What suicide and Greece tell us about precarity and capitalism

ABSTRACT

Many see precarity and precariousness as a ‘global condition', others do not. Most of these authors share the idea that populations suffer from economic displacements and ought to be at the forefront of states’ economic and labor policy agendas. However, these same authors, from different disciplines, presume an equivalency in precarity, missing that many peoples are racially exposed to injury, violence, and death. This article problematizes some of these disciplinarian notions and logics and argues that raciality is a global structure and a set of institutions of ordering and differencing through which the state resolves its contradictory demands by ‘checking claims’ about justice. Second, this article expands an analytics about subjectification and biofinancialization by reading how suicide and Greece are not projects but rather sites that expose the works of global raciality which aids, through the logics of precarity and the logics of ‘obliteration,’ the state’s work for global capital.

KEYWORDS:

• Global raciality
• precarity
• Greece
• suicide
• biofinancialization
• global capital

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It is important to note that this conversation of beings and persons has been at the forefront of liberal theory through certain hierarchical divisions between the homo phaenomenon (sensuous being, the living being) and homo noumenon, the focus of pure reason. We see this in Hobbes, Locke and more explicitly in Kant who criminalizes suicide as a violation of one’s human rights (i.e. the ‘humanity in my own person’) (Kant, 1790/1952, pp. 126–127).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by SSHRC [grant number 410-2009-2590].

Notes on contributors

Anna M. Agathangelou

Anna M. Agathangelou, PhD, teaches at York University. She is also the co-editor (with Kyle D. Killian) of Time, temporality and violence in international relations: (De) fatalizing the present, forging radical alternatives (Routledge, 2016) and author of the Global political economy of sex: Desire, violence and insecurity in Mediterranean nation-states (Palgrave, 2004).