The rise of nationalist, racist and anti-feminist ideologies is one of the most frightening repercussions of the collapse of socialism. Using psychoanalytic theories of fantasy to investigate why such extremist ideologies have taken hold, Renata Salecl argues that the major social and political changes in post-communist Eastern Europe require a radical re-evaluation of notions of liberal theories of democracy. In doing so she offers a new approach to human rights and feminism grounded in her own active participation in these struggles, first against communism and now against nationalism and anti-feminism.

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.

Series preface, Acknowledgements, Introduction, Part I: The fall of socialism ..., 1. The fantasy structure of war: the case of Bosnia, 2. The post-socialist moral majority, 3. 'Normalization' in the socialist regime, 4. The struggle for hegemony in the former Yugoslavia, Part II: ... and its implications for the theory of ideology, 5. Fantasy as the limit of distributive justice, 6. Legitimizing violence, 7. Crime as a mode of subjectivization, 8. Why is a woman a symptom of rights?, Conclusion, Notes, Select bibliography, Index