This thesis explores four magazines that emerged from autonomous groups in Athens concerning politics of desire and liberation: Amfi (Eng: dispute, 1978–1990), Skoupa (Eng:
broom, 1979–1981), Kraximo (Eng: slating 1981–1993) and Lavrys (Eng: double–axe, 1982–1983). By mobilizing the notion of ‘the haptic’ as a tripartite sense of touch that involves: a physical, an indexical and an affective touch (Campt,2012), this research focuses on archival stories that emerged from a haptic reading. To navigate this haptic exploration I have structured the chapters as a written weave. Chapter 1 constitutes the first part of the warp
where I discuss the sociocultural context of Greece and archives as sites of death and being. In chapter 2, as the second part of the warp based on first fieldwork impressions, I place the
yarns of complexities when researching social movements; language intricacies; and nodes on desiring differently. Chapter 3 (the first of the weft) focuses on Skoupa and women’s
ongoing struggle and I claim that the task of emotional memory is a necessary endeavour that requires our attention, then, now, and still. Chapter 4 weaves in the politics of Amfi and what I call: Anti–seriousness mobilization tactics. I argue that this formula of social mobilizations entail creativity and imagination as forms of resistance. In chapter 5 I introduce the aspect of the ‘optic’ and visual hapticality, to argue for some threads of fluorescent refusals that I encountered while reading Kraximo. In chapter 6 through ‘touching stories’ found in Lavrys I discuss politics of love, intimacy, and difference. Chapter 7 brings impressions and tensions of the four magazines together in relation to space and Lefebvre’s concept of ‘right to the city’. Ultimately, I argue that stories of living and desiring differently from social relations of capital, inhabit an otherwise (Hartman, 2019) which illustrates everyday practices of
imaginative will.