Comradely Greetings

The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj

Slavoj Zizek, Nadya Tolokonnikova

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781781687734
• eBook ISBN: 9781781687758
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"We are the rebels asking for the storm, and believing that truth is only to be found in an endless search ... Two years of prison for Pussy Riot is our tribute to a destiny that gave us sharp ears, allowing us to sound the note A when everyone else is used to hearing G flat."

In an extraordinary exchange of letters, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, imprisoned for taking part in Pussy Riot's anti-Putin performance, and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek discuss artistic subversion, political activism, and the future of democracy via the ideas of Hegel, Deleuze, Nietzsche, and even Laurie Anderson.

Two radicals, one in a Russian forced labor camp, the other writing to her from far outside its walls, show passionately - across linguistic and generational divides - that "there is still a common cause worth fighting for." Touching, erudite, and worldly, their correspondence unfolds with poetic urgency.

In association with Philosophie Magazine.

The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj

“All of our activity is a quest for miracles”

Nadya to Slavoj, August 23, 2012

Dear Slavoj,

We received the news that you have been supporting us in every way—in theory and in practice. How terrific! The three of us have been incredulous at the birth of this miraculous movement for political liberation, and your support will mean its continuation. I love miracles and strive for them. All of our activity is a quest for miracles. The inmates are studying your essay “Violence.”

Thanks for everything!

Good luck to all.

Nadya

“Ignore all who pity you as punk provocateurs”

Slavoj to Nadya, August 26, 2012

Dear Nadezhda, dear Maria, dear all of you!

I got your letters in Russian, which I can read (I learned Russian in high school!). Unfortunately, I cannot any longer write in Russian, so forgive me my English.

I cannot tell you how proud I am to be in contact with you. Your acts are well thought, and based on deep insights into how oppressive power works, how it has to rely on a hidden obscene agenda, violating its own rules. But more than that, you show all of us the way to combine these right insights with simple courage. Against all postmodern cynics, you demonstrate that ethical-political engagement is needed more than ever. So please ignore enemies and false friends who pity you as punk provocateurs who deserve mere clemency. You are not helpless victims calling for sympathy and mercy, you are fighters calling for solidarity in struggle. From my own past in Slovenia, I am well aware of how punk performances are much more effective than liberal-humanitarian protests. My dream is, when all this mess is over, to have a long talk with you about all these matters.

But I am well aware that we are fragile human beings at the mercy of forces of oppression, and this is why I am also filled with sad rage and fury—why can I not do more to help you? Please just let me know how I can be of ANY help and I will do it, be it political or personal. Next week I go to Toronto to present the new film The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, and I will dedicate it to you.

It may sound crazy, but although I am an atheist, you are in my prayers. Prayers that you will soon see your family, children, friends. Prayers that you will at least have some time to read and reflect in peace while in prison!

All my love,

Slavoj

“It is so important that you persist”

Slavoj to Nadya, January 2, 2013

Dear Nadezhda,

I sincerely hope that you’ve been able to organize your life in prison around small rituals to make your stay there at least tolerable, and that you have some time to read. Here are my thoughts on your predicament.

John Jay Chapman, an American political essayist, wrote back in 1900 about radicals: “They are really always saying the same thing. They do not change; everybody else changes. They are accused of the most incompatible crimes, of egoism and a mania for power, indifference to the fate of their own cause, fanaticism, triviality, want of humor, buffoonery and irreverence. But they sound a certain note. Hence the great practical power of consistent radicals. To all appearance nobody follows them, yet everyone believes them. They hold a tuning-fork and sound A, and everybody knows it really is A, though the time-honored pitch is G flat.” Is this not a fair description of the effect of a Pussy Riot performance? In spite of all the accusations, you sound a certain note. It may appear as if nobody is following you, but secretly they all believe you, they know you are telling the truth—or, even more so, that you stand for the truth.

But what truth? Why are the reactions to Pussy Riot performances so violent—and not only in Russia? The vacillations of the Western media are indicative here: all hearts were beating for you as long as you were seen as just another liberal-democratic protest against the authoritarian state; but the moment it became clear that you also reject global capitalism, the reports became much more ambiguous, with many now displaying a new-found “understanding” for your critics. Again, why?

What makes Pussy Riot so disturbing for the liberal gaze is the way you reveal a hidden continuity between Stalinism and contemporary global capitalism.

In one of his last interviews before his fall, Nicolae Ceauşescu was asked by a Western journalist why Romanian citizens were not free to travel abroad even though freedom of movement was guaranteed by the constitution. True, Ceauşescu replied, the constitution guarantees freedom of movement, but it also guarantees the right of the people to a safe homeland. So here we have a potential conflict of rights: if citizens were to be allowed to leave the country, the prosperity of Romania would be threatened and they would have endangered their right to a safe homeland. In such a conflict of rights then, one has to make a choice, and here the right to a prosperous and safe homeland enjoys the clear priority …

This same spirit of Stalinist sophistry remains alive and well in my own country, Slovenia, where on December 19, 2012, the Constitutional Court ruled that a proposed referendum on legislation to set up a “bad bank” would be unconstitutional, thus in effect banning any popular vote on the matter. The idea of the legislation was to transfer the bad debts of the major banks onto a new “bad bank” which would then be salvaged with state money (i.e., at the taxpayers’ expense), preventing any serious inquiry into who was responsible for the debts. The measure had been debated for months and was far from being generally accepted even by financial specialists.

The popular vote on the issue had been proposed by trade unions opposed to the government’s neoliberal economic policies, and their proposal had received enough signatures to make it obligatory. In the judgment of the Slovene Constitutional Court, however, such a referendum “would have caused unconstitutional consequences”—how? The Court conceded that a referendum was a constitutional right, but claimed that its execution in this case would endanger other constitutional values which, in a situation of deep economic crisis, should take priority—values such as the efficient functioning of the state apparatus, especially in creating the conditions for economic growth; or the realization of human rights, especially the rights to social security and to free economic activity … In short, in its assessment, the Court simply accepted as undisputed fact the reasoning of the international financial authorities exerting pressure on Slovenia to pursue more austerity measures. A failure to obey the dictates of those authorities, or to meet their expectations, the Court argued, would lead to further political and economic crises and would thus be unconstitutional—in other words, since following those dictates is a condition for the maintenance of constitutional order, they take priority over the constitution (and eo ipso over state sovereignty).

Slovenia may be a small marginal country, but this decision of its Constitutional Court is symptomatic of a global tendency towards the limitation of democracy. The idea is that, in a complex economic situation such as we have today, the majority of people are not qualified to judge—they just want to keep their privileges intact, and are ignorant of the catastrophic consequences which would ensue if their demands were to be met. This line of argumentation is not new. In a TV interview a few years ago, Ralf Dahrendorf linked the growing distrust in democracy to the fact that, after every revolutionary change, the road to new prosperity will lead through a “valley of tears”: with the breakdown of socialism we cannot pass directly to the abundance of a market economy—the limited, but real, socialist welfare and security systems will first have to be dismantled, and these initial steps will inevitably be painful. For Dahrendorf, the key problem is that this passage through the “valley of tears” will invariably last longer than the average period between democratic elections, thereby creating an irresistible temptation to postpone the difficult changes for short-term electoral gain. But if the majority are likely to resist the necessary restructuring, would the logical conclusion not then be that, for a decade or so, an enlightened elite should take power, even by non-democratic means, in order to enforce the necessary measures and thus lay the foundations for a truly stable democracy? When developing countries are “prematurely democratized,” the result is a populism which ends in economic catastrophe and political despotism—no wonder then that today’s most economically successful Third World countries (Taiwan, South Korea, Chile) embraced full democracy only after a period of authoritarian rule. Does this line of thinking not also provide the best justification for the maintenance of an authoritarian regime in China?

What is new today is that, with the continuation of the crisis that began in 2008, this same distrust of democracy, once limited to Third World or post-Communist countries, is gaining ground in the developed Western countries themselves. What, a decade or two ago, was merely patronizing advice to others, now concerns ourselves, as Western Europe, in its passage from the post-war Welfare State to the new global economy, is required to undergo a painful restructuring leading to widespread insecurity.

But what if this distrust is justified? What if it is only the experts who can save us, whether with full or less than full democracy? The least one can say is that since 2008 the crisis has furnished us with more than adequate proof of how it is not the people but the experts themselves who, in the vast majority, have no idea what they are doing. In Western Europe, we are effectively witnessing the increasing inability of the ruling elite to rule. Look at how they’ve dealt with the Greek crisis: putting pressure on Greece to repay its debts while at the same time ruining its economy through imposed austerity measures—thereby ensuring that the debts will never be repaid.

No wonder, then, that Pussy Riot makes us all uneasy—you know very well what you don’t know, you don’t pretend to have fast and easy answers, but what you are also telling us is that those in power don’t know either. Your message is that, in Europe today, the blind are leading the blind. This is why it is so important that you persist. In the same way that, after witnessing Napoleon entering Jena, Hegel wrote that it was as if he had seen the World Spirit riding in on a horse, you, sitting there in prison, embody nothing less than the critical awareness of us all.

Comradely greetings,

Slavoj

“We count ourselves among those rebels who court storms”

Nadja to Slavoj, February 23, 2013

Dear Slavoj,

One time, in the autumn of 2012, while I was sitting in pretrial detention with the other Pussy Riot activists, I came to your house for a visit. In a dream, of course.

I get what you’re saying about horses and the World Spirit, about Chapman’s “buffoonery and irreverence,” and more to the point about how and why all of these are so forcefully bound up with one another. Pussy Riot has wound up on the side of those who feel the call to critique, to creation and co-creation, to experimentation and the role of the unceasing provocateur. To put it in terms of the opposition Nietzsche set up, we’re the children of Dionysus, floating by in a barrel, accepting nobody’s authority. We’re on the side of those who don’t offer final answers or transcendent truths. Our mission, rather, is the asking of questions.

There are architects of Apollonian equilibrium in this world, and there are (punk) singers of flux and transformation. One is not better than the other: “Mamy raznye nuzhny, mamy raznye vazhny.”¹ Only our cooperation can ensure the continuity of Heraclitus’ vision: “This world has always been and will always be a pulsing fire, flaring up accordingly, and dying down accordingly, with the cycling of the eternal world breath.”

We count ourselves among those rebels who court storms,² who hold that the only truth lies in perpetual seeking.

Nikolai Berdyaev wrote in Self-Knowledge: “Truth as an object which intrudes itself and wields authority over me—an object in the name of which it is demanded that I should renounce freedom—is a figment: truth is no extraneous thing; it is the way and the life. Truth is spiritual conquest; it is known in and through freedom.” “Christianity itself is to me the embodiment of the revolt against the world and its laws and fashions.” “From time to time a terrible thought crossed my mind: what if obsequious orthodoxy is right and I am wrong? In that case I am lost. But I have always been quick to cast this thought from me.” All statements that might have come from Pussy Riot just as easily as from Russia’s great political philosopher. In 1898, Berdyaev was arrested on charges of agitating for the Social Democrats, indicted for “designs on the overthrow of the government and the church,” and exiled from Kiev for three years to the Vologda Gubernia. When the World Spirit touches you, don’t think you can walk away unscathed.

Intuition—and this is where your blind leading the blind comes in—is of stunning importance. The main thing is to realize that you yourself are as blind as can be. Once you get that, you can, for maybe the first time, doubt the natural place in the world to which your skin and your bones have rooted you, the inherited condition that constantly threatens to spill over into feelings of terror.

It’s tempting to think that fundamentalism is the only terrifying aspect of our situation, but the problem is bigger than that; fundamentalists are the tip of the iceberg. There’s a powerful antifascist dictum that “the fascists do the killing, the authorities the burying.” I remember something the curator Andrei Erofeev,³ whom I know to be anything but indifferent to antifascism, used to say while he was on trial at the instigation of the ultra-conservative People’s Council, and facing considerable jail time, for his role in organizing the “Forbidden Art—2006” exhibition: “If the People’s Council had acted without the sanction of state apparatuses, this tr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: by Michel Eltchaninoff
• The True Blasphemy: On the Pussy Riot Sentencing: By Slavoj Žižek
• Why I Am Going on Hunger Strike: An Open Letter: By Nadya Tolokonnikova
• The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj