Mick Hartley

Stuart Jefferies in the Guardian on Friday interviewed Jacqueline Rose, "feminist and psychoanalytic critic".

She reminisces happily about her time in Paris:

There she did a maitrise in comparative literature and started a doctorate about children's literature inflected with her new passion, Freud. "I loved Paris so much. I loved living in a foreign language." And more than that. The feminist critic Julia Kristeva became, as she puts it, her ego-ideal. "I just thought: 'Oh goodness, you can wear nice clothes and get your hair done and still be a feminist and a serious intellectual.'" When she returned to England aged 23, she passed off the initials on her Yves Saint Laurent scarf to leftwing friends as standing for Young Socialist League. She doesn't say whether anyone believed her.

Which is quite funny, though not perhaps in the way Rose intended. 

But the reason for the profile is that she has a new book out:

What will scandalise some about Rose's new book is that she uses psychoanalysis on Israel. But isn't putting the Jewish state on the couch shaming? Rose retorts: "I think it's Nietzsche who says somewhere that it's the people who are walking around happy, as if everything's perfect, who have something to be ashamed of. For psychoanalysis, psychic difficulty is your birthright and it's our attempt to repudiate it that makes it worse. So the point for me in using psychoanalysis to understand why a traumatised people might find locking themselves into a traumatised identity is to treat them with the greatest respect."

Not all Zionist positions warrant psychoanalytical critique….

Well that's a relief. 

The book is Proust Among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East. Here's the Amazon blurb:

Known for her far-reaching examinations of psychoanalysis, literature, and politics, Jacqueline Rose has in recent years turned her attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict, one of the most enduring and apparently intractable conflicts of our time. In "Proust among the Nations", she takes the development of her thought on this crisis a stage further, revealing it as a distinctly Western problem. In a radical rereading of the Dreyfus affair through the lens of Marcel Proust in dialogue with Freud, Rose offers a fresh and nuanced account of the rise of Jewish nationalism and the subsequent creation of Israel. Following Proust's heirs, Beckett and Genet, and a host of Middle Eastern writers, artists, and filmmakers, Rose traces the shifting dynamic of memory and identity across the crucial and ongoing cultural links between Europe and Palestine. A powerful and elegant analysis of the responsibility of writing, Proust among the Nations makes the case for literature as a unique resource for understanding political struggle and gives us new ways to think creatively about the violence in the Middle East.

Yes, I know: you've already added it to your shopping basket.

This is familiar territory for Rose : a previous work, The Question of Zion in 2007, argued that Zionism was a collective mental disorder induced by centuries of Jewish suffering. The Holocaust in particular had a psycho-pathological effect on the Israeli mind which prevented Zionists from being able to acknowledge the violence that they in turn were inflicting on the Palestinians. Oh yes. If you think it sounds like another Zionism=Nazism screed, well, you could be right – except it's dressed up with Freud, Kristeva, Lacan, and all the familiar accoutrements of certain parts of the intellectual left (and yes, she is, of course, a regular contributor to the London Review of Books). 

The new book sounds very similar, except with added Proust:

In Proust, to whom she returns repeatedly in her work, Rose found a Jewish writer of greater imaginative ruthlessness. It is Proust who goes right into the psychic space of his enemy. For instance, Proust writes about the Baron de Charlus who, in one incendiary passage of antisemitic sex fantasy, imagines a Jewish acquaintance's mother being beaten. "It would make an excellent show," salivates Charlus, "the sort of thing we like, eh, my young friend … to thrash that non-European bitch would be giving a well-earned punishment to that old cow."

Rose quotes this passage in her new book…, as an example of "the logic of projection". It's the European baron, not hated, exoticised, Jewish (m)other, who, Rose writes, "truly deserves, longs for, a thrashing".

"This is Melanie Klein stuff," she says. "You project on to the other the bits of yourself that you can't stand, but the function is to utterly purify yourself of the feeling. So your innocence is a form of violence against others." Proust got to this thought before Freud and his successors; indeed, Rose teaches an MA seminar at Queen Mary's College, London, to test her idea that there is no thought Freud had that Proust didn't have with greater complexity.

Never mind the dodgy timescale (Proust started À la recherche in 1909, and it didn't start appearing in published form till 1913, when psychoanalysis was already fairly well established), how depressing to see one of the world's greatest and most subtle novelists reduced to a Freudian hack – albeit a very good Freudian hack. It's a familiar move: all part of the great psychoanalytic tradition of co-opting great artists (notably, for Freud, Shakespeare) onto their books. Rather like, now I think of it, how Mormons like to retrospectively baptise the dead, including Holocaust victims, into the Mormon church.

Adam Levick at CiF Watch takes all this nonsense apart. But the best criticism of Rose, I think, can be found at the late lamented Democratiya, with Shalom Lappin's  superb  demolition of The Question of Zion (with Rose's reply, and Lappin's final word - all links pdf). Definitely worth revisiting.

Finally, let's remember Rose's part in the creation of Caryl Churchill's notorious "Seven Jewish Children". Howard Jacobson:

Jacqueline Rose omits to mention in her defence of this indefensible work that she is in some way – actual or spiritual – affiliated to it. The castlist expresses gratitude to her, though it is not clear whether that's for mothering the play intellectually, or for acting as Caryl Churchill's Jewish midwife in its delivery – advising her in such arcane Jewish matters, say, as the pleasure we take in the murder of non-Jewish babies.

But the play owes her a debt all right, particular in its unquestioning espousal of her theory that the Holocaust traumatised the Jews into visiting back upon the Palestinians what the Nazis had visited on them – a theory of dazzling psychological simplicity that turns Zionism (and never mind that Zionism long predates the Holocaust) into a nervous breakdown, and all subsequent events into the playing out of the Jews' psychic instability. By this reasoning, neither the Palestinians nor the Arab countries who have helped or hindered them are relevant. Jacqueline Rose spirits them away from the scene of the crime. They are redundant to the working of her theory, of no significance (whatever they have done), since the narrative of the Middle East is nothing but the narrative of the Jewish mind disintegrating.

What Jacqueline Rose seems not to have noticed is that this theory is a perfect illustration of the very Jewish arrogance she decries, assuming to itself responsibility for every deed.