Cultural Synergy: Nikos Romanos, neoliberalism, and death

21-year-old Greek anarchist Nikos Romanos is on hunger strike since 10 November, because the authorities deny him his legal right to be granted educational leaves of absence from prison to follow his university courses. He is currently held in hospital in a critical condition, while a thriving solidarity movement is holding protests and demonstrations throughout Greece and in many European cities. Romanos' legitimate demand is significant as such, but at the same time the fact that his life is at risk highlights that what is at stake in this case has wider consequences: succinctly put, Romanos' incarcerated body is inscribed in the order of power which has emerged in crisis-ridden Greece.

The Greek case has been viewed by Panayota Gounari as a neoliberal experiment resonating with social necrophilia; the latter is related to austerity policies resulting in "the physical, material, social and financial destruction of human beings: policies that promote death, whether physical or symbolic. The goal of the ongoing capitalist offensive in the form of a neoliberal doctrine is to destroy symbolically and physically the most vulnerable strata of the population". This condition has a two-fold manifestation. On the one hand, it is expressed in physical terms through the degeneration of the human body in a context of increased impoverishment, unemployment and homelessness that involves malnutrition, illness, and suicide.

On the other hand, it also finds a political expression in forms that Gounari understands as proto-fascist, such as urgent legislative decrees that violate the constitution; institutionalized instability relating to laws that keep on changing or are applied with retroactive effect; the degradation and devaluation of all things public; the restriction of the right to protest, such as prohibiting demonstrations in the centre of Athens during official visits; the increased exponential violence employed by the police, including the torture of arrested protesters; and the connection between the police and the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, which is responsible for violent paramilitary attacks, including the murders of the Pakistani immigrant Shehzad Luqman and the antifascist musician Pavlos Fyssas.

The pivotal political implication of such an account is perhaps reflected best through Giorgio Agamben's concept of the state of exception; a politically and legally ambiguous condition primarily signified by the suspension of the rule of ordinary law (State of Exception, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). And perhaps there is no better illustration of such a condition in contemporary Greece than the treatment of the migrant population and the human rights violations that are associated with it. Migrants have been scapegoated as 'invaders' of the country, as a 'bomb' in the foundations of society, and as a 'hygiene bomb' as well, by government officials; vast numbers of migrants have been rounded up in massive police 'sweep' operations based on racial profiling; undocumented migrants are being held in police stations and newly found detention centres under inhuman conditions; and most importantly, their irregular but constantly prolonged and unspecified period of incarceration has led to the materialisation of indefinite detention.

Hunger strikes, suicide attempts, desperate uprisings that are violently suppressed by the police, and deaths of detainees because of illnesses left untreated, are far from rare in the detention centres. Simultaneously, the Aegean Sea is becoming the grave of countless migrants and refugees fleeing war; and the illegal push back operations of the Greek authorities are another manifestation of how expendable migrant lives have become. Agamben has put forward the term homo sacer to address the human subject who has been stripped of their rights, whose life may be taken away with impunity, and whose position is structurally symmetrical to that of the sovereign: "the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns" (Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 53). And migrant bodies in Greece have indeed been drowned, killed, tortured, stabbed, shot at, or beaten; violence has been inflicted on them by ordinary people, such as their employers; in many cases by organised fascist gangs; and often by law enforcement agents, in the vast majority of cases with impunity.

In other words, the era of the crisis has given rise to an economic, political, legal and institutional context in which sovereignty is defined by its ability to determine life or death and produce expendable and disposable bodies, as exemplified by the subjugation of migrant lives to the power of death. Achille Mbembe has addressed this form of subjugation as necropolitics; and he has commented that "under conditions of necropower, the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred" (Necropolitics, Public Culture, 15.1, 2003).

These are the particularly demanding, and dangerous in their blurriness, terms under which Nikos Romanos has gone on hunger strike; to use the body as a "barricade", as his exact words are, is to reclaim it from the sphere of sovereignty and redefine it as a site of resistance. And this is the reason why this case requires urgent and substantial support; not only because the demand is justified, but also because the body is the very site of struggle between the power of death and, hopefully, the powers of life. And that struggle may begin on an individual basis, but it can only be fought, and hopefully won, on a collective basis. So as to literally avert death.

International coverage: