‘Inspiring acts of solidarity’ — Bahruz Samadov pens open letter to Slavoj Žižek
In a letter shared from prison, Azerbaijani researcher and OC Media contributor Bahruz Samadov speaks about philosophy and the hypocrisy of the Aliyev regime.
In a letter shared from prison, Azerbaijani researcher and OC Media contributor Bahruz Samadov speaks about philosophy and the hypocrisy of the Aliyev regime.
Bahruz Samadov was sentenced to 15 years in prison on charges of treason in June 2025. In early February 2026, he was transferred from Penitentiary N11 to the high-security Umbaki Correctional Prison. At the time, Samadov wrote a letter from prison warning that his removal to Umbaki could lead to his death through ‘someone else’s hands’.
An academic and a regular contributor to OC Media, Samadov frequently wrote about the peace process between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and the deepening authoritarianism in Azerbaijan following the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War.
On Saturday, he shared another letter from prison, this time written to philosopher Slavoj Žižek, following Žižek’s recent call for Samadov to be released. OC Media has published the letter in full below:
An Open Letter to Slavoj Žižek
I comradely greet you, dearest Slavoj, from a Baku prison, as Nadya Tolokonnikova used to do in 2012 from a Russian prison. I greet you as the thinker who is the major reason for the development of my intellectual journey — a book after book, from the SOI [a reference to the ‘self’ in existential philosophy] to the surplus-jouissance, is the reason and source of my radically heterogeneous discourse I have been spreading since the 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
What I have been witnessing since my arrest in August 2024 is an inspiring example of acts of solidarity. From the Radical Left to Free-Market Libertarians, [all] express support with my cause, sending letters, writing articles, talking to officials, and spreading awareness.
In December 2025, the EU Parliament accepted a resolution calling for the release of political prisoners in Azerbaijan, specifically pointing out my case. Recently, there has been growing support from the major opposition party of Azerbaijan, the Popular Front Party (PFP), whose leader, Ali Karimli, is imprisoned under bogus charges. The PFP has demonstrated they are sincerely following Liberal values and are not frightened of my marginality — the state media have been demonising me for the last 17 months as ‘an Armenophile’, ‘drug-addicted spy’, and an ‘inner enemy’.
But what is the state of things in today’s weird post-Covid world? Does the ‘strong nation-state’ (statist populism?), with the strong Master best fit the techno-feudal basis? Is it the return to the ‘archaic form of sovereign power’, as Foucault occasionally named the old structures of power relations in his Abnormal, where the sovereign is someone who merely punishes his enemies without aiming to discipline the convicts? In Azerbaijani prisons, political prisoners are surprisingly privileged — stay silent, use facilities, just are compelled not to ?, send messages to international organisations.
Is it a weird amalgamation of ‘ancient sovereign power’ with the modernised raison d’état — ‘We do not kill or torture them, so you can keep following your extractivist aims, buying our gas in Europe?’ Despite such banal-material aims, [and the attempts to] to silence European partners, the EU Parliament has made the right choice.
In the last years, you denounced the de-colonial anti-Westernism, calling for the re-thinking of European values, and here I fully agree with you. The Azerbaijani state spends a lot of money to invite useful idiots to various ‘anti-colonial’ conferences in Baku targeting France and India. But it does not mean the colonial mindset does not exist anymore. It means anti-Europeanism is a tool for autocrats to reject democracy and the principles of human, individual rights. Such decolonial fantasies easily become tools in the hands of political relations between states: after a recent reconciliation with France, such initiatives suddenly disappeared in Baku.
But is it our predicament to struggle in such political times of obscene masters lacking authentic subversive masters? Referring to Kierkegaard, you recall the Christ’s Scandal and the subversive roots of not-yet-institutionalised Christianity. Hours before my detention, I started reading ‘atheist Christianity’ and René Girard’s latest work on a close topic. These days, after my detention, I asked the guardians of the notorious State Security Service’s Detention Centre to bring me a Bible, wanting to read the New Testament from a new perspective — a wish that provoked them to beat me savagely. The idea of Christ who transgressed the old Jewish Ethical inspired me to the degree that I chanted the Christian Trinity when I was brought to court. My sudden performance puzzled many friends. But have I done something more scandalous in my country, questioning the sedimented, moralised antagonism towards the Armenian other, yet never denying the horrors and massacres my nation experienced. Revealing publicly the ugly faces of the ethnic conflict, it’s ‘forgotten events’ — that Armenians in fact had also been massacred.
At the political degree, I have agreed that the government’s legitimacy is precisely based on its ‘faithfulness’ to the sedimented national antagonism. Both have become the reason for accusing me of ‘high treason’ and ‘spying’ for Armenia, while obviously I have no access to state secrets. Even imprisoned, I am a problem in the body of the state, thus they are going to send me to a closed prison, depriving me of television and ? meetings with my lawyer.
As the closed prison is located in the outskirts, in a deserted area, I simply call it a Desert in my letters to my Belarusian artist friend Darya Cemra; but do not we all live in such Desert of the Real nowadays, trying to overlook the catastrophe and keeping our daily routines as if everything is alright?
Yesterday, I brought your book Against Progress to the court that is instructed to send me to the Desert. It was a symbolic response to your appeal to President [Ilham] Aliyev. I fully support such appeals — what you all do is a ‘Concrete Analysis of [a] Concrete Situation’. You all are my dearest comrades and friends. Such acts of solidarity are akin to the Rortian liberal neo-pragmatism, which aims at small tasks of reducing human suffering instead of blind dogmatism. Personally, I am sympathetic to the Rortian model of social politics. Maybe we shall learn from each other — the Left and the Liberals, in these dark times of statist right-wing hegemony with their own ‘neo-pragmatism’ cooperation for economic-extractivist ends and cynical overlook of violence and human suffering.
Hours ago, I watched The Hurricane, an amazing movie with [Denzel] Washington, featuring a convicted Black boxer who never committed the crime of murder and who gets justice only after spending 16 years in prison. Judge Sarokin concludes the crime the boxer, Rubin Carter, was accused of is less harmful for society than the crime of the police and previous courts that convicted Rubin Carter solely based on his skin colour. In my case, the court similarly sentenced me to 15 years solely based on my political views and anti-militarist stance.
I conclude this letter expressing my sincere admiration with you, dear Slavoj, who has been guiding me as the ‘subject who supposedly knows’, feels, and now, when I am in prison — stands with me, and not only with me but also against today’s catastrophe we [are] doomed to live in.
Arshaluys Barseghyan
