Hannah Arendt in the streets of Athens

Abstract

Athens for some time now has been an important site for civic protest. From the December 2008 ‘riots’ to the Indignant protests and after the streets of Athens have been flaring up in scenes of turmoil and dissent. This article sheds light on a particular moment of this continuous political upheaval, the 2011 Aganaktismenoi movement that grew massively and disappeared into thin air in all but a few months. These political phenomena are approached by deploying Arendt’s method of hermeneutic phenomenology and by trying to understand these events through a narrative analysis of participants’ stories. Among others, this analysis reveals an emptiness of political narratives (words) that did not correspond with the newness of the political actions (deeds) and allegedly created obstacles for political newness to enter the world of old politics or post-politics. Judging it from the present, political newness as the major political promise of the Syntagma Square occupation did not materialize within the framework of contemporary (democratic) formal politics. Instead, through the passage of time, politics proper found different ways to become enacted through the emergence of a solidarity movement, but also regrettably, through the unimaginable rise of an extreme far-right.