Resumen de Liberal articulations of the "Enlightenment" in the Greek public sphere
The paper analyzes ‘liberal’ 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 years of the ongoing ‘Greek crisis’. Discourse theory, informed by critical discourse analysis, is deployed to analyze these discursive articulations. The analysis shows that Greece’s economic/social/political problems are viewed as symptoms that underline Greece’s fundamental deficit, which is the country’s ‘lack of ‘Enlightenment’. The article concludes that such discourses are part of a biopolitical, disciplinary framework producing the object to be reformed by austerity: a ‘un-Enlightened’ ‘Greek character’, ‘guilty’ for ‘self-inflicting’ Greece’s crisis. This ‘reform of character’ envisioned by (neo)liberals in Greece and elsewhere, is supposed to emerge through the institutional advance of neoliberal restructurings such as indefinite austerity and privatizations, conditions to foster the neoliberal, entrepreneurial, mobile and austere subject, to potentially reproduce that capitalist process.
