Renata Salecl

"Love Me, Love My Dog: The Animal/Human Divide"

Wednesday, February 19, 1997

4:00pm

Humanities Center Annex

The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Ideology after the fall of Socialism Opening Out Feminism For Today

Routledge

Renata Salecl, Institute of Criminology, Slovenia

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 psychoanalitic, post-structuralist and feminist theories, Renata Salecl argues that the success of the new nationalist and anti-liberal ideologies can be understood through the concept of fantasy, and the willingness of individuals to identify with the hidden fantasies embedded in political discourse. In doing so she offers a new approach to human rights, feminism and other liberal theories grounded in her own active participation in the struggles against communism, nationalism and anti-feminism.

Renata Salecl is a philosopher and sociologist. She works as a researcher in the Department of Law at the Institute of Criminology, jubljana, Slovenia and has published widely in the areas of feminism, psychoanalysis and political theory. She is also a visiting scholar at the Gender Studies Program, New School for Social Research, New York.

Gaze and Voice as Love Objects

Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek, editors.

Duke University Press

One could draw the conclusion that love (as opposed to the sexual/sexed gaze) is making a comeback as a subject/object of discourse. Lacanianism reigns in readings of works as diverse as Michael Powells Peeping Tom, Edith Whartons Age of Innocence, Wagners Parsifal, Kafkas The Trial and Fredric Jamesons take on Saint Augustine & the Sexual Production of Western Subjectivity. Contributors include Mladen Dolar, Alenka Zupancic, Elisabeth Bronfen, Fredric Jameson, Zizek and Salecl

Envisioning Eastern Europe after Communism: Ideology and Identity in Transformation

Michael D. Kennedy, Editor

Explorations of cultural change in the former Soviet bloc.

How does one envision the sequel to communist rule in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union? In this volume of postcommunist cultural studies, artists, activists, and experts capture the complexity of ideological transformations and identities in formation in this region. The contributors reach beyond the discourses of civil society and nationalism, which usually structure our imagination of alternatives, to consider how the utopia, memory, and monuments of socialism might be transformed after the death of their communist master; how the Yugoslav War is shaped by the creation, and destruction, of fantasy; the range of alternative nationalisms in Eastern Europe; and how the civil society project is threatened, and how it might be reconstructed.By challenging the simple identities of citizen, consumer, and capitalist embedded in the discussion of political options with more complex images, this volume opens up the analysis of "transition" and encourages a new theoretical imagination that draws on interdisciplinary engagements among literary studies, history, political theory, psychoanalysis, and sociology. Contributors are Andrew Arato, Nicolae Harsanyi, Michael D. Kennedy, Vitaly Komar, Alexander Melamid, Ina Merkel, Edmund Mokrzycki, Mykola Ryabchuk, Renata Salecl, Vladimir Tismaneanu, and Konrad Weiss.

 

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