The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism After the Fall of Socialism (Feminism for Today)

176 Pages·1994·0.7 MB·English

by  Renata Salecl

The Spoils of Freedom

The Spoils of Freedom examines the emergence of nationalist, racist and
anti-feminist ideologies in post-socialist Eastern Europe. In a political context
that includes ethnic wars, post-socialist totalitarianism, capitalist moral
majority ideologies, and a virulent new patriarchy, this provocative study
asks what has become of the notions of democracy and human rights since
the collapse of socialism and challenges the ‘political correctness’ movement
and Western theoretical responses to the events which have occurred in
former communist countries.
The Spoils of Freedom views major social and political change through
contemporary theory. Using psychoanalytic, post-structuralist and feminist
theories, Renata Salecl argues that the success of the new nationalist and
anti-liberal ideologies can be understood through the Lacanian concept of
fantasy, and the willingness of individuals to identify with the hidden
fantasises embedded in political discourse. In doing so she offers a new
approach to human rights, feminism and other liberal theories grounded
in a radical rethinking of the fundamental concepts of philosophy,
psychoanalysis and language theory.
Renata Salecl is a philosopher and sociologist. She works as a researcher
in the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law, Ljubljana, Slovenia
and as a visiting scholar at the New School for Social Research, New York.
Apart from publishing widely in the areas of feminism, psychoanalysis and
political theory, she also participated in the struggle against communism
as well as against the post-communist nationalism and anti-feminism.
Feminism for Today
General Editor:
Teresa Brennan
The Regime of the Brother
After the Patriarchy
Juliet Flower MacCannell
Feminism and the Mastery of Nature
Val Plumwood
History After Lacan
Teresa Brennan
The Spoils of Freedom

Psychoanalysis and feminism after
the fall of socialism

Renata Salecl

London and New York
First published 1994
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

© 1994 Renata Salecl

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data has been
applied for

ISBN 0-415-07357-X (Print Edition)
ISBN 0-415-07358-8 (pbk)
ISBN 0-203-04610-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-21718-7 (Glassbook Format)
Contents

Series preface vi
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
Part I: The fall of socialism . . .
1 The fantasy structure of war: the case of Bosnia 11
2 The post-socialist moral majority 20
3 ‘Normalization’ in the socialist regime 38
4 The struggle for hegemony in the former Yugoslavia 58
Part II: . . . and its implications for the theory of ideology
5 Fantasy as the limit of distributive justice 77
6 Legitimizing violence 90
7 Crime as a mode of subjectivization 99
8 Why is a woman a symptom of rights? 112
Conclusion 134
Notes 142
Select bibliography 157
Index 163
Series preface

Feminist theory is the most innovative and truly living theory in today’s
academies, but the struggle between the living and the dead extends beyond
feminism and far beyond institutions. Opening Out will apply the living
insights of feminist critical theory in current social and political contexts. It
will also use feminist theory to analyse the historical and cultural genealogies
that shaped those contexts.
While feminist insights on modernity and postmodernity have become
increasingly sophisticated, they have also become more distant from the
realpolitik that made feminism a force in the first instance. This distance is
apparent in three growing divisions. One is an evident division between
feminist theory and feminist popular culture and politics. Another division
is that between feminism and other social movements. Of course this second
division is not new, but it has been exacerbated by the issue of whether
the theoretical insights of feminism can be used to analyse current conflicts
that extend beyond feminism’s ‘proper’ field. In the postmodern theory
he has helped build, the white male middle-class universal subject has had
to relinquish his right to speak for all. By the same theoretical logic, he
has also taken out a philosophical insurance policy against any voice uniting
the different movements that oppose him, which means his power persists
de facto, if not de jure. Currently, there are no theoretical means, except
for fine sentiments and good will, that enable feminism to ally itself with
other social movements that oppose the power networks that sustain the
white, masculine universal subject. Opening Out aims at finding those
means.
Of course, the analysis of the division between feminist and other social
movements is a theoretical question in itself. It cannot be considered outside
of the process whereby feminist theory and women’s studies have become
institutionalised, which returns us to the first division, between feminist
practice and feminism in the academy. Is it simply the case that as women’s
studies becomes more institutionalised, feminist scholars are defining their
concerns in relation to those of their colleagues in the existing disciplines?
This could account both for an often uncritical adherence to a
The Spoils of Freedom vii
postmodernism that negates the right to act, if not speak, and to the distance
between feminism in the institution and outside it. But if this is the case,
not only do the political concerns of feminism have to be reconsidered,
but the disciplinary boundaries that restrict political thinking have to be
crossed.
Disciplinary specialisation might also be held accountable for a third
growing division within feminism, between theoretical skills on the one
hand, and literary analysis and socio-economic empirical research on the
other. Poststructuralist or postmodern feminism is identified with the
theoretical avant-garde, while historical, cultural feminism is associated with
the study of how women are culturally represented, or what women are
meant to have really done.
Opening Out is based on the belief that such divisions are unhelpful.
There is small advantage in uncritical cultural descriptions, or an unreflective
politics of experience; without the theoretical tools found in poststructuralist,
psychoanalytical and other contemporary critical theories, our social and
cultural analyses, and perhaps our political activity, may be severely
curtailed. On the other hand, unless these theoretical tools are applied to
present conflicts and the histories that shaped them, feminist theory itself
may become moribund. Not only that, but the opportunity feminist theories
afford for reworking the theories currently available for understanding the
world (such as they are) may be bypassed.
None of this means that Opening Out will always be easy reading in
the first instance; the distance between developed theory and practical
feminism is too great for that at present. But it does mean that Opening
Out is committed to returning theory to present political questions, and
this just might make the value of theoretical pursuits for feminism plainer
in the long term.
Opening Out will develop feminist theories that bear on the social
construction of the body, environmental degradation, ethnocentrism,
neocolonialism, and the fall of socialism. Opening Out will draw freely on
various contemporary critical theories in these analyses, and on social as
well as literary material. Opening Out will try to cross disciplinary
boundaries, and subordinate the institutionalised concerns of particular
disciplines to the political concerns of the times.
Teresa Brennan
Acknowledgements

Various people read parts of the manuscript; for their valuable comments I
thank Parveen Adams, Glen Bowman, Miran Božovic, Mark Bracher, Joan
Copjec, David Carlson, Mark Cousins, Elizabeth Cowie, Mladen Dolar, Juliet
Flower MacCannell, Peter Goodrich, Fredric Jameson, Michael Kennedy,
Ernesto Laclau, Dean MacCannell, Chantal Mouffe, Michael Rosenfeld, Susan
Tucker and Alenka Zupancic. I thank Jane Malmo for her excellent work
in correcting my translation and giving me many helpful comments. My
special gratitude goes to Teresa Brennan for encouraging me to write this
book and for her insightful editing. I dedicate this book to my husband
Slavoj Žižek for his loving support.
Preliminary versions of some of the material contained in this book were
previously published in journals: American Journal of Semiotics, Emergences,
Law and Critique, New Formations, New German Critique, Praxis
International and Topoi.
Introduction

What does a feminist intellectual from Eastern Europe1 have to say about
the issues addressed by contemporary critical theory? Could such an
intellectual speak from a purely theoretical position, or must his or her
position be marked by the course of events that happened in his or her
own country? These were the questions that concerned me when I started
to write this book, which was initially supposed to be a philosophical and
psychoanalytical feminist reflection on events surrounding the fall of
socialism. But in the course of writing the book, I more and more came to
resist the idea of writing only about Eastern Europe for several reasons.
First, I realized that the whole set of questions related to ideology and
politics as such had become deeply problematic. The notions of democracy,
rights, feminism, etc. so central to Western theory suddenly lost their
established meanings when communism collapsed. And what surprised me
was how a lot of prominent Western intellectuals did not notice this change;
rather they behaved as though the collapse of communism, which happened
‘somewhere over there, far away in Eastern Europe’, only confirmed the
universality of notions such as democracy, human rights, and the capitalist
society to which these notions are linked. What those intellectuals did not
recognize was how these supposedly universal notions became incorporated
into new political discourses in surprising and sometimes disturbing ways.
Throughout the writing of this book I was, of course, conscious of the
position from which I think, speak and write. Both my involvement in the
opposition movement that provoked the disintegration of socialism in
Slovenia, and my involvement in the struggle against nationalism and the
deeply sexist moral majority emerging in the post-socialist era, have
significantly determined my theoretical position. But at the same time, my
interests in philosophy, psychoanalysis and feminist theory were not directly
linked to this political experience. This tension between working on issues
in ‘abstract’ theory and being engaged in major political change quickened
my work and was highlighted significantly by my relations with Western
intellectuals. Whenever I was invited to speak at a Western university I
was always expected to speak about what was going on in Eastern Europe.