The Plague: Living Death in Our Times, by Jacqueline Rose

 The most valuable essays here are "To Die One's Own Death" and "In Extremis" on Simone Weil. The first argues persuasively, to my mind, that Freud's concept of the death drive arose from the death of his most loved daughter Sophie Halberstadt-Freud due to the 'Spanish' flu. That theoretical innovation led to, in Rose's words, "a considerable downgrade in the status of the drives of self-preservation and mastery that were key to his earlier topography of the mind, as they are all now seen to be working in the service of the organism's need to follow the path to its own death," or as Freud puts it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, "The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion." Rose applies this insight to our experience of callous and careless death during the COVID pandemic and derives an ethical guide: we should work for a fairer world where people are enabled not only to live free and fulfilling lives, but also to choose how they wish to die.

The Simone Weil essay introduced me to a writer whom I had thought of only as a philosopher and a mystic, but not as a trade unionist and would-be French Resistance fighter. What Rose says about Weil's habitual use of analogy as a means of argumentation is very interesting: "Visceral and unworldly, Weil's analogies push at the limits of language, giving voice to something painful or that eludes understanding.... Analogy is a spiritual principle, since it is only by means of 'analogy and transference' that our attachment to particular human beings can be raised to the level of universal love."

The rest of the essays in the book say what needs to be said about the gendered violence, governmental ineptitude, and global inequities exposed and increased by COVID, but the same points were made by many other writers. The one gem, a powerful guide-post, comes in the essay "Life after Death," about living post-pandemic: "One place to begin would be to make room for the complex legacies of the human mind, without the need to push reckoning aside. Past wrongs would not be subject to denial, as if our personal or national identities depend on a pseudo-innocence which absolves us of all crimes. Let the insights of the analytic couch percolate into our public and political lives, and no less crucially, the other way round (we need to acknowledge the weight of historical affliction on our dreams) [emphasis mine]."

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