A letter from Nadezhda Tolokonnikova to Slavoj Žižek, February 23, 2013
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Tolokonnikova in Moscow Tagansky District Court, Russian Federation, 20 June 2012 © Denis Bochkarev
Dear Slavoj,
One time, in the autumn of 2012, while I was sitting in pretrial detention with the other Pussy Riot activists, I came to your house for a visit. In a dream, of course.
I get what you’re saying about horses and the World Spirit, about Chapman’s “buffoonery and irreverence,” and more to the point about how and why all of these are so forcefully bound up with one another. Pussy Riot has wound up on the side of those who feel the call to critique, to creation and co-creation, to experimentation and the role of the unceasing provocateur. To put it in terms of the opposition Nietzsche set up, we’re the children of Dionysus, floating by in a barrel, accepting nobody’s authority. We’re on the side of those who don’t offer final answers or transcendent truths. Our mission, rather, is the asking of questions.
There are architects of Apollonian equilibrium in this world, and there are (punk) singers of flux and transformation. One is not better than the other: “Mamy raznye nuzhny, mamy raznye vazhny.”1 “Only our cooperation can ensure the continuity of Heraclitus’ vision: “This world has always been and will always be a pulsing fire, flaring up accordingly, and dying down accordingly, with the cycling of the eternal world breath.”
We count ourselves among those rebels who court storms, who hold that the only truth lies in perpetual seeking.2
Nikolai Berdyaev wrote in Self-Knowledge: “Truth as an object which intrudes itself and wields authority over me—an object in the name of which it is demanded that I should renounce freedom—is a figment: truth is no extraneous thing; it is the way and the life. Truth is spiritual conquest; it is known in and through freedom.” “Christianity itself is to me the embodiment of the revolt against the world and its laws and fashions.” “From time to time a terrible thought crossed my mind: what if obsequious orthodoxy is right and I am wrong? In that case I am lost. But I have always been quick to cast this thought from me.” All statements that might have come from Pussy Riot just as easily as from Russia’s great political philosopher. In 1898, Berdyaev was arrested on charges of agitating for the Social Democrats, indicted for “designs on the overthrow of the government and the church,” and exiled from Kiev for three years to the Vologda Gubernia. When the World Spirit touches you, don’t think you can walk away unscathed.
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Intuition—and this is where your blind leading the blind comes in—is of stunning importance. The main thing is to realize that you yourself are as blind as can be. Once you get that, you can, for maybe the first time, doubt the natural place in the world to which your skin and your bones have rooted you, the inherited condition that constantly threatens to spill over into feelings of terror.
It’s tempting to think that fundamentalism is the only terrifying aspect of our situation, but the problem is bigger than that; fundamentalists are the tip of the iceberg. There’s a powerful antifascist dictum that “the fascists do the killing, the authorities the burying.” I remember something the curator Andrei Erofeev,3 whom I know to be anything but indifferent to antifascism, used to say while he was on trial at the instigation of the ultra-conservative People’s Council, and facing considerable jail time, for his role in organizing the “Forbidden Art—2006” exhibition: “If the People’s Council had acted without the sanction of state apparatuses, this trial wouldn’t be happening. So the situation, fraught as it is with the crescendoing possibility of violence, is reproduced by those same ‘experts’ who, from where they stand in the halls of power, are supposed to be able to make impartial decisions. ‘Only an expert can deal with the problem.’”
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That’s something Laurie Anderson sings: “Only an expert can deal with the problem.” If only Laurie and I could’ve had the chance to take those experts down a peg! And solve our problems without them. Because expert status is no portal to the Kingdom of Absolute Truth.
Reasonable minds at last are seeing how truth can come from the mouths of innocents. It’s not in vain that the Rus’4 so esteems its holy fools, its mad ones. In the beating, political heart of civil Russia’s capital city, at the site of Pussy Riot’s January 2012 performance, at the base of Red Square, stands St. Basil’s Cathedral, named after Russia’s beloved Basil Fool for Christ.
Cultural competence and sensitivity to the Zeitgeist don’t come with a college diploma or live in an administrator’s briefcase. You need to know which way to point the map. “Humor, buffoonery, and irreverence” might turn out to be modes of seeking truth. Truth is multifaceted, its seekers many and varied. “Different but equal,” as another good antifascist slogan had it.
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I think Plato was pretty much wrong when he defined human beings as “featherless bipeds.” No, a person does a lot more doubting than a plucked cock does. And these are the people I love—the Dionysians, the unmediated ones, those drawn to what’s different and new, seeking movement and inspiration over dogmas and immutable statutes. The innocents, in other words, the speakers of truth.
Two years for Pussy Riot—the price we owe fate for the gift of perfect pitch that enables us to sound out an A, even while our old traditions teach us to listen for G-flat.
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How can we resolve the opposition between experts and innocents? I don’t know. But this I can tell you: the party of the innocents, as in Herod’s time, will exemplify resistance. We’ll find our own basket and Pharaoh’s daughter to help us. Those who keep a childlike faith in the triumph of truths over lies, and in mutual aid, who live their lives entirely within the gift economy, will always receive a miracle at the exact moment they need it.
Nadya
PC-14, Mordovia
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