Alkisti Efthymiou in Conversation with Athena Athanasiou: Spectral Publics and Antifascist Eventualities

Abstract

This text is a conversation between Athena Athanasiou and Alkisti Efthymiou, drawing from Athena Athanasiou’s new book, Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Women in Black (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). The conversation discusses the critical potency of collective subjectivities such as the Women in Black and expands on issues that include political agency, vulnerability in resistance, spacing appearance, performing public mourning, or the traveling of social movements, associating them with contemporary feminist and antifascist urgencies. Central to the text is the concept of non-sovereign agonism, a form of political agency that addresses (or takes into account) the dispossessed quality of subjectivity and pays attention to the relationality through which we are constituted as subjects.
 Author(s): Alkisti Efthymiou and Athena Athanasiou
 Title (English): Alkisti Efthymiou in Conversation with Athena Athanasiou: Spectral Publics and Antifascist Eventualities
 Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 16, No. 1-2 (Summer - Winter 2019)
 Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje
 Page Range: 102-113
 Page Count: 12
 Citation (English): Alkisti Efthymiou and Athena Athanasiou, “Alkisti Efthymiou in Conversation with Athena Athanasiou: Spectral Publics and Antifascist Eventualities,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 16, No. 1-2 (Summer - Winter 2019): 102-113.

The Sky and The Storm

“…She later recalled that 'the mindfulness of body, the ground, the space…' invited her to reconnect her mind and body. She sensed more deeply than she had in some time, and experienced profound sadness for a loved one who was suffering (Efthymiou, 2021). Arawana reminds us that sadness can be a 'code word for compassion… sadness is powerfully human'.…”