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Jacqueline Rose

Jacqueline Rose is a co-founder of Independent Jewish Voices.

Originally published 31 July 2008

The Iron Rule

  • Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink, translated by Michael Henry Heim  Buy this book

Towards the end of Bernhard Schlink’s best-known novel, The Reader, the narrator is pondering his future after taking his state exam in law. He has just seen his former lover, Hanna Schmitz, convicted of war crimes: she had been a concentration camp guard, something he hadn’t known when she seduced him as a 15-year-old boy. None of the roles he saw played out in court appeals to him: ‘Prosecution seemed to me as grotesque a simplification as defence, and judging was the most grotesque oversimplification of all.’ He has lost his belief in post-Enlightenment law as enacting a gradual but steady progress towards ‘greater beauty and truth, rationality and humanity, despite terrible setbacks and retreats’. Now the law seems to him more like Odysseus’ journey – a process that endlessly circles back to its original starting point only to set off again. In this reading, the Odyssey is a story of motion, at once successful and futile, driven and without aim: ‘What else is the history of law?’ [ read more . . . ]

Selected bibliography

  • A Time to Speak Out: On Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity edited by Anne Karpf, Brian Klug, Jacqueline Rose and Barbara Rosenbaum (2008)
  • The Question of Zion (2005)
  • On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis in the Modern World (2003)
  • Albertine (2001)
  • Jacques Lacan and the Question of Psychoanalytic Training by Mustafa Safouan, edited by Jacqueline Rose (2000)
  • States of Fantasy (1996)
  • Black Hamlet by Wulf Sachs, edited by Jacqueline Rose (1996)
  • Why War? Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Return to Melanie Klein (1993)
  • Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne edited by Juilet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (1992)
  • The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991)
  • Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1986)
  • The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossiblity of Children's Fiction (1984)

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In the LRB archive

The Iron Rule · 31 July 2008

  • Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink, translated by Michael Henry Heim  Buy this book

subscriber-only content A Use for the Stones · 20 April 2006

Entryism · 22 September 2005

  • Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham

Deadly Embrace · 4 November 2004

  • My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing by Christoph Reuter, translated by Helena Ragg-Kirkby  Buy this book
  • Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers by Barbara Victor  Buy this book

subscriber-only content Failed State · 18 March 2004

  • Death as a Way of Life: Dispatches from Jerusalem by David Grossman
  • Someone to Run With by David Grossman

11 September · 4 October 2001

The Cult of Celebrity · 20 August 1998

Not currently in the LRB archive

 not available in archive Go girl · 30 September 1999

  • Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier
  • Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-98 by Adrienne Rich

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