On Violence and On Violence Against Women

Review It's really hard for me to overestimate how important [Rose's] work has been for me . . . I don't feel like that about very many writers. -- Maggie Nelson ― Grand Journal Rose has brought a profound, complex and forensic truthfulness to the subject of women and violence and the result is both emotionally and intellectually compelling . . . An immense achievement. -- Jude Kelly CBE, founder of the Women of the World Foundation Jacqueline Rose explodes the myth that violence and misogyny only happen to other women. -- Val McDermid On Violence and On Violence Against Women is timely and yet is also timeless - a philosophical, psychological and analytical exploration of personal and political violence. Not an easy read - but an important one. -- Helen Pankhurst This book confirms Jacqueline Rose's position as one of the world's foremost public intellectuals. She fuses psychoanalysis, philosophy, literary criticism, historical inquiry and political insight into essays that are profound and revelatory, always as incisive as they are humane. She brings new understanding to the gendered dynamics of violence in our age - from sexual harassment and transphobia in the United States and Britain, to femicide, protest and intergenerational trauma in South Africa. -- Mark Gevisser Ambitious, sobering . . . This is a hugely important book that threads together such diverse subjects as the treatment of migrant women, the heteroglossia of gender positions and the aesthetic politics of contemporary modernist writing by women to vitally and urgently warn that we must make room for the irrational, the unconscious, the in-between and the unnameable in order to think our way into a more just world. -- Lauren Elkin Rose's own sentences are cool, almost enameled in their polish and control. It's in the movement of her prose, the way she seizes and furiously unravels ideas from her previous books, that we see the vigor and precision of her mind, the work of thinking, of forging new pathways that she holds up as rejoinder to the muteness of violence . . . To read Rose is to understand that there is no border between us and the world; it is an invitation to a radical kind of responsibility. -- Parul Seghal ― New York Times Surprising and original . . . She has the gift that the greatest expounders of psychoanalysis share, of compressing difficult theoretical ideas and making them immediately applicable and illuminating . . . The more I read her, the more I see the world through her questions . . . Rose's careful attention to detail, her power as a close reader, yields startling insights . . . Her real power, what makes her necessary as well as unique, may be how she teaches readers to ask probing questions on their own. -- Christine Smallwood ― New York Review of Books These provocative essays probe assumptions that both fuel and mask violence in Western culture. ― New Yorker A daring thinker, willing to make bold statements and take imaginative leaps . . . her prose is cool and surgically precise, as she dissects masculinity with her own sharp blade . . . Rose offers a lucid and fresh approach. -- Anna Leszkiewicz ― New Statesman Timely . . . On Violence calls for us to pay attention to the world as it exists out in the streets, in governments and homes, but also to turn inwards to ask what exactly it is we refuse to see and therefore what we allow to continue. -- Rebecca Liu ― Prospect A call to greater reflection. -- Dani Garavelli ― The Herald No stone goes unturned in Rose's exhaustive inquiry into the enduring global crisis of sexual violence . . . Rose builds a compellingly argued theory that sexual violence is rooted in male fragility . . . For anyone looking to educate themselves on this essential subject, start here and now. -- Adrienne Westenfeld ― Esquire (Best Books of Spring) Many of our most celebrated intellectuals, of whom feminist theorist Jacqueline Rose is one, are revered precisely for the ambition of their books