The foundational myths of power and politics: an essay on the fortunes of democracy.
Towards a financial genocide: this is the title of a crude reportage on the Greek crisis. There is, in this pitiless image of Europe strangling Greece to the point of provoking its ‘social death’, a devastating symbolic connotation. It is as though the long ribbon of civilization – lasting over three millennia – had suddenly been rewound, bringing us back to where we started, back to before the walls of the Polis began to define the area of civilization.
Besides, the ‘invention of the city’ is humanity’s greatest innovation. This was the development that launched the process of power’s domestication: restrained behind city walls, it became possible to control the destructive forces through which the savage nature of domination had hitherto been expressed. There were two ingredients in this domestication: the force of Law and of the Word. Law represented the ability to subjugate natural violence to an idea of relational stability; the word, the possibility of reconfiguring time through stories. The two foundation myths of Medusa and Perseus, on the one hand, and of the Sirens and Ulysses on the other – which this book is about – encapsulate this transition from the ‘monstrous’ to the ‘human’: a kind of transformation of the ‘demonic’ nature of power, from a wild and uncontrolled force to an instrument subject to a ‘civilizing’ project.
What will happen now, at a time when the solidity of ‘physical places’ appears to vacillate and dissolve under the overwhelming pressure of financial ‘flows’, now that borders have started to dissolve and become more permeable, more vulnerable to the primordial ‘demons of power’?