plunder of state holdings, was arrested by Russia’s Interior Ministry. Detained without charge for 358 days—a week short of the legal maximum—he died suspiciously in custody on November 16, 2009, having previously been beaten and telling doctors he feared for his life. Three years later, the US government implemented the Magnitsky Act, a law restricting the access of Russian officials complicit in the incident to the US and its banking system. Russia responded with a similar law barring entry into that country by officials complicit in US torture and indefinite detention programs.
3 In an interview for a TV special celebrating his sixtieth birthday on October 7, 2012, Putin, asked about Pussy Riot, said that the court had “slapped them with a deuce,” referring to the women’s two-year sentence. He then added, “I have nothing to do with this. They asked for it, they got it.”
“I would like to conclude with a provocation”
Slavoj to Nadya, December 12, 2013
Dear Nadya,
I think our conversation should go on, because we left it open at a crucial point. In your last message, you emphasized the importance of taking into account the diversity among different countries, and how this diversity demands different forms of struggle. I fully agree, of course, but I would just like to add that this very diversity has to be located within the totality of global capitalism.
The Hegelian notion of totality to which I refer here is not an organic Whole, but a critical notion—to “locate a phenomenon in its totality” does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the Whole, but to include in a system all its distortions (“symptoms,” antagonisms, inconsistencies) asits integral parts. In other words, the Hegelian totality is by definition “self-contradictory,” antagonistic, inconsistent: the “Whole” which is the “True” (Hegel: “
das Ganze is das Wahre
”) is the Whole
plus
its symptoms, the unintended consequences which betray its untruth. For Marx, the “totality” of capitalism includes crises as its integral moments; for Freud, the “totality” of a human subject includes pathological symptoms as indicators of what is “repressed” in the official image of the subject. The underlying premise is that
the Whole is never truly whole
: every notion of the Whole leaves something out, and the dialectical effort is precisely the effort to include this excess, to account for it. Symptoms are never just secondary failures or distortions of a basically sound System—they are indicators that there is something “rotten” (antagonistic, inconsistent) at the very heart of the System. Or, to shift to a brutally concrete case: if you want to talk about global capitalism, you have to include Congo, a country in disarray, with thousands of drugged child-warriors, but as such fully integrated into the global system. And the same holds for Russia.
We should always bear in mind that global capitalism does not automatically compel all its subjects into a hedonist/permissive individualism. The fact that, in countries which have recently undergone rapid capitalist modernization (like India), many individuals stick to their so-called traditional (premodern) beliefs and ethics (family values, rejection of unbridled hedonism, strong ethnic identification, preference for community ties over individual achievement, respect for elders, etc.) in no way proves that they are not fully “modern,” as if only those in the liberal West can afforddirect and full capitalist modernization, while those from less developed Asian, Latin American, and African countries can only survive the onslaught of capitalist dynamics with the help of traditional values, i.e., as if such values are only needed when local populations are not able to survive liberal capitalism by adopting its own hedonist-individualist ethics. Post-colonial “subaltern” theorists who see the violent modernity of global capitalism as disruptive of traditional
3 In an interview for a TV special celebrating his sixtieth birthday on October 7, 2012, Putin, asked about Pussy Riot, said that the court had “slapped them with a deuce,” referring to the women’s two-year sentence. He then added, “I have nothing to do with this. They asked for it, they got it.”
“I would like to conclude with a provocation”
Slavoj to Nadya, December 12, 2013
Dear Nadya,
I think our conversation should go on, because we left it open at a crucial point. In your last message, you emphasized the importance of taking into account the diversity among different countries, and how this diversity demands different forms of struggle. I fully agree, of course, but I would just like to add that this very diversity has to be located within the totality of global capitalism.
The Hegelian notion of totality to which I refer here is not an organic Whole, but a critical notion—to “locate a phenomenon in its totality” does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the Whole, but to include in a system all its distortions (“symptoms,” antagonisms, inconsistencies) asits integral parts. In other words, the Hegelian totality is by definition “self-contradictory,” antagonistic, inconsistent: the “Whole” which is the “True” (Hegel: “
das Ganze is das Wahre
”) is the Whole
plus
its symptoms, the unintended consequences which betray its untruth. For Marx, the “totality” of capitalism includes crises as its integral moments; for Freud, the “totality” of a human subject includes pathological symptoms as indicators of what is “repressed” in the official image of the subject. The underlying premise is that
the Whole is never truly whole
: every notion of the Whole leaves something out, and the dialectical effort is precisely the effort to include this excess, to account for it. Symptoms are never just secondary failures or distortions of a basically sound System—they are indicators that there is something “rotten” (antagonistic, inconsistent) at the very heart of the System. Or, to shift to a brutally concrete case: if you want to talk about global capitalism, you have to include Congo, a country in disarray, with thousands of drugged child-warriors, but as such fully integrated into the global system. And the same holds for Russia.
We should always bear in mind that global capitalism does not automatically compel all its subjects into a hedonist/permissive individualism. The fact that, in countries which have recently undergone rapid capitalist modernization (like India), many individuals stick to their so-called traditional (premodern) beliefs and ethics (family values, rejection of unbridled hedonism, strong ethnic identification, preference for community ties over individual achievement, respect for elders, etc.) in no way proves that they are not fully “modern,” as if only those in the liberal West can afforddirect and full capitalist modernization, while those from less developed Asian, Latin American, and African countries can only survive the onslaught of capitalist dynamics with the help of traditional values, i.e., as if such values are only needed when local populations are not able to survive liberal capitalism by adopting its own hedonist-individualist ethics. Post-colonial “subaltern” theorists who see the violent modernity of global capitalism as disruptive of traditional
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