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Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj QUOTES

Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj QUOTES

1 " The Deleuzian philosopher Brian Massumi clearly formulated how today's capitalism has already overcome the logic of totalizing normality and adopts instead a logic of erratic excess: the more varied, and even erratic, the better. Normalcy starts to lose its hold. The regularities start to loosen, This loosening of normalcy is part of capitalism's dynamic. It's not a simple liberation. It's capitalism's own form of power. It's no longer disciplinary institutional power that defines everything, it's capitalism's power to produce variety - because markets get saturated. Produce variety and you produce a niche market. The oddest of affective tendencies are okay - as long as they pay. (...) What happens next, when the system no longer excludes the excess, but directly posits it as its driving force - as is the case when capitalism can only reproduce itself through a continual self-revolutionizing, a constant overcoming of its own limits? Then one can no longer play the game of subverting the Order from the position of its part-of-no-part, since the Order has already internalized its own permanent subversion. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj

2 " the only choice is that between direct or indirect relations of domination and exploitation, with any alternative dismissed as utopian. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj

3 " 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? "

― Slavoj Žižek , Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj

4 " Pussy Riot is a mask: a symplifying, modernizing mask. Prison, confinement, these are also masks, different masks, ones that help people of our generation to shake off cynicism and irony. When you put on a mask, you leave your own time, you abandon the world in which any sincerity will be mocked, you move into the world of cartoon heroes, where Sailor Moon and Spiderman, those consummate modern role models, can be found. (...) The masks that members of Pussy Riot wear hold, if any, a therapeutic function: yes, we belong to a generation raised on irony, but we also put on masks to reduce that impotent irony. We go out in the streets and speak plainly, without varnish, about the things that matter most. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj