Class, Negativity, and Becoming: The Poetic Counter-archives of Samson Rakas and Antonis Antonakos

In this chapter, class-related aspects in the work of two contemporary “minor” Greek authors/artists, Samson Rakas and Antonis Antonakos, are examined. The study offers critical theoretical reflections on the work of both authors and its situated context. The poetic works studied are produced in the social context of contemporary Greece. They depart from lived realities, memories, and counter-hegemonic narratives, while advancing affects, logics, and practices of self-reflectivity, melancholia, resentment, negativity, and flight. Though forms differ, Rakas and Antonakos share an anti-bourgeois and anti-nationalist, egalitarian stance, striving for the creation of a post-bourgeois assemblage, deterritorializing majoritarian nationalist confines. The dimension of class exists in the poetics of both authors, as a critique to the modern, capitalist Greece/world, and bourgeois subjectivity, and as an aspiration for the advance of post- bourgeois social relations, social formations, and subjectivities.