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The Plague: Living Death in Our Times
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 Living Death In Our Times enacts a psychic reckoning for our moment and for the future to be forged in its aftermath.
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 Living Death In Our Times enacts a psychic reckoning for our moment and for the future to be forged in its aftermath.
176 pages, Hardcover
First published June 7, 2023
22 people are currently reading
671 people want to read
About the author
Jacqueline Rose
92 books183 followersJacqueline Rose, FBA (born 1949, London) is a British academic who is currently Professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.
Rose was born into a non-practicing Jewish family. Her elder sister was the philosopher Gillian Rose. Jacqueline Rose is known for her work on the relationship between psychoanalysis, feminism and literature. She is a graduate of St Hilda's College, Oxford and gained her higher degree (maîtrise) from the Sorbonne, Paris and her doctorate from the University of London.
Her book Albertine, a novel from 2001, is a feminist variation on Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.
She is best known for her critical study on the life and work of American poet Sylvia Plath, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, published in 1991. In the book, Rose offers a postmodernist feminist interpretation of Plath's work, and criticises Plath's husband Ted Hughes and other editors of Plath's writing. Rose describes the hostility she experienced from Hughes and his sister (who acts as literary executor to Plath's estate) including threats received from Hughes about some of Rose's analysis of Plath's poem "The Rabbit Catcher". The Haunting of Sylvia Plath was critically acclaimed, and itself subject to a famous critique by Janet Malcolm in her book The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
Rose is a regular broadcaster on and contributor to the London Review of Books.
Rose's States of Fantasy was the inspiration for composer Mohammed Fairouz's Double Concerto of the same title.
(from Wikipedia)
Rose was born into a non-practicing Jewish family. Her elder sister was the philosopher Gillian Rose. Jacqueline Rose is known for her work on the relationship between psychoanalysis, feminism and literature. She is a graduate of St Hilda's College, Oxford and gained her higher degree (maîtrise) from the Sorbonne, Paris and her doctorate from the University of London.
Her book Albertine, a novel from 2001, is a feminist variation on Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.
She is best known for her critical study on the life and work of American poet Sylvia Plath, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, published in 1991. In the book, Rose offers a postmodernist feminist interpretation of Plath's work, and criticises Plath's husband Ted Hughes and other editors of Plath's writing. Rose describes the hostility she experienced from Hughes and his sister (who acts as literary executor to Plath's estate) including threats received from Hughes about some of Rose's analysis of Plath's poem "The Rabbit Catcher". The Haunting of Sylvia Plath was critically acclaimed, and itself subject to a famous critique by Janet Malcolm in her book The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
Rose is a regular broadcaster on and contributor to the London Review of Books.
Rose's States of Fantasy was the inspiration for composer Mohammed Fairouz's Double Concerto of the same title.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
June 5, 2023
In this book, I have concentrated on the cruelty of social arrangements: the fatally uneven response to Covid by governments across the world, the resurgent and abiding inhumanity of war, the torture for many women of 'normal' domestic life. But I have also been in search of slivers of justice, flashes of radical empathy, moments of resistance and solidarity whose urgency becomes all the more pressing as the grounds on which each one relies - whether in terms of individual conduct or broader human understanding - seem under pressure of global ruthlessness, to be crumbling beneath our feet.
It's telling that these interconnected essays written between March 2020 at the start of the UK lockdown and February/March 2022 just after Russia invaded Ukraine already feel... not dated, but not quite current. As I write this, the UK Covid enquiry is already mired in absurdist Tory politics as the Government seeks to take out a legal injunction against its own enquiry headed by a former judge appointed by the Government itself over the release of all requested Government communications that fed into Covid decision-making. (It's also snarkily amusing to see this Government using the principles of human rights as a defence of their cover-up, given that they are at public war with the very concept of human rights, not least when it comes to the humane treatment of refugees and asylum seekers - but that's another story.) And Rose had no idea, though could probably have guessed at, the extended predations of Russia in Ukraine.
Nevertheless, it's always both stimulating and comforting to see one's own thoughts and feelings reflected back through such a sharp and lucid intellect as Rose (who, I should say, is one of my icons). She frames these essays around Camus, especially La peste/The Plague, Freud on the psychoanalytics of hysteria, neuroticism, trauma and death, and Simone Weil, philosophical humanist par excellence with her own experience of war, inequality, and activism. Indeed, it's important that the epigraph to this collection comes from Weil:
We are not really without hope. The mere fact that we exist, that we conceive and want something different from what exists, constitutes a reason for hope.
(Oppression and Liberty, 1933)
This is, then, not a hopeless collection though there is much cause for despair: from the dismantling of humanities teaching in the UK university sector ('no-one I know doubts for one minute that this is a reaction to the role that universities are playing in creating a space for social critique at a time when it has never been more needed') to the massive and widening inequalities on individual, group, community and country basis; from the uneven and controversial responses to Covid to the re-emergence of right-wing extremism.
Rose, inevitably, treats these issues of our present moment through her own scholarly expertise in Freud and psychoanalysis, and the philosophical writings that tackle race, class, gender and economic inequalities. Her readings of Camus and Weil help us contextualise our experience, not least of the sudden undeniable presence of public death as a result of Covid and the war in Ukraine, no longer something we can repress and deny.
Rose's writing is lucid and accessible: this is her writing for a public, not an academic audience, and she gives a thoughtful, sensitive account of how we might think about some of the most pressing anxieties of our time.
Thanks to Fitzcarraldo for an ARC via NetGalley
May 31, 2023
A series of short, interconnected essays reflecting on the period covering March 2020 to early 2022 from academic and cultural critic Jaqueline Rose, building on articles originally circulated in places like The Guardian, The New York Review of Books or as lectures. Rose draws on a range of literary, psychoanalytic and philosophical frameworks and writers to consider the world during Covid, as well as what might lie ahead.
It's a meditative, erudite collection that suggests avenues of thought rather than poses definitive answers or solutions. Rose’s particularly invested in exploring the ways in which Covid exposed dramatic social and political fault-lines, challenging widely-held myths centred on solidarity and the inevitability of progress. She’s also, unsurprisingly, focused on possible responses to direct encounters – new for many parts of the world – with mass death, tied to Covid and then the war in Europe. She uses Camus’s novel The Plague which sold in its thousands during Covid’s early months, to explore, among other things, the resurgence of ideas about contagion which leaked into or were deliberately exploited to justify countries like Britain’s policies on refugees. Camus also enables a consideration of the ways in which mass death may highlight or encourage the pitting of people against one another – at the height of Covid, ageism, ableism and racism both on an individual and wider political level were very much to the fore.
Rose then turns to Freud and his writings post-WW1, some of which can be interpreted as his reaction to the loss of his daughter Sophie during the post-war outbreak of Spanish Flu. A loss that inflected his thinking on issues of life and the presence of death – actual or impending. The aftermath of monumental loss and grief leading to what Freud termed a kind of “transgenerational haunting” which demanded a collective as much as an individual response, which Rose sees manifested in an underlying call for solidarity in his post-war theorising.
This idea of solidarity and of the need for collective responsibility, both during and after the pandemic, is expanded in Rose’s essay on philosopher and anti-fascist, anti-colonialist activist Simone Weil who was predominantly writing during WW2. The, somewhat contradictory, Weil was dedicated to promoting an ethics of love and mutual care, believing in an urgent need to “make common cause” with those wider society deemed as marginal or disposable. Rose ties Weil’s work to her own discussion of the situations faced by many women during lockdowns, often forced to take on the brunt of domestic labour from childcare to home-schooling to housework, a ‘re-traditionalising’ for many – at least in the West – of the domestic sphere. She then examines the impact of those shifts on domestic violence which rocketed during lockdowns, resulting in a so-called ‘shadow pandemic’ in which, drawing on Kristeva’s words, women were literally punished for the fragility of the outside world.
In “Life After Death” Rose muses on the possible legacies of Covid, for many mercilessly exposing the precarity and unpredictability of their previously taken-for-granted existence. For the ultra-wealthy, like Jeff Bezos, money is most often pinned as saviour. But Rose is more interested in those who’ve responded beyond the level of the individual by confronting injustice, part of which requires an ongoing atonement for the past particularly the lingering impact of colonialism and slavery.
In her afterword “On Virtue” which builds on philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s classic piece, Rose considers the spotlight the pandemic shone on failure to take responsibility - politically, culturally or individually - and the links between this and the looming crisis posed by rapidly-accelerating climate change and rising global inequality. Rose is a member of the May ’68 generation but one of those who’s retained a political conscience and desire for change but there’s still a lingering hint of idealism in her discussion which can sometimes make it a little broad sweep. Although it’s still the most convincing of the pandemic-era books I’ve read. Rose is most passionate when addressing Weil - she certainly succeeded in making me eager to read more about Weil’s life and actions, even when I felt Rose was a little too forgiving of the gaps in Weil’s thinking. It’s a fairly sober book but it’s fairly accessible too, and not without glimmers of hope, woven into Rose’s overview of a deeply fragmented, fractured world is an emphasis on possibility glimpsed through what she calls “flashes of radical empathy.”
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Fitzcarraldo for an ARC
It's a meditative, erudite collection that suggests avenues of thought rather than poses definitive answers or solutions. Rose’s particularly invested in exploring the ways in which Covid exposed dramatic social and political fault-lines, challenging widely-held myths centred on solidarity and the inevitability of progress. She’s also, unsurprisingly, focused on possible responses to direct encounters – new for many parts of the world – with mass death, tied to Covid and then the war in Europe. She uses Camus’s novel The Plague which sold in its thousands during Covid’s early months, to explore, among other things, the resurgence of ideas about contagion which leaked into or were deliberately exploited to justify countries like Britain’s policies on refugees. Camus also enables a consideration of the ways in which mass death may highlight or encourage the pitting of people against one another – at the height of Covid, ageism, ableism and racism both on an individual and wider political level were very much to the fore.
Rose then turns to Freud and his writings post-WW1, some of which can be interpreted as his reaction to the loss of his daughter Sophie during the post-war outbreak of Spanish Flu. A loss that inflected his thinking on issues of life and the presence of death – actual or impending. The aftermath of monumental loss and grief leading to what Freud termed a kind of “transgenerational haunting” which demanded a collective as much as an individual response, which Rose sees manifested in an underlying call for solidarity in his post-war theorising.
This idea of solidarity and of the need for collective responsibility, both during and after the pandemic, is expanded in Rose’s essay on philosopher and anti-fascist, anti-colonialist activist Simone Weil who was predominantly writing during WW2. The, somewhat contradictory, Weil was dedicated to promoting an ethics of love and mutual care, believing in an urgent need to “make common cause” with those wider society deemed as marginal or disposable. Rose ties Weil’s work to her own discussion of the situations faced by many women during lockdowns, often forced to take on the brunt of domestic labour from childcare to home-schooling to housework, a ‘re-traditionalising’ for many – at least in the West – of the domestic sphere. She then examines the impact of those shifts on domestic violence which rocketed during lockdowns, resulting in a so-called ‘shadow pandemic’ in which, drawing on Kristeva’s words, women were literally punished for the fragility of the outside world.
In “Life After Death” Rose muses on the possible legacies of Covid, for many mercilessly exposing the precarity and unpredictability of their previously taken-for-granted existence. For the ultra-wealthy, like Jeff Bezos, money is most often pinned as saviour. But Rose is more interested in those who’ve responded beyond the level of the individual by confronting injustice, part of which requires an ongoing atonement for the past particularly the lingering impact of colonialism and slavery.
In her afterword “On Virtue” which builds on philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s classic piece, Rose considers the spotlight the pandemic shone on failure to take responsibility - politically, culturally or individually - and the links between this and the looming crisis posed by rapidly-accelerating climate change and rising global inequality. Rose is a member of the May ’68 generation but one of those who’s retained a political conscience and desire for change but there’s still a lingering hint of idealism in her discussion which can sometimes make it a little broad sweep. Although it’s still the most convincing of the pandemic-era books I’ve read. Rose is most passionate when addressing Weil - she certainly succeeded in making me eager to read more about Weil’s life and actions, even when I felt Rose was a little too forgiving of the gaps in Weil’s thinking. It’s a fairly sober book but it’s fairly accessible too, and not without glimmers of hope, woven into Rose’s overview of a deeply fragmented, fractured world is an emphasis on possibility glimpsed through what she calls “flashes of radical empathy.”
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Fitzcarraldo for an ARC
July 21, 2023
Being convinced we have moral ownership of the earth is the best way to make it uninhabitable. Perhaps the governments of the Western world are useless on climate because the very thought of catastrophe is so at odds with the idea of earthly power.
I was completely unaware of this collection of essays, not being familiar with the author. Citing the idiom of the Instagram, a survey of Covid and Ukraine through a reading of Freud? Yes please! Rose examines the idea of mortality made manifest in these extreme situations. Culpability amidst routine death becomes a philosophical query. Freud was familiar with both war and plague, thus the death drive as a variation of pleasure principles.
There is also a titular portrait of Camus which corresponds with a concluding reading of Weil. I didn't find those as effective, especially when then confronting the rise of authoritarianism and global warming, but associations amongst Freud/Weil/Camus created a rich tapestry of references.
This is well worth anyone's time.
I was completely unaware of this collection of essays, not being familiar with the author. Citing the idiom of the Instagram, a survey of Covid and Ukraine through a reading of Freud? Yes please! Rose examines the idea of mortality made manifest in these extreme situations. Culpability amidst routine death becomes a philosophical query. Freud was familiar with both war and plague, thus the death drive as a variation of pleasure principles.
There is also a titular portrait of Camus which corresponds with a concluding reading of Weil. I didn't find those as effective, especially when then confronting the rise of authoritarianism and global warming, but associations amongst Freud/Weil/Camus created a rich tapestry of references.
This is well worth anyone's time.
December 13, 2023
Now Year 4 of the Great Plague is nearly over, I'm once again willing to read books titled The Plague. Rose's book makes a good companion to Camus' novel The Plague, which I read two months ago. Her initial chapters reflect upon it in light of covid, then turn to Freud and Simone Weil as interpreters of the pandemic experience. Rose writes with great elegance and I was pleased to learn about Simone Weil, as she includes biographical details. However I wasn't left with much in the way of substantial insight about covid. The Plague is a short book, only 131 pages without the notes and sources, so reading it reminded me of What World Is This?: A Pandemic Phenomenology. Inevitably for a book finished in 2022, Rose's analysis is of the years 2020 to 2021 when lockdowns and other government interventions predominated.
True as this is, as of December 2023 the future seems to consist of burying that knowledge of death. 2022 and 2023 have been characterised by governmental neglect of the pandemic's continued impact on public health. We are now required to simply accept this significant additional health risk. In the UK, only the oldest and most clinically vulnerable have received covid boosters in the past two years. Most of my friends and colleagues have had covid three or more times. Is it still too early to reflect philosophically upon a pandemic that is still happening? How can we talk of 'reconstruction after covid' while still in the midst of it? Five out of nine people in my team at work currently have covid!
The Plague's other topic is the war in Ukraine, which has been rather overshadowed in recent months by the much bloodier invasion of Gaza. It is perhaps inevitable that a book focused on a specific moment will rapidly seem incongruent with the next disasters and developments. The Plague is beautifully written but did not provide the insight I was hoping for. My expectations were likely unrealistic - philosophical reflection requires a different timetable to a hot take. I did enjoy learning about Simone Weil, though, and would like to read more about her.
What on earth, we might then ask, does the future consist of once the awareness of death passes a certain threshold and breaks into our waking dreams? What is the psychic time we are living? How can we prepare - can we prepare? - for what is to come? If the uncertainty strikes at the core of inner life, it also has a political dimension. Every claim for justice relies on belief in a possible future, even when - or rather especially when - we feel the planet might be facing its demise. This is all the more the case as the pandemic allows the bruising fault-lines of racial, sexual, and economic inequality in the modern world to press mercilessly on our sense of reality for everyone, unavoidably, to see.
True as this is, as of December 2023 the future seems to consist of burying that knowledge of death. 2022 and 2023 have been characterised by governmental neglect of the pandemic's continued impact on public health. We are now required to simply accept this significant additional health risk. In the UK, only the oldest and most clinically vulnerable have received covid boosters in the past two years. Most of my friends and colleagues have had covid three or more times. Is it still too early to reflect philosophically upon a pandemic that is still happening? How can we talk of 'reconstruction after covid' while still in the midst of it? Five out of nine people in my team at work currently have covid!
The Plague's other topic is the war in Ukraine, which has been rather overshadowed in recent months by the much bloodier invasion of Gaza. It is perhaps inevitable that a book focused on a specific moment will rapidly seem incongruent with the next disasters and developments. The Plague is beautifully written but did not provide the insight I was hoping for. My expectations were likely unrealistic - philosophical reflection requires a different timetable to a hot take. I did enjoy learning about Simone Weil, though, and would like to read more about her.
August 22, 2025
Anlatım tarzı bana biraz kopuk kopuk geldi bu yüzden bana çok hitap eden bir kitap değildi ancak değindiği noktalar hoşuma gitti.
May 7, 2023
The Plague is a collection of essays written by Jacqueline Rose in the context of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, in connection with the works of Albert Camus, Freud and Simone Weil. From time to time, I like to read a book like this, full of ideas, arguments and analysis, a new perspective on current events to provide food for thought and things to consider. For example, the author highlights that two things can be true at the same time, staying home to protect the vulnerable people around us and limit exposure, infections and death, while also staying home might mean domestic violence, transforming into the unprotected. It was also interesting for me the discussion about death and how we perceive it, how we think about it, now more than ever.
The essays are showing the intellectual power of the author, they are close to academic style and I generally liked reading it, however I felt there was something missing, that could have convinced me to love it. That missing part could be the writing style, the way things are presented, but also I would have liked to have more of the author's opinions, in addition to the other writers mentioned.
Thank you, Fitzcarraldo Editions and Netgalley, for providing me with an ARC in exchange for a honest review!
The essays are showing the intellectual power of the author, they are close to academic style and I generally liked reading it, however I felt there was something missing, that could have convinced me to love it. That missing part could be the writing style, the way things are presented, but also I would have liked to have more of the author's opinions, in addition to the other writers mentioned.
Thank you, Fitzcarraldo Editions and Netgalley, for providing me with an ARC in exchange for a honest review!
June 20, 2023
Whilst a little disjointed, Rose managed to bring me back to the last two years, laying out the impact of Covid on both individuals and societies. I'm always a little wary of people who give so much time to Freud, but the second half of the book and the essays on Simone Weil and gendered experiences of war and lockdown were great. She also reminded me how angry I should still be at the government, and especially Johnson, for how badly handled Covid was.
January 5, 2025
12/12. It makes you feel more human
September 30, 2023
Jacqueline Rose has me feeling like dropping out of life and becoming a Hal Hartley villain who walks around town all day giving monologues like this:
"Only by recognizing the frailty of our morality, the unsteady hold we have on virtue, or even our perverse capacity, our readiness to embrace the worst on offer, is there the faintest chance of moving to a better place. Nothing is more dangerous than confronting a world full of fear, arms akimbo, with a boast. Or, hanging on in the face of disaster to the idea that we each, individually, are good, that our perfection, lamentably unmatched by an imperfect reality, is something into which the ills of the time-pandemic, climate catastrophe and war- unfairly encroach. According to such a mindset, the more insecure things appear, the more confident, assertive, and controlling we need to become in order to master both the world and ourselves. There is only one step from here to what Simone Weil would call the exertion of force, a form of power whose sole function is to impose itself. Not once does she waver in her conviction that force in this sense, not least the belief in immutable strength which upholds it, will always be found at the opposite moral pole to justice."
*said with Adrienne Shelly vibes*
"Only by recognizing the frailty of our morality, the unsteady hold we have on virtue, or even our perverse capacity, our readiness to embrace the worst on offer, is there the faintest chance of moving to a better place. Nothing is more dangerous than confronting a world full of fear, arms akimbo, with a boast. Or, hanging on in the face of disaster to the idea that we each, individually, are good, that our perfection, lamentably unmatched by an imperfect reality, is something into which the ills of the time-pandemic, climate catastrophe and war- unfairly encroach. According to such a mindset, the more insecure things appear, the more confident, assertive, and controlling we need to become in order to master both the world and ourselves. There is only one step from here to what Simone Weil would call the exertion of force, a form of power whose sole function is to impose itself. Not once does she waver in her conviction that force in this sense, not least the belief in immutable strength which upholds it, will always be found at the opposite moral pole to justice."
*said with Adrienne Shelly vibes*
July 2, 2023
It has dated before the publication - these essays rather repeat what we already know about the recent pandemics (eg rise in domestic violence against women), but it does not offer anything fresh. The author's erudition does not help to enlighten things, but leads her to go in circles around same problems. I wasn't convinced.
September 5, 2023
This book had some very profound points that were well written, but it was a real chore to get through. While this books concern was meant to be Covid-19 the majority of the book was an analysis of scholars works and their musings on death, justice etc. If Rose wanted to write a book about Sigmund Freud, she should have just done that.
September 10, 2023
The most valuable essays here are "To Die One's Own Death" and "In Extremis" on Simone Weil. The first argues persuasively, to my mind, that Freud's concept of the death drive arose from the death of his most loved daughter Sophie Halberstadt-Freud due to the 'Spanish' flu. That theoretical innovation led to, in Rose's words, "a considerable downgrade in the status of the drives of self-preservation and mastery that were key to his earlier topography of the mind, as they are all now seen to be working in the service of the organism's need to follow the path to its own death," or as Freud puts it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, "The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion." Rose applies this insight to our experience of callous and careless death during the COVID pandemic and derives an ethical guide: we should work for a fairer world where people are enabled not only to live free and fulfilling lives, but also to choose how they wish to die.
The Simone Weil essay introduced me to a writer whom I had thought of only as a philosopher and a mystic, but not as a trade unionist and would-be French Resistance fighter. What Rose says about Weil's habitual use of analogy as a means of argumentation is very interesting: "Visceral and unworldly, Weil's analogies push at the limits of language, giving voice to something painful or that eludes understanding.... Analogy is a spiritual principle, since it is only by means of 'analogy and transference' that our attachment to particular human beings can be raised to the level of universal love."
The rest of the essays in the book say what needs to be said about the gendered violence, governmental ineptitude, and global inequities exposed and increased by COVID, but the same points were made by many other writers. The one gem, a powerful guide-post, comes in the essay "Life after Death," about living post-pandemic: "One place to begin would be to make room for the complex legacies of the human mind, without the need to push reckoning aside. Past wrongs would not be subject to denial, as if our personal or national identities depend on a pseudo-innocence which absolves us of all crimes. Let the insights of the analytic couch percolate into our public and political lives, and no less crucially, the other way round (we need to acknowledge the weight of historical affliction on our dreams) [emphasis mine]."
The Simone Weil essay introduced me to a writer whom I had thought of only as a philosopher and a mystic, but not as a trade unionist and would-be French Resistance fighter. What Rose says about Weil's habitual use of analogy as a means of argumentation is very interesting: "Visceral and unworldly, Weil's analogies push at the limits of language, giving voice to something painful or that eludes understanding.... Analogy is a spiritual principle, since it is only by means of 'analogy and transference' that our attachment to particular human beings can be raised to the level of universal love."
The rest of the essays in the book say what needs to be said about the gendered violence, governmental ineptitude, and global inequities exposed and increased by COVID, but the same points were made by many other writers. The one gem, a powerful guide-post, comes in the essay "Life after Death," about living post-pandemic: "One place to begin would be to make room for the complex legacies of the human mind, without the need to push reckoning aside. Past wrongs would not be subject to denial, as if our personal or national identities depend on a pseudo-innocence which absolves us of all crimes. Let the insights of the analytic couch percolate into our public and political lives, and no less crucially, the other way round (we need to acknowledge the weight of historical affliction on our dreams) [emphasis mine]."
January 12, 2025
“The plague sparks a revolution in the blood. It erupts like a protest or insurrection, offering a fleeting moment of lucidity in an unjust world.” I have mixed feelings about The Plague, a book of essays by Jacqueline Rose about the pandemic of 2020 and various matters that intersect with it, across history, literature, culture and more. It starts off strong, reflecting on questions around truth, war-as-pandemic, and despair, and then considering how the death of Freud’s favourite daughter, after she caught the Spanish Flu, had an influence on his work (‘death drive’ seems to have been coined two weeks later, for instance). At this point, however, the collection starts to come unstuck, for me; the chapter ‘Living Death’ raises some crucial points about the “shadow pandemic” of domestic abuse; unfortunately, its condemnation of lockdown fails to offer another option, and seems to blame public health for private violence — it’s a tricky arena, and one I am struggling even in brief, in review, to sum up well, but Rose’s argument feels just as not-there as mine. Further, the point about ‘feminicide’ in the essay seemed a bit nebulous, even aimless. The next essay states, with reference to racism and discrimination, that “People will no longer accept denials that the problem exists” — but who are these “people”? Perhaps it’s a matter of mood, but the optimistic generalising in places didn’t sit quite well with me; meanwhile the later essay on Simone Weil, through well-written and enjoyable, did feel unfocused at times and in all less relevant than any other essay in the book. It is, altogether, an interesting read, frustrating for the biggest part because it feels like it could’ve been great. I read it via NetGalley — out 7 June.
June 25, 2023
'Only by recognizing the frailty of our morality, the unsteady hold we have on virtue, or even our perverse capacity, our readiness to embrace the worst of offer, is there the faintest chance of moving to a better place. Nothing is more dangerous than confronting a world full of fear, arms akimbo, with a boast. Or, hanging on in the face of disaster to the idea that we each, individually, are good, that our perfection, lamentably unmatched by an imperfect reality, is something into which the ills of the time – pandemic, climate catastrophe and war – unfairly encroach. According to such a mindset, the more insecure things appear, the more confident, assertive, and controlling we need to become in order to master both the world and ourselves. There is only one step from here to what Simone Weil would call the exertion of force, a form of power whose sole function is to impose itself. Not once does she waver in her conviction that force in this sense, not least the belief in immutable strength which upholds it, will always be found at the opposite moral pole to justice. Being convinced we have moral ownership of the earth is the best way to make it uninhabitable. Perhaps the governments of the Western world are useless on climate because the very thought of catastrophe is so at odds with the idea of earthly power.'
July 2, 2023
I don’t know I didn’t find this particularly insightful on basically any point. She seems to be stretching thinly to connect her readings of Freud and Weil to our currently moment—there’s only ever a slight connection along the lines of “doesn’t this quote resonate with what’s going on today?” Which honestly feels very analytically immature. She risks false equivocation by transposing specific responses to their historical moment to extend to the recent pandemic and it shows. The back cover also promises to take us through the current war which it absolutely does not do. At one point she also refers to the war in Ukraine as morally clear which points to an uncritical liberalism. Since she spends a LOT of this book speaking about the Second World War it could have been interesting to trace the troubled persisting legacies and rise of Neo-nazism in Ukraine, especially in the section on Simone Weil. She condemns our world leaders for their lack of response to the pandemic and their desire for a controllable world being tied to their own fear of death but that’s not exactly a hot take, like, no shit Sherlock.
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January 16, 2024Commentary on the covid pandemic and how , in many ways, it was not handled very well.
In the meantime we react badly with an international emergency. Author uses three individuals handling such terror. Sigund Freud with a practical approach, Albert Camus with his literary response with a book by that name The Plague, about how it could be handled and in fiction was handled.
Simone Weil and her pragmatic philosophy approach.
Freud once stated that no one believes in their own death. p. 76My terror of forgetting, wrote Jewish scholar Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, is greater than my terror of having to much to remember. -- There can be no struggle for justice without a vision of the future, so long as we lose sight of the worst of the past. WE all need to become the historians of our public and private worlds. p. 86
I cannot go towards God in love without bringing myself along. p 102
couch limits our way of thinking - the workings of the intellect. p. 104-5
The desire to humiliate the enemy [there in all war or conflict} can't be tolerated. p. 104
We should give more credit to philosophy of Simone Weil.
In the meantime we react badly with an international emergency. Author uses three individuals handling such terror. Sigund Freud with a practical approach, Albert Camus with his literary response with a book by that name The Plague, about how it could be handled and in fiction was handled.
Simone Weil and her pragmatic philosophy approach.
Freud once stated that no one believes in their own death. p. 76My terror of forgetting, wrote Jewish scholar Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, is greater than my terror of having to much to remember. -- There can be no struggle for justice without a vision of the future, so long as we lose sight of the worst of the past. WE all need to become the historians of our public and private worlds. p. 86
I cannot go towards God in love without bringing myself along. p 102
couch limits our way of thinking - the workings of the intellect. p. 104-5
The desire to humiliate the enemy [there in all war or conflict} can't be tolerated. p. 104
We should give more credit to philosophy of Simone Weil.
May 19, 2025
Jacqueline Rose’s 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, takes us into our own COVID crisis. 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. How quickly we forget what we have recently come through.
August 13, 2023
A collection of essays written mainly in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, about how a capitalist society living in defiance of death brought it even closer. The book argues that we should not push the thought of death away from our lives, but live in recognition and respect of it, so that our days can be fuller and more meaningful, and our societies more just for everyone.
I thought this book has very interesting things to say, especially the first 2-3 essays. Funnily enough, I just watched the Barbie movie recently when I first started reading this book, and this feels like an extention of the central theme of the movie.
I thought this book has very interesting things to say, especially the first 2-3 essays. Funnily enough, I just watched the Barbie movie recently when I first started reading this book, and this feels like an extention of the central theme of the movie.
March 17, 2023
Accessible, passionate, wide-ranging while relentless in its focus - my first experience of nonfiction from Fitzcarraldo did not disappoint.
Rose is always interesting and often challenging, and this collection of essays, while not exactly controversial, certainly caused the occasional eyebrow raise. I really enjoyed it, though found myself more engaged during the sections on Freud and Klein than I was during the section that focused on Simone Weil.
My thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions and NetGalley for the ARC.
Rose is always interesting and often challenging, and this collection of essays, while not exactly controversial, certainly caused the occasional eyebrow raise. I really enjoyed it, though found myself more engaged during the sections on Freud and Klein than I was during the section that focused on Simone Weil.
My thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions and NetGalley for the ARC.
May 22, 2024
Using Camus, Freud and Weil as points of reference, Rose leads our thoughts through the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, positing them alongside the spanish flu and world wars a century ago. She argues for the need to 'live death' in order to live in equality and justice. Thinking through 'how would Camus encounter our times' (and, then, Freud and Weil) feels like a useful endeavor, for they all experienced many of the same death-dealing phenemomena in their lives and dedicated their lives to reflecting on them.
August 30, 2023
A challenging and often provocative collection of essays. Had it not been a library book, I would doubtless have done a lot of underlining. As it is, I did take notes, and will follow up on some of the themes Rose introduces. How refreshing it is to learn from such an impassioned and knowledgeable woman.
April 1, 2025
3.5. A tough read. We desire war so that we can do things we’d not dare do in normal times.
Justice figurines seem to be women.
Plagues or wars take from us the necessity of having a death that means something.
Justice figurines seem to be women.
Plagues or wars take from us the necessity of having a death that means something.
July 16, 2023
Functional and cathartic, reassuring in the fact that it is written by Jacqueline Rose.
November 28, 2023
Thought provoking. Probably worth a four. Book to contemplate.
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December 22, 2023A contemplation of the virtue that humanity holds and whether it might be enough to save us from our own demise.
March 17, 2024
Way too dumb for this
October 6, 2023
Casual insights, loosely connected. Unremarkable political criticism. I picked this up after the New Yorker profile by Parul Sehgal, which, together with praise from Edward Said, Maggie Nelson, and others, built unmet expectations. Rose's thinking on Weil is unclear. Sometimes Simone is infinite, others *anathema*
December 29, 2023
I did not mind this, but at the same time I did not feel like there was that much to this. It is a bunch of musings which share the theme if somehow being related to covid.
Perhaps the readers fault but i did not think too much of this.
Perhaps the readers fault but i did not think too much of this.
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