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Rose brings courage, insight and compassion to every topic in this book, and gives the readers a taste of her uniquely feminine way of looking at the world: at injustice, identity, nationality, language, literature, and more through a psychoanalytic lens. A writer, literary critic, lecturer, and teacher, Rose's oeuvre is impressively diverse. The Jacqueline Rose Reader is divided into four groups of essays, each with an informative introduction by the editors, Justine Clemens and Ben Naparstek, who have chosen from Rose's writings, resulting in a thoughtful book, rewarding and exciting in its intellectual scope, and above all thought provoking.
The first section, “Analysis,” includes articles on femininity, feminine sexuality, Lacan, and Melanie Klein. The second, “Nation,” deals with nationality, the concept of evil, justice, and Zionism. The third section, “Representations,” includes essays on literature and cinema, as well as excerpts from Rose's novel Albertine. The last, “Interventions,” deals with Zionism, the Holocaust, the Israeli 2008 incursion into Gaza, as well as an interview with Rose, which concludes the book.
For Rose, the personal and political are inextricably bound together. Moreover, as her editors point out, “Political life in general remains a form of sexual experience” (p. 3) for her. Indeed, the feminine perspective in her experiencing of the world is always through a psychoanalytical lens, as she is looking both inside and out. In her interview, Rose explains: “I have always seen psychoanalysis as a form of freedom and creativity … a place to go where I could negotiate my own history, and then renegotiate my path to political and historical reality …” (p. 346).
In her graduate studies in Paris in the seventies, under the powerful influence of Lacan, she wrote her dissertation on Peter Pan and the way adulthood reveals itself in children's fiction with its “unconfessed desires and projections” (p. 8). The psychoanalytically oriented French femini