Death’s Work
On Jacqueline Rose’s The Plague
Hannah Zeavin
It is oft observed in linking COVID-19 with the Spanish influenza that the latter seems barely remembered. This has served as a prediction for the rendering of our moment in its concrete representations to come. Yes, television shows nodded to the pandemic, and novels used it as plot turn. Although the Spanish influenza seems to have been culturally memory wiped, it does linger. We don’t tend to call a parlor a parlor but a living room—so many died, and their bodies were held in those quarters. Those rooms, in essence, demanded a rebrand. In city buildings, our furnaces are similarly a hangover, as is the problem that our apartments get too hot to bear, forcing us to open the window to the cold, inviting it in.
But if the Spanish influenza isn’t so visible, say, in novels from the interwar years, it is in the very bones of how we live; past tragedy is still a structuring feature of how we think about our lives even a century later. Jacqueline Rose, in her latest book The Plague, shows us this may be because, in times of grief and the great loss that attends it, we do not tend to take flight into the concrete, but into abstraction. Rather than finding traces of our desperate times in the desperate measures of heroes or contained in the prosody of the poem, we should look for it in theory. It makes sense then that it would show up in how we think the psychical and how we would think the social.
To harmonize between these terrains, in The Plague, Rose takes up the triad of Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud, and Simone Weil as guides. Rose works tirelessly to name the present through each of their diagnoses of the past. These three signal thinkers of the then, namely the rise of fascism and the world wars, are repurposed and reread in light of our now, which finds, as many have noted, various kinds of uneasy similarity. While the book traffics in historical precedent, what Rose offers us is no underthought meme of how we’re currently reliving, say, 1933—when the doomsday clock of the past clicked ever closer to full fascistic state and total war. Instead, Rose uses the triad of thinkers to offer us a way to think about psychical precedent.
Rose begins with an overview of the now, breathlessly reporting the ruin of contemporary human life (Rose is, at moments, Benjamin’s angel of history personified). The ensuing book is a history of a present already fading, blown back against its own energy. The minute particulars are cataloged, so as not to be lost precisely because they already are. Along the way, Rose’s older objects and foci return to us, anew. Femicide and domestic violence—topics in two of her recent books—resurface in relation to lockdown (or as Rose would have it, “the ‘self’ in ‘self-isolate’ is therefore a decoy.”) Mad women and the care crisis reappear.
Reading the plague in the present tense is, as Rose tells it, unsettling anyway. The time signatures are only now slightly out of joint with our present, in which the effects of the pandemic, its iodine traces, what it associates to, are all now largely repressed in the social conscious and at every level of civic life (and they will be, until, like all repressed things, they return, sometime out there, in the future). Better to read it in conjunction with that news that stays news: the old end of the world. In Rose’s hands, the repressed of the past is equally given weight to that which we’re submerging of our long now already. But instead of World War I, the Spanish influenza, World War II, the journey into it, the passage out of it, Rose turns to how we thought the past, and rather than the facts of its contingent events, its theories are made to associate to our pandemic (which is, after all, not really a plague; we’re living through viral spread, not bacterial).
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Rose’s The Plague began, at least in its kernel form, with its middle thinker, Sigmund Freud. Rose was first to present the text as the Vienna Freud Memorial Lecture in the spring of 2020. When the lecture was finally delivered, it was from Freud’s home in exile—London—rather than the home from which he bid a hasty retreat in 1938. The delay meant that, rather than deliver the lecture on the expected day, May 6, Freud’s birthday, Rose delivered it on his death day, September 23. She stood, alone, livestreaming, between two couches: the one on which Freud saw patients (famous, public) and the private one on which he died. At least the former had accompanied Freud on his journey out of Nazification. The private trauma and the collective one become the two poles of the resulting book.
If, for Camus, war was metaphorized to plague, and if Simone Weil spent the final years of her short life as the era’s “relentless diagnostician” before dying from self-starvation and tuberculosis, for Freud the plague (the Spanish flu) came directly on the heels of the Great War and caught him ill prepared. Freud had been, as it were, prepared to lose his sons Ernst and Martin (the third, Olivier, was spared service); Freud had even dreamed it. But his dream was a message from the unconscious, not the future, and his sons were spared. Two years after the Armistice, in the least deadly and final wave of the Spanish flu, Freud’s beloved daughter Sophie died.
Rose’s The Plague asks us to think on the grounds of such sudden loss, both individual and collective: “How can we prepare—can we prepare?—for what is to come?” For Rose “what is to come” enfolds both the loss of others and the loss of our selves. Rose opens this territory with the declaration, “One of the strangest and most perverse gifts of war is its capacity to shred any delusion that death is somehow random and innocent of human calculation.” She will use the invocation to reread one of the more controversial shifts in Freudian thought: Freud’s contribution of the death drive, which was born with his daughter’s death.
Rose generates a moving collage of Freud’s letters, as his thought moves from the start of the war, all hope and heart pledged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to its bitter end in which he wrote simply: “I weep not a single tear for this Austria or this Germany.” Freud is a flexible thinker—one capable of revising even his most deeply held beliefs, and he did so all the time on matters theoretical, like trauma and money, and private, like matters of friendship. Rose shepherds us through Freud as he is battered by the world, by illusionment and disillusionment, from wealth and the “spring” of psychoanalysis to the war’s end, in which Freud had almost no paying patients and had lost 95 percent of his savings. Beyond the bank and the consulting room, he despaired of a future for the practice and the world.
For Rose “what is to come” enfolds both the loss of others and the loss of our selves.
It was in this moment that Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle, whose title means, in a sense, exactly what it says. Freud’s experience in the war and with war trauma (and in observing how children repeat to work through it) led him to wonder why we seem to desire our deaths, or at least something not on the side of life. Why might we want to revisit the very thing that ails us, and for no apparent gain? Why are we, after all, attached to our symptoms? Why might we desire nothingness? As he generalized from his observations with soldiers experiencing war neurosis and this compulsion to repeat, these needs for unpleasant, unlively experience seemingly contradicted Freud’s life drive. If previously Freud would have argued that we self-protect at all costs (even masochism, which he theorized on the grounds of his youngest daughter, Anna, and thought of as sadism directed inwardly rather than as a self-attack), now Freud had something different to say. As he answered his own questions, Freud claimed, eventually: “The aim of all life is death.”
If previously psychoanalysis would have said the aim of life is life, now Freud had revised the basic instincts of the mind into a duality: life and death. The contribution of the death drive is not the most persistent controversy in psychoanalysis (that honor belongs to the early seduction theory and Freud’s repudiation of the same in favor of the Oedipus complex), but it is up there. Rose isn’t interested in adjudicating this. Instead, she focuses on how Freud arrives at the death drive in the sixth chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. What occasioned its solidification?
Rose argues that it was his daughter Sophie’s death. The war and its aftermath gave Freud the impetus for the first five chapters, but he could only name the death drive after the loss of his daughter. Rose pauses over Freud’s correspondence after Sophie’s death (as well as the death of Sophie’s son and Freud’s grandson not that long after): “Years later he would write to his friend Ludwig Binswanger, after Binswanger’s son had died: ‘We shall remain inconsolable and never find a substitute. . . . It is the only way of perpetuating the love which we do not wish to renounce’—an idea that could not be further from his best-known writing on mourning as a task to be completed.”
Yet Freud was very careful, as best he could, to thwart the interpretation that the death drive—his latest great revolution in mind—could be put down to mere individual loss, no matter how personally shattering. Was he worried about the connection drawn between Sophie and the work, experiencing it as resubjecting him to the crisis of objectivity and scienticity of psychoanalysis? Did it feel exposing? Could he not bear to see the connection, his gain from his shocking loss? Whatever the reason—and there is likely to be more than one—Freud was adamant it was not so, like a patient immediately rejecting an interpretation before it can percolate.
Alas, historians have gotten the better of Freud (especially Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, whose scholarship Rose draws on significantly). Rose describes Freud’s turn to the death drive as an evolution, one “moving between elegy and treatise, between sorrow and science” to offer us “a philosophy of grief.” Using the rhyme of the Spanish flu with COVID-19, Rose argues, in sum, “death in a pandemic is no way to die.” Or, we might say, she argues collective death is no way to die and yet, despite everyone being alone at the end, all death is collective.
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Freud experienced a double melancholia: the loss of the state and the loss of a child. The personal and political are always liable to come in the guise of the other for they are continuous. In an early essay on melancholia, Rose turns away from the abstraction of the individual (and our individual losses) to the question of politics and political loss. A life without the dead in mind, writes Rose, “does not seem to me an idea on which any kind of viable psychic or political future can be built.” That we have necropolitics is precisely because too often the dead are kept out of the political future. Or as Rose quotes Weil in the concluding triptych of The Plague, “as soon as any category of humans is placed outside the pale of those whose life has value, nothing is more natural than to kill them.” This repression of the dead, as well as the splitting of humans into the social dead and the living, has of course been a feature of our ongoing pandemic. Repression, on this account, may be the antonym of repair.
For Freud, the loss of the state was more gradual; it took the entirety of the war. Sophie Freud died merely five days after falling ill. Many others in the family had been sick, the others at war. Her death couldn’t be anticipated. There was no dream, no wish, no anxiety, no ability to omnipotently control it. This loss appeared, in Freud’s theorization, as the drive to death. The loss of the life instinct. Now, no longer would melancholia be merely a pathological state, a response to loss, but the expression of a drive, something we all have inside us. We might call this—the creation of a theory—by Freud’s own terms. It is a flight into abstraction, a sublimation that allows us to do the work of going on being.
In his most recent book, Preexisting Conditions, Samuel Weber argues that plagues are coextensive with the writing of history, and that we receive plagues of the past through storytelling and metaphor rather than history. His signal example: that we call the COVID-19 pandemic a plague at all, when it isn’t one. Psychoanalysis and history each are the study of preexisting conditions. Here, Rose is asking after the preexisting conditions of a theory, about what in a biography and what in a social life allows for new thought, when thinking itself is nearly impossible.
In this way, Rose mirrors Freud, or finds a mirror in him. Rose is not merely asking after how the father of psychoanalysis resaw the human mind and behavior, but how she—and we, her readers—might resee them now. Rose is here advancing the science of psychoanalysis as an individual who has suffered tragedy—the loss of a sister, who died two years after an ovarian cancer diagnosis. This is not to risk, as Jacqueline Rose describes the possible pitfalls of her reading of Freud and Freud, a wild analysis (which I believe she avoids), or a speculative reading of author and text, conflating psychoanalytic precepts for something approximating if not approaching the truth. And I won’t. Unlike Freud, Rose’s work didn’t take on a new character or obsession per se in the face of death—it just returned to an area of inquiry—one Jacqueline came to after her sister Gillian’s death. Repetition is the sign of the death drive lurking. To arrive to the 2023 book, one way to retell that story is to start in the early 1990s, when Rose started making studies that we might argue culminates in The Plague, and like Freud, she started right after a loss that was unthinkable and may remain so.
Freud turned his great losses into theory; Rose follows suit.
Sublimation is a strange untheorized defense wherein one converts or deflects sexual energy into anything nonsexual. It can easily be mistaken for a Protestant work ethic (and of course, work ethic is indeed sublimation). Sublimation was already a zone of interest in Rose’s work in her third book, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991). That book is, among other things, a study of the engine of fantasy and even, perhaps, of that productive fantasy we call sublimation (“It is a truism to say that writing something nasty can be a way of keeping nice.”) If Sylvia Plath turned Jacqueline Rose to her study of sublimation, as well as to fascism and, crucially, to psychoanalysis’s answers to it, her subsequent work can be read as a preparation for using sublimation—Freud’s own flight into abstraction—to answer the key question of the plague: how to prepare for what is to come (perhaps the way to prepare for the unanticipatable is by doing it belatedly).
Rose was, long before The Plague but similarly prompted by her own loss, tracing Freud’s shifts on thinking mourning and melancholia. Following Gillian Rose’s death, Jacqueline Rose wrote the essays that would become On Not Being Able to Sleep. In it is a chapter called “Virginia Woolf and the Death of Modernism,” which she has herself pointed to as the paper she wrote in relation to the loss of Gillian. The paper is about Virginia Woolf’s modernism, centered on what it is to mourn, and what it is to relate to the dead. Here, Rose shows that Freud’s boundary limits around nonpathological mourning (vs. the pathological, melancholy) are contradictory, another site of his intense revision, his responsiveness to the world outside. Although “Mourning and Melancholia” is one of Freud’s most famous papers, it was not his last word on mourning nor was it his first. “On Transience” preceded “Mourning and Melancholia” by two years, which is to say, it was drafted in a moment much earlier in the Great War. The third movement of Freud’s evolving look at the conditions of relating to the dead, the lost, the traumatic, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, was completed and published in 1920 with the war over. Freud wasn’t done yet—Civilization and Its Discontents can be read with these previous works as well. (Rose dealt with all of them in the 1990s, but not at the same time.)
If melancholia and mourning are—from the outside—indistinguishable for Freud, melancholia is present when the individual “knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him” and introjects the lost object, thereby keeping it alive but also turning aggression, previously felt toward the dead, inward. The limits this can place on the living are termed the melancholic pact, a form of solidarity with those no longer here. All pacts—including faith—require, in Rose’s words, “even if only unconsciously, a form of involuntary, blind identification with the dead.” The mourner doesn’t do this according to Freud’s most famous schema—they don’t eat the dead. But Freud had already changed his mind. Rose therefore argues that what we mean by mourning and by melancholia “bears all the signs of its genesis in a moment of cultural dismay” (as many theorists have argued before and since, melancholia doesn’t have to be pathological in its refusal to adapt to loss, but a correct response to dispossession).
For Rose, one of the deftest readers of the psychoanalytic canon, this poses a thorny question: Is it then pathological to identify with the dead? As Rose writes elsewhere, “Freud himself was the one who most convincingly argued that the object which has been murdered is precisely the one which is most mourned, that murdering an object is the start of identification and not the end? Or is it not withstandable to identify with the dead and thus that identification is ejected—except for when we know not that we identify.” This becomes the kernel of answering the riddle presented by Sophie Freud’s death. Sometimes we know whom we’ve lost, but not what in them. The result is a theory gained from experience, without knowing from whence it comes.
In “On Transience,” Freud writes that “to psychologists mourning is a great riddle, one of those phenomena which cannot in themselves be explained but to which other obscurities can be traced back.” It is my suggestion here not that Gillian Rose’s death is somehow a secret subtext in The Plague, but that this loss resulted in a series of preparations for thinking about shared or total loss—about apocalypse. And, anyway, Jacqueline Rose very rarely writes in the self-revealing capacity of the first-person singular (of course she uses it declaratively and argumentatively all the time). When she writes of lived experience, she is—true to psychoanalytic precepts—much more likely to use the collective “we” and “us.” Freud turned his great losses into theory; Rose follows suit.
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As Rose also notes, we’re not yet able to mourn the plague. Or Rose again, in her earlier preparations: “Couldn’t one instead say . . . that the one who grieves knows and does not know at the same time?” Isn’t one always both mourning and melancholic?
Gillian Rose is quietly featured in a great deal of Jacqueline Rose’s work. Gillian Rose was of course a philosopher whose own work was wide-ranging, and took up Marxist aesthetics, the Frankfurt School, and the Neo-Kantians. Reading Jacqueline’s oeuvre, one is more likely to come across an explanatory footnote grounded in Gillian Rose’s abstract, theoretical work than a sororal or personal mention. In The Plague, Gillian Rose is mentioned twice, both times in passing. The first is as a sister (the year of her birth, 1947, was the same year Camus’s The Plague was published). The second is as a thinker (Gillian Rose wrote on Simone Weil, and like her, was a Jewish woman who converted to Christianity and died in her thirties, although Jacqueline doesn’t make mention of these rhymes).
Jacqueline Rose has said very little publicly about her sister’s death, or about Gillian Rose’s last triumph in Love’s Work. She did once say, in an interview for the Guardian: “I admire her book and I love it for what it did for Gillian in the writing of it, but it is not my story and it is not a story I would have told.” (As Rose wrote of Virginia Woolf, “the dying mind gropes for reason.”) Gillian Rose as thinker may be omnipresent in Jacqueline Rose’s work, introjected inside the text, but Gillian Rose as sister, especially as a lost sister, is largely absent. This is quite different from how Gillian Rose moved to work at the end of her life in Love’s Work, where Gillian, close to death, used her proximity to ghostliness to tell her story—to tell it without merely flying into abstraction. In fact, it was a flight into the concrete, to the minute particulars. Jacqueline Rose had just written The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, about how the dead are a text, as are the living, a text we can access in order to address fantasy. In Love’s Work, Jacqueline as sister does make an appearance as herself, rather than only as a thinker.
The terrible thing about being a sister is that when our siblings speak, their psychic reality does too, and we feature in it, but ourselves, our family situations, appear in the funhouse mirror of the other’s internal world. We may have the same parents, on paper, but in some ways, we don’t. A mother is different to her first and second child, both because she has grown and changed and because children are themselves agentive, have different temperaments, can pose new problems or be other old psychic objects refound. Abstractions help us get beyond psychic reality even if they are born there—Jacqueline Rose has staked her oeuvre on this insight from psychoanalysis. More of us can mourn a plague than can mourn the death of one particular child, a particular sister. More of us can tangle with what is unsettled about the social. Or that’s the bet. We might say, there is no democracy in love relations, especially not while you’re dying, especially not with your sibling. Jacqueline is the master of taking flight into abstraction (as was Gillian); even a sister’s death is run through Virginia Woolf, through Sigmund Freud, through Simone Weil, through a plague itself. Perhaps the dying Gillian Rose felt she needed to, in Love’s Work, do the working of mourning her own life via the concrete, her own minute particulars. If Freud argues, “at bottom no one believes in his own death,” perhaps Gillian changed genre to begin that work, that of death.
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Jacqueline Rose ends her wide-ranging book of essays and occasional texts, The Last Resistance, with a chapter dedicated to her sister. Perhaps dedicated is not the correct term, for the chapter is called “On Gillian Rose,” not “To,” nor “Of” or “For.” A meditation more than a dirge, an essay more than a kaddish. At the time of the piece’s original delivery in 2005, Gillian had been dead a decade. The opening address starts with an anecdote that just slightly precedes Gillian’s diagnosis. Jacqueline Rose is careful to tell us that she had been in less touch with Gillian, and that this was unusual.
Abstractions help us get beyond psychic reality even if they are born there—Jacqueline Rose has staked her oeuvre on this insight from psychoanalysis.
The anecdote is one of sisterly telepathy, if not the failure to separate: despite having been working at some remove, the two sisters (and a cousin) were all drawn, at this moment, to the Holocaust in their work. Jacqueline was working on The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, and therefore on Plath’s famous use, and misuse, of the Shoah and fascism. Gillian was deep in her work on Jewish theology, as well as the ongoing consecration of Auschwitz, which turned those murdered there, she thought, into ever-more-perfect victims. The cousin was restaging a play, a version of Macbeth, from within a death camp. The short memorial speech (now written, titled, and turned essay) culminates, as many of Rose’s pieces do, by turning away from settled science through the science that unsettles us: psychoanalysis. Here, instead of offering her own reading of an emergent crisis and its volatile topography, she turns to Gillian Rose’s urgent ethical demands, an open question. Jacqueline Rose writes of Gillian, “the question for her was not therefore ‘Could I have done this?’, which plunges ethical life into pure interiority, a realm of the soul dangerously sequestered from the world; but ‘How easily could we have allowed this to be carried out?’”
Jacqueline Rose ends her reminiscence: “Today, I, we, still terribly—still terribly, after these ten years—need her reply.”
The Plague might be read as the reply that Jacqueline Rose has prepared to give in her sister’s stead. Jacqueline Rose has been preparing to answer Gillian’s question ever since her early work on Sylvia Plath concluded (Gillian reported Jacqueline saying just before Gillian’s death, “I’ve had enough of mad girls”). In the intervening two decades, Gillian Rose’s work has been a citational anchor, a person to think with, ambient in Jacqueline Rose’s work. Through the living sister, the dead one continues to speak.
At its core, The Plague poses a pair of central and evidentially difficult questions. The first, proper to Rose’s oeuvre, is best articulated in the Freud sections in which she takes on the signal question of our moment of endless catastrophe and, thus, one usually met with the force of denial: What is it to live through that which we cannot (psychically) prepare for? But quietly, there is a second question posed to the reader: “What can we ask of the polity in apocalyptic, plague-ridden times, when the worst of such times has manifestly arisen out of the decisions of the polity itself? What can we ask, or rather what should we be asking, of ourselves?” This question is different, on its face, from the one posed by Gillian Rose at the end of her life: “How easily could we have allowed this to be carried out?” Gillian asks after the organization of an apocalyptic polity—how we let it form. Jacqueline asks what can be done now, once the crisis has changed time signatures to become ongoing and permanent. Gillian looks at formation, Jacqueline looks at aftermath.
But these are versions of the same question. Perhaps, like a melancholic, Jacqueline has introjected Gillian’s question, to let it live inside her own, to answer the call of the lost sister, the surviving one living for both. Superficially, this is easy, shared intellectual ground—one that antedated Gillian Rose’s early death. Each of the Rose sisters is on the side of uncertainty: Jacqueline Rose, as that genius inheritor of the psychoanalytic ambivalent stance, and Gillian Rose, the genius inheritor of what she terms the “equivocation of the ethical.” Rather than Gillian’s equivocation of the ethical, Jacqueline Rose offers the equivocation of the psyche. Yet, while Jacqueline Rose sets about answering how we might prepare for the unanticipatable, always, close at hand, is the question of collective ethics. As with all melancholics, Rose’s question is not just an address but a response—it has taken on the life of the other so that the other doesn’t die. Perhaps this is why Freud becomes the central, or at least germinal figure of the book. Not because he is the father of Rose’s psychoanalytic tradition, but because, like him, Rose is offering us a meta commentary on how to think loss in theory by showing us theory is born not of frustration, exactly, but of unknowable grief.