ABSTRACT
The Archaeological Society at Athens was founded in 1837 in what then was the newly-established capital of a newly-established nation-state. The fledgling Greek state was thus allowed to find in archaeology its ideological foundations and the material evidence for its existence, as the development of a national – Hellenic, as opposed to ‘Greek’ – archaeology offered to the newly-established kingdom a welcome repertoire of symbols and a convenient toolbox of cultural strategies that were going to prove very useful in the years to come. The bodies generated by the Greek crisis – excluded, precarious, and vulnerable – are biopolitically reproduced as citizens and subjects only to the extent they legitimize the crisis itself, typically as justification for its enforcement in the first place. The bodies featured in those early works appear as the alienated, aggressively unfamiliar bodies of national discontinuity, the noncanonical bodies of sexual diversion, the vulnerable, unwanted bodies loitering the edges of late modernity.
