A review by pilesandpiles
Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj by Slavoj Žižek, Nadya Tolokonnikova

3.0

I read this out of interest in the ideas of Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot, and I'd recommend it to others who are curious about the same. Zizek, for those who are familiar with his persona and recent ideas about global capitalism, does his usual thing. His letters are predictably super mansplain-ey. In one he situates Tolokonnikova as the one of the two of them whose ideas come from the actual experience of imprisonment, while he has the privilege of theorizing -- as though Tolokonnikova's words and ideas, especially pertaining to her conditions of imprisonment, weren't also a mode of theorization, and as though her understanding of those conditions weren't already mediated and not some direct truth... Gayatri Spivak says all this better in the first couple of pages of "Can the Subaltern Speak," where she calls out Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze for doing something very similar. Anyway, Zizek actually backtracks and apologizes to Tolokonnikova, though only for being a male chauvinist, not a Western intellectual chauvinist. Also, if you're interested in Pussy Riot's feminism, there's almost nothing specifically about that in this book.