From Proust in Palestine to Marilyn Monroe’s America: An Interview with Jacqueline Rose

In this interview, Jacqueline Rose discusses her engagements with psychoanalytic feminism and discusses its legacies in the United States and in Great Britain. She uses Lacan and Freud not only to read literature but also to discuss politics, especially the issues of anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism in Europe, apartheid in South Africa (through J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer), and Israel-Palestine relations. The organization Rose cofounded, Independent Jewish Voices, organizes public events in Great Britain to discuss these issues. Rose also talks about her career, teaching immigrant students, and her recent book on Proust. She reads Proust politically, situating him historically in relation to Freud and Dreyfus, and then takes him on a journey through Palestine by way of Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett as well as Middle Eastern writers like Elias Khoury or filmmakers like the Palestinian-Israeli Elia Suleiman. Her next book will be about Marilyn Monroe, Rosa Luxembourg, and Charlotte Salomon. Rose’s previously published monographs, to which she refers in the interview, include The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction; Sexuality in the Field of Vision; The Haunting of Sylvia Plath; Why War? Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein; On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis in the Modern World; The Question of Zion; The Last Resistance; and Proust among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East. With Juliet Mitchell, she edited and contributed to the influential collection of Lacan’s essays in English, titled Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne.