This essay is a personally and politically implicated account of the December 2008 youth uprising in Greece, by an academic who, along with a group of her colleagues, participated actively in “street action” and followed closely the discourses articulated around it, struggling to make the events intelligible to themselves and debating the main issues that this rebellion raised: the absence of political claims and the production of violence against material symbols of the current regime of power. It is an attempt to make sense of the “events” while they were still resonant with the puzzlement, predicament, and ambivalence of the moment. It is also part of the effort by a section of Greek intellectuals of radical and leftist background to oppose the attempt by dominant political forces and social science to classify these events as a moment of disorder produced by small groups of troublemakers to be repressed and condemned to oblivion. It is part of the effort to provide a witness for them, instead, as a rebellion, as a story telling us something about Greek youth, politics, and society that must be listened to, understood, and interpreted, and as an “event” creating new potentialities in Greek political processes that remain to be revealed.
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