Slavoj Žižek & Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova Exchange An Extraordinary Series of Letters

Miss­ing for almost a month, impris­oned Pussy Riot mem­ber Nadezh­da Tolokon­niko­va has been report­ed by her hus­band as recov­er­ing in a Siber­ian hos­pi­tal from issues relat­ed to her hunger strike. As The Guardian reports, Tolokon­niko­va didn’t only resist by refus­ing to eat, she also kept up a live­ly cor­re­spon­dence with Sloven­ian the­o­rist Slavoj Žižek while endur­ing report­ed abuse at the penal colony in Mor­dovia where she had been sen­tenced. It seems from the edit­ed cor­re­spon­dence pub­lished by The Guardian that Žižek began the con­ver­sa­tion in ear­ly Jan­u­ary. “All hearts were beat­ing for you” he writes, until “it became clear that you reject­ed glob­al cap­i­tal­ism.” In a lat­er, April 16 reply, Tolokon­niko­va explains exact­ly what Pussy Riot rejects:

As a child I want­ed to go into adver­tis­ing. I had a love affair with the adver­tis­ing indus­try. And this is why I am in a posi­tion to judge its mer­its. The anti-hier­ar­chi­cal struc­tures and rhi­zomes of late cap­i­tal­ism are its suc­cess­ful ad cam­paign. Mod­ern cap­i­tal­ism has to man­i­fest itself as flex­i­ble and even eccen­tric. Every­thing is geared towards grip­ping the emo­tion of the con­sumer. Mod­ern cap­i­tal­ism seeks to assure us that it oper­ates accord­ing to the prin­ci­ples of free cre­ativ­i­ty, end­less devel­op­ment and diver­si­ty. It gloss­es over its oth­er side in order to hide the real­i­ty that mil­lions of peo­ple are enslaved by an all-pow­er­ful and fan­tas­ti­cal­ly sta­ble norm of pro­duc­tion. We want to reveal this lie.

Read the full pub­lished exchange at The Guardian’s site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fear of a Female Plan­et: Kim Gor­don (Son­ic Youth) on Why Rus­sia and the US Need a Pussy Riot

Russ­ian Punk Band, Sen­tenced to Two Years in Prison for Derid­ing Putin, Releas­es New Sin­gle

Slavoj Žižek Demys­ti­fies the Gang­nam Style Phe­nom­e­non

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness