The Last Resistance

by Jacqueline Rose

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.

Genres: History, Psychoanalysis, Politics, Nonfiction, Jewish

237 pages, Hardcover

First published May 17, 2007

About the author

Jacqueline 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)

Reviews

[Lana · Rating 5 out of 5]

reading this in the current political context feels as salient as ever… a v important read in understanding how the Zionist imagination has shaped the contours and justification for the state of Israel/occupation of Palestine. Rose is unrelenting in her critique of Zionism but takes the uncomfortable yet crucial step of entering the imagination of the other in order to understand and fully historicise/contextualise the creation of a collective identity/nationalist ideals. Perhaps one of the most important books I’ve read to date

[TheTyee.ca]

Jacqueline Rose, a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, expertly weaves literature into our understanding of political and psychological life today in Israel and Palestine in her profound and profoundly ambitious new collection of essays The Last Resistance. The essays have been published to coincide with the anniversary of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, which began 40 years ago today with the beginning of the Six Days War. "An occupation," Rose notes in the introduction, "that has now lasted longer in Israel's history than the period between the Declaration of Independence of 1948 that founded the state and the 1967 war which was when it began."

Rose's work mobilizes the nuance of literature to make both Palestinian suffering and moral degradation in Israel more...
Read more...
http://thetyee.ca/Books/2007/06/05/LC...

[Ralph Römer · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to understand Zionism and its ongoing effects on the Israel-Palestine conflict, this book is a must read.

Rose chooses a psychoanalytical approach, through the writing of mostly anti-Zionist/former Zionist Jewish writers (Rose is herself Jewish). This approach gives powerful insights into the 'mental displacement' by Israel of the horrors of the holocaust to the Israel-Palestine conflict that has been ongoing for the past 75 years.

Be prepared for some dense writing though and some Freud :-)

[Douglas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A profound literary book steeped in Freudian psychoanalysis demonstrating that the Israelis see themselves as victims when, in fact, they are oppressors.

[Omar Abu samra · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important analysis

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

With a near-suffocating does of Freudian analysis, Rose drifts through authors writing about Resistance and Zionism, I think? This book was not easy to digest, as I think Rose's reliance/dependence on Freud inundates her analysis of her topics to the point of drowning them in psychoanalytic jargon and subjective concepts. Kind of like that last sentence of mine, I guess. I'm no Freudian, or Lacanian, or Jungian either, and I tend to shy away from over-psychologizing thoughts, feelings, and actions because I think it has the tendency to remove agency, or at least soften it by falling back on drives or archetypes or essences we cannot ever understand, thereby overcomplicating even the simplest of choices. As it has been said, sometimes a pipe is just a pipe. And I don't mean that in the Foucauldian sense ("This Is Not A Pipe"). Anyway. I was intrigued by Rose's introductory remarks but then she went all psychology-speak and I disengaged rather quickly. Rose also discusses several authors and their fictional works, but I was not always sure how they were tied to her topic. I found much of this book to be less than clear about how it defines and explores resistance as it relates to Jewishness, Zionism, terrorism, and the State of Israel in the present day.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part 1, which is the length of a consistent, short, tight compilation of essays, would have been 5 stars. But the addition of parts 2 and 3 which feel like a series of appendices that drag the book out beyond where you wanted to stop really drags the experience down.

So I'll stay with part one and the few essays that feel like an extension to that core. Reading Rose re-presents being-Jewish as a nonmonolithic experience. It revivifies points of discussion and interpretation that have been foreclosed in our increasingly stupid present.

Cross-read against Freud's own ambivalences towards Zionism and nationalist commitments in general, these engagements with literature, politics, history, and psychoanalysis serve to destabilize all of the certainties that have allowed this country to merely watch genocide take place in the 21st century. This book called attention to the fact that, 20 years ago Rose already knew that liberals were constitutionally incapable of stopping apartheid and genocide.

[Amanda Gray · Rating 3 out of 5]

I gave this 3 because I felt very let down by the end. For how intriguing the story was, the build up, and just the way the mystery unraveled the ending was too simplistic without covering the entire picture.