The Plague

(Paperback)

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What do you do with death and dying when they can no longer be pushed to the outer limits of your lived experience or dismissed from your conscious mind How do you live with death or rather how do you 'live death' when death comes too close, seeming to enter the very air you breathe

The Plague is a collection of essays guiding us from the Covid-19 pandemic through to the war in Ukraine in order to imagine a world in which a radical respect for death might exist alongside a fairer distribution of the earth's wealth. 'Living death' will appear as something of a refrain, a reminder that to think of death as random, or as an avoidable intruder into how we order our lives, especially in the West, is an act of defiance that is doomed to fail. In the thought of the philosopher Simone Weil, who plays a key role in the book, only if we admit the limits of the human, will we stop vaunting the brute illusion of earthly power.

Reviews

'To read Rose is to understand that there is no border between us and the world; it is an invitation to a radical kind of responsibility.' - New York Times

'[Rose's] work remains surprising and original ... The more I read her, the more I see the world through her questions ... Her real power, what makes her necessary as well as unique, may be how she teaches readers to ask probing questions on their own.' - New York Review of Books

Author Bio

Jacqueline Rose is the author of numerous books about psychoanalysis, literature and culture, feminism, and the Middle East. She is the cofounder of Independent Jewish Voices, launched in the UK in 2007 and a fellow of the British Academy. Rose is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, and the Guardian, among many other publications.