Plague
The Plague is a collection of essays guiding us from the Covid-19 pandemic through to the war in Ukraine in order to imagine a world in which a radical respect for death might exist alongside a fairer distribution of the earth's wealth. 'Living death' will appear as something of a refrain, a reminder that to think of death as an avoidable intruder into how we order our lives, especially in the West, is an act of defiance that is doomed to fail. In the thought of the philosopher Simone Weil, who plays a key role in the book, only if we admit the limits of the human, will we stop vaunting the brute illusion of earthly power.
Review:
'The vitality of these valuable essays on death, war and Simone Weil keeps on giving long after the last page has been turned.'
- Deborah Levy, Guardian
'Rose cements her place at the summit of Anglo literary culture. The book is also testament to the essay as the most exhilarating form through which to confront the history of the present ... Rose never tries to have the last word or entomb her subjects in cast-iron conclusions about their life and thought. She invites us to do our own thinking, to grapple with the violence and paradoxes of existence.'
- Gavin Jacobson, New Statesman
'This is a brief but beautifully written book, full of memorable insights into life, death, and politics. In particular, the final essay on Weil is a wonderfully moving mix of biographical, philosophical and political analysis...In Weil's writings, Rose finds a glimmer of hope in dark times: "against race, class and national affiliations, Weil's heart is beating right across the globe".'
- P.D. Smith, Guardian
'It's really hard for me to overestimate how important [Rose's] work has been for me... I don't feel like that about very many writers.'
- Maggie Nelson
'Jacqueline Rose has no peer among critics of her generation. The brilliance of her literary insight, the lucidity of her prose, and the subtlety of her analyses are simply breathtaking.'
- Edward Said
'A surfeit of elegance and intelligence.'
- Ali Smith
'One of the most original and intellectually sophisticated minds at work today.'
- Eimear McBride
'As a literary scholar and psychoanalytic thinker, Rose has long insisted that we pay close attention to the subterranean fears, fantasies, and narratives that structure our most pressing sociopolitical problems.'
- Merve Emre, The Nation
'To read Rose is to understand that there is no border between us and the world; it is an invitation to a radical kind of responsibility.'
- Parul Sehgal, New York Times
'[Rose's] work remains surprising and original ... The more I read her, the more I see the world through her questions ... Her real power, what makes her necessary as well as unique, may be how she teaches readers to ask probing questions on their own.'
- Christine Smallwood, New York Review of Books
'Instead of avoiding that foregone conclusion, these essays - which touch on everything from the pandemic to the war in Ukraine - encourage a radical respect of death as, if nothing else, a reminder of our equality as humans, which feels especially important in a world that grows less equal by the day.'
Roisin Lanigan, i-D
'It's a profound take on creating a more just world in the wake of the pandemic.'
- Publishers Weekly
'This book, is ...startingly up-to-date in ways that other explorations of the pandemic are perhaps not, set as it is on reminding the reader that, while we may be some way out of the woods, there remains a discomforting after-effect. So, despite dealing explicitly with the pandemic, Rose establishes a formulation within a period bookended by two key events: the beginning of UK lockdown and the invasion of Ukraine, yoking them together in accordance with Albert Camus' assertion that "the two realities of history which to date people have never been prepared for [are] plagues and wars," and an understanding that, often, one disaster bleeds into the next. This stands in quiet structural defiance to the usual narrative rolled out by news outlets, in which each constituent tragedy stands isolated and disconnected from the other.'
- Lia Rockey, The Arts Desk