I had written “must read” for a couple of reasons. One was that, although Žižek theorizes various kinds of disruptive activisms with which Canadians are familiar in the current Idle-No-More, anti-whaling, anti-arctic oil drilling, anti-fracking and anti-wind turbine protests, we have never, as far as I know, observed him in dialogue with an imprisoned activist. Neither does he try to board arctic oil rigs from an inflatable boat, nor, like Pussy Riot and Femin, introduce performance art into politically sacred spaces – unless one considers Hegel scholarship such a space. (I note – re the recent visits of Russian search engines here – that some of the Femin webpages tonight seem to have been hacked and replaced with pages of official-looking Cyrillic text.)
But Žižek’s writings are undoubtedly important to some current activists – though probably unknown to Esther Wightman of the London-Ontario-area anti-wind-turbine movement. In these letters Žižek himself gradually becomes uncomfortable with the contrast between his scholarly activism (which in his initial letters often seems condescending) and the consequences of acting on intellectual belief that Tolokonnikova is enduring. “ But I feel guilty writing this: who am I to explode in such narcissistic theoretical outbursts when you are exposed to very real deprivations?” he writes toward the end of his second letter.
Her polite response to both the condescension and his dubious apology (“You should not worry about the fact that you are exposing theoretical fabrications while I am supposed to suffer the ‘real hardship’.”) , elicits this interesting passage from him:
This simple sentence made me aware that the final sentiment in my last letter was false: my expression of sympathy with your plight basically meant, “I have the privilege of doing real theory and teaching you about it while you are good for reporting on your experience of hardship …” Your last letter demonstrates that you are much more than that, that you are an equal partner in a theoretical dialogue. So my sincere apologies for this proof of how deeply entrenched is male chauvinism, especially when it is masked as sympathy for the other's suffering, and let me go on with our dialogue.
My second reason for the Twitter post was not only that the political opinions of artists are often discounted, but also that in the popular press the Pussy Riot members are also usually not even recognized as artists or intellectuals. Even some of the readers of the Guardian – a newspaper that is ambigously both popular and semi- intellectual – who responded to the letters seemed to think that Pussy Riot’s young women were mere “airheads” – rather than public intellectuals.
Žižek’s successful attempt to contact Tolokonnikova is significant in that by its mere happening it has operated to disprove both the “airhead” thesis and the alleged ‘criminality’ of protests that theatrically exceed the boundaries of civil disobedience. The correspondence also implicitly makes visible parallels between various well-known-in-the-West protests that Vladimir Putin has encountered, from Greenpeace, Pussy Riot and Femin, and between these and various anti-whaling, anti-fracking and anti-Wall Street protests.
Here in Canada the publication of the letters came in the same week that Toronto mayor Rob Ford famously bragged about his familiarity with his wife’s “pussy,” and a week after my review here of Stan Dragland’s Deep Too in which he ponders the meaning of having been accused of being “pussywhipped.” Pussy Riot members have been bravely helping thinkers like Dragland by making the link between the deep misogyny of such usage and the right-wing economics of oil exploration, oligarchic wealth, and international banking utterly visible. For a second in these letters Žižek remarkably found himself implicated.
FD