The Plague
Living Death in Our Times
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this searching meditation, Rose (On Violence and on Violence Against Women), codirector of the University of London's Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, explores what novelist Albert Camus, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and philosopher Simone Weil can teach readers about the inequalities exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Passages from Camus's 1947 novel The Plague, about the fictional disease's exacerbation of the "yawning gulf between rich and poor," anticipated the impact of Covid-19, Rose writes, pointing to the disparity between U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who received top-of-the-line medical care after contracting the virus, and an East London nurse who died from it at home after his requests for an ambulance were refused. Freud's writings offer insight into creating a more empathetic world, according to Rose, who suggests that the flip side of Freud's assertion that individuals feel some hostility even toward loved ones is that people can also empathize with "putative enemies," such as China, "a country the Western world is now being told to hate." Rose's sophisticated analysis brings an idiosyncratic perspective to the Covid era, and she concludes on an optimistic note, encouraging readers to embrace Weil's call for solidarity with the downtrodden. It's a profound take on creating a more just world in the wake of the pandemic.
