NADEZHDA TOLOKONNIKOVA and SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj. Reviewed by Joshua Barnes
The lived experience of punitive cruelty colours these vibrant theoretical exchanges between Pussy Riot’s Nadya and Slavoj Žižek.
‘Virgin Mary, mother of God, banish Putin!’ So went Pussy Riot’s ‘Punk Prayer’, an insurrectionary protest song aimed at Vladimir Putin’s neoconservative government, publicly delivered in February 2012. Their performance – in Moscow’s deeply symbolic Cathedral of Christ the Saviour – lasted for less than a minute, but as a consequence three of Pussy Riot’s five members were sentenced to two years’ hard labour for the crime of ‘inciting religious hatred’.
Pussy Riot’s ostensible bandleader, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (or Nadya, as she signs her letters), was sent to a labour camp in Siberia to manufacture police uniforms. Following the internment of Pussy Riot’s members, Slovenian philosopher and academic celebrity Slavoj Žižek joined intellectuals and activists around the world in calling for their release. In August 2012, Nadya wrote a short letter to Žižek thanking him for his support, and the two continued to correspond for the duration of Nadya’s imprisonment. (In fact, before the arrests, the two had had plans to meet for a forum in Moscow.)
Their letters are often punctuated by long periods of silence – for their exchange to be possible at all, Žižek’s letters had to be translated from English to Russian and dispatched to Nadya by a contact in the Federal Parliamentary Service; Nadya’s replies were written on special forms and vetted by the prison guards. In March 2014, when Nadya was released several months before the completion of her sentence, her exchanges with Žižek were compiled and released by Verso Books as Comradely Greetings.
The book –very short – is essentially composed of two sections: Nadya’s open letter, ‘Why I Am Going on Hunger Strike’, followed by 11 letters that she and Žižek exchanged during her captivity, with ‘Hunger Strike’ serving as a manifesto for their discussion. Nadya’s descriptions of the horrific conditions in the camp frame the central question that emerges from their dialogue – namely, how to reconcile the dissonance between speculative theories of ethics, capitalism and justice and the realities of those concepts. Their philosophical discussions are always concretised by the squalor of the gulag. Nadya writes:
When the pipes are clogged … urine gushes out of the hygiene rooms and clumps of faeces go flying… we get to do laundry once a week [in] a small room with three faucets from which a thin trickle of cold water flows.
Deprivation is the method of discipline in the labour camp, as the prisoners are fed ‘stale bread, generously watered-down milk, rancid millet and only rotten potatoes’.
What distinguishes Comradely Greetings is the dynamic relationship that emerges between Nadya and Žižek, which is equally respectful, profound and combative. Nadya declares that Pussy Riot is a ‘simplifying, modernising mask’, and that they ‘count ourselves among those rebels who court storms, who hold that the only truth lies in perpetual seeking’. This ideology derives from classic scepticism, and embodies Pussy Riot’s masked, highly symbolic activism: for both Nadya and Žižek, radical ideas are paramount. As he writes of the group:
[Pussy Riot are] not individuals, they’re an Idea … this is why they are such a threat: it is easy to imprison individuals, but try to imprison an Idea!
Žižek posits, in solidarity with Nadya, that the era of global capitalism is premised on infinite expansion. In the classical Marxist schema, capitalism inevitably atrophies into revolution after the contradictions inherent to its labour production have become too fierce. Žižek argues, however, that contemporary capitalism actively creates and relies upon these very contradictions: multinational companies outgrow their labour conditions and outsource it to fiscally dependent nations where labour can be obtained more cheaply, for example.
In response to Žižek’s theory, Nadya writes that when she was young she wanted – a quiet irony – to work in advertising: her counter-argument is that global capitalism functions like advertising, and has:
… a deep interest in seeing that you and I believe the system runs completely on principles of free creativity, limitless growth, and diversity, and the flip side – millions of people enslaved by all-powerful and (take it from me) fantastically stable standards of production – remains invisible.
Like Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks or George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, the remarkable feature of Comradely Greetings is Nadya’s urgent, empathic experience of punitive cruelty. The brutality with which the inmates are forced to meet their quotas colours her vibrant exchanges with Žižek on the ideas of Nietzsche, Marx, postmodernism and Laurie Anderson. Her confinement is not deployed as mere texture, though – rather, it supplies a deeply serious context for each exchange of theory.
Although the solidarity and comradeship that emerges between Nadya and Žižek is often remarkable, it is perhaps a shame that he was her interlocutor. He is well known in the West as the author of almost 70 books, however, if one reads more than, say, three of Žižek’s books, one begins to see that his corpus of examples, anecdotes and jokes might only be as wide as it is shallow.
Comradely Greetings was the seventh book featuring Žižek to be released in 2014, and he was last year accused three times of self-plagiarism and lazy scholarship, allegedly ripping passages out of his earlier works for op-eds in the New York Times and cribbing the academic work of others into his own pieces in Critical Inquiry. Despite his theoretical dexterity, Žižek’s tendency to self-cannibalise has earned him his share of notoriety; as Sarah Kay remarks in her Žižek: A Critical Introduction, ‘he is at risk of writing faster than he can read, and at times faster even than he can think’.
And he redeploys his comfortable array of anecdotes throughout Comradely Greetings (veteran readers of Žižek’s stuff could probably make a robust drinking game out of recognising examples from previous works). This is not always a bad thing, as Žižek’s analyses are almost always fluent, but it does diminish the authenticity of the relationship between Nadya and Žižek – eventually the reader, and perhaps Nadya, too, tires of his shtick.
But the book remains an important document because it renders the central problems of philosophy alongside the unbearable physical circumstances of Nadya’s internment. In The Gulag Archipelago Alexander Solzhenitsyn suggests that if the intellectual heroes of Chekhov’s plays ‘who spent all their time guessing what would happen in Russia in twenty, thirty or forty years’ had been confronted with a prophecy of the brutalities of the Stalinist gulags that would contaminate Russia for most of the last century, ‘not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums’. Indeed, Žižek and Nadya both embody Solzhenitsyn’s ‘intellectual heroes’ as they reckon with the text’s fundamental concerns: What relationship do philosophy and reality maintain? How can the former radicalise and improve the latter? As Žižek writes:
What makes Pussy Riot so disturbing for the liberal gaze is the way you reveal a hidden continuity between Stalinism and contemporary global capitalism.
Even though the arteries of violence, repression and injustice may still remain hidden, the ultimate objective of radical philosophy – that of intellectuals and activists alike – is to reveal and undermine the repressed kinship of liberalism and fascism.
Joshua Barnes is a student and writer from Melbourne. He has published fiction in Voiceworks and Gore Journal and he studies Creative Writing at RMIT University.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Slavoj Žižek Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj Verso Books 2014 PB 112pp $12.99
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