This book invites us to think about politics in Greece ‒and thus the current crisis‒ in terms of a deeper (dis)ruption that has been taking place for a long time, beyond the central political scene.

With the theoretical axis being the view that difference produces exclusions, subjects people to hierarchical relationships and thus operates as a source of competition, the powerful experiences accompanying the negotiation of difference are described –intolerance, indignation, pain, and even trauma– fueling the hidden politics of everyday life.

The authors examine both synchronically and historically the processes of differentiation and experiences of difference related to borders, ethnocultural identity, gender, body, and sexuality, unfolding on multiple levels –transnational, national, local, interpersonal– and concerning various categories of subjects: defenders of the northern and eastern borders, political refugees returning to Greece, neo-bourgeois Athenians, migrants from Albania or the Philippines, thalassemic individuals active in the disability movement, childless adult women advocating for an alternative approach to marriage and motherhood beyond the dominant biopolitics.

In a regime that imposes official national uniformity across various dimensions of life, the fate of the claims of the different has been their relegation to the unofficial margin. Thus, in the realm of cultural intimacy, beneath the glossy surface of politics, an explosive mixture of unresolved differences and competitions simmered, rendering the political system more fragile than the rhetoric of consensual, deliberative democracy of the later Metapolitefsi allowed to appear.