Children of the Dictatorship: Student Resistance, Cultural Politics, and the “Long 1960s” in Greece by Kostis Kornetis (review)

In his work, The Politics of Aesthetics (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), Jacques Rancière notes that “there is an ‘aesthetics’ at the core of politics that has nothing to do with [Walter] Benjamin’s discussion of the ‘aestheticization of politics’ specific to the ‘age of the masses.’ It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of expression” (8). It is in this manner that Jacques Rancière attempts to salvage politics (Carl Schmitt’s “the political”) from Benjamin’s problematization of both politics and aesthetics and the resulting facility with which politics has been dismissed as “mere aesthetics.” In contradistinction to that, Rancière proposes the realization of a political aesthetics that looks at the experience of politics, the tropes of its praxis, and the synesthesia that makes politics seductive and that resides in the folds of political action—the colors, smells, art forms, the “showing” of the being. Could politics be possible if encountered only on the level of the intellect, not on the level of its affect?

Kostis Kornetis’s Children of the Dictatorship is an important and timely book that revisits precisely this tension of aesthetics and politics through the particular location of totalitarian politics and youth aesthetics. Even though Kornetis does not engage with Rancière, the queries he addresses in his book have brought into sharp relief the questions that undergirded the clandestine politics of Greek youth during Greece’s dictatorship from 1967 to 1974. Kornetis looks at the generation that spans the years from 1958 to 1974 and focuses on the particular microgeneration that was born after the Civil War (1946–1949) and acquired its political subjectivity under the junta. Neither here nor there, often dismissed as having been outside of what is known in Greece as the generation of the Polytechnic, this generation has long been overlooked while being branded irrelevant and confused by the immediately preceding generation that was born during the Civil War and created the youth movements in Greece. This is a book on and of ego-histoire, in the most French (or Greek) manner, where history and story, two words that in both languages are the same (histoire in French, historia in Greek) and mean both documented history and the history of undocumented affect, appear to be crossing paths and demanding equal legitimacy. On those crossings Kornetis rests the analysis of his—our—question: what is the contact point between aesthetics and politics and what takes place there?

Kornetis does not posit this question in the abstract but from specific locations—Greece, youth, totalitarian political formations, multiple resistances, and revolutions—from the purely political (the resistance to the dictatorship) to the purely aesthetic (the aesthetics of the hippies, of the politically engaged youth), in order to insert the politics of emancipatory aesthetics as the breaking point of the aesthetic of totalitarian antipolitics. There are two places that Kornetis interpolates in this gesture: cosmopolitan Athens and progressive Thessaloniki, or, better said, what Athens thinks of Thessaloniki (politically progressive) and what Thessaloniki thinks of Athens (cosmopolitan). The two cities have been at odds many times, but always on the wrong assumptions: Athens thinking of Thessaloniki as being on the forefront of the labor movement, while Thessaloniki thinking of Athens as being more Marxist, more on the forefront of the labor movement. These are not idle ruminations, as Kornetis shows us, but specific observations that have to do precisely with the specificity of youth and its engagement with the basic question.

Neither is “the youth” that Kornetis invokes an idealized or disembodied abstraction. Rather, what he brings up is a very interesting and very well-executed delineation of what I call a “micro-generation.” These micro-generations are actually different affective locations—a micro-generation of fear, a...