answers to Napoleon

I often sign using the letter M.

It is not symbolic, just a way to strike a balance between anonymity/privacy on the net and personalizing the signature. There is an ongoing debate about these issues, even in Greece recently, with reference to blogging.

About "having no justification to be rational should we take deconstruction seriously", I guess, I can only say that "reason" is part of our intellectual makeup; we are lost without it and unfortunately, it is an endangered tradition. Endangered by the irrational media, mass phenomena etc

There is certainly a paradox in Foucault's attempt to elicit the discourse of déraison, defined more or less as the silence of reason. Like there is a paradox in Plato's ideas. There is always a flaw in every attempt at totalisation. In post modernism, the Frankfurt school and more recent thinkers, we see a tendency to humanize philosophical discourse and accept/integrate its fragmented and multilayered character.

These are progressively "rhizomatic"/organic discourses.

What I retain from post-modernism and deconstruction, basically, is an attempt to reveal the fissures of dogmatic rationalism. These writers took philosophical analysis (and critique) to its limits, digging under the surface of structuralism and under the surface of structured language, something that had already been the object (in a much wider sense) of works of fiction like Ulysses.
Thomas Pynchon is another interesting example.

What I find offensive is the cult of sentimentalism, eg in the work of Paulo Coello, or in Harry Potter and other best sellers. Commercialism favors the absence of critique!

About communism: I would look at marxism as an interesting theory. On the other hand, the "soviet union"... I would have considered as an application of imperialism to marxism rather than the opposite. Russia today is not communist but certain methods remind the soviet union. Totalitarian idealism/ communism/ national socialism... are these not related?

About greek socialist governments "imposing social cohesion through countless laws and destroying free association", I think I agree with you. What we need is a limited number of very strict laws to regulate the bonding of individual interests. We should safeguard freedom and democracy too. Encouraging people's dependence on the state is totalitarian. Such are the socioeconomic systems where it pays to be corrupt.

I don't understand very well what you say about Pasok and their system of widespread patronage. In all cases, I don't think Simitis could have centrally controlled the political personnel and the regime mentality. They ended up behaving just like the old political right that had monopolized this country's wealth before Pasok. You know "our children will get the jobs etc"

I totally agree with you about public space. I worked with reconstruction.gr for a couple of years, saw the misery and the hope inherent in fringe politics and local associations, I saw the bureaucratic mentality and the lack of interest on the part of state and local institutions, the waste of funds, the difficulty and the satisfaction of coming to an understanding with fellow citizens on a basis of disinterested free association.
However, I am currently taking a break, because I felt a little bit tired/wasted/decentered and in need to resume a more personal body of work. Would this be my turn to make a move to the right to save my sanity from this vision of precariousness and the objective void under my feet? I don't know. I guess the dead do have a say in all we do. I tend to believe that most of our choices are chemically conditioned by our inherited genes and it takes all kinds of choices to have a working society. Health is a matter of measure and balance!
Sometimes, I think that if I could I would just move to Vancouver :-)