An ambience for indifference: On the ethics of exclusion and the Greek debt crisis

Leandros Kyriakopoulos

Keywords: Neoliberalism, debt crisis, Greece, dispossession, affect, ethics

By focusing on the years after Greece’s debt crisis announcement and implementation of austerity measures, this article examines the affective formations that render the project of neoliberalism a necessity. Since neoliberal politics recognise debt crisis as an ‘opportunity’ for strengthening the state via austerity measures, deregulation and state properties privatisation, deprivation of assets and work becomes an inevitable byproduct suffusing the sense of ‘security’ and ‘protection’ with affective value. By investigating indifference as a societal ambience, this presentation questions how the experience of loss and the longing for security met amplifying the further dispossession of the afflicted other.