The Plague: Living Death in Our Times -- Jacqueline Rose

<p><b>A slim, heart-wrenching, and rousing new book from the leading feminist writer Jacqueline Rose.</b> <p/>In early 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began to infiltrate public consciousness, sales of <i>The Plague</i>, the classic novel by French philosopher Albert Camus, skyrocketed. At the same time, the virus's toll surged exponentially. Amid the harrowing loss, many sensed a glimmer of possibility--the potential for radical empathy wrought by shared experience--even as the death-dealing divisions of class, race, gender, and citizenship were underscored like never before. We have been through a time of 'living death' when, for millions across the globe, untold horror has seemed to infiltrate the very air we breathe. <p/>Jacqueline Rose's trenchant new book unravels recent history via the lives and works of three extraordinary thinkers--Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud, and Simone Weil, each one afflicted by catastrophe. Their politics and private griefs, the depth of their understanding, fling open a window into our present crises. Rose, one of the most insightful thinkers on politics and psychoanalysis alike, has written a story of unusual range, spanning World War II to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, surging domestic violence to emboldened anti-racist protest, the Spanish influenza to Omicron, Boris Johnson's deranged optimism to Vladimir Putin's megalomania. <i>The Plague: Living Death in Our Times</i> enacts a psychic reckoning for our moment and for the future to be for