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.