Bloodlines: Performing the Body of the "Demos," Reckoning the Time of the "Ethnos"

Organized around fantasies of endangered national sovereignty, discourses of population decline bespeak a highly politicized cultural anxiety that has come to haunt individual and collective imaginaries in the public life of Greece in the 1990s. The rhetoric of biopolitics about the precarious future presents the nation as a bleeding body and an object of mournful nostalgia and affective idealization. Prompted through normative renderings of time and life, anxiety over population decrease emerges as an idiom of gendered subjectivity, a technology of governmentality, and symbolic capital of national narratives. Despite its volatility, this "truth regime," in a Foucauldian sense, is crucially implicated in the constitution of intimate subjectivities according to the cultural intelligibility of reproductive heterosexuality, familial generationality, and national continuity; it represents, however, a code of intelligibility that is not invariably shared and is widely contested. Since the national-cultural preoccupation with the future has taken on a marked salience as a politics of the present, "time" has emerged as a flexible signifying practice, a strategic force that social actors work as much with as against, while dealing with the spectral limits of the lived temporality of the nation and their own.