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.