‘Humour is not resigned; it is rebellious.’ Sigmund Freud ‘Humour’ On 28 March 2017, activists known as the ‘Stansted 15’ obstructed a charter airplane, preventing it from taking deportees back to their countries of birth. The Stansted...
Elena Loizidou
Elena Loizidou is a Reader in Law and Political Theory at the School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London.
‘We are not with the State, We are with the Community’
All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream. — E. A. Poe In an interview that Alexis Tsipras gave to the...
Lauren Berlant as Cynical Philosopher: An Introduction
If body, then everything can follow (Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 266) ‘Stray dogs have knowledge,’ the late Greek writer Margarita Karapanou writes, ‘because they have suffered pain… Pedigree dogs in relation to stray dogs are still unborn’ (my translation). In this...
Health, Safety and Publicness: Athens, August 9–14, 2012
Five days in Athens. Five very varied days. I used to frequent Athens as a teenager with my parents. We were always transit visitors, en route to Kano, Nigeria where my late father used to work. Those visits where quick, two days in Athens, visiting ancient monuments,...
Ask not what you can do for your country but what we can do for each other
I am thinking of the 77 year old Greek pensioner who took his life earlier today in Syntagma square, Athens. I am thinking of JFK’s 20th of January 1961 inaugural address speech where he uttered these well cited words: “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” The Greeks are not Americans. J.F. Kennedy in this inaugural speech was talking about a new world, where poverty, disease and injustice could be obliterated globally and where, “a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved”. And of course such a world could not be motivated into existence through this speech, nor does it exist […]
A Play on Justice: The Trial of Phryne at (Occupied) Old Street Magistrates Court
Yet it is precisely the disenchantment of beauty in the experience of nudity, this sublime but also miserable exhibition of appearance beyond all mystery and all meaning, that can somehow defuse the theological apparatus and allow us to see, beyond the prestige of...
Riots and Ineloquence
In Nicholas Ray’s 1955 Rebel without a cause we...
Strike for the Present, Perhaps This Is All There Is
José Saramago’s Death at Intervals (2008) tells the story of Death going on Strike. In Saramago’s imagined country ‘since the beginning of the new year, or more precisely since zero hours of the first day of January’ that there is ‘no record of anyone dying’ (2008:3)....
Disobedience Workshop
20 – 21 May 2011 Birkbeck College, University of London Malet Street, Rooms G15 & 416 For reservation please contact V.kelley@bbk.ac.uk Friday 20 May Malet street, G15 11.00 – 11.15 Welcome & Tea/Coffee (Elena Loizidou) 11.15 – 1.00 Session 1: Chair: Carolina...
Thinking of Political Violence: a minor commentary on March 26th 2011, London
Events, by definition, are occurrences that interrupt routine processes and routine procedures; only in a world in which nothing of importance ever happens could the futoroligists’s dream come true. No one engaged in thought about history and politics can remain...