Jacqueline Rose on Zionism, Freud, Sylvia Plath and more.

good morning I think I'm allowed to speak now is Australia I was thinking a an episode and white noise where the narrator sees his daughter sleeping and she's obviously dreaming she's mouthing something he thinks the dreams of a five-year-old what are they and he wanders over and she's Toyota Sarika so after this session with you know one of the world's premier wa surura critics Jacqueline rose you'll probably go home now than beer deluxe I hope that's not the case I hope you I hope you have the question of Zion firmly implanted in your in your unconsciousness my name is Justin Clemens I'm I guess the host this morning I think that the reason I'm here is because I'm one of the co editors of this excellent book with a very pallid cover and the Jacqueline Jacqueline Rose reader of which I was it was an incredible experience to be able to read all of Jacqueline's published work to that moment and and then try and you know hack it apart which is I guess the the job of an editor and pretend that this curatorship you know is a is a boon rather than a rather than a an attack on something greater than yourself so can you please welcome hurt someone someone and and Jacqueline is as they say they normally say this room isn't big enough for the both of us but this room isn't the beat big enough for the single one of you these I believe that it's sold out immediately and they're they should have been you know should have been more seats and this is one of the things I guess that I read when I read your work is they should always be more safe there's there's always exclusions passages and so on going on even in the the most apparently generous of of openings that are whether where the textual or or pragmatic I was wondering if you you'd start to speak about these these problems with problems of repression essentially and and maybe with respect to families as well well we've got a paucity and in the first sentence so I've got to find a way of responding to that but before I do I just want to thank you for being here and to thank Justin publicly for the extraordinary work that he did on this book which leaves him in the position of knowing me better than I know myself but if you're a Friday and that's normal you don't know yourself so it's sort of fine opacity I'm not quite sure how to respond to opacity but I think what Justin's picking out is that psychoanalysis has been for me my sort of companion through the years through the decades as a sort of way of thinking and thought what I say to my students is that without Freud idea to go be able to think in the same way he's been sort of a figure who's allowed me to contemplate the idea that whenever anything is going on publicly or officially or in terms of the performance of who we are there will be a backstory there will be another story that is both being heard but also has to be silenced in order for the person to go on believing in the selves in the way that they do and oddly enough that's sort of that basic idea I think it probably links just about everything I've written about but the two examples that come to mind are of course the Middle East conflict my difficulty as a Jewish woman in trying to deal with a nation Israel which calls on me to participate in its own public discourse and its own existence and expects that of me not just in the simple sense that Israel claims to speak for Jews in the world but in a much much more profound symbolic sense of belonging and so I felt a very undutiful daughter and that's a polite way of putting it in relationship to what other people think about me I felt a very unsuitable daughter in not responding to that call but what it led me to feel that I needed to do was to understand why that call is so powerful and to understand what it is that it might be carrying and concealing at the same time because I hope whatever the political affiliations of the people of people in this room are it would be nice if we could see a bit more actually but maybe the lights will come a bit later this is a national meant to be a conference thank you thank you it's a conversation right whatever the political affiliations of you in this room I hope you would probably recognize that there is something intractable about this conflict there's something about it that has a kind of resilience and a kind of an investment almost the labeed '''l emotional investment in in israel's version of itself as the victims of history and that is a form of licensing of what I was certainly described as for occupation as were to describe his occupation but a certain notion about what is justifiable given that history it's a it's a very very heady mix and so I wanted to understand what behind the sort of militarization of the country and its what what many people look like it's and are often its brutal policies towards the Palestinian what's the subtext what is the vision behind that what is it that's driving it so that has been absolutely central but it also relates there's a bit of a long answer I promise you the rest won't be as long as anything but it also rates to something is different as say Marilyn Monroe about whom I was talking yesterday and in her case it's the perfection of the image and whenever if you think psychologically if someone is being offered to the world are so perfect you smell trouble you know that it's carrying the count of something you know there's something being concealed and the more I delved into her not only did I find this incredibly sentient political alive critical woman but that what she was alert to was what she was being used for by the end of her life she was being tracked by the the FBI she was on their list from 1955 the last eight years of her life because of her left leanings but she hated Hollywood she absolutely hated it and she saw what it was manipulating and she says in one amazing interview with bill whether be the wonderful journalist she says the politicians get away with murder because most people knows little about politics as I do so she's really making a relationship between political state violence and the world ignorant of people so it's all in it for me in ways that I could you know and it's I make it somewhat coherent or maybe a little paranoid but I make it some more link than it is but it's always looking for something else than what we're being encouraged to see I guess that would be yeah it seems to me that in your writing at least it always begins with an encounter or at least your accounts of an encounter so at the beginning of your book States a fantasy you say you're visiting a sister who's living with better ones in in Israel at that time and that started to that triggered this this train of thought which is what sort of a land is making such a claim upon me and insists on making this claim such that if I try and demure from this claim I'm in trouble I must be with them or I'm against them even if I'm always already with them or then if I'm not always it already with them that I must be excluded and this is it this is how you begin with with a familial encounter with a sister overseas this was an incredible story I have a sister who's a real rebel and our father decided the way to sort her out was to send her to Israel and I remember sitting in a pub and sanjana's wouldn't him saying you know the right of return he said it's amazing it means she can go and live in Israel I can send her a fridge with no time I thought oh that's great you know okay miss ion is a myth of texture design isn't of tax-dodging you know okay so I listen to all of this and off went my sister to live in Israel and she did everything it was wonderful she was meant to go straight to an old pan and learn Hebrew instead of which she hung out with the Bedouins in occupied Sinai and and she sort of wandered around the desert in a long velvet cloak as she taught herself Arabic and it was incredible so I went to visit her in fact I was being asked to go and check her out right because there was a suspicion that things weren't going quite according to plan so I got there and she took me out to the village in the Negev where she was staying and on one side of the track was a Holiday Village for Israelis with soldiers in full gear military gear and chains and she said that's the is really Holiday Village she said I'm putting - a shack on the opposite sides attraction and that's where we're staying and it was the one Bedouin Shack they'd left in place because the guy who owned it was a smuggler and therefore he would give them information so we slept in the tent and then occasion I would wander over the other side to the village and sit down in the cafe and an Israeli soldier came out one day and said what do you think your sister so I starting she's great I think she's gay what do you might he says she's a and I realized that what he meant was that no sir no Jewish girl would hang out with Bevans unless she was a prostitute and that was such an eye-opener but that whole trip and I'll just get tell you one other anecdote from that ship I found myself sitting on the plane next to dima Habashi I know if you've heard of George Habash the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and she was being educated in a private school in England and she said to me are you Jewish and I said yes so you probably think the land belongs to you and I found myself saying without thinking it no actually I think it belongs to you it's sin doesn't belong to me I don't live there right should go to her mother should please go to Ramallah her mother was working for Aurora it shows the United Nations relief some Works Association and which top girls out of the camps train them to be beauticians dietitians dentist's assistant sent them to Jordan in Lebanon sent them across the borders every six months the government would shut down the camps they'd all go back into their camps and never be seen again so we decided to go and visit them her mother would not meet us because we were Jewish but when we arrived at the UNRWA agency about ten girls came rushing out to greet us in blue overalls ecstatic we were foreigners we were visitors they was so pleased to see us they were Palestinian girls and we would strut it was in love licks chat and then they will smile and all their teeth were wrong and I was of course there's no dentistry in the refugee camps and it was a political education in a split second suddenly you see it you actually see what's going on and then just to finish this this story because it's so true that my relationship to Israel was determined by this trip on the way back are we after a few days in the desert guess what we want to stay in the hotel have a bathroom so we stayed in stayed in a hotel in Netanya and was sitting in the lobby and it says Gideon's shift hotels and there about a diplomat in Tel Aviv they're about 2000 hotels and on the plane and this was so unlikely I found myself not Dima bash this time getting on shifts sons and he starts talking to me and I said Hugh and later to give you guys my father we don't talk to each other I says what do you do he said i'm an arms dealer he said I sent her a cell to anybody except for Communists and Arabs and terrorists so I salute him who does that leave me anyway so this was going really well you've imagined and then he said to me and this is the point story he said so what do you think of Israel so I said well actually I found it extremely disturbing I said I went to Ramallah and I saw the refugee camps and I saw the settlements and this was in the eighties the settlements being built I said I found it so I feel very sorry for you so I said why do you feel sorry for me you say like an Italian way to goes to live in New York and loses all touch with her home I said that this was not my home excuse me it's not I have I said I think this conversations come to an end don't you and a conversation but those little Intel it's incredible I mean you know you had some little political education every moment you everywhere you turned you were being politically educated if you could hear it so yes you're right that was a moment where again I was meant to be to know who I was in Israel I've never had such a deeply disorienting experience as that was and it strikes me too that it's linked not just to these encounters but but details that can't be managed in these encounters that the rotting teeth of the of the girls who greet you for instance or there although the what seems to me a kind of crazy analogy of the Italian waiter in in New York what what's that what's that doing so is this these the points at which in these details or these details at which something exposes itself or where management fails that you want to start your your your critical analyses that's what I meant I'm interested in moment where something official that is meant to be persuasive shows the cracks along the scenes and if you think psychologically that will always always be the case I mean in relationship to the Middle East a lot of people are very depressed about it because despite the ongoing peace talks a number of us think nothing's gonna happen but it is central sort of belief or psychoanalysis that the symptom is in the end to cost me that the war will break because the amount the amount of emotional energy you have to use up in keeping the symptoms and the defense in place in the end is too it's too costly and it's too debilitating it's sucking off too much from everywhere else so swamped something starts to give so wears a lower hand psychoanalysis can be seen as I once said before it was of course a terrible pessimist but I wouldn't say it was a depressing discourse but I mean is about the suffering behind the nirav reason on the other hand I think it's a deeply optimistic discourse because it says the symptom you are always deceiving yourself but you cannot deceive yourself interminably something's going to give in the system so I get great solace is it working that mm-hmm even even even when in your analyses for example in the question of Zion leads you back to 17th century messianic sects of we should basically failed sects of shab ties V for instance who you see who's missing ISM still operative in kind of militarized Israel today can you can you speak about better that traces cause a lot of dispute actually it's interesting I mean my argument is that even in so-called secular Zionism there is still a messianic strain and Geoffrey Hartman who founded this extraordinary and he died I think only about a year ago and founded this amazing not Geoffrey Hartman Hartman I can traverse the first day I'm confusing him with the American literary critic yeah no not Geoffrey Hartman thank you David Hartman of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Israel he wrote a book in which he said he he wanted to save Judaism from its messianic street and he firmly believed that the appropriation of Jewishness by messianism in Israel was cutting off the youth for a positive Jewish identity it's a very very interesting argument but he certainly saw it as having a messianic streak in it and if you read you know who he Bangor Ian's writing of Eureka advisements writing even he's talking about the slow incremental killing of the land you can find that way of thinking inside you know inside carbolic Zion you know Kabbalah Judaism about the idea that you will help the coming of the Messiah by an incremental transformation of the conditions under which he might arrive so it's not always an apocalyptic vision although having said that gushin show'em says you will not remove the apocalyptic sting from the language even if you try to secretary create a secular hebrew you will not be able to do it and that's just since I wrote the book people written about this more and more that there's a kind of messianic so rational and thinking about Zionism as divinely inspired as somehow waiting for something that's always threatening to come and never will which then produces it chimes in with the permanent discourse of fear in Israeli society so again I'm you can hear what I'm interested in is is that emotional tinge of what is being presented as a political logic and I just said something else about that which is some of the critics of the book the question of Zion just felt you know what I done was preposterous to use psychoanalysis to talk about Zionism because it was felt that that is true moved from the Jewish people the rational as in the reason for the need for self-determination well you know what always says we need a positive over determination which is all that can be true of course it's true you know I say on page three of the book that the desire for national self-determination was a legitimate disaster as she doesn't know what had happened that's not a problem for me but they can also be fueled by other forms of investment and those are the ones that I think are most tricky so when the book was translated into Hebrew which I was very very moved and thrilled about they asked me to write a preface and so I just said just axiomatic for psychoanalysis that no one is ever demeaned by the unconscious you know I mean it's Freud stated aim in interpreting dreams was to establish the Devolder which means in German the work the dignity of the psyche I mean that's the basic movers the things you're ashamed of don't be ashamed of because we're all in it together so there's no grounds for shame so in a sense that's been and it's it's got worse and I've gone on arguing it which is to say that there is an effective emotional investment in a political rhetoric it's not to degrade it it's to try and understand it but you know we're living in an era where psychoanalysis is more and more on the defensive we're talking with CBT I don't know that big thing here cognitive behavioral therapy there was what else is there it was incredible moment in England where you know the government said we've we there's been too much drug based therapy you saw yes we need talking therapist you thought yes and then they can't CBT well you know where you have to you are talked out of your symptom in six sessions and that's the end of it you know the idea that there might be a complex set of psychological determinants the idea that you might have to remember something is just not the issue so there we are living in a moment for it I mean people like Darren leader have written Brittany about this the onslaught against psychoanalysis because it goes under the surface and nobody has time for that there were speedy speedy culture nobody wants to stop and think in that way hmm and since you've raised the fundamental role of intense effects unmanageable effects and in politics can I also remind you of your your work on apathy which seems to be at least at first blush to maybe answer physical to these cities but you say something else in your your essay on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission yes change this is terrible thing about having an edited reproducing my own anxiety let me fill I'm interested in that 4:30 I don't feel anything for us well this are just very struck in the TRC I don't know I mean it's the most extraordinary historical document and I found myself teaching a course on South African literature and so I I read quite a lot of the TRC because it is a psychotic public moment and this moment where you know you will speak the truth of course the inners Desmond Tutu said there's a real problem is that half of these people lying through their teeth and secondly they came to tell the truth only to get off so yeah it's a very disturbing sort of celebration and disintegration of what speaking the truth might be nonetheless it was the public the only up hearing I think Jeremy Hardy who's here will tell me if I'm right about this up to that point I think it was the only one ever to have been old it's hearing simple Rick I think the South African TRC so it was an attempt at a kind of public catharsis and there was just one moment in it in the very brief section on with him where a woman wrote a letter saying and I I feel I am incriminated and apartheid because I was too apathetic to do anything about it so it was really pushing as far as you can go the notion of the bystander and of course it's very interesting that the TRC goes for the perpetrators that's a great sound and that's my daughter Jacqueline so the intervention and the TRC has been criticized for going for the perpetrators we're not going for the system of apartheid and therefore not going for the bystanders the universities get at this section this long for example and it's a big question here about who is guilty okay so should had enough no it's not even the mouths of babes anymore it's their you know the mobile phones it's a little bit longer so there was a very descendeth etic and therefore i I am guilty and I just thought that was such a moving statement it does relate to what we're talking about because the apathy is a political symptom but I say the sense that there is a world in which you have no role to play I mean there's a lot of discussion going on about this in England at the moment and about the D politicization and the collapse of civic society they said I met somebody yesterday's a historian here who said she just she might not be here today at this event she written a book on trust and critiquing the idea that we all distrust our politicians and therefore politics has come to an end and her argument first was very good to distrust your politicians and secondly that's harping back to a golden age of participation as if this was not a political moment so it's a way of deep litter sizing the now okay so I felt behind that apathy was actually at Machinery of State and of compliance and of identification with state objectives and apartheid that was being concealed under what looked like I'm not sure I have a role to play Who am I in this I have nothing to do so it is part of the same thing I hope that was just my attempt to make them connect I guess one of the things that really struck me about the work of Jacques Lacan the French psychoanalyst who of course you're one of the first great translators of some of his works enter into English and particularly the the feminine sexuality volume that you did with Julian Mitchell but it always struck me one of the things about Lacan that I I loved immediately was his very ironic remarks about psychoanalysis doesn't make you feel better it just enables you to speak a little better and it's on I'd like to I'd like to ask you about how do you think that your work enables people to speak a little better if at all well speak a little better is interesting because LACMA ended up being very critical as a nation of full speech which was very early on in his life he said the patient starts by either speaking to me or speaking about herself when she can speak to me about herself then it's over like it's she's cured so there was some notion of achieving a certain dimension of speech which would complete the therapeutic process and complete yourself he gave up on that he became much more skeptical about the idea that speech was somewhere in which she can simply find yourself because speech is always a partly public process I would say what psychoanalysis does and here for me there's a profound link to the politics of Hannah Arendt it allows you to think differently it releases a certain kind of mental process which can work against the grain of what it is you think you're meant to be thinking so I just really Hannah Arendt recently in relationship to Rosa Luxemburg and she she was talking about thinking as a form of freedom and of course Rosa Luxemburg have a famous statement was freedom is always the freedom to think otherwise and for me for me faint famous statements that actually she's saying that in the context of Lenin the rush revolution so they were really talking about what she called the Nightwatchman state and you have to have the freedom to think differently it was part of her defense of democracy so I would say that what psychoanalysis does is allow your mind to release itself back into thought and in in this context I've always been very struck by a wonderful essay by Christopher Boas who's one of the most brilliant english-speaking analysts alive today and he wrote an essay on a course called incest and there's been a lot of controversy about whether the second husband believes patients who've been abused or not which the answer is yes of course they believe them and then they say so now what let's talk about what it means to you that's let's take it a step further he said something rather different he said that when a patient walks into the room who's been abused his heart sinks and the reason why his heart sinks is because he knows that is all they're going to talk about that is all they are going to be able to talk about over and over and over again so he started thinking about this and he thought well of course because if you are a child in a state to be a child is to be capable of reverie to allow your mind to roam and to move if you're abused is like a piece of crashing reality comes in and cuts off your capacity of thought blocks the mind it is all there is so he realized this one it's a really wonderful article that his own oh here we go was actually a moment of what what will be called countertransference he was actually picking up where the patient was stuck and how they too was Oh No here we go again and the idea was that by releasing the experience into the analytics space you just might be able to give back to that person the capacity of their mind to roam okay so psychology is for me about a certain kind of freedom of thought and if you then link that to errant & Luxenberg it then becomes a for political dissidents potentially I mean they're deep that they're deeply connected for me Oh at least I want them to be I want them to be deeply indeed and that I I think I think then of your essay on evil which we're in which in fact you quoted boluses essay here and you make this this too incredible remarks um one of which it seems where your quotes Osama bin Laden Tony Blair some others and you say isn't it strange that people who speak about evil they all start to sound exactly the same as each other that's the the first remark you make that I was very struck by the other one in in the context of Ebola in particular as evil as a form of transcendence and I was wondering if you could you could speak to both of those remarks now well there were I mean when I first gave the paper on evil at a conference I read out the three remarks about the earth spreading across the world and evil having to be combated and I asked people who who they thought had said them and it was a deliberate trick nobody could get it and one was bin Laden and one was Blair and one was Bush I think remember well let the sheriff Chiron it was Chiron and they do all sound the same and people use the word evil mostly don't think it it's a performative it does not need to be defined you say the word that has certain effects I thought well that is really very very strange and disturbing as if as if it it this is wonderful so I'm slightly associating here there's this wonderful woman called Mary Weingarten who is was the head of she was the director for the occupied territories of physicians for Human Rights for a long time and now she's an activist in London and she just said whenever anybody says the word security everybody in Israel stands up straight and stops thinking I thought that was just such a beautiful expression so whenever anybody says the word evil everybody stands up straight and stops thinking so I felt it was sort of similar I forgot what the second steamer was you want evil as a form of translation oh yes well this was again I was using Christopher Burruss article where he suggests that the enactment of certain kinds of violence is is an attempt to transcend your own death but one of the ways of thinking about the capacity to kill is that it's a form of projective identification you get rid of the death in you you project on the other and then you kill it and somehow then you become an immortal and become godlike well of course you do because you've taken life from somebody else and I just thought it was a very suggestive article again and I couldn't go further than this because it was just suggestive about what might be engaged psychically in certain forms of absolute power that they if they transcend themselves and they transcend the other clear that they also has something about transcending out and death by enacting it in advance you know you can get you know hysteria early for Christmas you know just one step ahead of yourself for some reason you've it may makes me think of a book that you've written on a lot but also I think all of the people you've also written on have also written on a lock which a lot which is some Freud's Moses and monotheism or or Moses and Moses the man Sayid has written great work in this regard and Lacan again and and many other people and you know and it seems to me that the the analysis that that Freud is attempting to broach in that very very crazy book is something about the phantasms of evil as transcendence of secondary revisions of effacing your own past and the very attempt to memorialize that and moreover the generation of a new nation that maybe even genocide allows for a nation of slaves can you I mean they're they're obviously very broad aspects but let me just see has anybody here read Freud's Moses the monotheism yes a few people okay so this is any of you at all would have asked at the other way is there anyone who hasn't read Freud smothers isn't one of these they're just too embarrassed to play no no sorry those a moment is that there's an incredible book by for which she wrote it in the passage to exile so he wrote it between living in Vienna and coming to England in flight from Hitler so since it's about the passage right it then strangely becomes an enactment of what he's writing about which is Moses leading the people out of slavery and it's overt it's his most tormented labyrinthine book he says this is on this this book has feet of clay I don't feel the attachment or confidence in it that I feel in any of my other books he's distraught about it and he says what do I think I'm doing I'm taking from the Jewish people their favorite son he says Moses was an Egyptian by the way he is in a tradition there's a whole tradition as I discovered of people who said that Moses was an Egyptian but as ever science said it points out brilliantly and his essay on this book it is so scandalous to say that the creation of a people was dependent on a stranger I said Moses was an Egyptian the Jewish people have been founded by somebody who today will be seen as their enemy and therefore it's a it's a very inspiring nation of what group formation might be where you don't only include the am and all groups of course are created in order to exclude the alien you make them the origin of who you are now Freud goes even further than this because he says there were two Moses that's another scandal you can't be divinely created twice you know it has to happen anyone so the new divinely created twice one was peace-loving one was violent it's very empty one believed in righteousness one believed in war fascinating if Israel is caught in a dilemma between those two founding figures of Moses but it's it's as if I mean this is the way I see it at the time of the rise of Zionism now at the time of the rise of Hitler Freud is struggling to find a model for group formation that won't be like anything else there's ever been so he wants a group formation where you are founded twice where your founder was an alien where you tried to kill him it's terribly important they tried to kill Moses in this account because he was too difficult monotheism is way too hard for anybody to cope with in this account and therefore violence which what most groups do we're innocent you're guilty so we can kill you right it is one of the founding myths of group formation that we have a good people we have are in possession of some truths or some identity or some love or some passion which makes us creative and there's something horrible now that is threatening us all the time so he takes the violence which you could say it is the purpose of group formation to put somewhere else to justify its own violence and brings it back to the founding heart of group identity we just read this and you think what an amazing thing to have tried to pull off he more or less fails to do it it's a completely wacky book and in its full of comments about him the most famous one is the creation of the the face of the defacing of a Texas like a murder it's very very easy to perpetrate the act but it's almost impossible to get rid of the traces and he's just talking about the revisions of Jewish history and relationship to this Egyptian founder so I think for many people and you're absolutely right just in that it's received more commentary than Hamlet almost and this book is now become a bit of an aura text because it's about the or it's about the origins and it just gives us another way of thinking about it is it's quite it's one okay we haven't read it it's worth struggling with if you by the way if you can't face it edward Syed's freud and the non-european is a really brilliant shortcut that's what I always say to my students love you can't forget halfway through and leave don't work just go meet up decide it's fine mmm okay so Edward pay for the non-europeans the beautiful ice mmm I know this is a again a strange free association but it does make me think of it another form of excess and and unbearable speech which is that of Sylvia Plath and Sylvia Plath you've written one of the the great critical texts on on her work the haunting of Sylvia Plath in which your your interpretation of maybe one of the most famous poems in English at Bertha's daddy could you could you speak about what you do to the resurrection daily or how you read it which it sort of often commander you know it's often been accused of a an identification which is not allowed to sustain Sylvia Plath is not Jewish how can she's an individual how can her individual trauma be compared to that of the Holocaust and on the other side feminists both affirming Sylvia Plath and denouncing her as well for exactly the same sorts of reasons whose speak about them well it's gonna be a session on the bell jar later but it's on the bell jar it's not on daddy daddy is an extraordinary poem I may not I okay how many people know silver past daddy yes okay she was criticized for making her father sound like a Nazi and she was criticized for saying every woman loves her fascists right so you can see how this Pony could cause an awful lot of trouble and my understanding of it was not that she had no right to identify with the Holocaust but rather and this is on the basis of conversations with so Friedland are the amazing Holocaust survivor and writer about Nazis and his big volumes are not susan has just come out in the last couple of years where he said his task was to go around the world talking about it because the generation who lived it were dying and there will be no one left to talk about it so I just said to him well then isn't it the responsibility of people who did not experience it to find a way of connecting to it so I would want to turn the prism path around and not say she is appropriating the Holocaust from our personal ends but that she is trying to make a leap of imagination which will connect her to that history which she precisely did not live so to make a crazy analogy in a way you know David Grossman wrote see under love because he did not experience the Holocaust he says this in discussion and many interviews that it was his task to put himself inside the camp through the voice of Monique under trying to understand the grandfather of a sermon and what he lived in the cow's office that's very different plus was not Jewish her father was suspected of being a German sympathizer and he died when she was 8 so then there's every opportunity to inflate to a mega fantasy which you get in the poem the Colossus of course so I wanted to say she's making a link she's not appropriating it is appropriating her and I would still want to make that argument which is to turn the pressure on saying what are the available forms of identification for people who precisely were not there how do you keep it alive if not through such an act of identification in relationship to the boot in the face if you look at it syntactically this as well as true criticism comes into its own I think if you look at it syntactically it's not clear who's putting the boot in whose face let's say it's extremely ambiguous and at moments it's not as if everyone loves a fascist I I want to be beaten up by fascist which is problematic for feminism it might be everyone loves the fascist because every woman has a certain violence in her which she's not allowed to have for which she might want to identify with Marilyn Monroe I am violent everybody has violence in them in her journals right for me this is a psychoanalytic point that if you think you are innocent you will be guilty of what Christopher Byers cause violent innocence I you will put your violence into somebody else and think you have a right to kill them so it is you know I see this you I see this as Plath was taking huge risks in her writing and the same thing happens in the rabbit catcher you know which Ted Hughes stupidly forgive me took out of Ariel because thereby incriminating himself because this is if he thinks the rabbit catcher as me so we'll take that one out along with the courage of shutting out which clearly was him okay so we'll take all these ones out that make me look terrible therefore therefore making himself look absolutely terrible okay so he took out rabbit catcher and there is not I had this poem and I thought you know the trap the trap is full of hair and it's soft and it's muck and I saw the arise the trap wasn't just a male phallic image it was also to do with female sexuality so how you distribute the fear how you distribute what in issues testing against from her own brilliant and inspired involvement in the complexities of what it is to have the body of a woman it's impossible to do it you can't do it well that brought the house down so I got you know I mean yeah when you write on Plath you get the Owen Hughes you know how dare you and after she softened you up with normal threats and everything else then you get the correspondent not anymore so you get the correspondence with Ted Hughes and he said in a letter to me was I aware that in certain countries to speculate on a mother's sexual identity was grounds for homicide so my friend said to me if any strange plane tickets come through who's listening to some wonderful destination don't go Jerry go and I wrote back to him and I said look I'm saying nothing about her sexual life about which I know nothing I'm saying something about what perfect writing can allow you to do against the civilized norms of what were expected to be thinking the author of Crow and everything might like this but oh no oh no he hated it and then of all threats and solar for the legal threats but for me what's extraordinary about classes that she takes those risks and for me that is a psychotic moment there is no thought we are not capable of having and it's better to have them than not otherwise you will divide the world into good and evil hmm I suppose that I feel that quite strongly well on that note we we might take the risk of throwing it open to questions from the audience jacqueline like we have about 10 10 minutes for questions I'm sure you all have something to say so um and Anthony Jaqueline I'm interested in your thoughts about jacques lacan when you can telecoms work first and your transition well perhaps the transition over the decades in terms of what did you find valuable at the start in the middle and at the end well what's still in transition well I I'm not sure I can do it quite in the sequence that you suggested but what attracted me to Lachlan was that I thought he was a scandalous thinker and we have to remember that you know he wasn't Freud Viennese patriarch living in an establishment world or even that even that's controversial because Vienna was hardly an establishment City after all as Scotty has demonstrated but he wrote for minitor he wrote for the serenus he really wanted to bring out the dissolute in psychoanalysis not the disseminated a logic Derrida but the dissolute in psychoanalysis and I found that very very exhilarating and I also found his outrageous statements about women like you know there is no sexual relational a woman does not exist I all found I found all that incredibly encouraging and liberating because as if he was taking a certain phantasmagoria of what women are meant to be and just putting a red mark through it and saying think again and the ab/c arbitrary nature of sexual difference I found I found all that very challenging and I just wanted to translate it was a way of trying to understand it I've worked much less with lacquer in the last few years or from the last decade I've gone much more back into Freud and I I I can't really give a simple answer to that I mean I still do levels ethics seminar which I didn't know when I was much younger I still think is his most brilliant seminar on what Lacan has to say about ethical life and the difficulty of ethical life through his reading of Antigone and so on but I have been working much much more with Freud in the last few years and people like Christopher Burrell I assume you know just I just think there's something in Freud all the time which challenges me and excites me and so I don't feel like that's not a good answer I'm really sorry yeah please thank you one of the basic fundamentals of cycle analysis is the search for truth and what I was struck by was when you send your political thoughts and opinions were influenced by your trip to Ramallah and those incidents what I was quite struck by but that sounded like a one-sided search for the truth and I'm wondering I haven't read your works whether you have also gone and looked at the other side in a real genuine search for truth I would say that the fundamental axiom of psychoanalysis is to know thyself and as a Jewish woman who is called on by the Israeli state to identify with its policies and who is accused of self-hatred if she criticizes it I feel my obligation is to understand the identification I am being called for encore - so my work has been to understand the power of Zionism and what I think it carries and what I think it's asking of me have I also tried to understand the Palestinian narrative and history will of course on the course I teach at Queen Mary which is called Palestine Israel Israel Palestine when we spend politics and military imagination and we spend the first moments in the sewol discussing wise Palestine Israel Israel Palestine because it is contentious which one came first right and you need to students need to know it's contentious we start with the israeli poet Yehuda a Mekhi and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and it is absolutely essential to the course that we enter into both stories and we try and understand them both sides and the other rule of the course is that anything can be said in the course and then I have teaching the Milan Road and so I have you know British Muslim students there students from Somalia there are students from Iraq I had an Iraqi and Mizrahi nan the course a few years ago I've had Palestinians on the course I mean the atmosphere in the room is electric and many of the young women who have there who are British Muslims say I'm on this course because we are pro-palestine my family and I want to understand what it is that were Pro and I want to understand the other side so if you're asking i'm not balanced by the way and i'm not impartial because i think to be balanced in an unbalanced world is crazy right so if you're asking me for impartiality and balance you won't get it from me but if you're asking me for an attempt to understand what both sides in this conflict are saying and what their investments are yes of course question here please you talk a lot about what's happening behind performance and I guess at a political level and a state level is that kind of pulling a part of the threads something that can happen during the process or does it need to happen in a separate critical space well that's familiar that's such a good question I mean you're in the middle of an election right and of course I were I was at the feminist discussion yesterday where they had to stop themselves from talking about Julia Gillard for the whole time but and I would have loved it if they had actually but it's it's very clear that this has been a moment or I say clear I'm not as confident as that you tell me if this is right where something very ugly has surfaced at the heart of politics and somebody a woman has tried to articulate an address in it and what they were saying on the platform it was Monica ducks and Anna Goldsworthy and people what they were saying was that this has raised the level of consciousness and produced a collective discourse about misogyny but it's also of course produced a very ugly backlash and she's been sacrificed I mean whatever you think about her carbon tax tax policy and all of that she was clearly sacrificed so I think the answer is yes and no I think you can do it at the time but you might pay a very high price for it but it's ongoing sinuses pantsy career forgive me that's lack one's account of the symptom Sanna Cespedes a clear it never ceases to be written which say that these little moments of opening and breakage and symptomatic collapse are there for the whole time all the time and one of the tasks of a certain kind of political analysis I think is to go for them and expose them every time they appear and I like to think that changes the terms of the discourse but it's very tricky what you said because it will initiate a kind of bring the barriers back down and very ugly things thing can happen but yeah that's a great question thank you and don't want to defend evil quite a big fan of it and I think that this your essay is about politicians using the idea bin ladin as your homages which is I think you're absolutely spot-on but now I'm thinking about writers and creative writers and poets using evil and there I think maybe evil is actually in a donor senses negative generative idea that I'm thinking about flowers of evil I'm thinking about even illusions of evil precisely as a setting platform and I wonder if there it's actually something that come at us thinking and at state level not at a political level well it's interesting I was having a conversation I mean here's some she will know as part of the LRB LAN Review of Books contingent and one of the other participants in that is Andrew Hagen and he was talking about the fact that he was having a conversation with an author who I won't name because he might not want me to be sharing this quite so probably I could about the idea of evil thoughts and he was saying you know like you might be standing at the head of a bus stop and you might suddenly think that happen if I pushed that old man onto the bus and he said this to a very very distinguished woman writer and should I have those thoughts all the time he's there great when you write about it the piece never came in he's tried to commission it or ask for it many many times because evil thoughts are something we all have a none of us compared to the MIT but we have them except perhaps to our analysts right in the past you know it's one of the places where you can do that or turn nearest and dearest depending on the relationship so I couldn't agree with you more that evil is something you can perform in fiction and in fact one of the things I was interested in that essay was cáceres essay on evil with Elizabeth Costello and I was at a conference in in Amsterdam called evil and kutzia was there and he read our pardesi before to become part of the Elizabeth Costello book and in it some of you may remember he it's it's in the first-person voice of a woman who goes to a conference on evil where she's going to criticize a book about the last days of Hitler's would-be assassins and to say this book has gone too far only to discover the author of the book is in the audience okay and while she's discussing evil she remembers being violated as a young girl now you have to imagine one thing reading that then you have to imagine cuts they're standing there a man reading the voice of a woman describing herself being violated as Iago now in disgrace he is adamant that the man cannot go there right so when Lucy is raped she never talks to him and he has to understand he cannot go there I was fascinated he broke his rule and he actually wrote it from the point of a woman and then performed it from the point of Honor I felt he'd gone too far but he's so clever that's what the whole article is about whether you go too far so it became a kind of staging of how far literature can go down the path of evil and certainly I agree with you the point about literature is that it takes you down pathways of the mind that are not acceptable anywhere else and in that context it's a form of freedom and I agree and I always say to my students you know we're the places in the culture in a if you are a man that you want to say actually I'm a woman and vice versa that you can say that without being carted off which was now Germany has a third sex on their passports things are changing but one is I can ask the other one is literature so yes I agree with you I'd like to just remind you that Jacqueline has to be frog-marched down to the bookstore immediately following this and forced to sign books until she can sign no more but that requires you to do the right thing and and buy those books by our book by all of her books and that's the least you can do can you please some follow her down so please you

Channel: London Review of Books (LRB)

Views: 18,903

Rating: 4.7487922 out of 5

Keywords: Jacqueline Rose, Sigmund Freud (Author), Sylvia Plath (Author), Zionism (Political Ideology), melbourne writers festival

Id: D-qyuEBL0-o

Length: 54min 29sec (3269 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2015