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Jacqueline Rose

Jacqueline Rose teaches at Queen Mary, University of London. A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity, edited with Anne Karpf, Brian Klug and Barbara Rosenbaum, will be published by Verso.

From the London Review dated 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)
  • The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1996)
  • 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)
  • 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

  • Get a Life by Nadine Gordimer

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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