Comradely Greetings by Slavoj Žižek Read Free Book Online

Did you notice how the religious fundamentalists in the US took over the very form of Leftist popular protest (grassroots self-organization against State power) and redirected it against the Leftist tradition?
    But, my dear Nadya, I feel a certain sense of guilt in writing these lines: who am I to explode in such narcissistic theoretical outbursts when you, as a concrete individual, are exposed to very real empirical deprivations. So please, if you can and want to, do let me know about your situation in the prison: about the daily rhythm, about (maybe) the small private rituals which make it easier to survive, about how much time you have to read and write, about how the other prisoners (and the guards) treat you, about your contacts with your child … I have always thought that true heroismlies in these apparently small ways of organizing one’s life so as to survive in crazy times without losing one’s dignity.
    With all my love, respect, and admiration, my thoughts are with you!
    Slavoj

“I write you from a Special Economic Zone”
Nadya to Slavoj, April 16, 2013
    Dear Slavoj,
    You really think “today’s capitalism has already overcome the logic of totalizing normality”? I say maybe it hasn’t—maybe it just really wants us to
believe
it has, to accept that hierarchization and normalization have been exceeded.
    You mention places where the legal rights that limit exploitation are suspended in the name of the world capitalist order. At this very moment, I write you from a Special Economic Zone. Seeing it with my eyes, feeling it on my skin.
    As a kid I wanted to work in advertising. I had a whole romance with it. So now I know how to evaluate advertisements and commercials. I get the finer points. I evenappreciate the things that by definition they have to keep silent about.
    Late capitalism’s anti-hierarchic and rhizomatic posture amounts to good advertising. You and Brian Massumi are right to point out that capitalism today has to
appear
loose, even erratic. That’s how it captures affect—the affect of the consumer. When it comes to manufacturers (especially the ones who aren’t located in high-tech business parks) this ‘velvet’ capitalism can afford to change its stripes. But the logic of totalizing normality still has to continue its work in those places whose industrial bases are used to shore up everything dynamic, adaptable, and incipient in late capitalism. And here, in this other world hidden from view, the governing logic is one of absolutely rigid standards, of stability reinforced with steel. Erratic behavior is not tolerated from workers here; homogeneity and stagnation rule. No wonder authoritarian China has emerged as a world economic leader.
    Modern capitalism has a deep interest in seeing that you and I believe the system runs completely on principles of free creativity, limitless growth, and diversity, and that the flip side—millions of people enslaved by all-powerful and (take it from me) fantastically stable standards of production—remains invisible. We have an interest in exposing this deception, which is why I insist on unmasking the static, centralized, hierarchic basis of what advertising will later sanctify as a product of unbridled creativity alone.
    That’s why I take exception to your distrust of thinking that is posited within the frameworks of binary oppositions, and even insist on the use of such binaries as a heuristic—onethat is situational and, when it must be, even burlesque. This is exactly how I deploy the opposition between Apollonian equilibrium and Dionysian flux. And given the broad expansion of fundamentalist tendencies in politics and economics, I’m sure we can’t yet write off the suggestion of militant workers that economic growth and ecological conservation must be antithetical.

    With regard to the techniques that the global economy’s intellectual and ad-industry core has developed for escaping static identities of subjugation, my feeling is