ABSTRACT

This chapter explores a slightly different aspect of Slavoj iek's politics of negation, again through the Greek crisis that is to say, his notion of the radical refusal or Bartleby politics. Iek has been a prominent supporter of SYRIZA since the beginning of the eurozone crisis in the autumn of 2009, regularly sharing a platform with Alexis Tsipras and Yannis Varoufakis and giving talks in Athens. Drawing on iek's own analysis of the financial crisis, Fabio Vighi and Heiko Feldner argue that what Naomi Klein's position of outright rejection fails to address is the fact that the effect of the rescue packages is real and effective and the alternative would be much worse. As iek writes in The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, SYRIZA represented a real alternative to the European establishment; it represented all that was worth saving in Europe democracy, trust in the people and egalitarian solidarity.