11 September

LRB Contributors, 4 October 2001

... returned and clicked on the second column. Presently a thing like a solid grey-white cauliflower rose until it was a mountain covering all south Manhattan. This is how we bury you. It was the most open atrocity of all time, a simple demonstration written on the sky which everyone in the world was invited to watch. This is how much we hate you. Six thousand ...

Protests with Parasols

Michael Wood: Proust, Dreyfus, Israel, 20 December 2012

Proust among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East 
by Jacqueline Rose.
Chicago, 239 pp., £22.50, February 2012, 978 0 226 72578 9
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... true? What can the narrator really know of Albertine if for him depth is just a name for mystery?Jacqueline’s Rose’s novel Albertine (2001) doesn’t answer this question but it does answer the previous one, and it takes the sentence about Albertine and her non-understanding of the narrator’s pages as one of its ...

Diary

John Barrell: On Allon White, 29 August 1991

... he began writing Too close to the bone – this must have been in March 1988. A few weeks later Jacqueline Rose and I went away with Jen White and Allon to spend a night in Wells and to look at the cathedral, which Allon knew by heart from photographs but had never seen. By now, a second bone-marrow transplant seemed to have failed; he was very ...

The Impossible Patient

Amia Srinivasan: Return of the Unconscious, 25 December 2025

... wish, and so reveals that our sense of ourselves as simply a woman or a man is, in the words of Jacqueline Rose, ‘the outcome of multiple repressions whose unlived stories surface nightly in our dreams’. The trans person is the chimera we all desire and dread.It is no surprise, then, that the increasing visibility of trans life has led to the ...

He’s Humbert, I’m Dolores

Emily Witt, 21 May 2020

My Dark Vanessa 
by Kate Elizabeth Russell.
Fourth Estate, 384 pp., £12.99, March 2020, 978 0 00 834224 1
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... suffered doesn’t have to define a life completely. I kept returning to an optimistic aside by Jacqueline Rose in her essay on trans narratives in this paper (5 May 2016): ‘Trauma is not pathology but history.’ If Vanessa had emerged from her experience with her loyalty to Strane intact, it would fly in the face of the accepted evidence; it would ...

It’s wild. It’s new. It turns men on

Yitzhak Laor: Amos Oz, 20 September 2001

The Same Sea 
by Amos Oz.
Chatto, 201 pp., £15.99, February 2001, 0 7011 6924 9
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... has slept around and been influenced by Aramaic, English, Polish and whatnot.’ It was clear to Jacqueline Rose in States of Fantasy (1996) that ‘Oz defines one of his tasks as a writer as the preservation of the (sexual) integrity of Hebrew against modernisation and foreignness.’ But matters are far worse. The word ‘language’ in Hebrew, as in ...

Ruthless and Truthless

Ferdinand Mount: Rotten Government, 6 May 2021

The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism 
by Peter Oborne.
Simon and Schuster, 192 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 1 3985 0100 3
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Political Advice: Past, Present and Future 
edited by Colin Kidd and Jacqueline Rose.
I.B. Tauris, 240 pp., £21.99, February 2021, 978 1 83860 120 1
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... in reading Political Advice, the excellently quirky collection of essays edited by Colin Kidd and Jacqueline Rose, how often deceit or dissembling comes up. You could be forgiven for thinking that a successful adviser is one who tells half-truth to power. Joanne Paul, for example, describes the debate in More’s Utopia about the obliquus ductus, the ...

Clutching at Insanity

Frank Kermode: Winnicott and psychoanalysis, 4 March 2004

Winnicott: Life and Work 
by Robert Rodman.
Perseus, 461 pp., $30, May 2003, 0 7382 0397 1
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... how far these deviations complicate the transference and obscure its interpretation’ (quoted by Jacqueline Rose in On Not Being Able to Sleep). Rodman conjectures that while Riviere was Winnicott’s analyst she couldn’t not have discussed him with her mentor, Melanie Klein. He admits there is no documentary evidence for this, but clearly regards it ...

A Diagram of Power in the Arab World

Michael Gilsenan, 2 October 1997

Master and Disciple: The Cultural Foundations of Moroccan Authoritarianism 
by Abdellah Hammoudi.
Chicago, 195 pp., £30.50, September 1997, 0 226 31527 4
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... interrogations seem to me to be cousin to those of Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities and Jacqueline Rose in State of Fantasy: how are Arab communities and nations imagined? What are the fantasies that are constitutive of their different political and social identities? And in the shadows hovers the great question for Arab intellectuals: what is ...

Prejudice Rules

LRB Contributors: After Roe v. Wade, 21 July 2022

... Mba, Azadeh Moaveni, Toril Moi, Joanne O’Leary, Niela Orr, Lauren Oyler, Susan Pedersen, Jacqueline Rose, Madeleine Schwartz, Arianne Shahvisi, Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia Srinivasan, Chaohua Wang, Marina Warner, Bee Wilson, Emily Witt Elif BatumanWhen​ Roe v. Wade was overturned, I was finishing the tour for my new ...

Diary

Marina Warner: Medea, 3 December 2015

... children’s well-being, maternal ambivalence and the direction of feminism runs very high, as Jacqueline Rose searchingly discussed in her essay ‘Mothers’ (LRB, 19 June 2014). Ever since Euripides showed unexpected sympathy with Medea she has been a heroine for real-world questions about women – their status, their weakness – and about ...

Big toes are gross

Hal Foster: Surrealism's Influence, 6 June 2024

Why Surrealism Matters 
by Mark Polizzotti.
Yale, 232 pp., £16.99, March, 978 0 300 25709 0
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... and theory, which took up the question of ‘sexuality in the field of vision’ in the 1980s (as Jacqueline Rose referred to it then). In any case, today the women of Surrealism are esteemed as much as the men, if not more. Meret Oppenheim received a major retrospective last year, and women Surrealists featured prominently in the 2022 Venice ...

Too Much

Barbara Taylor: A history of masturbation, 6 May 2004

Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation 
by Thomas Laqueur.
Zone, 501 pp., £21.95, March 2003, 1 890951 32 3
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... of the unconscious dynamics of forbidden desire, he was surely onto something. ‘Shame,’ Jacqueline Rose wrote recently, ‘is one of the ways we try to forget part of ourselves,’ and it is this amnesia that ultimately lay behind the masturbation panic. Solitary Sex concludes on an ambiguous note. Surveying representations of masturbation on ...

There is no cure

Michael Wood: Freud’s Guesswork, 6 July 2006

The Penguin Freud Reader 
edited by Adam Phillips.
Penguin, 570 pp., £14.99, January 2006, 0 14 118743 3
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... with individuals. ‘Freud’s theory of sex is also a theory of politics,’ Edmundson says. And Jacqueline Rose, in her introduction to Mass Psychology and Other Writings, reminds us that ‘we are “peopled” by others’: ‘Even when we dream, we are not alone.’ Especially when we dream, perhaps. ‘Peopled’ is an important word for her, since ...

No Dose for It at the Chemist

Helen Thaventhiran: William James’s Prescriptions, 24 October 2024

Be Not Afraid of Life: In the Words of William James 
by William James, edited by John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle.
Princeton, 387 pp., £25, January 2023, 978 0 691 24015 2
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William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician 
by Emma K. Sutton.
Chicago, 251 pp., £24, December 2023, 978 0 226 82898 5
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... seems unignorable in any full study of William. Writers from Alice’s biographer Jean Strouse to Jacqueline Rose have described the ‘telepathy of disease’ between the James siblings, who circulated symptoms throughout their lives. They found one another engrossing as medical cases. William wrote to Henry: ‘I blush to say that detailed bulletins of ...