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Upon finishing reading Jacqueline Rose's The Plague: Living Death in Our Times, I wanted to record what remains in the immediate aftermath, with all its forgetting, misremembering, and misrepresentation. I wanted to trace what is fleeting in such a reading by giving space to what already begins to retreat and dissolve. After all, this is a book about death or, more specifically, “death in our times,” so we can be forgiven for performing an analysis that enacts this dissolution, that attempts to capture what is always on the verge of ending.
Rose stakes her writing about death in our time, which, she holds, is a time that uniquely has no place for death. Between the lines of her commentary, she comes close to suggesting that “the plague” appears precisely to show us the necessity of including the death we are always avoiding. Moreover, “the plague” is the lawful and unavoidable consequence of some as yet unidentified origin story that might involve the breakdown of the food chain and the perversion of the relation between the human and the animal; which is to say, it might involve capitalism.
I must admit to a sense of distaste for the task of reading a text so firmly anchored in the pandemic. The first line in the
Introduction states, “This book has been written in the heat and chill of its moment” (p. 3). To read it is to be drawn back into a time that is no longer the time of that moment. As for COVID, we now hardly speak of it. If someone reports being ill, we take it in stride. It is from our time, the time after that moment, that we read essays which are not about but firmly in that time, speaking and writing it. By now there is a kind of familiarity with ways in which this inexplicable disaster provoked all sorts of attempts to wrestle with the disorientation that came in its wake and hoped to restore it to some narrative coherence, thereby threatening to erase precisely what is most deathly in its advent—the sheer lack of any clear trauma plot able to explain