The Performative Politics of Greek Debt

After demonstrating that the sphere of finance more broadly and politics of debt more particularly build on performance and theatricality, I shed light on the illusions that are, I argue, constitutive of Greek debt. I make the case that Greek debt is about a perpetually failing pay-back inseparable from Greece’s western creditors’ postcolonial interests and the orientalizing logics of finance capitalism. I examine how this “performative misfire” of Greek debt is legitimized by the staging of Greece’s structural dependence upon the west as “independence”–a spectacle often maintained by narratives that frame Greece as the “birthplace” of western civilization and as a direct and continuous extension of Greek antiquity. I map connections between these notions of “performative failure” and finance capital’s elusive promise to autonomize itself from industry and production. Finally, I introduce the concept of performance economy in order to conceptualize economies that build on acts disruptive of these illusions.