The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben said in an interview that “thought is the courage of hopelessness” ─ an insight that is especially pertinent for our historical moment, when even the most pessimistic diagnosis as a rule finishes with an uplifting hint at some version of the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. The true courage is not to imagine an alternative, but to accept the consequences of the fact that there is no clearly discernible alternative: the dream of an alternative is a sign of theoretical cowardice; it functions as a fetish that prevents us thinking through to the end the deadlock of our predicament. In short, the true courage is to admit that the light at the end of the tunnel is most likely the headlights of another train approaching us from the opposite direction. There is no better example of the need for such courage than Greece today.

The double U-turn that the Greek crisis took in July 2015 can appear as nothing other than a step not just from tragedy to comedy but, as Stathis Kouvelakis noted in Jacobin magazine, from tragedy full of comic reversals directly into a theatre of the absurd. Is there any other way to characterise the extraordinary reversal of one extreme to its opposite that would bedazzle even the most speculative Hegelian philosopher? Tired of endless negotiations with EU executives in which one humiliation followed another, Syriza called for a referendum on Sunday 5 July asking the Greek people if they support or reject the EU’s proposal of new austerity measures. Although the government clearly stated that it supported a No vote, the result was a surprise: the overwhelming majority, more than 61 per cent, voted No to European blackmail. Rumours began to circulate that the result – victory for the government – was a bad surprise to Alexis Tsipras himself, who had secretly hope that the government would lose, so that a defeat would allow him to save face in surrendering to the EU demands (“We have to respect the voters’ voice”). However, literally the morning after, Tsipras announced that Greece was ready to resume the negotiations, and days later Greece negotiated a EU proposal that is basically the same as what the voters rejected (in some details, even harsher). In short, he acted as if the government had lost, not won, the referendum. As Kouvelakis wrote:

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And things went on in this direction. On the night of 10 July, the Greek parliament gave Alexis Tsipras authority to negotiate a new bailout by 250 votes to 32, but 17 government MPs didn’t back the plan, which means he got more support from the opposition parties than from his own. Days later, the Syriza Political Secretariat, which is dominated by the left wing of the party, concluded that the EU’s latest proposals are “absurd” and “exceed the limits of Greek society’s endurance” – leftist extremism?

But the International Monetary Fund itself (in this case a voice of minimally rational capitalism) made exactly the same point: an IMF study published a day earlier showed that Greece needs far more debt relief than European governments have been willing to contemplate so far – European countries would have to give Greece a 30-year grace period on servicing all its European debt, including new loans, and a dramatic maturity extension . . .

No wonder that Tsipras himself publicly stated his doubt about the bailout plan: “We don’t believe in the measures that were imposed upon us,” he said in a TV interview, making it clear that he supports it out of pure despair, to avoid a total economic and financial collapse. The Eurocrats use such confessions with breathtaking perfidity: now that the Greek government accepts their tough conditions, they doubt the sincerity and seriousness of its commitment. How can Tsipras really fight for a program he doesn’t believe in? How can the Greek government be really committed to the agreement when it opposes the referendum result?

However, statements such as that from the IMF demonstrate that the true problem lies elsewhere: does the EU really believe in its own bailout plan?

2017. Slavoj Žižek. The Courage of Hopelessness. Allen Lane. In these troubled times, even the most pessimistic diagnosis of our future ends with an uplifting hint that things might not be as bad as all that, that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Yet, argues Slavoj Žižek, it is only when we have admit to ourselves that our situation is completely hopeless….