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Article published In: Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 16:2 (2017) ► pp.195–218

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Liberal articulations of the ‘Enlightenment’ in the Greek public sphere

 | National Research University, Higher School of Economics
Published online: 7 April 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.15022.myl
Abstract
This study presents a scrutiny of ‘liberal’ discursive constructions of the ‘Enlightenment’ in the Greek public sphere. The study is based on the analysis of articles published in two news/lifestyle websites, ‘AthensVoice’ and ‘Protagon’, during the (ongoing), so-called, ‘Greek crisis’. Discourse theory, informed by critical discourse analysis, is deployed to analyze these discursive constructions. The analysis shows that Greece’s economic/social/political problems are constructed as symptoms that underline Greece’s fundamental deficit, which is the country’s alleged ‘lack of ‘Enlightenment’, as perceived by ‘liberal’ voices in Greece and elsewhere. The article concludes that such discourses are part of a biopolitical, disciplinary framework producing the object to be reformed by austerity: an ‘un-Enlightened’ ‘Greek character’, ‘guilty’ for ‘self-inflicting’ Greece’s crisis. This ‘reform of character’ envisioned by liberals in Greece and elsewhere, is supposed to emerge through the institutional advance of neoliberal restructuring processes that include austerity reforms, privatizations, and loss of labor and civic rights, conditions to foster the neoliberal, entrepreneurial, mobile and austere subject, to potentially meet the socio-political requirements of late capitalist growth.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: the ‘Enlightenment’ as an inherited feature
  • 2.Theoretical framework: the Enlightenment, liberalism and Greece
    • 2.1Problematizing the ‘Enlightenment’ concept
    • 2.2The content of liberalism today and its relevance to the disciplinary uses of the ‘Enlightenment’
    • 2.3Problematizing Greece’s modernity
  • 3.Popular lifestyle/opinion media in Greece addressing the ‘Greek particularity’
  • 4.Analytical method
  • 5.Analysis: the chain of equivalence of concepts defining the Enlightenment and the semantic exclusions they entail
    • 5.1Reproducing the Occidentalist cultural hierarchy
    • 5.2Secular intolerance
    • 5.3Idealizing the bourgeois
    • 5.4Individuals as problems and solutions: the EU and the Eurocurrency as vehicles for European identity
    • 5.5The post-democratic perspective: beyond the Right and the Left
    • 5.6The post-political vision: technocracy instead of politics
  • 6.Conclusions: a dogmatic and conformist ‘Enlightenment’
  • References
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