SUMMARY:

This essay is a contribution to the book forum “The Power of Soft Matter” discussing Julia Vaingurt’s book Soft Matter: The Poetics of Weakness in Late Soviet Socialism (2025), which identifies weakness as a defining aesthetic and ethical strategy in late Soviet nonofficial culture. By analyzing authors who intentionally cultivated vulnerability and failure, the book illustrates how these artists rejected the state’s ideological obsession with heroism and power in favor of a shared, tentative humanity. The essay explores how a discourse of weakness serves as a subversive tool to deconstruct grand narratives and patriarchal structures of power, noting that while weakness fosters nonconformity and subversion, it also risks being co-opted by “strong” imperialist rhetorics or collapsing under the weight of grand narratives. The author agrees that recognizing a universal vulnerability can foster a new solidarity capable of resisting modern authoritarianism and militant hypernormativity.