The Last Resistance
Jacqueline Rose Verso, 256pp, £16.99
"To be a literary critic," writes Jacqueline Rose in appreciation of Edward Said, "is, amongst other things, to enter the mind of the other, to invite and even force your reader to see themselves in situations far from their own."
In this brilliant collection of essays, Rose examines what it would require to fulfil such a task. Whether she is exploring the correspondence of Freud and Arnold Zweig, analysing a novel by Vladimir Jabotinsky, or discussing the writing of David Grossman, Nadine Gordimer, Shulamith Hareven, W G Sebald and others, for Rose the measure of success or failure is how much the reader is invited - or forced - to see beyond an idealised self.
Just as in States of Fantasy and The Question of Zion, two of her best books, Rose shows no lack of polemical spirit. But the strength of her writing comes from a method of reading through which the tiniest folds of the text are revealed: dilemmas, ambiguities and paradoxes that, in the name of clarity, are often excluded from mainstream writing and debate. But Rose confronts the complex truth; for example, exploring the contradiction of Zionism, as both religious and secular ideology, through the paradoxical life of Jabotinsky, one of its most fervent propagators.
For the revisionist Zionist leader was "typical as a literary-minded Russian-speaking Jew with virtually no ties to Jewish tradition and culture . . . Jabotinsky's Zionism is shorn of Jewishness even when he appeals to sacred traditions as having a part to play in the forging of the national (racial) mind." Only the "literary-minded", an artist, in other words, could accommodate the religious tradition within a modern ideological structure.
A restless reader who defies the barriers between text and world, politics and aesthetics, Rose is always on the move. She ranges from present to past, from Vienna to Palestine, South Africa, 9/11, Auschwitz, Abu Ghraib and the question of evil. Her aim is to reconnect issues and areas that, for the purposes of politics and propaganda, are kept separate. She links histories, tragedies, individual and collective experiences, but acknowledges different contexts and perspectives; victims don't always identify with other victims. On the contrary, as Rose shows in one of her best essays, "Displacement in Zion", victims of displacement often identify other victims - even their own - with their persecutors. A Catholic Croatian refugee who, in order to marry an Israeli converts to Judaism, sees Palestinians not as victims of dispossession like her but as victimisers and aggressors. Palestinians being, in the majority, Muslims, she identifies them with her old enemy, the Muslim Croats.
Rose is concerned about the question of what it means in the modern world to be "one of a people". Her answer in these essays comes as a practice of thinking and reading that is profoundly ethical and radically committed to universal democracy. But such rare practice is always accompanied by resistance, some of which is vicious, if not to say fatal. This resistance is the topic of the title-essay.
Just like displacement, resistance has different meanings. In political conflict, resistance is a means to fight tyranny and achieve freedom, but in psychoanalysis it is the opposite; tyranny and resistance complement one another. "Resistance is blindness," says Rose, following Freud and Zweig, "It is the strongest weapon or bluntest instrument the mind has at its disposal against the painful, hidden, knowledge of the unconscious."
Freud identifies five forms of resistance, but it is the fifth, or the last, that concerns Rose. It is the most dangerous because it allows the patient, an individual or a nation, to derive pleasure from pain and hate, and it cannot be destroyed without the risk of destroying the patient. Nationalism, as an expression of a nation's absolute self-love, is one form of this resistance. This offers a powerful analysis of the attitude of many countries and nations today, not the least Israel and the Palestinians. It also makes the psychoanalyst, just like the literary critic, "one of a people" - a political activist against closed minds and self-idealisation.
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