How does a state construct its dangerous citizens? And by what methods and processes did the Greek state decide who would be worthy of being called its citizens and who unworthy? The book dives into this question and presents, in a way that is both panoramic and detailed, the intricacies of the experience of resistance to state terrorism during the 20th century in Greece.
Bringing into dialogue multiple research methods - oral testimonies and autobiographical narratives with historical archives and analyses, official statements and unofficial silences - the book traverses the history of the last hundred years to trace how the citizens of the country were characterized and persecuted as leftists, whether they were or were not.
It distinguishes and describes the process of constructing a gray zone of existence, that of the "dangerous citizen," which, like another Cimmerian abyss, was systematically and methodically filled with disobedient lives. It follows the realization of biopolitics through the practices of the modern state and questions the distinction between "life" and "livelihood." Today, when the so-called "extremism theory" has flooded public discourse, Neni Panourgia locates it in Arendt's and Castoriadis' theories about the roots of totalitarianism and traces it in the recent positions of the "historical revisionists."
But, beyond anything else, it proposes and prioritizes the reintroduction of the human being as a central point of reference - not as a unit above all others, but as the minimal point upon which any conceptualization of the political, the existential, the social must be built, and it makes a methodological proposal for how we can henceforth write about things known but not clear, experiences lived but not verbalized - about how, both subtly and violently, the state constructs "dangerous citizens."
[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]
