Renata Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism after the Fall of Socialism. London and New York:  Routledge, 1994. pp.  viii, 167. Index.

Renata Salecl presents a historical and political analysis of the changes in East Europe through a felicitous mingling of the discourses of feminism, psychoanalysis, law, and philosophy. She thereby opens out, at this millennial moment, questions of relevance not merely to the East European countries but to the liberal democracies whose triumph over Stalinism has brought an unexpected challenge, stirring up interconnected elements of thought across disciplines. At such a moment of dangerous complacency for the West, the times before and after the collapse of Stalinism deserve our closest attention.

Salecl interposes theoretical arguments with surveys of recent history in Czechoslovakia and the former Yugoslavia. What ties the two together is the part played by fantasy in political life. Fantasy in politics is a subject that has been insufficiently explored. One reason is not far to seek: its exploitation by the Nazis has strengthened a dangerous dislike for the topic that is attributable to an Enlightenment presupposition, which still lingers tacitly in political philosophy: that rationality is best characterized by a dismissal of anything that partakes of illusion. Salecl shows that the theoretical place of fantasy has now become an urgent concern for political inquiry. What emerges from her considerations is that, if the rationalist dislike continues to encourage the ignoring of fantasy, then those who realise its potential for the attraction of power will be left to manipulate it as they please, as the East European examples she gives amply demonstrate.

What is the source of fantasy? Her answer is the Lacanian one: that it springs from the insuppressible attempts of jouissance, the libidinal, anarchic source of desire, to overcome the incompleteness of its symbolic direction. The symbolic holds out in its secret implications the prospect of an ultimate completion of all desire, a return to a non-existent maternal plenitude from which the self in process is induced