behind him a relatively brief but careful poetic oeuvre, which, even though it may have, after a point, spun around its own symbolic and ideological deadlock (Leontar is 1983), nevertheless left an indelible mark on the modern Greek poetic arena, securing within it (by sheer force of poetic style) a mechanism for Seferis's perpetual reproduction. There is enough written about Seferis's poetry, especially in Greek, to constitute a full-fledged industry. To take up the subject of Seferis's poetry once again would first require, from my point of view, a ruthless dismantling of this accumulated refuse of discourse surroundi. Seferis actually supervised and edited a volume of poems by his brother Angelos Seferiadis, which was published eighteen years after the latter poet's death (1967). And at one point in his notebooks, Seferis records four verses that Cavafy was allegedly fond of recalling, though their author remained unknown to him. He then remarks with characteristic understatement: "My father's verses," and goes on to record with glee an eyewitness's claim of having heard Cavafy s additional comment: " Verses of some Smyrnaic poet; the best forgotten verses I know'" (Days, 3: 247). I cite this as an introductory example of the meticulous and discreet application of the Seferian discourse to the fashioning of Seferis. (Since I will be quoting often from either Seferis's Essays or his published journal [Days], I will cite the source by its monolectic title, followed by volume and page numbers.)

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ing his verses and his name, a task for which I am certainly not suited.2 Yet there is another reason for not taking the time to address the Seferis phenomenon as a poetic phenomenon. For as distinct as Seferis's poetry was, he would not have achieved such cultural dominance without his consistent and prolific critical production, what Dimitris Dimiroulis has rightly called "his critical clairvoyance" and "his perspicacity and adroitness in appropriating, modifying, and exploiting the ideas of his time" (1985: 59—60). Seferis wrote a series of essays that exemplify, perhaps even more than his poetry, the contemporary obsessions of Neohellenism. In what is surely an apparition of Montaigne, Seferis entitled these prose writings Dokimes, redirecting the literary term "essay" (dokimion) back to its original meaning as it had been coined along with the genre: "attempt," "trial." In the space of two large volumes of these "trials" (written 1936—71 and published in 1944, 1962, and 1974 [final edition]) parades the entire Neohellenic "spirit" and "tradition" under the keen eye of the culture's supreme judge, in what becomes a glorious show of the mechanisms of national-cultural memory, replete with the most conspicuous lapses.3 As Dimiroulis again notes, Seferis exercises "literary criticism not as aparergon but as a high-valued ergon" (1985: 63). I would add that a close reading of Seferis's notebooks (which he carefully prepared for publication) would show this condition to obtain there as well. In other words, anything that Seferis writes becomes by design a literary statement, providing as such an overall cultural intervention of enormous power and a hegemonical presence rarely granted to individuals, especially individuals who cannot be construed, strictly speaking, as political figures. After years of ambivalent reflections on the makeup of this particular figure in modern Greek culture, I would now unreservedly say that in taking up Seferis one takes up the significance of genius. I am using this term deliberately (and against all of Seferis's acolytes who use it addictively), because by genius I certainly do not mean the traditional notion of divine order descending to the domain of one individual mind. Instead, I would situate this notion entirely within the terms of certain social-historical boundaries—a phase of national culture, in this case. I am referring to that one "individual" discourse which, for reasons entirely different each time, carves out the very terms a culture uses to proclaim its historical identity at a given moment. Like the 2. However, for a brief example (in English) of this type of project, see the excellent article by Dimiroulis (1985) and the many insights to be found in Lambropoulos's essays (1988). 3, My friend and colleague Vangelis Kalotychos has named Seferis's collected essays "the most deliberate and most covert anthology of modern Greek literature" (my emphasis). Indeed, this anthological order, with its necessarily canonical implications, is woven into the very form of the Seferian critical utterance.

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significance of all historical moments, this can only be assessed in retrospect. Shakespeare, in this sense, is a genius insofar as he comes to monopolize the terms of "Elizabethan England"; Baudelaire is a genius insofar as he comes to monopolize the terms of "Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century"; Gandhi is a genius insofar as he comes to monopolize the term "Mahatma"; and so on.4 Shahid Amin's argument for the resolutely overdetermined construction of Gandhi, in fact, is an appropriate ground in which to anchor an interrogation of the phenomenon of Seferis. For although Seferis was certainly not a "Mahatma," he does exercise his power under that tremendously ambiguous and cross-discursive sign of grace. It is my contention—and I am making it strictly in regard to Seferis's prose—that in reading Seferis's essays one is implicated in a field of seduction where there is simply very little room for negotiation. I say this without meaning to underestimate the extensive canonizing role of the literary and critical discourse that elicited, and continues to elicit, out of Seferis's "voice" the signs with which to fashion its own. Nor do I wish to underplay the historical need of post-Civil War Greek national culture to invest in an intellectual father figure. All this deserves due attention, and in any case, the sheer mass of parasitical language that trails the Seferian legacy makes it difficult to ignore. Nonetheless, there is no way to reduce the overwhelming impact of Seferis's presence to an external condition, to a political or psychological cultural demand that created a Seferis to satisfy some allegorical or historical need. Any autonomous engagement with Seferis s writing (which in the current Greek context is simply to say, any actual reading of his writing) would be called upon to acknowledge and address its entrance into a territory of seduction that is completely inherent in the writing, interwoven with its texture, with the very terms of its form. Seferis establishes within and by the form of the essay an indisputable grace. Perhaps this is due in large part to his extremely attentive abandonment to the resilience and the open-ended structure of the genre itself. Theodor Adorno has provided us with an eloquent meditation on the essay as a particular form of thinking, which is also a defense of the essay against the totalizing claims of a scientific or philosophical treatise. Simultaneously, in a 4. Regarding Gandhi, I am referring to Shahid Amin's illuminating article (1988), which demonstrates how Gandhi is transformed into "Mahatma" by virtue of a series of symbolic negotiations between the peasant population, nationalist leaders, and the colonialist apparatus. Gandhi becomes in this way a more or less sovereign signifier, which is then attached to whatever practices any one of these parties chooses as ideological representations—that is, as exercises of its power. The conjuring up of "Makriyiannis" although less overwhelming, is an analogous case.

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true co-incidence of content and form (the essays mark), he makes his claim concrete with a remarkable piece of writing, which "proceeds, so-to-speak, methodically unmethodically" (i984a: 161). His contention is that the essay's form has been from the beginning tied to the fragmentary and ephemeral trace that is human experience, the point at which historical totality is most radically mediated. Thus, unlike all the various other revered modes of transmitting and preserving knowledge, the essay is by virtue of its form unyielding to any kind of transcendental enterprise: "the desire of the essay is not to seek and filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal" (159). In this way, the essay is a form of writing immanently tied to the writing's circumstances. Seferis explicitly invokes this discursive condition in his Preface to the Essays, submitting it to us, however, with a moralistic qualification: "these studies are marked by the circumstances, which is to say that, besides the flaws of the author, they also contain the flaws of the times" (Essays, i: 14). But Adorno goes further than noting merely the historical contingency of the form. Indeed, as a consequence of the essay's absolute contingency, which is manifested in "the form's groping intention" (ig84a: 164), the essay can never quite master its object. At best, it can achieve an interchangeability between the theory and its object by an unceasing process of selfreflection: "The essay would like to cure thought of its arbitrariness by taking arbitrariness reflectively into its own procedure instead of masking it as spontaneity . . . The essay remains what it always was, the critical form par excellence" (166). We could paraphrase Adorno s terms and suggest that in its constant (yet always momentary) self-reflection, in its coordination rather than its subordination of the elements of knowledge, and in its fundamentally anachronous place (170), the essay is, so to speak, nomadic. It mobilizes its object of reflection consistently away from, and against, some abstract and truth-claiming conceptual closure. This is a transgressional mobility; "the law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy" (171). But how does Seferis fit into this terrain? To begin with, I think it would be more than a simple amusement to imagine an encounter between Seferis and Adorno. Certainly, the reconstitution of Odysseus in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment would have derailed Seferis's otherwise carefully cultivated equilibrium (although beyond this empathic symbolic investment in the Homeric hero, Seferis might have found the impetus of the project much to his liking). Moreover, Seferis was an overt Francophile in his literary spirit and remarkably English in his public life, and he held a deeprooted mistrust of German culture largely because of its disastrous legacy

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within nineteenth-century Greek letters. But in spite of all this, there is a certain affinity between these two men.5 The likeness appears in all of the "problems" and the "solutions" this voyage might display for us in retrospect—and I am using this kind of language (and in quotation marks) to deflect the traps of the usual terminology of value. In any case, we could perhaps identify the intersecting ground of these two figures as a shared "philosophical ethos " in Foucault's sense of the concept (1984).6 No doubt, Seferis had never read Adorno, whose thought did not really circulate widely outside Germany until the 1968 period, near the time of Adorno's death and only a couple of years before Seferis s own. (The circulation of thought has in many ways its own history, independent of the subject or text to which it is nominally attached.) But a sensitive reading of Seferis's notebooks during the 19405 and up to the mid-1950s, as well as of the essays he wrote during this period, reveals a similar position vis-a-vis the exigencies of history, exigencies whose present Adorno and Seferis shared.7 I have embarked upon this tangent in order to dramatize a certain historical mark in Seferis s thought that is usually smothered in the narrowly, artificially "Greek" assessments of his presence. But to return to the matter at hand: Surely, much of what Adorno sees (and practices) in the essay is quite 5. "The Jews are all of us," Seferis wrote in Cairo, May 1941 (Days, 4: 91). A year later, he would add: "We say that we are fighting for European civilization. . . . Germany is civilization and its doings perfectly European, that is, scientific. They kill us, they dismantle us, they lay us to waste entirely according to the rules of science" (224). See also his discussion of Alban Berg and atonal music, as early (in Greek terms) as 1939 (Essays, i: 107—9). 6. Beyond this particular Foucaultian characterization, a point must be stressed regarding Seferis and the question of ethos. After years of wrestling with the phenomenon of "Seferis" (inevitable for any Greek involved in literary practices), I have come to the conclusion that no matter how extensive a political, theoretical, philosophical, or formalist critique one may direct at Seferis's work, there is no ground upon which one can honestly (i.e., given the textual evidence of an absurd amount of self-reflexive and self-informative material) disclaim Seferis's integrity in his decision-making processes and his public positions, culturally or politically. For instance, Seferis's idealization of Makriyiannis, although resolutely hegemonic and in retrospect perhaps even self-serving ("objectively" speaking—that is, as the order of things bears it out), is strictly a matter of conviction, not expediency. This motive persists throughout Seferiss entire life, including his stance during the military regime near the end of his life (1967—71). Seferis has a remarkably acute ear for the sounds of history, despite the fact that in the end we may each like a very different kind of music. In other words, a critique of Seferis (by definition counterhegemonic) that challenges the heights of his hegemony is a delicate and complex undertaking and could not be conducted as some sort of simple "patricide." I write this note, in what some might call Seferian form, with a desire for it to stand as the counter-conscience, although an entirely complicit one, to the critique that follows. 7. I am using the word position to account, politically, for the two writers' overall aesthetic and philosophical range. Hence, their shared obsessions with civilization, Utopia, art, redemption, nostalgia, and critique.

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relevant in our attempt to locate Seferis's seductive effect. For instance, each one of Seferis's essays engages one but ephemerally, offering a glimpse of knowledge as if from the window of a train crossing the interminable landscape of history. In fact, most of these essays were written under circumstances of travel—often against the author's wishes—that is, outside the geographical site of their concern, outside Greece. This situation is no more a circumstance than it is a design: "It is difficult for us to discern [things], because in discerning we distort" (Essays, i: 66). But that is precisely Seferis's magic: to obliterate the distinction between circumstance and design. Seferis's essays pursue an unsystematic trajectory, weaving in and out of their epistemic territories with a seemingly arbitrary logic. This aspect has become especially dear to all those Greek literary critics who have voluntarily taken up their place as executors of Seferis's intellectual estate. Thus, Greek criticism has become a hapless simulation of unsystematic and impressionistic writing. This has been duly pointed out in the best critiques of both Seferis and his clones. But often these critiques themselves ultimately imply the desire for a systematic Greek criticism.8 Although I fully stand by the critique, I suspect its conclusions, for they could place us dangerously close to the traditional rationalist claims of science and liberal philosophy. The question, for me, lies elsewhere: namely, what might be the system that "invisibly" coordinates the asystematicity of Seferis? Or, in Adorno's terms (although with an antithetical emphasis), what might be the method that ensures the unmethodical order of Seferis's prose? In other words, I am not interested in debunking this "unmethodical" methodology, which has been highlighted as an endemic condition of contemporary Greek criticism. No doubt, Greek criticism lacks method, or rather, in being blind to Seferis's method, it merely reproduces his method. But this is precisely the point of Seferis's hegemony: the preservation of his discourse requires everyone else's tabula rasa. The reproductions of Seferis are texts without history, for history has already been written for them. And so the followers of Seferis, although they inherit a method, practice an unmethod, a methodological void. Or, to put it more precisely: although not forced to travel fleetingly from place to place, they travel anyway—to nonplaces, without sense, like the companions of Odysseus with wax stuffed in their ears. In this sense, Seferis's overall project—the essays as a collected, preserved, and incessantly memorialized body—actually subverts the terms that might make the essay as a form an indomitable writing practice. The basis of this 8. See particularly Dimiroulis (1984) and Lambropoulos (1988: 209-35).

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collection is, significantly, not the philological fact of gathering and ordering a group of texts together. It is an immanent condition present in each one of them, despite their individual attachments to different times and places. The very title. Essays, was conceived when only about a fourth of the essays were written. It represented, preemptively, all those other unknown essays that were yet to be written; it thus ensured their collection, their place in an enclosed totality Furthermore, as his signature (which marks the end of each essay along with a notation of the precise time and place of each) records in effect Seferis's own coordinates, the collected essays are also a deliberate and constitutive collection of biographical instances, a tableau historique of Seferis. "Deep down, the poet has only one subject: his living body" (Days, 5: So), This may be a rather typical modernist statement, but it is nonetheless accurate. Seferis's essays are merely trials of the same body: a body of texts that is, paradoxically, one text, the same text. The style of this text (this body) is (or essays) an utterance with no /, The effectiveness of Essays stems from an extremely refined cultivation of a style, a critical utterance, that manages in a striking way to efface, and thus accentuate, the authorial presence. In this, Seferis is merely putting into practice T. S. Eliot's early motto in "Tradition and the Individual Talent": "The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality" (1960: 53). Dirniroulis has identified this tendency toward self-effacement in Seferis's poetry as well, recasting in the title of his article ("The 'Humble Art' and the Exquisite Rhetoric") the call from one of Seferis s own verses: "We brought back/these carved reliefs of a humble art" (in Dirniroulis 1985: 79, my emphasis). Indeed, Seferis s tropos (which, in fact, becomes his topos, his ground) is an unreserved, often underlined, humility: "I do not care for the worship of the I" (Days, 3: 241). And certainly, from his constant invocations of Plato's Apology to his numerous subtle imitations of Socratic mannerisms, Seferis does fashion himself the Neohellenic Socrates: "Let us say that I have said nothing" (Essays, i: 457). Yet, as Castoriadis has pointed out regarding Heraclitus (in fact, another authoritative canvas for Seferis s self-portraits), "humility is nothing but the summit of arrogance" (1987: 4). In this deliberate self-effacement, this autobiographical invisibility, Seferis's essay figures ideologically as the polar opposite of Adorno s essay, its alter ego. The criticism of Seferis speaks much louder with its silences than with its carefully elaborated, though elusive, pronouncements. While it seeks to articulate the boundaries of the Neohellenic imaginary, its own imaginary is best revealed in what it refuses to articulate. It is there, perhaps, that one might want to look for Seferis's method, a method deeply woven into the texture of his essay, the texture of its seduction.

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This discursive ellipsis, which hovers unacknowledged beneath what is often self-described as a sinuous prose, characterizes the critical discourse of Seferis's generation in general. Much has been written in Greece about the so-called "Generation of the 305," so much and in such a deliberate manner as to institute an entire logic, which, sadly, dominates Greek literary criticism today: the logic of generations by decades, as if the life of literature consists in its imperative wardrobe changes every ten years or so. The "Generation of the 305" is particularly significant because it initiated this kind of logic by elaborating on its own semiology. This elaboration rests on a constitutive rhetorical contradiction between this generations exemplary internationalism abroad (where Greek literature is granted the universalist status of contemporary Art) and its dogmatic Hellenism at home (where Greek literature is encoded with the insular signs of demoticist populism). Seferis spearheads this double (and duplicitous) self-representation with a series of essays on the poetics of his time and its relation to the (neo) Hellenic tradition, all written shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. The ideological axis of these essays is a New Critical stance informed particularly by the modernist poetics of Paul Valery and T S. Eliot. Though operating initially under the shadow of the early Eliot, here Seferis parallels the development of Eliot's critical writings of the 19405, with a moralistic advocation of artistic independence and experimentation, an "avant-garde" that is to act as the implicit critical conscience of society, as the undisclosed repletion of its lack.9 When Seferis theorizes (whether on writing, politics, or culture in general) he does so not as a "theorist" but as a "poet"—which in his terms means as a literary technocrat in society's service: "the theoretician theorizes; the poet, no matter how much inhabited by the gods, is homofaber, a practical man" (Essays, i: 159). It is important here to note that Seferis s "modernist" theories follow more or less the path of the demoticist problematic as it was articulated in the i88os with Yiannis Psicharis's chronicle of his "return" voyage into Greece.10 9. As Kapsalis points out in an essay that best conceives the relation of Seferis to the program of Anglo-Saxon New Criticism, "the 'New Critical' poem is always that which is missing from society. Its organic aesthetic self-sufficiency is construed and determined precisely as soda! lack and presupposes, in order to function, an organically constituted totality of similar works: Eliot's 'tradition' " (1987: pt. i, p. 81). 10. Neohellenic criticism has altogether repressed the fact that Yiannis Psicharis's seminal publication (My Voyage, 1888), which is traditionally seen as the source of the demoticist movement, was primarily a travel narrative in the guise of scientific field work, a study of the present state of the Greek language which is just as much an account of the authors first impressions of Greece on his return as an adult. Although Psicharis was an accomplished linguist, having had the fortune of Renan's tutelage, this particular work has, ideologically, nothing to do with the problematic of language. It is merely the work of z flaneur, like the many

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Seferis merely wants the demoticist tradition to embrace modernist technique and modernist poetic sensibility. Since the demoticist movement was, historically, a nationalist movement, concealing a conservative ideology within a tremendously successful populist vision, Seferis's intervention consists in seizing upon this vulgar polemic and displacing it into a refined aesthetic. Hence his recognition that the demoticist language is as artificial as any other, for all writing partakes in this sense of an artifice. With an inventive rhetoric, Seferis turns this artifice into an art, which in order to be Art (modernist art) must be Nature. It is worth quoting the passage at length: Naturally, every written language is artificial, as they say. This means, I suppose, that a certain art is needed in order to write. But art is needed in order to run as well, without saying that if we are good runners we run artificially. We run artificially by car. Our art is based always on a nature, and it is this nature that matters. Everything is a question of balance; we need nature and we need art, and we also need occasionally a new conception of nature, in order to advance art. But it is bad art when the artificial gives us the impression of artificiality. (Essays, i: 67)n

This passage employs a rhetorical mode that is fundamental to the ideological design of demoticism and its triumph as Neohellenism's populist hypostasis. Populism dictates the entire national-cultural ground because it absorbs and redeems whatever elements contribute to its continuation. Mobilizing these elements synecdochically in a constantly revolving series of substitutions, the demoticist-populist discourse is inscribed with continuity not only as essence but as form. Just as, in aesthetics, Art speaks as Nature and viceversa, so, in politics, the State speaks as the Nation. However, the historical period and the discourse encapsulated by Seferis's criticism go one step further, to bring aesthetics and politics into a relationship of identity: "with the generation of the 19305, ethnos [nation] and lacs [the people] become synonymous, simultaneously aesthetic abstractions and ideological weapons, reference points and means of self-confirmation" (Dimiroulis 1984: 83). This identitary closed circuit is then served up by the "Generation of the 305" as an expression of national identity, as a modern Hellenicity. who have graced the history of modern Greece—better yet, of the philologist flaneur, who takes hisflanerie from his linguistic laboratory out into the street. The crucial twist here, however, is that Psicharis s gaze sacrifices the dominance of its detachment for the hegemonic desire to control the terms of Neohellenic discourse. n. To the rationalist clarity of this comment I would juxtapose the following condensed metaphorical illustration, taken from an elaboration on the effortless nature of Makriyiannis: "When you see his manuscript, it is like a wall—a wall built up of stones, one placed on top of another. You see that each word is added to another word like a stone on top of another stone" (Seferis 1970:67).

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Seferis lends to this identitary logic a more refined articulation, which is to say, a more effective self-occultation. In his famous debate with the neoKantian philosopher Konstantinos Tsatsos on the status of modern poetry (1939), Seferis reacts adamantly against the use of "Hellenicity" as an aesthetic criterion. He names it "a dangerous and difficult discourse [logos]" and he rails against all those "misjudgrnents" uttered in its name (Essays, i: 98). He then goes on, in fact, to weave a self-occultation in the guise of critical judgment: "That's why I call ['Hellenicity'] dangerous; because we might happen to destroy purely Hellenic values, with the belief that we are supporting Hellenic art. Yet the opposite may also happen, which is why I used the word 'difficult': that is, to subjugate ourselves to values little or not at all Hellenic, believing we are Hellenizing ourselves" (Essays, i: 98-99). There is an inveterate paradox in this passage: the discourse of Hellenicity obfuscates things Hellenic. This should not surprise us, for in identitary logic the most refined arguments are closed and circular. What is actually interesting in this passage, however, is its implicit assertion that in acting with Hellenicity as an a priori, we are operating under the distorting influence of belief. We believe that we are Hellenizing things, that we are defending Hellenic art, while in fact we are doing the exact opposite. The corrective that Seferis recommends (by implication, of course; never directly) is that we must exercise critical judgment; we must be close readers, and as such, read the Hellenicity of things. In other words, Hellenicity does matter for Seferis, contrary to what he says explicitly; in fact, it matters in the most authoritative way. But its authority does not lie in a prescribed condition. Hellenicity is exercised in the work of the critic. It is the very essence of human activity itself, that which makes art the most sublime expression of nature.12 Seferis transcribes (metaphorizes) the signification of Hellenicity onto the signification of Nature. He prompts us often, one way or another, "to learn which are the biological features of our speech" (Essays, 1: 70, my emphasis). In his essay on Erotokritos, the sixteenth-century Cretan verse-romance, he states it in no uncertain terms: "the fifteen-syllable verse comes closest of any other rhythm to the deepest waves of our speech.... It is not just an expressive but a psychic and a somatic manner [fropos], which brings us closest to the roots of ourselves" (Essays, i: 298). For Seferis, the effective dissemination of Erotokritos and its survival is primarily a matter of its form—that is, a language that renders into verse the spoken language of its time. In elevating the current 12. Seferis is in this particular sense a romantic, except that he lends to his discourse the discreet rationalism of an Anglo-Saxon modernism. Hence, his reverence for Solomos and his acceptance of Perikles Yiannopoulos> both of whose personalities were otherwise most antithetical to Seferis s.

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idiom into poetry, the poet enters the rhythm of his society, thus guaranteeing organically the immortal remembrance of his verse. In this sense, "Hellenicity" achieves an underhanded, a furtive, aesthetic value. Its explicit "artificial" expression (the "ruined" signs of the ancients) gives way to a "natural" one (the immortal roots that spring up everyday). "Hellenicity" embraces the ideology of sentimentality From a space of (ancient) memory, it passes into a space of (present) myth; from its allegiance to drama, it turns to melodrama. Eleni Vakalo, in her analysis of the aesthetics of Greek art as it developed in the 19308, has put the matter so precisely that I have little to add. I translate: Imperceptibly, without being sensed, the essence of the meaning of Hellenicity was altered. Its ideological investment was displaced onto the sentimental level. Its intellectual content was replaced by an emotional one. The mission for a continuity of tradition passed onto a poetics of "absence," the point at which "mythology" loses its strong ties to the living (active) operation of a community and becomes, necessarily in our days, only an individual, "personal mythology" (1983:21)

Seferiss presence signifies the most elaborate construction of a personal mythology, a condition he cultivated by virtue of his consistent self-effacement in the name of a transcendental Hellenicity, itself a practice of "a poetics of absence." The task that Seferis sets up for himself is to write a history of this transcendental substance, which is to say, to map.its elusive voyage within the trajectory of the Greek language. As I already pointed out, this is an anthological task, literally a discriminating gathering of those sublime blossoms that are to be codified as the (neo)Hellenic tradition. In his analysis of this project and its filial relation to New Criticism, Dionysis Kapsalis focuses on the etymological implications of the notion of "tradition," as well as those of its rhetorical armory—"metaphor." In Greek, both words are inscribed with a condition of movement in space, of transportation. Pamdose ("tradition") literally suggests a transmission of signs across the historical terrain, and metaphora signifies the primary semiological property of this transmission. Kapsalis stresses the role of the second, making an interesting use of I. A. Richards's translation of the Aristotelian value of "good metaphorizing" into "the command of metaphor" (1987: 2: 96). The emphasis on command leads to an appreciation of the position of the master poet or critic who makes it his task to tamper with the allegedly organic transmission of the elements of his culture, while underlining their organic essence and even going so far as to introduce his own presence into

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that organic flow. Here, Eliot and Seferis are absolutely compatible within their contexts. Both embark on the project of redirecting and realigning their proper traditions in order to construct in the process the "organic" antecedents of themselves: Eliot with the metaphysical poets, Seferis with Ewtokritos and Makriyiannis. This project is itself fundamentally a metaphorical project, as it involves a rearrangement, a transposition, of certain historical significations by virtue of an introduction, for example, of new interpretations of past literary works, different poetic and critical practices, or certain theoretical structures developed specifically in order to displace the canonized cultural paradigms. The notion of metaphor thus emerges as both the form and the field in which the battle for the (re)orientation of tradition takes place. Seferis stands (as does Eliot) at the center of this site, being both the instigator of this metaphorical process and its executor, its carrier (metaphoreus). Indeed, the self-effacing presence of Seferis consists in his rendering himself as the metaphorical device—that is, his ascription to his own self of a metaphorical property. Thus, like a modern Hermes, he transposes himself into the various texts and discourses that constitute the (neo) Hellenic tradition and rearranges them as he pleases. The work of the metaphor, as Kapsalis insists, is expansionist in its form, interventional, and Seferis fashions himself in this sense as a modernist deus ex machina who will redeem a valiant but mishandled tradition and set it on its proper course. Nothing must stand in his way, not even Greece itself! "Greece becomes a secondary affair, when one contemplates Hellenism. Whatever in Greece gets in the way of my contemplation of Hellenism, let it be destroyed" (Days, 3: 95). This nearly fanatical resolve of Seferis to make himself the singular subjectivity in the vortex of an entire culture, the incessant metaphoreus of its essence, rarely surfaces above his carefully cultivated countenance. Nevertheless, it lies consistently beneath his utterance; it signifies the mobilizing force in his act of writing and the point of ideological cohesion in his poetics, so that "he can write his poetry as an unceasing etymology of the essence of Hellenism" (Kapsalis 1987: 2: 97), Although fundamentally secular and certainly rationalist in the best Enlightenment sense, Seferis enters this metaphorical enterprise not as an agent of a historical practice but as a servant to a metaphysics. Kapsalis insists—and he may be right—that Seferis s metaphysics is predicated directly upon the metaphysics of metaphoricity itself: "The metaphysics of a general metaphoricity is precisely what permits Seferis to connect 'the command of metaphor' as a practical issue of his art with the identity of a tradition, with the significance of an entire civilization, and to negotiate the metaphysical content of this tradition as if it were simply a

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practical matter of his own art" (2: 97).13 But what might also be interesting to consider is the extent to which the metaphysics of metaphoricity exists already as a constitutive condition of the Neohellenic tradition, and whether Seferis is merely playing out the contemporary exigencies of a national culture founded on the metaphysics of a most formidable metaphor: the Hellenes. This metaphor is implicated directly in an anthropocentric metaphysics. "Hellenism means humanism " Seferis wrote at one point (Days, 4: 134), and we have seen his elevation of Makriyiannis into the sacristy of anthropos. Furthermore, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech before the Stockholm Academy (1964), Seferis characteristically returns to this favorite schema of his (as we saw it in his lecture on Makriyiannis), the "abolition of the Sphinx" upon the invocation of that one talismanic word, anthropos: "this simple word ruined the beast" (Essays, 2: 161). Of course, the history of civilization signals that the beast actually consists in such "innocent" logoi as this one by Seferis. Indeed, the beast is the very employment of that one word that abolishes whatever wishes to stand in its way, if I may allow language to indulge for a moment in the very same metaphysics of Enlightenment myth. Seferis s complicity in the metaphysics of metaphoricity, then, resides in his conceiving of Hellenism asphysis and in occupying, in his artistic practice, the position of transcriber (interpreter) ofthisphysis into text. His motivation is certainly not that of a nationalist, strictly speaking, but of a (meta)physician. For one thing, he abhors any kind of militancy, of intellectual organization as engagement, in the sense that Jean-Paul Sartre lent to the term. Seferis serves the State indirectly, and perhaps even against his explicit wishes, in preserving and cultivating, like a master plastic surgeon, the ideal legacy of Hellenism. In a letter from Pretoria, South Africa (1941) to the English classicist Robert Liddell, Seferis elaborated on his conviction of the unity of the Greek tradition as follows: "It is not a national pride that makes me think that way. It is because I can't have a clear image of Greece otherwise. . . . It is a work of intellectual counterpoint but we are bound to it" (Days, 4: 167—68, English in the original).14 13. It is unavoidable not to pause and consider here, as an amendment to Kapsalis s otherwise insightful critique of Seferis by way of Paul de Man, that de Man would actually have been delighted with Seferis's project, given his own plan outlined at the end of his famous essay "Literary History and Literary Modernity" (1983: 142-65), where literary history is unveiled as none other than the project of literary interpretation. On this basis, de Manian criticism consistently involves the task of metaphor i zing (transposing) textual signification from fiction to interpretation, from poetics to hermeneutics. This is precisely the task of Seferis's entire critical (i.e., anthological) oeuvre. 14. At times, however, this work escapes even the discursive dexterity of Seferis and results in embarrassingly contrived and, for all practical purposes, nationalist statements. For example, upon hearing a villager narrating some ancient legend he admitted he had learned from a

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The engagement here lies in the singular identity of the artist's or critic's work with his national-cultural tradition. This identitary circuit is exacerbated in the case of the Neohellenic tradition, because there the equation is already predicated on the (neo)Hellene's being metaphorized as anthropos. The nature of Hellenes is construed as different from any other insofar as it makes necessary above all the mobilization of some allegedly inherent human attributes beyond the constraints of civilization: "I have a very organic sentiment that identifies human nature with Hellenic nature. . . . It is the opposite of the condition of nonexistence, the abolition of the self, that one experiences in front of the magnificence of certain foreign landscapes" (Essays, 2: 54). In other words, Seferis's implicit political project is ultimately to intervene in Neohellenic tradition as the vehicle inscribed with the mark of a natural identity. His metaphysics consists in the outline of an aesthetic practice that highlights himself as the metaphoreus of the Hellenic physis. I have already likened Seferis to a modern Hermes, although this god was admittedly much too fickle for Seferis's standards to be desired as a symbolic precursor. Nonetheless, Seferis's actions warrant this comparison, and I repeat it because it strikes a wonderful irony in light of the fact that Seferis's greatest poetic rival, and the one to whom he devoted the most uncompromising and most elaborate part of his critical efforts, was a poet from the land of Hermes: Constantine P. Cavafy, of Alexandria. Indeed, in conjunction with Seferis s lecture on Makriyiannis, his critical encounter with Cavafy illustrates better than any other aspect of his work his intervention into the Neohellenic literary canon. Seferis wrote two major essays on Cavafy s work, "C. P. Cavafy, T. S. Eliot: Parallels" (1946) and "A Little More on the Alexandrian" (1941—46), although it is crucial to understand that whatever Seferis wrote about Cavafy, anywhere^ is but a whirlwind of returning apparitions of the same text. This text's aim was to settle once and for all the problem of the relation between the rival text, Cavafy, and the point of contention: the Neohellenic tradition. In this settlement, Seferis takes over as the leading negotiator, engaging the full force of his already sanctioned metaphorical task. What emerges as the key rhetorical figure in these essays is interpretation as translation. This is established as an inherent element in Seferis's readings, so that literally no reading can take place without (re)writing. Seferis is quite explicit in this, although to judge from the textual evidence he seems entirely foreigner, Seferis reacts with a startling incredulity. "It seems to me much more likely that he had heard the story from his mother than from a foreigner," he says (Essays, 2: 144). What can one say to such pyrotechnic naivete? It sounds so unfortunately, so deliberately—as Seferis himself would say derisively—"artificial."

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unaware of the political implications of his act. Seferis never acknowledges reading or writing as a negotiation between certain positions of power. But I need to take a moment here to elaborate. The signifying range of the literal, in my use of the term, always goes far enough to include the metaphorical or transpositional level that is a necessary aspect of any act of criticism. That is, the metaphorical praxis of criticism, as a condition of constructing meaning, is a literal condition, transcribed in the very letter of the critical utterance. Regarding Seferis, however, I use the term literal to refer also to the actual materiality of the conditions in which he wrote his essays on Cavafy, a point we cannot afford to ignore. More specifically, Seferis kept consistent notes on Cavafy's poems throughout the war years he spent with the exiled Greek government in Egypt and South Africa, writing his meditations in the margins of certain of Cavafy's poems that he copied by hand from a borrowed book. As Seferis himself describes it in his characteristic idiom: "I live even in the margins of the sky.... I tell you, I am a medieval copyist, that we have reached at last the era when the abolition of printing was invented" (Essays, i: 420-21). The sentimentality of this scenario should not be underestimated, considering, for example, how cacophonous this tone sounds next to the lithe irony of history's master copyists, Bouvard and Pecuchet. Likewise, the symbolic force of the copying activity cannot be ignored, for it denotes a transcription from one language to another, manifesting concretely the usually unacknowledged excess produced by the act of reading. It is Seferis himself, however, who provides us with an explicit instance of interpretation as unabashed rewriting. In relating a chance remembrance of two of Cavafy's verses while strolling through the dark streets of 19405 Alexandria, Seferis stresses his sudden association of these verses with the time the poem was written (1922, the year of Greece's defeat in Asia Minor). This realization in turn yields two Seferian verses in variation of Cavafy's. Then comes his immediate confession: "almost unconsciously, I translated them [Cavafy's verses]" (Essays, i: 330). Indeed, beyond any other consideration, this kind of allegedly free-associative translation (metaphora) is the almost unconscious process of the entire body of Essays. Seferis applies himself to this practice meticulously at all points of his essayistic endeavor, although we rarely have the fortune of such an uncensored glance at it.15 15. Another such instance may be a comment he made in passing late in life: "translating is interesting always because it is a means of controlling your own language" (Seferis 1970: 65). Here, the self-reflexivity of the thought is apt for the autoscopic pedagogical nature of the practice.

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Seferis embarks on his general transcription of Cavafy by analogically displacing the late Hellenistic years (the poet's chosen historical parameters in his work) onto the period of the rise of Greek folk song, subsequent to the Ottoman conquest and the fall of Byzantium.16 Moreover, Seferis attributes to Cavafy's "personal" stance "the sentiment of humiliation and deterioration he constantly carries inside him" (Essays, i: 511), which is a resolute attempt to repress Cavafy's irreverent cultural and sexual sensibility. In this way, Cavafy s depiction of the Hellenistic years as the epitome of sensuality lawlessness, and multiplicity becomes, in the hands of Seferis, a desperate symbology of (neo)Hellenic decline—indeed, of military and cultural national defeat coded in the "personal-mythological" terms of the Asia Minor disaster. Cavafy emerges in Seferis's essays as a poet of decadence, whose only redeeming attribute is an idiosyncratic resurrection of a past peripheral Hellenism: "Cavafy marks the point where a tradition of the dead is 'consumed' within life" (Essays, i: 364). Seferis clearly experiences great difficulty in dealing with the peculiarities of Cavafy: "In hard times, Cavafy is not strong enough to help out. If they were to ask me whom I would name 'strong,' with the meaning I have now in mind, I would spontaneously name Makriyiannis. . . . Cavafy s words mislead easily; they have already misled so many" (Days, 5: 156-57). What corroborates this underlying anxiety and suspicion is Seferis's obvious irritation with Cavafy's poetics, expressed in the only passage in Essays where his posture of humility is derailed. Cavafy's poetics does indeed pose a threat to Seferis. His poetic language sneers at Seferis s most sacred Hellenic tradition and disdains those values that constitute "the healthy way of life"—the Greek spirit: "he expresses himself with an indolence I do not like" (Essays, i: 393). Cavafy comes in for several off-hand dismissals as Seferis goes down a carefully manipulated list of poems, chosen so as to construct a definitive representation of Cavafy s poetic development. But there are two passages that exemplify Seferis s project vis-a-vis Cavafy, if only because they mark those moments when the Seferian-Socratic countenance is shattered. The 16. This leads Seferis to identify Cavafy as a Phanariot (i.e., a member of the intellectual tradition represented by Byzantine aristocratic culture, centered around the neighborhood of Phanari in Ottoman Constantinople), a point of which the essays never fail to remind us. The fact that Seferis himself, offspring of the Smyrnaic bourgeoisie, multilingual, and educated in the latest literary and critical currents of European thought, names (in the 19405) Cavafy's unorthodox and nonconformist sensibility "Phanariot" shows the covert political value of the term. It is a slogan, a bit of political rhetoric that ultimately serves to grant Seferis's own position a coveted, but outwardly denied, populism, to designate his desired transcendence of his real tradition (the same one that engendered Cavafy).

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first involves a reading of Cavafy's poem Chefece ... ilgran rifiuto (Essays, i: 388-92).17 The tide is a partial eclipse of a well-known verse from Dantes Inferno: chefece per vilta il gran rifiuto. Seferis immediately accuses Cavafy of distorting Dante's verse, although he is certainly not addressing the grammatological distortion that lies in the ellipsis. For Seferis, Dante s sense of the grand refusal inheres not in the act of uttering "the great No" but in the act of saying nothing, neither yes nor no. Those who have made the grand refusal have chosen nothing, neither virtue nor sin, and Dantes punishment for them is the contempt of God and Satan both; just as they refused life, they are now refused by the afterlife. Seferis's analysis of Dante may have its merits, but he in turn refuses to recognize that Cavafy can rewrite Dante as he pleases—indeed, just as Seferis himself does, although Seferis believes he is merely rendering in modern, demotic Greek Dante's true meaning. The difference resides, and the polemic takes place, between two distinct ideologies of reading, one nihilist (literally, "the great No") and the other conservative (literally conserving the "original" Dantean meaning). Of course, on the actual level of interpretation there is no gain; there is only game. Seferis, via Dante, sees the great No as an action, an affirmation (albeit condemnable in a religious order), and the grand refusal as inaction, inertness. Cavafy, on the other hand, sees the great No and the grand refusal (by implication) as action, but action without an instrumental end, without return(s), gratuitous, ignoble, a leap into the void, an ellipsis. This is why the moral backbone of Dante's verse (villa, "cowardice") is rendered absent by Cavafy. In this perhaps paradoxical sense, Cavafy comes to affirm conviction (although solely in negation), which comes all the way around, across the historical and discursive void, to meet in fact Dantes demand—at least, as Seferis explains it for us. The evident conclusion is that Seferis engages in an interpretive practice that harkens back to Dante's authority in order to discredit Cavafy's poetics, to show it up as an irresponsible 17. Cavafy wrote this poem in 1901. To make my discussion more directly approachable, I translate: Chefece. . . ilgmn rifiuto For some the day comes when they must say the great Yes or the great No. It's clear at once who has the Yes ready within him, and saying it leads him beyond, to honor and conviction. He who refuses does not repent. If he were asked again, he'd still say no. And yet, this no, the right no, wears him down for an entire life. For a slightly different translation, see Cavafy 1992: 12.

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use of the classics. So, the new critic concludes: "But why does Cavafy himself force me into this exhausting analysis with this intolerable tide of his? It is a bit too much for him to ask us to listen, when he or his Sidonian youths mangle in their reading a great poet'* (Essays, i: 391). With this, Seferis himself provides us with our transition: the venomous critique of Cavafy for his use of Dante explodes into the most hostile of attacks when Cavafy dares to take up, as a poetic topes, that great Athenian father, Aeschylus. This particular blasphemy involves one of Cavafy's later poems (1920) and one of the best known, "Young Men of Sidon, (A.D. 400) ."18 Vassilis Lambropoulos has shown to what extent this poem had become the pretext for ideological conflict among Greek critics since its publication, even before Seferis entered and altered the scene by the 19405 (1988: 182—208). In fact, he contends that Seferis *s successful intervention, with his uncompromising condemnation of the poem, was already set up as part and parcel of the established hegemony of the "Generation of the 19305 " a discourse that had, as he puts it, "invented" a Seferis as the voice of a (neo)Hellenic plenitude in a Waste Land era (Lambropoulos 1988: 199—200). Seferis indeed fashions a self-confident and, as we shall see, presumptuous voice. In this critique, he cannot help but reveal his sentiments, and his Socratic mask is stripped off. He responds with an immediate sneer: "here, he [Cavafyj is playing with men who have established with great authority their sentiments and their personalities in our consciousness, [playing] with works that are major psychological events" (Essays, i: 443). The tone is severe and patriarchal, entirely appropriate to the staging of Aeschylus. Seferis proceeds in fact to become Aeschylus; that is, he goes so far as to forge Aeschylus s voice in order to counteract Cavafy s voice, literally text against text. For a young Sidonian to criticize Aeschylus is not only preposterous, Seferis tells us, but a wound to "our tradition"—our Hellenism. "Aeschylus" (the quotation marks are Seferis's) must correct the poern: But you forget—it s natural—a few details. You said, I fought among "the herd " No, my young descendant, I fought together with free men like me, my equals, with those who learned to play my choruses, and all of us together had faith in my tragedies. I fought with my tragedy, so that we could write dramas and stage them in any way we wanted. . . . I fought for our self; I did the same when I wrote. (Essays, i: 444—45)

This exceeds mere role-playing for national pedagogical purposes. Who is 18. The poem is too long to transcribe here. But the point of contention centers around the young Sidonian's fiery critique of Aeschyluss epigrammatic self-representation on his tomb, as is reported by Plutarch. The Sidonian s implicit calling in the poem for another kind of poetics is otherwise left untouched by Seferis.

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this "Aeschylus" anyway, if he is not the one addressed by the young Sidonian in the poem? Why is he marked by a quotation? These hypocritical talents of Seferis, in whom are they actually invested?19 Finally, who wrote the dramas and fought with his tragedies, free, equal, and insignificant outside the people's stage in Athens? It would be vulgar to suggest an answer, for there is no "Aeschylus" who would use the / so obviously pointed at himself. Cavafy does not wound our tradition but our Seferis, the grand poet-priest, who (re)presents our tradition. The words of "Seferis/Aeschylus" are self-inscribed with a divine, prophetic power that strikes with the peculiar combination of Yahweh and Zeus at the irreverent modernity of the young Sidonian Cavafy: "We had thereto, and the wooden walls still mattered; they had a magical force. You have capitals and a bare world" (Essays, i: 445). Seferis sides with the glorious Hellenic myth, interweaving the patristic rhetoric of those early Christian texts from those very same Hellenistic years of Cavafy s poetic world. He speaks of we, a Makriyiannian we. But in that we hides the singularity of the /, and the Hellene Seferis, the stern overseer of the barbarian Cavafy, becomes "the new national Greek poet simply by playing successfully the anti-Cavafian Cavafic" (Lambropoulos 1988: 200). We have thus reached the point of endless substitutions, names and ages flashing across the page, properties summarily being appropriated and rehashed. It is an Odyssean voyage, and Seferis's wrestling with Cavafy is a wrestling with the terms of one's return home. Not surprisingly, the one poem that breaks Seferis's resistance to Cavafy is "Ithaka" (1911). This poem addresses the Odyssean topos before the journey even begins so as to nullify the primarily romantic transcriptions of Odysseus's hypothetical dissatisfaction with home (see Jusdanis 1987: 143-44). It is a poem that suggests the ultimate internalization of homeland, which in Seferis's mind becomes not so much the political and geographical entity called "Greece" as a desperate desire for an organic, a biological, experience of the Hellenic: "Homelands are not abstract; they are incarnate" (Days, 4: 206). Let us keep in mind that Seferis, like Cavafy, was nurtured by a Greece existing outside the boundaries of the Greek State, a regional diasporic Greece that gave its profound symbolic allegiance to the figure of the Mediterranean. This Greece, by the time of Cavafy s death and the birth of Seferis s essays, ceased to exist altogether. Moreover, Seferiss response to Cavafy in particular was overdetermined by his wanderings along with a traveling Greek State apparatus during the war. His turn to Cavafy, though long premeditated, did not in fact take place until this urge to travel was irrevocably i p . I merely present the term in its literal ancient Hellenic etymology. Hypokrisis: the skill of elocution, of playing a part on the stage,

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fulfilled: "its most decisive motive was the longing of the refugee, or perhaps more correctly, the neurosis of the exiled" (Essays, i: 368). This is literally a peripheral condition, whose meaning Seferis desired to monopolize and freeze once and for all under the signifier of his name. Thus, although he tells us that Ithakas "mean whatever they mean for each one of us" (Essays, i: 429), Seferis undertook Cavafy's Odyssey in order to displace it with his own. Seferis does become Odysseus—not, however, under the command of the proper name but under the name of the commanding property: not as Odysseus but as Outis, no one. This masterstroke of self-effacement as affirmation, the Odyssean con par excellence, takes place appropriately enough in the closing remarks of Seferis's Stockholm address: "I also thank you because the 'magnanimity of Sweden' allows me to feel at last that I am no one. I mean to say, in the sense that Odysseus gave it when he responded to Polyphemos, the Cyclops, as 'Outis1—no one within this mysterious now: Greece" (Essays, 2: 362). Applause. "He acknowledges himself to himself by denying himself under the name Nobody; he saves his life by losing himself" (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972: 60). It is impossible to elude the strike of this most formidable of metaphorical instances—of all the dramatic acts, the most Seferian praxis. We have been enclosed in a ceremonial celebration of the dialectic of Enlightenment, a Seferian pharmacy where a Hellenic intoxication reigns— "this mysterious flow" The indomitable question the text of Hellenism raises—why not the Sphinx and the Cyclops? why are they not Hellenes?—is merely swept aside in this path. They are mere hurdles, as is the Alexandrian himself. "We have a capricious history" (Essays, 2: 166). The point, of course, is that the dialectic of Odysseus that Seferis takes the trouble of invoking here has already taken place at the level of the very signification of Greece. That is, the negation that Seferis practices upon himself, he has already put into effect in his relation to "Greece." It is clear, from many self-reflections in Seferis's notebooks and the turn his poetry takes, that after the Second World War, and even more so after the Civil War, Greece as an intrinsic signification ceases to exist. It becomes instead entirely, irreversibly, a metaphor with constantly mobile traces—and in this particular sense, a Utopia: "Greece resembles an island of Utopia, whose shore we might reach within this night's sleep; where everything is possible" (Days, 4: 359). Seferis makes it his vocation to mark the ground of this paramount possibility, to become explicitly the chronicle of this incessant transposition (metaphora)™ 20. In his last writings, however, and especially after the military takeover in 1967, Seferis, while still spending a good amount of time outside Greece, began to shift his metaphorical terminology toward an invocation of Greece as an indisputable and fixed topos, "my topes" A

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The trope of this new wandering topos can only be a poetics of return. Paradoxically, just at the moment when the Hellenic ground vanishes into impermanence, it is simultaneously reinvoked intact, and in place, within the very gesture of longing for a return.21 This is perhaps one of those few exceptional moments when we might catch a glimpse of the operations of what I have been calling "the national imaginary" Nostalgia, the illness of return, is an illness of the imaginary. This certainly does not mean that nostalgia is an imaginary illness—"the traumatic event is real as an event and imaginary as traumatism" (Castoriadis 1987: 390). Ironically enough, under the circumstances, this illness has been inscribed from its inception with both philology and Hellenism: As Jean Starobinski tells us, the discourse of nostalgia began when the word was coined as a medical term in 1688; it was "a pedantic neologism . . . , invested with the appropriate classical trappings," whose scholarly origin we have completely forgotten (1966: 84-85). The etymology of the word is a composite of nostos (return) and atgos (sorrow). It is revealing (but not surprising within the boundaries of my entire argument) that nostalgia is discursively implicated with things Hellenic. The prevalence of the Homeric topos in the discourse of the West was probably crucial in the invention of this word. Nostos is an especially Homeric figure, although we should keep in mind that in Homer "the return home" is primarily coupled with desire, not sorrow. From this perspective, nostalgia is a relatively modern discourse, the inevitable part of an Enlightenment world. This makes it a historical illness. Nostalgia is a psychosomatic condition in a secular world analogous to spiritual possession in a religious world, an illness inextricably bound with the imaginary signification of home, but a home unattainable even in death.22 significant factor in this switch, apart from the particular exigencies of his advanced age, which made mobility a more problematic affair, was his adverse reaction to students and other expatriated radicals who questioned his residence within Greece as silent complicity with the dictatorial State. As against these critics, he responded to the regime with an overt, though still metaphorically signified, political position: he resisted the state of affairs by cultivating a stubborn will against displacement. See his Manuscript '68 (Seferis 1986). 21. "If it is the fixed order of property dependent on the settled life that grounds the human alienation in which originates all homesickness and all longing for the lost primal state of man, it is nevertheless the settled life and fixed property (only in which the notion of homeland can appear) to which all longing and all homesickness are directed" (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972: 78). 22. The social history of nostalgia proves fascinating, and it deserves an in-depth study. For instance, nostalgia reaches its highest prevalence as a disease along with the development of national armies. Perhaps, as homeland begins to be defined more as a military configuration (and becomes as such always negotiable within the terminology of power), so does the longing for it increase. And since no administrative disciplinary action can ultimately reshape an imaginary

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From early on, Seferis sought to transcribe the terms of this condition, which he attributed directly to the contemporary psychocultural manifestations of Greece. I translate at length a revealing passage, written in 1936: As time and things go on, I live increasingly with the strong sentiment that we are not in Greece, that this construction which various important persons represent daily is not our place [topos], but a nightmare with scant luminous breaks in between, filled with a heavy nostalgia. To feel nostalgia for your place while you live in your place—nothing could be more bitter. Still, I think that this sentiment (whether conscious or not, it makes no difference) characterizes all those of our people in the last hundred years worthy of some attention: those great swimmers, who struggled, as long as their arms held out, to reach the shore and see from up close this hard island of Aiolos, the other Greece. (They all sank....) (Days, 3: 33)

I have insisted on the literal translation of topos as "place" (instead of the obvious metaphorical meaning of "country") in order to emphasize the spatial texture of the notion of nostalgia. In this passage, Greece is indeed the topos of nostalgia, so that Seferis s topography of Greece can only point to a vanishing (or constantly transpositional, displaced and displacing) entity. Greece is there and not there; a close look would reveal that it is elsewhere, across an unfriendly sea, at another place. Greece is always an other Greece. Therefore, it is always sought and longed for, return is its permanent psychic condition, and so on. In other words, nostalgia is its immanence, for the spatial coordinates of Greece are constantly revolving, predicated as they are on a permanent condition of return to a place that does not exist. To return to a Utopia: "to feel nostalgia for your place while you live in your place." In Greece, nostos becomes the topos, so that Greece as Utopia can only be signified as a nostalgia, a nostalgia for Utopia. The sorrowful longing for a return to nowhere: that is Seferis s (un)method of seduction. Throughout Seferis's texts, the nostalgia for Utopia is simultaneously propelled in antithetical temporal directions: on one hand, it is a nostalgia for Greece as a Utopia of the past, a vanished world (Aeschylus, the monastic caves of Cappadocia, Erotokritos, Makriyiannis); on the other hand, it is a nostalgia for Greece as a Utopia of the future (a topos that will come out of our Hellenic vision, as our vision gradually realizes itself: Hellene as anthropos). This process is a fairy tale, in the sense that Ernst Bloch perceived in the manifest content of Utopian thought. Seferis's insistence on the Greek folk song as the crux of a modern Hellenic language (indeed, of a modernist Ianreality, a temporary intoxication is demanded, and thus we come upon the invention of troopentertainment as a new means of social distraction (or control). See Starobinski (1966: 95—96),

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guage), as well as his numerous invocations of Scheherazade (Halima) and her stories, bears this out. In the midst of this fabular narrative, in between past and future, lies a Greece that Seferis cannot recognize, a Greece of others, for others—all those who do not abandon themselves to the integrity of the (neo)Hellenic style. It is true that in this respect Seferis remained throughout his life consistent as a critic of the present. Even his early essays advocating the practice of a Greek modernism grounded themselves in an atemporal sensibility, invoking, for example, Gregory of Nanzianzus as a figure of Hellenic modernity, strolling the streets of Athens as a fellow university student in the 19305. Although this image belongs also to a modernist formalism often invoked in Seferis s poetics, still, the critique of the present is a direct affect of his Utopian desires. "The essential function of Utopia is a critique of the present. If we had not already gone beyond the barriers, we could not even perceive them as barriers" (Bloch 1988: 12). The paradox, however, that transforms in the very moment of its conception the Seferian Utopia into a controlled and controlling topos lies precisely in the fixating mechanism that a nostalgia for Utopia brings to the overall concept. For Utopian space is nomadic by definition. In being nowhere, Utopia has access to everywhere, a vision in motion always in the process of seeking a place. On the other hand, nostalgia, by virtue of its tremendous concentration on the trajectory of return, aims constantly at a fixed space. A nostalgia for Utopia is therefore quintessentially paradoxical. In the passage cited above, Seferis desires precisely to cast his eyes once and for all on that other shore, to fix Utopia in his sight. The unhappy consequence (though remaining unacknowledged) is that in seeing Utopia, Seferis abolishes it: a reincarnation of Oedipus and a reabolition of the Sphinx by the magic of anthropos. Thus, partly by circumstance and partly by design, Seferis never quite escapes the ghosts of his own creation. They emerge around him undaunted and inflexible, like the statues of heroes Neohellenism is so fond of erecting everywhere in its path, idols of national-cultural worship.23 If modern Greece is indeed artificial from the depths of its historical formation, its nationalcultural task could not but consist in reiterating and reinforcing this artifice, renewing and refashioning the means of its facade. Neohellenism, in this sense, could easily be conceptualized as a technology of idols. And Seferis would have to be one of its most refined constructions, for he in turn deline23. "Greece is the most artificial of all the artificial nations that resulted from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. . , . The 'national' ideology tried to replace the social and racial heterogeneity of the Hellenic space with some kind of religious homogeneity, a homogeneity of 'morals and customs' and from then on erect everywhere statues of'heroes1" (Kaklamanis 1989: I3-H)-

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ates a set of practices that not only select the proper objects of worship but elaborate the very gestures of worship. The revered place that Seferis s Essays occupies in today's Greek canon is an inevitable consequence of its project, inherent in its very task: to codify and to instruct by example in the liturgical practices of a contemporary Hellenicity. These gestures that Seferis insisted upon calling "trials" unwrap page after page, sentence after sentence, the gestures of a Neohellenic idolatry. But this liturgy has no place in the contemporary world—at least, not without cost. In fact, any symbolic contact with the languages of this world is a veritably nightmarish affair. (Such are the exigencies of a Utopian topos) In an essay of 1970, which turned out to be one of his last, Seferis presents us with a series of reflections on Artemidorus, the famous oneirocritic of antiquity. The gestures of idolatry are here extended into the writing of a dream. It is a dream about the quintessential topos of dreams in the Neohellenic psyche, a dream about the Acropolis. It is also a dream fully conscious of its discursive lineage. Seferis begins by returning us to the site of Freud's disturbance of memory, noting that despite Freuds visit and his later reflection upon it, despite all that we have seen and the little that we have learned, the Acropolis still remains in its place intact. Seferis returns once again to the sacred site, though his dream propels him forward in the course of time: I found myself on the Acropolis. A sense that in the meanwhile civilization had made great advances. Upon the Parthenon's western front, an agitated crowd. They were all gazing at the central columns, bubbling loudly I asked a man who was gesturing beside me [about the scene]. What kind of an idiot are you? Where did you land from? Don't you know a thing? I looked at him in a daze. There! The auction! Lift up your blinders! If that American toothpaste company wins, our GNP is saved for years to come. (Essays, 2: 326) A disturbance of memory. The Acropolis still remains in its place intact, though no longer the mythical love-object of history: now the coveted object of a commercial desire. Sold. The Americans won!, shouted the man next to me in a frenzy, as if a man who was watching a football match. .. . And what are they going to do?, I managed to ask. They're smart as hell, he answered. They will carve out these columns into the shape of a toothpaste tube. (327) The Acropolis once again disfigured: "the famous monster." What do we do with this new monstrosity? Certainly, no matter what a psychoanalysis of Seferis's dream might yield, the sociopolitical references are much too vulgar

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in their signification to be set aside. Seferis is writing during the military dictatorship; Americanism and tourism reign triumphant. This is a new world, another('s) Greece. Seferis s Hellenism, processed and crushed like a toothpaste, is being packaged and sold to maintain the teeth of Western civilization—sharp and sparkling white, like Pendelic marble. Melodramatic, surely. But Hollywood was always partial to nostalgia and its melodrama, and in this dream Seferis collides inevitably with his own nostalgia s new bounds: "The emphasis [of nostalgia] has changed. We no longer speak of disease but of reaction; we no longer underline the desire to return but, on the contrary, the failure of adaptation. . . . The theory of nostalgia put the accent on the original environment (on the Heim); the theory of inadaptation accentuates the paramount necessity of reintegration into an existing milieu" (Starobinski 1966: 101). Yet the existing milieu of Hellenism has always been, since its symbolic configuration and appropriation by the language of the Enlightenment, the milieu of the commodity. This was after all the ground that elicited thefldnerie of PhilhellenisiTL In desperately trying to fix his nostalgic gaze on the (neo)Hellenic Utopia, in meticulously producing one after the other the new idols of Hellenism, in designating the gestures of national idolatry, Seferis falls prey to the same commodification. Seferis's dream of the Acropolis is the commodity s dream of itself Thus, the Seferian desire is displaced into a nightmare. It is the neurosis of nostalgia in a world that speaks of inadaptation, "the neurosis of the exiled" in a Greece that is nowhere. The Odyssey has no home. Horkheimer and Adorno understand this well: "Homeland is the state of having escaped" (1972: 78). Self-confined to the shores of Homer, for all his poetics of absence, Seferis could never have written that verse.

CHAPTER 7

'Homologia /Apologia' THE WRITING OF NATIONAL HISTORY

The New Rules of the Game: Rousseau's 'Confessions' One could well wonder why the genetic matrix for the confessional text in Western societies still takes us back to Augustine and does not brake to a halt before the formidable phantom of Rousseau. Perhaps the matter is selfevident; at least it must be to those who are partial to chronological primacy. Or perhaps the evidence lies in the testimony that Western societies, despite their repeated claims to a secular modernity and an aesthetics of emancipation, might still be undergoing the experience of a Christian conversion. On the other hand, taking the matter a bit further, what counts perhaps as evidence of Augustine's primacy over Rousseau might lie in the particular way of figuring and signifying woman as mother. Namely, to confess that you had sinned at your own mother's breast (Augustine) may be decisively more enchanting than to confess your passion for being spanked by the hands of a woman who in every such case would inadvertently be your mother (Rousseau) . The first is possibly more outrageous, but it is difficult to believe that its primacy is not due to the prevalence of guilt as a mobilizing force in Western culture. Consider why the brilliant confessions of St. Theresa de Avila, although drawn from the same collusion of sexuality and idolatry particular to Catholicism, do not rival Augustine's authority. It is not only that she is a woman; it is that she confesses to a resolutely guiltless pleasure (which may just have something to do with her being a woman, but that is another matter). In any case, although I do not dispute the genealogical debt that Rousseau does owe to Augustine, I believe there is a radical difference here, a

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difference of form, if only because the confessional act in the manner of Rousseau defers to its singularity as social/cultural act instead of sublimating itself to a prescription of metaphysical adoration. If Augustine's Confessions chronicle one man's deliberate effort to desubjectify himself in order to gain access to a divine community and to entice his reader to do likewise, Rousseau's Confessions aspire to something contrary: the characterization of uniqueness, the establishment of personality. Rousseau's opening gesture is practically legendary: I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself Simply myself I know my own heart and understand my fellow man. But I am made unlike any one I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different [au moins je suis autre]. Whether Nature did well or ill in breaking the mould in which she formed me, is a question which can only be resolved after the reading ofrnybook [c'estce dont on ne peut juger qu' apres m'avoir lu\. (Confessions, 17)

This passage is legendary if only because it aspires to the creation of a legend. It presupposes that the whole project is framed on both sides, before and after its enactment, by a void. It lays claim to the articulation of the unprecedented and the unreproducible at once. Augustine's shadow has thus been effaced before a single line of actual confession has even begun to be scripted, and each word is crafted with the force of an autotelic vision. Surely, the text is endowed from the start with an enormous burden: not only will it document a unique nature but it will offer the reader the opportunity to judge the work of Nature itself. Rousseau does not concern himself with enticing the reader to emulate his project; he remains indifferent to conversion as such. He demands instead the reader's actual participation in the fashioning of personality, the reader's share in the will to confess, drawing him into the unfolding of the confessional narrative by nominating him as the narrative's master, by granting him the will of the confessor: Since I have undertaken to reveal myself absolutely to the public, nothing about me must remain hidden or obscure. I must remain incessantly beneath his gaze, so that he may follow me in all the extravagances of my heart and into every least corner of my life. Indeed, he must never lose sight of me for a single instant, for if he finds the slightest gap in my story, the smallest hiatus, he may wonder what I was doing at that moment and accuse me of refusing to tell the whole truth. I am laying myself sufficiently open to human malice by telling my story, without rendering myself more vulnerable by any silence. (65)

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This may be construed as an Augustinian move. But if Rousseau's reader (who, incidentally, is figured in this passage explicitly by the singular pronoun —antonym—of the public at large), does emerge with a voyeur's omniscience, he resembles the grand surveying eye of Augustine's God only formally. Augustine raises the issue of God's omniscience so as to outmaneuver the necessity of the Other's interlocution to the fashioning of the Self. Since God will always already know what I will confess, what I confess does not matter. The meaning of my confession does not consist in the content of my confession but in the performative act: what I confess is that I confess, the content is the askesis itself, and the real interlocutor (though never quite acknowledged as such, for the presence of God can never be outperformed) is the / whose fashioning I am enacting. But in this doubling of the self, a performative autonomy is thoroughly veiled by an a priori heteronomy so that the selffashioning through confession becomes finally a performance of idolatry In Rousseau, however, things do not quite work this way. The reader is invoked in the position of the Other without any qualms, indeed under the presupposition that only the Other makes possible one's desire, in the same didactic equation that informs Rousseau's Emile: "I could swear that until I was put under a master, I did not so much as know what it was to want my own way [je n'aipas su ce que c'etait qu'unefantaisie]" (Confessions, 22).l I need not underline the mechanism of self-undoing inherent in this statement, a rhetorical trick that hinges on the figure of mastery. Where does mastery lie? In the administering of discipline or in the exercise of desire—one's own desire? Various contemporary discourses on sexuality have addressed this question at length and with valuable insight, but in this case the question is meant to delineate, in an allusive fashion, the two loci in the radical difference between Augustine's and Rousseau's confessional acts. For in endowing the reader so generously with the burden of the Other, of the Other who enables (and thus is eclipsed by?) one s desire, Rousseau frees himself from the burden of staging an interlocution with his own self Unlike Augustine, Rousseau recognizes that the Other is truly a voyeur, the agency that enables access to one's desire to exhibit oneself, the desire to confess; therefore, the Other's omniscience is false, or rather, it is not a matter of divine providence but a matter of disciplined readership. i. J. M. Cohen's translation offantaisie to "wantfing] my own way" is quite inventive, and I stand by it. But we should also keep in mind thatfantaisie, as a certain denotation of desire and the world of the imaginary in general, signifies above all the notion of whim, and thus refers directly to the fashioning of childhood and of infantile desire, the pedagogical impetus par excellence. Hence my reference to Emile.

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There is thus no doubling of the /in Rousseau's confessional act because, given the deeply encoded ambivalence in the notion of mastery between confessor and confessant, there is no guaranteed heteronomy to make it inevitable. Since the reader does not know a priori the content of my confession, what I confess suddenly takes precedence over the mere act of confession. This is not quite to say that the performative force of confession, so characteristic in Augustine, is somehow defused or overcome. Rather, the performative moment in Rousseau is now immanent to the confessional discourse itself, a discourse that—like the "vice" fashioning Rousseau s sexual nature ("that dangerous supplement which cheats Nature")—invokes the reader's mastery merely as fantasy, as causal fantasy, and has no use of him beyond that: "My function is to tell the truth, not to make people believe it" (192). Telling the truth becomes merely the rhetorical device in constructing a new myth of transparency that will strip from the reader s hands the reins of interpretation.2 With the interlocutor (whether as the I itself or the addressed reader) relegated to mere formality, the discourse itself takes over in a kind of automated self-fashioning that, following the metaphorics of the supplement, alludes presciently to the ways of celibatory machines. If not quite a discourse without a subject, then perhaps a discourse of a subject in the making, but also of a subject already made, an object's discourse: "Whoever you may be that wishes to know a man, have the courage to read the next two-three pages and you will have complete knowledge of Jean-Jacques Rousseau" (300). There is something striking about this phrasing, at once focused on the singular subject yet steeped in the impersonal. The labyrinthine figural refolding points to anything but transparency The invoked grammatical subject is utterly impersonal ("whoever wishes to know a man"), while the subject with the name is but the object of the discourse, the life-matter of two-three pages. What we see is a displacement of the I into a strictly objective category, a reification that renders it available to the public at large as an object (of knowledge) to be consumed. In this respect, Rousseau's Confessions is an account of the phenomenon 'Jean-Jacques Rousseau," a social phenomenon that already has a history, or rather various histories, shared and pitted against each other, intersecting and divergent. Hardly an autobiography, Rousseau's text aspires to a didactic biography of a social persona—a corrective biography, no doubt (a point to which I shall return shortly)—but, nonetheless, a 2. The whole ambiguous question of transparency in Rousseau is addressed in Starobinski's great text La Transparence et {'obstacle (1971) and is also taken up in Derrida's famous analysis of writing as the dangerous supplement in Of Grammatology (1974).

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biography not of a person but of an image, indeed a narrative of the construction of a social image, a social history of the commodity Rousseau. This lies far from Augustinian territory whichever way we look at it, and it should not surprise us in the least that the operative Urtext for Rousseau himself is not Augustine's Confessions but Plutarch's Lives. This other genealogy—to which we would have to add the presence of Montaigne as the modern initiator of a secular idiom of authenticity—lends to Rousseau's text a traceable ideological purpose. True to its Enlightenment spirit, this text aspires to the creation of the unique individual, the autonomous particular entity, which is then presented as no less than the new universal. The notion of personality (the subject that cannot be doubled, reproduced) holds the key to opening up the new image of anthropos. With transparency and authenticity as new and powerful alibis, moral inconsistencies and contradictions (namely, the whole discourse of guilt attached to the Judeo-Christian notion of sin) lose their determinant force. Personality becomes interesting precisely by virtue of its contradictions, by virtue of its irresolution. In this new confessional staging something paradoxical happens: contradiction and irresolution become the premier actors in the service of transparency. The myth of transparency is staged in a theater of intrigue, betrayal, and conspiracy, forging a narrative of transgression and secrecy, shady deals and paranoid fantasies. Truth can only be derivative of untruth, which is to say that the experience of Enlightenment subjects one to a regime of darkness. It is an untenable equation that testifies to a labyrinthine enterprise: "the dark and miry maze of my confessions" (28), elaborated later as "the work of darkness in which I have been entombed for eight years past, without ever having been able, try as I might, to pierce its hideous obscurity" (544). It is hardly extraordinary then that the confessant loses hold of the trajectory of the confessions, that he becomes subjected/subjugated to the personality "Jean-Jacques Rousseau." When he resumes his confessional act two years after the first part is completed, the author is no longer the authoritative agency of the text. Rather, he exists (he writes) under the texts compulsion, as if the author is the antecedent of the text Rousseau. This procures an astonishing confession, one of the most remarkable passages in the book. I quote at length: I am only undertaking this task under compulsion, with a heart oppressed by grief. It can offer me nothing but misfortunes, treasons, perfidies, and sad, heart-rending recollections; and I would give everything in the world if I could enshroud what I have to say in the darkness of time. Being forced to speak in

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spite of myself, I am also obliged to conceal myself, to be cunning, to try to deceive [a tacher de donner le change\? and to abase myself to conduct that is not in my nature. The ceiling under which I live has eyes, the walls which enclose me have ears. Uneasy and distracted, surrounded by spies and by vigilant and malevolent watchers, I hurriedly put on paper a few disjointed sentences that I have hardly time to re-read, let alone to correct, I know that despite the huge barriers which are ceaselessly erected all around me, they [on] are always afraid that the truth will escape through some crack. How am I to set about piercing those barriers? I am attempting to do so but with little hope of success. Judge whether this is stuff out of which pretty pictures are made, or such as can colour them with attractive colours. I warn those who intend to begin this book, therefore, that nothing will save them from progressive boredom except the desire to complete their knowledge of a man, and a genuine love for truth and justice. (263)

In contrast to the famous words that introduce the project of the Confessions, this passage registers a dramatic shift in both tone and vision. This is not to say that the initial invitation to judge the work of nature by virtue of the cumulative experience of reading is now forfeited. Here, too, the reader is invoked as judge, and the act of reading is still to harbor the ultimate logic of the confession, to guarantee the production of truth. But the authoritative primacy of both the reader (the confessor) and the author (the confessant) have by now been displaced in favor of a self-reproducing, self-authorized text. From this point on, the confession is extracted by force, by compulsive obedience to the demands of the social object "Jean~Jacclues Rousseau." The legacy of this object, this cultural commodity, has risen to such heights of power that it dictates the very terms of self-fashioning, a self-fashioning that at this point becomes, strictly speaking, a nonsensical notion. Rousseau experiences this nonsense—the commodity-self that is an Other fashioned as Self by others—as a paranoid fantasy. This new condition makes for a confession of concealment and deception, an unveiling of a life of elaborate veiling, if you will, which cannot but also imply the inverse, in the manner of the famous "Cretan liar" paradox. Caught in the throes of its own excess—an ever more externalized lack of control increasing in direct proportion to the exercise of internal control, an excess fueled by chastity—the production of truth cannot but succumb to a teleological purpose. The task is no longer simply to confess the truth but to achieve the truth. Hence, Rousseau lapses into a corrective project against the (public) image of himself, against the very thing that compels him to act, the thing he is compelled to correct. His confession now turns into a defense, a 3. Note that Derrida has identified this idiom as the most admirable expression of the supplement (1974: 154).

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classic apologia in form but put forth in a radically new context, for it is a confession that must serve as a defense against himself. It must also be public: a self-proclaimed unique and unmediated narrative of truth before the most formidable tribunal (medium of justice) in modern society, the mass public. In this respect, Rousseau's Confessions is a groundbreaking text because it attempts to forge a social history out of—and against—its own mass mediation. This places Rousseau in the precarious position of wanting to act as the accuser against those who, in his eyes, have brought about his status as an accused, while knowing full well that to satisfy this desire means to immerse himself further and further in the interminable mire of his social persona, the liberation from which produced the will to confess in the first place. An apologia (in its strict legal meaning) cannot but become imperative, since he must avail himself of the right (indeed the duty) of the accused to pass his own judgment upon himself and upon the circumstances of his case. Rousseau attempts to resolve this quandary, in the last book of the Confessions, with a desperate gesture. He invites the reader to add to his appointed role of judge the role of the detective, to disentangle the myriad threads of Rousseau's mysterious fate, to map the labyrinth of his life.4 In other words, he confesses to his incapacity, in the last instance, to read his own text, and consequently he surrenders both himself (as confessant) and his truth (as confession) to the terms of his irreconcilable Other, his (unreadable) social persona. In the very name of uniqueness, transparency, and truth, he has thus fashioned himself into a criminal presented before the police (the mass public) and compelled to confess by the very authority of criminological procedure. No doubt, what operates here is a specific historical marking: the general compulsion to confess, which Foucault has identified as the characteristic predicament of modern Western society since the eighteenth century (1980: 53~73)« The deeply embedded obsession with sexual excess and denial in Rousseau's discourse corroborates this view. But what makes this case especially striking is the weaving of a text that taps into the inventory of social history and appropriates its authority in a form that would become the emblem of a modern literary affinity (Proust providing a particularly apt example). Precisely in forging this form, which partakes of both literature and social history, Rousseau's Confessions become a paradigmatic text for de4. Jeremy Tambling comes to a similar conclusion in his intriguing book on the history of the confessional gesture in Western culture (1990: 104-5). But our readings diverge significantly since he does not recognize Rousseau's dissolution of the Augustinian problematic, placing him instead at the head of a romantic tradition of confession that includes Wordsworth andDeQuincey.

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ciphering the will of national history—a particular kind of nineteenth-century text that, I would argue, develops an ecriture so characteristic as almost to qualify as a specific literary genre. It is my contention that this particular form of writing is constituted around a confessional narrative mode interwoven with a rhetorical posture that alludes to the ancient discursive tactic of apologia. I have already suggested in what ways Rousseau's text opts for this tactic at the point when the production of truth through confession is appropriated by the socially constructed object of confession. When the social persona/public object Rousseau takes precedence over the subject Rousseau—when the social object determines the parameters of Self as Other—then the subject willing-totruth, if brave enough to confront his inevitable reification, cannot but resort to some kind of apologia. This was in a sense Socrates' predicament before the polis. Surely, the particular circumstances characterizing a radically democratic environment of that kind, the circumstances that fashioned the first political subject, are not quite equivalent to Rousseau's. Nonetheless, the reference is essential, both because Plato's famous scene becomes the ultimate arch-referent in any discussion of apologetics in antiquity and because certain rhetorical characteristics in this scene seem to be reproduced unabated. Curiously, apart from Plato's text, there is little documentation of apologia as a specific philosophical act, even though we have no reason to believe that Socrates was in this respect unprecedented. When the term "Apologists" is used historically, it usually refers to those figures responsible for a series of early Christian didactic writings (second-fourth centuries). These writers intended to defend the new religion against charges of godlessness and immorality (the palpitating ghost of polytheism), usually by attributing these traits to their opponents. Thus, the discourse explicitly aimed at an outsider, an audience external to the faith, yet the language employed was clearly delimited to the familiarity of the faithful. This was the crucial rhetorical device, for the actual, unnamed, act of the Apologists was indeed preaching to the converted. But this is hardly as tautological or self-defeating as it sounds by today's standards. On the contrary, in retrospect, it seems like an ingenious and formidable maneuver. Suffice it to say—and this is, I think, a dramatic illustration—that these polemical texts were mostly written in Greek, as part of a Hellenistic philosophical tradition, yet they avidly advocated monotheistic practices. Embodying (like Rousseau's text) the rich and often untenable contradictions of a transitional historical era, early Christian apologetics used a rhetorical strategy that amounted to a preemptive strike, on the one hand reproducing the discourse of the Apologists' polytheist opponents (in their actual idiom) as accusation, and on the other hand exorcising that discourse

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from the community of the faithful by underlining its alterity Christian apologetics signifies, in this sense, a cathartic ritual against infidel contamination before this latter actually takes place—indeed, so it will not ever take place. If only by considering the specific politics of conversion, Augustine's text, which is essentially contemporary, belongs to the same trajectory. Augustine's confession might be deemed as his apology before the court of God. For not only does he seek his innocence (God's grace), but he wants to strike against all those infidel practices he encapsulated before his conversion. Augustine recognizes that the danger of the Other is internal and that in order to eliminate the Other two things are required: first, to undo every one of your enemy's charms by discrediting them within the domain of your own body; second, to articulate your enemy's arguments against you so perfectly as to neutralize them—to appropriate them completely and merely bounce them back to their source as indelible attributes. Thus, confession may be intimately linked to apologia, especially if we consider modern legal discourse where the two come to be particularly complicit in each other's meanings. It is rather commonplace to envision the act of confession before the police as extracted, forced—in any case, staged. The accused confesses to the terms of the accusation. This tautology is already embodied in the etymological compound of the Greek term: homologia, "to say the same [thing]." In Greek criminological language, the term is still used this way, and it is to be contrasted with the more common understanding of "confession": exhomologesis, where the prefix ex signifies a directive, an externalization, if you will, which adheres well to the religious/penitent aspect of confession, the process of self-fashioning that aspires to a transcendent self. On the other hand, in certain juridical traditions—although not in the United States, where the attorney has usurped the right of the final statement—a defendant holds the right to present what is called an apologia. This is hardly an admission of guilt, although it may be couched in those terms and may often be tantamount to that. But its ultimate purpose is to undo the logic of guilt, to reverse the accusation (if only by winning the sympathy of the court), and in this particular legal sense apologia is contrary to homologia, confession. Nonetheless, no defendant can stage his defense without engaging in some sort of confession, without giving an account (a narrative) of the contingent parameters of the accusation/guilt.5 It is this particular complicity between the two rhetorical practices, effectively achieved in a realm where the legal/penal and the literary meet, that elucidates the problematic of na5. Consider the following derivations in the ancient Greek etymology: apologismos = "account" and apologos = "a long tale, a fable "

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tional history as a particular form of writing. This is a secular realm, a crossroads that cannot be conceived outside nineteenth-century Europe. It is a time and a space in which nations employ the conventions of legal/penal, literary, and, as Foucault would argue, sexual discourses in order to constitute themselves fully as subjects. History emerges as the premier discipline (one could almost say, it is deliberately forced into the forefront, it is deliberately outed), so as to settle the accounts with each nation's past and preside over the organization of its future. Confessing to Oblivion To say that national history hinges on the exercise of memory is to state the obvious. Memory will be considered the regime of history so long as history is narrated, given that the propensity for narrative is a peculiarity endemic to the human mind, the capacity to give concrete form to a phantasm, to make a phantasm present—in the case of history, to organize a past into a present. History itself, whatever it is, is certainly not what is narrated, what is made present by narration. For whatever it is, history is life (to reach deep within the core of Nietzsche's famous argument), and life is as finite and fleeting as it is radically always present and thus cannot be re-presented, cannot present itself to itself. This fundamental existential quandary is precisely why history (as past life) is made and remade (narrated, represented) with such urgency. Making history is, in this sense, an inscrutable notion, despite so many attempts, from such different quarters, to demonstrate that histories (of peoples, nations, events, or ideas) are mere inventions. No doubt, it is both prudent and fruitful to understand how a given history is a construction, particular and instrumental in its circumstances and purposes. But this does not go very far in helping us understand what it means to make history, where the verb "to make" encompasses within it the enormous distance that separates the notion of construction from the notion of creation. "Men make their own history," Marx says in his i8th Brumaire, "but they do not make it just as they please." Traditionally, Marx s interpreters have taken the second phrase as a structural qualification, as evidence of the circumstantial (read: historical) constraints on the making of history. This covert tautology has dispatched a good part of the Marxist tradition down the road to oblivion as to the first and main phrase: that history belongs to the realm of human activity, that history is, in the last instance, what human beings do. This lapse has led to some tragic results, the worst being the foundation of Marxist metaphysics. But what seems to me most unfortunate of all is the

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swift interpretation of that remarkable second phrase to mean an external constraint. For no matter how open The i8th Bmmaire might be to practically any interpretation (no matter how contradictory), such an unequivocal conclusion is not warranted anywhere in the text. The openness of this text, however, shall be paid its due on another occasion. Suffice it to say here that the apparent discrepancy between simply making history and making it as one pleases would yield much greater insight if considered as an internal condition, as a discrepancy that resides at the core of historical praxis itself. This discrepancy corresponds precisely to the distance that links history as indelible (though finite) present with history as past written and rewritten as present: "The tradition of all the generations of the dead weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living" (Marx 1978: 9). Tradition is a nightmare because it means giving one's self fully to the dirty tricks of memory The dead come to life to reclaim the space of the living; the words of the living are lost amidst the miraculous performance of resurrection. What keeps one from making history as one pleases are those phantasms "encountered and inherited from the past," the ghostly memory that compels one to speak it as history, one's own history. National history is a genre epitomizing this compulsion to write the ghostly past into the present tense of nationhood (where it then fashions itself as always already present), a genre driven by the compulsion toward confession. The confessional text—at least since Rousseau—has been implicated in a paradoxical relation with the workings of memory, for it recalls a set of events in order to fashion (to authorize) a new self that will efface its author. Rousseau's account of his erotic incapacity in the famous episode with the Venetian courtesan is a fine instance of this paradoxical use of memory in confession (300—302). The courtesans derisory dismissal—Gianneto, lasce k donne, estudia la matematica—figures as an exemplary liturgical utterance that ordains the author into his life's path, that consecrates him as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is what Rousseau himself cannot utter to himself, for he seeks to deny the order of things, the order of being Rousseau. (That is, after all, both the impetus and the purpose of the Confessions.) But Rousseau s denial of the order of things cannot veil his longing for an order that he must obey, an order that can only be uttered by an Other—indeed, for Rousseau, only by a woman. Although the episode is recalled nominally to attest that weakness of character that led him away from the simple pleasures of life (the authentic life) and toward the misfortune of being a man of letters (the life that necessitates confession), it ultimately serves a contrary purpose: to affirm the propensity for a life of letters. And although Rousseau repeatedly denounces this life as unnatural (or inauthentic), he presents it here as the natural inclination of his

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personality (or shall we say, of the personality Rousseau?), a nature that draws its strength from incapacity, a perverse nature. The game of veiling and unveiling that takes place in this recollection is formidably complex. While the confessant claims to divulge his most secret sentiments, he delegates the most authoritative utterance as to his essence to another, the Other who confesses the deepest (and now objective) truth on his behalf. What does this memory then mean to accomplish? Explicitly, it aims to lend credibility to the thesis of transparency whose ultimate purpose in turn is to absolve the confessant of his inauthentic past life. At this level, memory of the past is employed in the service of erasure of the past. Yet implicitly, as a consequence of the literary universe that commands this confession, this remembrance is a textual (a rhetorical) affirmation of the present condition, an indelible present predicated on an effaced past. Memory and oblivion, avowal and denial, transparency and occultation, all co-inhabit and co-ensure, antagonistically, the confessional site.6 In this same fashion, every nation seems to embrace a cultural project in which its historical memory is both affirmed and negated simultaneously We might recall Ernest Kenan's famous assertion in his 1882 lecture "What Is a Nation?": "Oblivion, indeed I would even go as far as to say historical error, is a most essential factor in the creation of a nation, which is why the progress of historical studies often puts nationality in danger" (1922: 284—85). Renan intended in this essay to account for the superiority of the Western European type of nation, while acknowledging both the artificial nature of nation building and a shared history and ancestry among Western European nations (particularly France and Germany) that exceeds national boundaries.7 Since for Rousseau race, language, and ethnicity cannot be equated with nationality, the fundamental ingredient of the nation could only be a continuous (re) affirmation of common interest, "a daily plebiscite" (307). In this process, forgetfulness is imperative: "The essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things" (286). Indeed, the most sublime expression of common interest is for all to forget together. Forgettingbecom.es the epitome of all common interest, the 6. For a fine account of this paradoxical employment of memory in confession, see Terdimans discussion of Musset (1989). For a detailed genealogy of the institutional consequences of the confessional form, see Hahn (1986). 7. In this latter point, Renan exhibits a Germanophilia that was characteristic of many intellectuals of his time after the Franco-Prussian War. Martin Thorn's "Tribes Within Nations" (1990) provides an exemplary analysis of the entire framework of Renans Germanism. We shall return to it below, when we examine such Germanic affinities in the work of Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, Greece's premier national historian.

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shared communal space that locks antagonism out of the orbit of history and makes of national history a continuum. Nonetheless, this kind of imperative cultivation of social amnesia (which has been growing in speed and efficiency as mass-media technology becomes increasingly refined) cannot but be predicated on an indelible memory. Benedict Anderson, in his masterful revision of his own reading of Renan, recognizes in this paradox one of the most effective tricks of the national imaginary Consider Renan: "All French citizens are obliged to have already forgotten [doit avoir oublie] Saint-Barthelemy or the Midi massacres in the thirteenth century" (286), In his absolute demand for national amnesia, in the very same breath, Renan names what is to beforgotten, and he names it as the very mark of nationality. Not only does nationality hinge on the communal coalescence that takes shape in the act of forgetting, but, paradoxically, the very act of forgetting affirms the national site of memory This is not a matter of mere repression, for even if not exactly conscious, the act of forgetting is a matter of the national will, a ritualized performance of the will to forget. In a brilliant reading, Anderson discerns in this paradoxical act a ritual for what he calls "the reassurance of fratricide": that nations are fond of interpreting (and thus instituting) life-threatening encounters with an external enemy as foundational internal conflicts, fratricidal occasions that bless the topos of national origin and are thus indelible, which is precisely why they must always already have been forgotten (1991: 199—203). With characteristic irony, Anderson adds a slew of examples to Renan s: the American Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the Battle of Hastings—all constructions appropriated from their composite historical markings as emblems of national institution. The Vietnam Memorial is in this respect the nationalized site of the American Sixties, a monument of names abstracted from a continuous mass-cultural memorialization of an age. In this parataxis of names, the State has committed to stone the Hollywood industry's abyssal memorial reiteration of an age and its dead, itself fueled by whatever might link the aesthetics of'Apocalypse Now! to the verite of the Zapruder film. The reassurance of fratricide becomes possible only within a logic of assimilation. Renan sees Western European history as the only proper model for the emergence of nationhood. Or rather, to be more accurate, he sees national institution as a particularly European affair, a mode of drawing internal boundaries within the territorial expanse established by the German invasions (later reiterated by the Normans) and the subsequent cultural diffusion of conquerors and conquered. Renan s narrative of origin places the institution of the Nation-form within the overarching matrix of a fraternity

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of culture, which is not merely prenational (medieval feudal Europe) because it is already postnational (Renan envisions a future European confederation). He thus ascribes to national institution a radical historical contingency but places it within the horizon of a timeless fraternity predicated on the forgetting of historical difference. In this instance of oblivion, fratricide emerges as the necessary phantasm that makes the trauma of origin imaginary and then exorcises it with an equally imaginary politics of reconciliation.8 Beneath the shadows in Renan s classic lecture lurks the assertion that the force of Western civilization is the force of assimilation. Contrary to this Western assimilationist model, Renan points to the congenital failure of the many cultural elements under Ottoman control to achieve proper and healthy nationhood. For the multicultural character of Ottoman society precluded the necessity of forgetting historical difference. The social order was differential at the core, in such a way that political identity was fundamentally multiple and negotiable. It is true that for Renan the Ottoman Empire collapsed because it could not foster the conditions for the emergence of "real" nations, but he in turn cannot possibly conceive that the Ottoman order (which, in the nineteenth century, was the order of antiquity) came to an end precisely because of the enforced nationalization of the various cultural entities it contained. The discursive chasm here is currently being played out once again, with ridiculous retrogression, in Bosnia. The very term "balkanization" testifies to the West's long-standing contempt for the region, as much as it declares the West's fundamental inability to decipher what must seem an alien sense of society and history, an alien milieu of memory. Nonetheless, one could easily envision a Serbian nation in the future that would commemorate, perhaps with sadness or delicate melancholy (what a momentous occasion of its collective will to oblivion!) the Bosnian massacres as its own night of Saint-Barthelemy. As Sarajevo is currently being rebuilt, hopeful in its hopelessly irreversible rupture, I cannot help but catch the last retroactive flash of a Yugoslav nation that vanished because its sense of history did not embrace the logic of assimilation. A future Serbia, Croatia, or what have you, homogenized by its own forgetfulness—what is the genocidal will but the will to forget?—will have gained at last a European identity, with a 8. One of the key gestures that locked the hold of the Greek Socialist Party (PASOK) on power in the early 19805 was the incorporation of the Communist Resistance against the Nazis into the national narrative fold and the orchestration of national reconciliation between the two sides of the Civil War (1944-49). This ritual was punctuated by the ceremonial burning of all police files accumulated on Greek leftists in the 4O-odd years since the Resistance. In this one sublime gesture of the State s will to oblivion, conducted within the symbolic domain of emancipation and thus appropriating the imaginary of resistance, PASOK obliterated whatever real historical authority the Greek Left was to have for years to come.

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cultural memory conquered by a national history. This new acquisition by the national imaginary will have returned to Renans wishes, for its national history will have been based on a historical error (over whose bloodied corpse today we mourn) and its deceased cultural memory memorialized as monumental site whether in the extant bones of King Lazar, the infallibility of the Pope, or the name of Alexander the Great. Such are what Pierre Nora has called lieux de memoire, shards of memory pillaged by history, "moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded" (1989: 12). Nora merely describes the realization of what Renan once aspired to. Having outlived Michelet and facing zfin de siede apotheosis of the discipline of history as the epitome of the human sciences and confronting the nation as the crowning achievement of a historicist consciousness, Renan looks with terror at society's passionate need to wrestle memory away from the production of history. When he argues in favor of historical error, or when he considers the discipline of history dangerous to the experience of nationality, he is acting not out of adherence to the passion for memory but, quite the contrary, out of fear for memory's collusion with history. In other words, in his advocation of historical error, he calls for a society capable of commanding its production of history, which is to say, a society that can hone its will to forget to an expertise, like today's "professional archivists [who] have learned that the essence of their trade is the art of controlled destruction'* (Nora 1989: 14). In this sense, RenanJs terror and the urgency of his lecture are diametrically opposed to the tone of Nietzsche s seminal essay "Uses and Abuses of History for Life/' written just eight years before (1874). This essay represents the other point of view on the 1870 war, the sentiment of a radical intellectual who recognizes in the face of military victory a cultural defeat. Although nominally both authors take the side of oblivion against history, Renan argues for a pure history purged of memory, while Nietzsche yearns for a sense of history that would undo itself in its loyalty to life. When Nietzsche assails the historians of his time (whose textual authority has usurped the power of the German imagination to envision itself differently) in order to institute a different Self, he is presciently condemning the amnesiac world of automated professional archivists that Renan's philological-anatomical froideur went on to produce. While Renan is terrified of the primal passions invoked by the return of a ghostly past, he is equally wary of society's reliance on the fleeting present. On the other hand, Nietzsche recognizes that the capacity of society's memory has been extinguished by the overwhelming burden of the past, those "indigestible stones of knowledge" (1983: 78). Society has lost the

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sense of its perishable nature; it has forgotten the nature of its own mortality and therefore lives the eternal death of an idol, a textualized ideal, with an eternalized history accrued and duplicated over time. This is the sort of history that Nietzsche asks us to forget. He calls for a forgetting of history to counteract the already instituted forgetting of life: the daily wrestling with fmitude, the fleeting but clear vision that an unencumbered sense of mortality affords.9 It is precisely this sense of the finite, of the perishable, that imbues the individual or social imagination with the power of creation in the midst of annihilation (but also with the power of annihilation itself, at times more cataclysmic than any such power by any imagined divinity)—in other words, the radical imaginary leap of creating one s self as other. Nietzsche calls for nothing less. Often read as an impassioned manifesto of modernity (which it undoubtedly is), Nietzsche's essay also makes it possible to glimpse the horizon of a radical sense of history, or better yet, the inscrutable horizon of making history which will always have to be, if anything at all, a matter of life. Thus, he concludes with a call for the avowedly Heraclitean project of "organizing the chaos" of existence (122-23) as a way of returning history to the realm of life and making life the realm of making history Nietzsche's horizon would have to be one of the greatest obstacles to the mentality of national history which makes the Nazis' use of him in their nationalization of German history one of history's exemplary moments of oblivion. For the Nazis, Nietzsche became a crucial lieu de memoire. Just as Wagner himself was memorialized as one of Wagner's myths, so Nietzsche was monumentalized through such (ab)uses of his radical Hellenic project as Albert Speer's imaginary architectural annihilation of Berlin. As lieu de memoire, Nietzsche eclipsed his own sense of history, which vanished in oblivion, while as national archive, he became "the deliberate and calculated secretion of lost memory" (Nora 1989: 14). Perhaps national history discerns no obstacles. Unconcerned with the actual workings of societal memory oblivious to its own oblivion, national history is a lithe genre, aspiring to the creation and justification of a legendary object. National history is perfectly unaware of the "malady of history" (to use a 9. Following Nietzsche's call, but as an explicit reflection on Marx, Jean-Luc Nancy (1990) has made an interesting attempt to disentangle this quandary (between making history as narrative reflection and making history in and through the very process of life) by dispelling history's traditional affinity with time and situating it in the "communitarian" space. For Nancy, the notion of "finite history" is a tautology Finitude is the state of history; it is the space where history happens, history meaning ultimately the common dimension of things and events, whatever makes a community able to apprehend its life. The attempt to render this apprehension representable (an impossible task by definition) accounts for the production of history as narrative reflection.

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Nietzschean phrase), since its raison d'etre is to absolve the nation of its infirmities and its excesses. But since "history can [also] be considered as a series of therapies" (de Certeau 1988: 301), national history may also be deemed the transcript of a society's "normalization" toward modernity, which is in effect society's nationalization. National history is penitent and therapeutic, as much as it is narcissistic and incendiary. It is not merely a narrative exaltation of the past but, strictly speaking, a poetic excavation of an imaginary future. As a confessional text, national history opts for a hyperbolic and didactic representation of the self; as an apologia, it is preemptive and redemptively sacrificial.

Michelet's Prefaces History becomes a discipline when its explicit association with philosophy—arguably originating with Vice's Sdenzia nuova or Voltaire's Essai sur les moeurs and culminating with Hegel—is severed from historiography (White I 973* 135~3 256; and law, 160-74 Stewart, Charles, 191 Stocking, George, no Strouggari, Maria, i Son Svoronos, Nikos, i8on, 187-88, 190-91 Sweet, Paul R., 94 Tambling, Jeremy, 23 3n Tanzimat reforms, 61-64 Terdiman, Richard, 23 8n Thorn, Martin, 238n, 256 Todorov, Tzvetan, 129-30, i39n Trabant,Jiirgen, 94 Trinh Mmh-ha, 44 Tsatsos, Konstantmos, 211 Tsoukalas, Konstantinos, 54, 72, 85n, 87— 88, 98n, 166, 169-70

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Tziovas, Dimitris, 89n, i77n, 275n Ulmen, Gary, 160-63 Underdevelopment, 64-70, 164-67 Uneven development, 69—70 Utopia, 221-26, 269, 279 Vakalo, Eleni, 212, 277 Valery, Paul, 209 Velestinlis, Rhigas, 84-85,146n Veloudis, Yiorgos, 142, 153 Velouhiotis, Aris, :8in Venturi, Franco, 76 Vergopoulos, Kostas, 54-55, 57, 6364 Vico, Giarnbattista, 243 Virilio, Paul, 2 Vlahoyiannis, Yiannis, 177, i8on, 197, 200, 254n Voltaire, 72-73, 97, 102, 243, 257, 263 Vryonis, Speros, 6on Wallerstein, Immanuel, 65-68 Webber, Frances, 156 White, Hayden, 52n, 243-44 Williams, Raymond, 67n Wittig, Monique, 163 n Yiannopoulos, Perikles, 21 in, 270-71 Zambelios, Spyridon, 182, 258-59 Zionism, 33~34 Zizek, Slavoj, i3n, 26, 32, 36-37, 127-28, 153-54, 157, i?1* 2 0 I » 27i, 278 Zumthor, Paul, 186