The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism after the Fall of Socialism by Renata Salecl London/New York:  Routledge, 1994,  vii + 167 pp., $16.95.

In The Spoils of Freedom, Renata Salecl affirms that her theoretical position must be marked by the course of events that took place in Eastern Europe. Her interests and experiences with feminist theory and psychoanalysis were not initially linked to her more political involvement in Slovenia, for example, against nationalism and the moral majority in the post-Socialist era. The social and political changes in post-Communist Eastern Europe require a reevaluation of liberal theories of democracy and feminist theory.

The text is part of a series titled Opening Out, which emphasizes the use of feminist theory to analyze the historical and cultural genealogies that have shaped social and political contexts (p. vii). The Spoils of Freedom aims to “open up” Eastern Europe to readers and reexamine theoretical premises critics and feminists have taken for granted (p. 7).

Salecl explores the collapse of socialism, along with new meanings of feminism and democracy following the events in Eastern Europe. The Western notions of democracy and feminism lost their meanings after the collapse of communism, writes Salecl. Western intellectuals could not understand the intricacies of the