Free Comradely Greetings by Slavoj Žižek Page B

our failure: in a free society, so we are told, we are all capitalists investing in our own lives; it’s up to us to put more time and effort into our education than into having fun if we want to succeed, etc.
    At a more directly political level, US foreign policy pursued a determined strategy of damage control by way of re-channeling popular uprisings into acceptable parliamentary-capitalist constraints—as was done successfully in South Africa after the fall of apartheid regime, in the Philippines after the fall of Marcos, and in Indonesia after the fall of Suharto, etc. It is at this precise conjuncture that radical emancipatory politics faces its greatest challenge: how to push things further after the first enthusiastic stage is over, how to take the next step without succumbing to the catastrophe of the “totalitarian” temptation—in short, how to go further than Mandela without becoming Mugabe.
    If we want to remain faithful to Mandela’s legacy, we should thus dispense with the celebratory crocodile tears and focus on the unfulfilled promises his leadership gave rise to. We can also safely surmise that, on account of his undoubted moral and political greatness, he was at the end of his life aware of how his very political triumph and elevation intoa universal hero was itself the mask of a bitter defeat. His universal glory is but a sign that he didn’t really disturb the global order of power—which certainly cannot be said of Pussy Riot.
    Awaiting your answer, and with the hope that the two of you who are still in prison will soon be released,
    Slavoj

“When you put on a mask, you leave your own time”
Nadya to Slavoj, March 11, 2014
    Dear Slavoj, a good day to you,
    As fate would have it, your last letter found me already out of prison. Which came as quite a surprise, since my time there was marked by a completely unfounded, irrational certainty that prison goes on forever.
    But in some sense, prison really does go on forever. My “co-conspirator” Masha Alyokhina and I lost no time after our release in founding the “Zona Prava” 1 movement, the goal of which is the reeducation of prison wardens andthe establishment of a protest training program inside the camps. We’re beginning with women’s camps, since female prisoners are the ones most totally deprived of voice. Why is this so? Probably because women have long had inculcated into them a deep a sense of weakness, of their need for a big, strong man … Our work is already turning up evidence that a lot of them buy into this garbage. And their “big, strong man,” since these women are prisoners, can come only from the prison administration. Our task, Zona Prava’s task, is to provide them an equally big and strong alternative.
    In due time, we and Zona Prava will have to answer an old question: can the—pardon me—subaltern speak? How can sister-inmates develop their own language, existing alongside the official one spoken by prison administrators? How can they draw up the map to another world, a world different than that of the administrators? The story of the subject’s development in prison is extremely meaningful.
    A Russian jail is an island of institutional totalitarianism, a site where thought and action become unified. Further, the template for this unification has little in common with other officially promulgated prisons, like our conception of motherhood, orthodox religion, and respect for the law. In fact, so long as the administration isn’t inconvenienced, a person’s decline and fall is encouraged. A high level of aggression is encouraged, and a foundation is set for baseless anger and hatred. By what right can we call this a system of “corrections”? Is it not, rather, the rubric for a slavishly obedient, oppressed, and humiliated existence? Or an existence that is two-faced, cynical, and hypocritical, one that survives by the reptilian law of “you die today, I’ll wait untiltomorrow”? What can we make of