Jacqueline Rose

Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty is guided by a simple argument: that motherhood is the place in our culture where we lodge - or rather bury - the reality of our own conflicts, of psychic life, and what it means to be fully human. Mothers are the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which becomes their task (unrealizable, of course) to repair. To the familiar claim that too much is asked of mothers - a long-standing feminist plaint - Rose adds a further dimension. She questions what we are doing when we ask mothers to carry the burden of everything that is hardest to contemplate about our society and ourselves. By making mothers the objects of licensed cruelty, we blind ourselves to the world's iniquities and shut down the portals of the heart. To demonstrate this vicious paradox at work, Rose explores a range of material: investigative writing and policies on motherhood, including newspaper reports, policy documents, and law; drama, novels, poetry, and life stories past and present; social history, psychoanalysis, and feminism. An incisive, rousing call to action, Mothers unveils the crucial idea that unless we recognise what role we are asking mothers to perform in the world, and for the world, we will continue to tear both the world and mothers to pieces.

Mothers

On Violence and On Violence Against Women

Edward W. Said

Banned by the Freud Institute in Vienna, this controversial lecture became Edward Said's final book.

Freud and the Non-European

In these powerful essays Jacqueline Rose delves into the questions that keep us awake at night, into issues of privacy and publishing, exposure and shame. Do some women writers- Christina Rossetti, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath- have a special talent for self- revelation? Or are they simply more vulnerable to the invasions of biography? Turning to psychoanalysis, Rose explores its affinity with modernism and asks what it can tell us about the limits of knowledge, both about the most intimate and baffling components of experience and about the furthest, hallucinatory, reaches of the mind. Written with style, power and clarity, these fine studies move deftly between public, political and private, unconscious worlds. Offering new links between feminism, psychoanalysis, literature and politics, ON NOT BEING ABLE TO SLEEP provides a resonant and thought provoking collection for the present day.

Psychoanalysis and the Modern World

On Not Being Able to Sleep

Jacqueline Rose argues for the importance of sexual difference and fantasy as key concepts through which an interrogation of contemporary theory should be sustained.

Sexuality in the Field of Vision

Peter Pan, Jacqueline Rose contends, forces us to question what it is we are doing in the endless production and dissemination of children's fiction. In a preface, written for this edition, Rose considers some of Peter Pan's new guises and their implications. From Spielberg's Hook, to the lesbian production of the play at the London Drill Hall in 1991, to debates in the English House of Lords, to a newly claimed status as the icon of transvestite culture, Peter Pan continues to demonstrate its bizarre renewability as a cultural fetish of our times.

The Case of Peter Pan, Or the Impossibility of Children's Fiction

Jacqueline Rose's heroines could not appear more different from each other: revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg; German-Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon, persecuted by family tragedy and Nazism; film icon and consummate performer Marilyn Monroe. Yet historically these women have a shared story to tell as they blaze a trail across some of the most dramatic events of the last century--revolution, totalitarianism, the American dream. Enraged by injustice, they are each in touch with what is most painful about being human, bound together by their willingness to bring the unspeakable to light. Taking the argument into the present are today's women, courageous individuals involved in some of the cruelest realities of our times. Grappling with the existence of honor killing--notably through the stories of Shafilea Ahmed, Fadime Sahindal, and Heshu Yones--Rose argues that the struggles of feminism are far from done. In the final three chapters, Rose celebrates the work of three brilliant contemporary artists--Esther Shalev-Gerz, Yael Bartana, and Thérèse Oulton--whose work grows out of an unflinching engagement with all that is darkest in the modern world. Women in Dark Times shows us how these visionary women offer a new template for feminism. Taking their stand against the iniquities of our times, they tread a path between public and private pain, confronting us with what we need most urgently but also often cannot bear to see.

Women in Dark Times

Plague

The Last Resistance

Jacquelin Rose

States of Fantasy (Clarendon Lectures in English)

On Violence and on Violence Against Women

Haunting of Sylvia Plath

Zionism was inspired as a movement--one driven by the search for a homeland for the stateless and persecuted Jewish people. Yet it trampled the rights of the Arabs in Palestine. Today it has become so controversial that it defies understanding and trumps reasoned public debate. So argues prominent British writer Jacqueline Rose, who uses her political and psychoanalytic skills in this book to take an unprecedented look at Zionism--one of the most powerful ideologies of modern times. Rose enters the inner world of the movement and asks a new set of questions. How did Zionism take shape as an identity? And why does it seem so immutable? Analyzing the messianic fervor of Zionism, she argues that it colors Israel's most profound self-image to this day. Rose also explores the message of dissidents, who, while believing themselves the true Zionists, warned at the outset against the dangers of statehood for the Jewish people. She suggests that these dissidents were prescient in their recognition of the legitimate claims of the Palestinian Arabs. In fact, she writes, their thinking holds the knowledge the Jewish state needs today in order to transform itself. In perhaps the most provocative part of her analysis, Rose proposes that the link between the Holocaust and the founding of the Jewish state, so often used to justify Israel's policies, needs to be rethought in terms of the shame felt by the first leaders of the nation toward their own European history. For anyone concerned with the conflict in Israel-Palestine, this timely book offers a unique understanding of Zionism as an unavoidable psychic and historical force.

The Question of Zion

By the wide sands of Normandy a cluster of young girls wheel and play, riding their bicycles along the promenade their hair flying in the Channel winds. Among them is Albertine. A sickly boy watches, longing to posses some of the girls' vitality, their verve and beauty. For her part, Albertine envies his life, the Grand Hotel, the rich leisured friends, shopping on the Grands Boulevards. She makes her play, and wins. But eventually he will make Albertine his captive, trapping her in his airless Paris apartment and his suffocating, possessive love. And as she struggles with herself and her fate, the desire she feels is not for him but for others, her free, sensual women friends. In this powerfully atmospheric novel, Jacqueline Rose re-tells the story of Albertine from Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, from her point of view. But this remarkable retelling stands on its own. Cut free from the master's text, the woman's story carries us into a lush, dreamlike inner world, in which a drama of passion is played out on bodies and minds alike - suggestive and sexy, intriguing and provocative.

Albertine

Since her death in 1963 at the age of thirty, Sylvia Plath has become a strange icon---an object of intense speculation, fantasy, repulsion, and desire. Jacqueline Rose stands back from the debates and looks instead at the swirl of controversy, recognizing it as a phenomenon in itself--one with much to tell us about how a culture selects and judges writers; how we hear women's voices; and how we receive messages from, to, and about our unconscious selves.

The Haunting of Sylvia Plath

A slim, heart-wrenching, and rousing new book from the leading feminist writer Jacqueline Rose. In early 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began to infiltrate public consciousness, sales of The Plague, the classic novel by French philosopher Albert Camus, skyrocketed. At the same time, the virus’s toll surged exponentially. Amid the harrowing loss, many sensed a glimmer of possibility—the potential for radical empathy wrought by shared experience—even as the death-dealing divisions of class, race, gender, and citizenship were underscored like never before. We have been through a time of ‘living death’ when, for millions across the globe, untold horror has seemed to infiltrate the very air we breathe. Jacqueline Rose’s trenchant new book unravels recent history via the lives and works of three extraordinary thinkers—Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud, and Simone Weil, each one afflicted by catastrophe. Their politics and private griefs, the depth of their understanding, fling open a window into our present crises. Rose, one of the most insightful thinkers on politics and psychoanalysis alike, has written a story of unusual range, spanning World War II to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, surging domestic violence to emboldened anti-racist protest, the Spanish influenza to Omicron, Boris Johnson’s deranged optimism to Vladimir Putin’s megalomania. The Plague: Living Death In Our Times enacts a psychic reckoning for our moment and for the future to be forged in its aftermath.

Living Death in Our Times

The Plague

A bravura exploration of politics and writing in dark times In The Last Resistance, Jacqueline Rose explores the power of writing to create and transform our political lives. In particular, she examines the role of literature in the Zionist imagination: here, literature is presented as a unique form of dissidence, with the power to expose the unconscious of nations, and often proposing radical alternatives to their dominant pathways and beliefs. While Israel–Palestine is the repeated focus, The Last Resistance also turns to post-apartheid South Africa, to American national fantasy post-9/11, and to key moments for the understanding of Jewish culture and memory. Rose also underscores the importance of psychoanalysis, both historically in relation to the unfolding of world events, and as a tool of political understanding. Examining topics ranging from David Grossman, through W.G. Sebald, Freud, Nadine Gordimer, the concept of evil, and suicide bombers, The Last Resistance offers a unique way of responding to the crises of the times.

Since her suicide in 1963 at the age of 30, Sylvia Plath has become a strange icon. This book addresses why this is the case and what this tells us about the way culture picks out important writers. The author argues that without a concept of fantasy we can understand neither Plath's work nor what she has come to represent. She proposes that no writer demonstrates more forcefully than Plath the importance of inner psychic life for the wider sexual and political world. By the author of Sexuality in the Field of Vision .

Edward William Said

Reveals Saidâe(tm)s abiding interest in Freudâe(tm)s work and its important influence on his own.

Na Inglaterra, uma mulher é impedida pelo marido de lavar as mãos em pleno isolamento da pandemia de Covid-19. Outra, assassinada a tiros pelo companheiro através da porta do banheiro da casa dele na África do Sul. Nos Estados Unidos, uma mulher que denunciou um notório abusador sexual é humilhada no tribunal. No Brasil, uma parlamentar é alvo de agressões verbais do futuro presidente do país. Como a violência se instala nas mentes, em especial a violência contra as mulheres, e que problemas parece falsamente estar resolvendo? Para Jacqueline Rose, essa é uma especulação que precisamos fazer para enfrentar a violência e até mesmo identificá-la — já que muitas vezes ela se manifesta de formas oblíquas como em ajustes legislativos e estratégias econômicas. Para complicar ainda mais, Rose acrescenta, a violência floresce justamente porque criamos formas elaboradas de escondê-la de nós mesmos, embora ela seja constituinte da nossa humanidade. Neste livro, a violência é escrutinada a partir de histórias individuais, dados estatísticos, desdobramentos políticos e sociais, teses filosóficas, psicanálise e das linguagens literária e jornalística. Hannah Arendt, Toni Morrison, Roxane Gay, Rosa Luxemburgo — entre muitas outras, emprestam suas obras e ideias para uma costura vigorosa e crítica entre literatura, psicanálise e feminismo. O impacto mental da leitura destes ensaios perdura, e sua força se dá por decantação. Ao iluminar detalhes que se mostram brutais, ao rejeitar o diagnóstico fácil, ao analisar frases que passariam por banais e revelar seu poder destrutivo, ao aproximar ideias de variados campos do pensamento, Rose sobrepõe sem pressa camada sobre camada ao debate sobre violência. Seu raciocínio sinuoso vai e volta do indivíduo para o todo, sem jamais desprezar as vítimas, e nos coloca em posição de responsabilidade e agência ao nos chamar para pensar pra valer. Para ela, precisamos “entender a força interior da violência, resistir à mortal tentação de fazer dela sempre um problema do outro”. E escutar “as vozes que trilham o instável caminho entre esses dois esforços — aquelas vozes que mostram que lidar com a violência interior e lutar contra a violência do mundo são coisas inseparáveis”.

Jacqueline Rose

Books

Your next favorite book is out there