Jacqueline Rose on Violence and on Violence Against Women

 

It is a truism to say that everyone knows violence when they see it, but if one thing has become clear in the past decade, it is that the most prevalent, insidious forms of violence are those that cannot be seen. Consider, for example, a photograph from January 2017. A group of identical-looking white men in dark suits looked on as their president signed an executive order banning US state funding to groups anywhere in the world offering abortion or abortion counselling.

 
The passing of the “global gag rule” effectively launched the Trump presidency. (It was scrapped by Joe Biden soon after his inauguaration a few weeks ago.) The ruling meant an increase in deaths by illegal abortion for thousands of women throughout the developing world. Its effects have been as cruel as they are precise. No non-governmental organisation (NGO) in receipt of US funds could henceforth accept non-US support, or lobby governments across the world, on behalf of the right to abortion. A run of abortion bans followed in conservative Republican-held US states. In November 2019, Ohio introduced to the state legislature a bill which included the requirement that in cases of ectopic pregnancy, doctors must reimplant the embryo into the woman’s uterus or face a charge of “abortion murder”. (Ectopic pregnancy can be fatal to the mother and no such procedure exists in medical science.)
 
At a talk in London in June 2019, Kate Gilmore, the UN deputy commissioner for human rights, described US policy on abortion as a form of extremist hate that amounts to the torture of women. “We have not called it out in the same way we have other forms of extremist hate,” she stated, “but this is gender-based violence against women, no question.”
 
The resurgence of hate-fuelled populism has become commonplace in the 21st century. But it is perhaps less common to hear extremist hate, notably against women, being named so openly as the driver of the supreme legal machinery of the west.
 
It is a characteristic of such mostly male violence – “violence regnant”, as it might be termed, since it represents and is borne by the apparatus of state – that it always presents itself as defending the rights of the innocent. These men are killers. But their murderousness is invisible – to the world (illegal abortions belong to the backstreets) and to themselves. Not even in their wildest dreams, I would imagine, does it cross their minds that their decisions might be fuelled by the desire to inflict pain. Neither the nature nor the consequences of their actions is a reality they need trouble themselves about.
 
With their hands lightly clasped or hanging loose by their sides, what they convey is vacuous ease. Above all, they brook no argument. Their identikit posture allows no sliver of dissent (not among themselves, not inside their own heads). Such violence in our time thrives on a form of mental blindness. Like a hothouse plant, it flourishes under the heady steam of its own unstoppable conviction.
 

This moment stands as one of the clearest illustrations of the rift between act and understanding, between impulse and self-knowledge, which for me lies at the core of so much violence. We can name this male violence against women, as the UN commissioner did without reserve, but men are not the only human subjects capable of embodying it. Women throughout history have cloaked themselves in state power. And men are also the victims of violence – the most prolific serial rapist in UK history, sentenced to life in January 2020, had preyed consistently upon vulnerable young, heterosexual men.
 
But in response to the increasing visibility of gender-based violence, I want to focus on one deadly mix in particular: the link between the ability to inflict untold damage and a willed distortion – whether conscious or unconscious – in the field of vision. Violence is a form of entitlement. Unlike privilege – which can be checked with a mere gesture, as in “check your privilege”, and then left at the door – entitlement goes deeper and at the same time is more slippery to grasp. As if hovering in the ether, it relies for its persistence on a refusal to acknowledge that it is even there.
 
To take another iconic moment of the last few years: Prince Andrew’s BBC television interview of November 2019, when he tried to explain that his visit to the home of child trafficker and abuser Jeffrey Epstein in 2010, barely months after Epstein’s conviction for sexual assault, arose from his tendency to be too “honourable” (staying with a convicted sex offender was the “honourable” thing to do). He was floundering in the dark. His denials that he had ever met or had sex with Virginia Giuffre, formerly Roberts, who states that she was coerced into sex with him when she was 17, were met with ridicule. It was an extraordinary display of blindness: to the young female victims, trafficked by Epstein – allegedly with the support of Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now awaiting trial – not one of whom got a single mention; to the self-defeating farce of his own case (unlike Oedipus, his blindness was atoning for nothing).
 

But he was also revealing a chilling truth, which I suspect played its part in the speed with which he was summoned by the Queen and dismissed from his royal duties without ceremony, despite the fact that he is reputed to be her favourite child. Honour, here in its royal incarnation, revealed its true colours as the right to violence with impunity. (In the UK any investigation into Epstein has been summarily dropped.) For that very reason Virginia Woolf warned women in the 30s not to be tempted by the panoply of power and the trappings of national honour – which would suck them into war. But the shiftiness is not an afterthought. It is hardwired into the whole process, the chief means whereby entitlement boasts its invincibility and hides its true nature from itself.
 
In one of his best-known formulas, Freud wrote of “His Majesty the Baby”, by which he meant the will to perfection and the burden of adoration that parents invest in their child. Narcissism starts with the belief that the whole world is at your feet, there solely for you to manipulate. Beautifully self-serving, its legacy is potentially fatal – as in the myth of Narcissus, who drowned in his own reflection in a pool – since it makes it wellnigh impossible for the human subject to see or love anyone other than themselves.
 
Aggressivity is therefore its consequence, as the child struggles with the mother, or whoever takes her place, against the dawning recognition that they are as helpless as they are dependent on others to survive. “Every injury to our almighty and autocratic ego,” Freud writes in his essays on war and death, “is at bottom a crime of lèse-majesté”. (In the unconscious, we are all royalty.)
 
But for those at the top of the social pecking order, narcissism mutates, not into loss, not into something you have at least partly to relinquish, but into an accursed gift, one that too easily leads to violence. No human, however powerful, is spared confrontation with the limits of their own power, with those realms, in the words of Hannah Arendt, “in which man cannot change and cannot act and in which, therefore, he has a distinct tendency to destroy”.
 
Arendt was writing in the 50s about the forms of murderous totalitarianism that had spread over the Earth, but her prescient words are no less relevant now, when dictatorships are on the rise, we face the destruction of the planet, black men are being shot on the streets of the US, and the rates of death from austerity, rampant inequality and impoverishment are increasing by the day. When the pandemic started to break across the globe at the end of 2019, it soon became clear that one of its most striking features would be the way it accentuates the racial and economic fault lines of the world – from the fact that black, Asian and minority ethnic citizens in the UK are four times more likely than white people to die of Covid-19, to the killing of George Floyd which, mid-pandemic, repeated and underscored a historic context of violence. Nor did it seem to occur to any of the (mainly) men in power that the mantra to stay home and save lives in fact threatened the lives of women subject to domestic violence who were now trapped inside their homes; under lockdown the rate of such violence has soared.
 
Who decides what is called out as violence? Who determines the forms of violence we are allowed, and permit ourselves, to see? Not naming violence – its often undercover path of destruction, its random disposal of the bodies it needs and does not need – is one of the ways that capitalism has always preserved and perpetuated itself.

 
In one of her sharpest insights and most trenchant ripostes, socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg cautioned against the charge that the 1905 Russian Revolution had spilt blood by pointing out that the level of suffering was nothing compared with the indiscriminate, mostly unremarked, cutting down of lives by the brute machinery of capital that had flourished up to then. “Abroad the picture created of the Russian Revolution is that of an enormous blood-bath, with all the unspeakable suffering of the people without a single ray of light,” she stated at a rally in Mannheim in 1906. “The suffering during the revolution is a mere nothing compared to what the Russian people had to put up with before the revolution under so-called quiet conditions.”
 
She then listed hunger, scurvy and the thousands of workers killed in the factories without attracting the attention of the statisticians. “Quiet conditions” is a key phrase – she is referring to the skill with which capital cloaks its crimes.
 
In January 2019, Conservative ministers in the UK recommended that grant allocations to local authorities no longer be weighted to reflect the higher costs of deprivation and poverty, with the result that money could be redirected to the more affluent Tory shires (a move variously described as a “brutal political stitch-up” and “an act of war”). These moments of violence move silently, as do the women today who are so often the most affected: threatened by Brexit with the loss of equality and human rights protection, including employment rights and funding for women’s services (notably in relation to sexual violence, where the number of rapes reported to police in England and Wales doubled between 2013 and 2018, while prosecutions fell), or forced into sex work as a result of the universal credit system, part of a Conservative overhaul of benefits for people on low household income that is now acknowledged as catastrophic for the most socially vulnerable.
 
When Iain Duncan Smith, the architect of the policy, was knighted in the 2020 new year honours list, 237,000 people signed a petition objecting to the award for a man “responsible for some of the cruellest, most extreme welfare reforms this country has ever seen”. The Department for Work and Pensions denies any link between the new credit system and survival sex, dismissing the tales of women as anecdotal.
 
It is generally recognised that the spending “free-for-all” inaugurated by Boris Johnson after his 2019 election victory was intended to secure a further electoral term, but will have no effect on the basic gulf between the rich and the dispossessed (the moneys released for the NHS are a fraction of what is needed). Nor is there any confidence that the flurry of NHS spending brought on a year later by the pandemic will be significantly sustained. To general outcry, the promised NHS pay rise for nurses has turned out to be a derisory 1%.
 
Male violence is the standout feature of the day, but it is also central to my argument that the masculinity enjoined on all men, and paraded by so many, is a fraud. On this, I take my distance from radical feminism, notably that of the influential school of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, which sees violence as the unadulterated and never-failing expression of male sexuality and power – a self-defeating argument if ever there was one (if true, then men will rule the world for ever). Instead, it is crucial for me that, even while calling out masculinity in its worst guise, we allow to individual men the potential gap between maleness and the infinite complexity of the human mind.
 
How can we as feminists make that gap the beating heart of women’s fight against oppression, against the stultifying ideology of what women are meant to be, and not allow the same internal breathing space to men? Surely our chance of a better world relies on the ability of all of us to stop, think and reject the most deadly “requisite” behaviours? No man comfortably possesses masculinity (any more than, other than by killing, one person is in total possession of anyone else). Indeed, such mastery is the very delusion that underpins the deranged and most highly prized version of masculinity on offer. Prowess is a lie, as every inch of mortal flesh bears witness. But like all lies, in order to be believed, it has to be endlessly repeated.

One of the most striking aspects of the saga of Hollywood producer and sexual abuser Harvey Weinstein, as told by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey who broke the story in the New York Times, is that he seems to have been at least as keen on the slow burn of coercion and resistance, which would sometimes go on for hours, as on any act of so-called consummation.
 

Rowena Chiu, for example, describes how, shortly after being hired as his assistant, she endured four hours of threats, cajoling and bribes. At the end, “He parted her legs, and told her that with one single thrust it would all be over”. She managed to get out of the room. (What exactly, we might ask, was in it for him?) Clearly, for Weinstein, the revulsion he provoked was a core component of his pleasure, which is not to say that he did not also wish to get his way with these women. “If he heard the word ‘no’,” commented one of the key witnesses in the February 2020 New York rape trial, who chose not to be named, “it was like a trigger.” For Zelda Perkins, another assistant who was subjected to his assaults, he was “pathologically” addicted: “It was what got him out of bed in the morning.”
 
If sexual violence always tends to spiral out of control, it is because the agent of that violence must know deep down he is on a losing wicket. Weinstein’s physical collapse after his arrest can therefore be read not just as a staged plea for sympathy – a day after photos were released showing him using a walking frame on his way into court in December 2019, he was seen walking around a supermarket unaided – but also as an inadvertent display of the fragility and eventual bitter truth of the human body, a truth his predatory behaviour was designed to conceal from the women he abused, from the world, and from himself.
 
This suggests to me that one reason why he got away with it for so long, why so many people in the profession chose to turn a blind eye, was not just brute negligence towards women, nor fear of the career-destroying consequences for anyone who dared to speak out; it was also because no one wanted to open the Pandora’s box of a man like Weinstein’s inner world, to look too closely at his greatest fears – any more than they wanted to recognise what, given half a chance, such a man might be capable of.
 
This puts anyone seeking to combat these forms of violence in something of a double bind, or at least imposes on us the need for special vigilance. If sexual violence arises from a form of tunnel vision, and from burying those aspects of the inner life that are most difficult to acknowledge or see, it is also the case that raising violence to the surface of public consciousness is not always transformative in the ways we would want it to be.
 
Perhaps nowhere so much as in the field of sexual oppression does the adage apply that recognising an injustice, and bringing it to the world’s attention, is no guarantee that the offence will be obliterated and justice prevail.
 
Weinstein’s February 2020 conviction for criminal sexual assault in the first degree and rape in the third degree, along with his jail sentence of 23 years the following month, are a victory for women. He was, however, cleared on the two most serious charges of predatory sexual assault, which means that one of the women – the actor Annabella Sciorra, who had been the first woman to testify against him in a criminal court – was not believed.
 
The suggestion by Weinstein’s lawyer, Donna Rotunno, that she would be an “excellent witness” as she had spent her whole life “acting for a living” appears to have been effective – as if only liars make acting their career. The idea that this trial dismantled once and for all the image of the “perfect” rape victim – someone unknown to the assailant, certainly not in a relationship with him that continued after the rape, able to recover and recount her experience with perfect clarity almost from the moment it happened – might also have been premature. There is also the risk that the fame that put him under the spotlight might turn out to have served as a distraction from the perennial, “mundane” nature of sexual crime.
 
In this case, revulsion against a sexual felon – the revulsion that also appears to have fuelled his own desire – and the law were on the same side. But time and again we see the legal struggle for redress against sexual assault brought up against the most stubborn forms of resistance and sidelining. This seems to be due, at least in part, to the fact that human subjects can be roused by what disgusts them; that licentiousness, even in the political order that is meant to tame and subdue it, can be a draw. This certainly seems to have played a part in the 2016 election of Donald Trump, when his ugly misogyny was either dismissed as mere masculine playfulness, or else championed, and positively fired up his base, as it continues to do to this day.
 
Chelsea Clinton has described such misogyny as “the gateway drug”, a soporific that lulls the senses and opens the door to greater nastiness to come. Permission is granted to a vicarious frisson of erotic pleasure and rage, so often directed towards women, which no one is in a hurry to admit to.

 
By common assent, Trump is a law-breaker: two rape accusations, one made and then withdrawn by his first wife, Ivana, and one from the journalist E Jean Carroll, who has sued Trump for defamation on the grounds of his denials and aspersions; multiple cases of sexual harassment, by his own boastful acknowledgment; numerous exploitative hiring and financial practices swept under the carpet or settled out of court, but still publicly known; not to mention the grounds for his impeachment in 2019 – abuse of power for political gain (passed by the House of Representatives and then blocked in the Senate).
 
Likewise Boris Johnson. There is evidence that in 1990, he agreed to provide the address of a journalist to a friend who wanted to arrange for the journalist to have his ribs cracked as revenge for investigating his activities.
 
In the case of Trump’s first impeachment, it was not that his supporters even necessarily agreed with him that the charges were a “hoax”, as he repeatedly claimed in the face of mounting evidence against him, or even that he could do no wrong. Rather, it was that he was adulated in direct proportion to the wrong that he clearly could do. It is because he was transgressive – because, in the words of US TV host Rachel Maddow, he could be relied upon to do something “shocking, wrong or unbelievably disruptive” – that it became “a rational newsworthy assessment to put a camera on him at all times”.
 
If violence is so rousing, it would seem to be in direct proportion to its power to suspend anything vaguely resembling thought, to release the rush of blood that gives you no time to pause. It allows no introspection, even though – or because – violence plunges so deeply into who we are. A law-breaker at the summit of politics is enticing. Arendt wrote of the danger to the social fabric posed by a world in which state authority and its laws have degenerated to the point where civil order and democracy, or even mere decency, come to be felt as treacherous: “Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognise it – the quality of temptation.” A lawless regime relies on the hidden guilt of human subjects, drawing them into the illicit, dissolute world to which everybody already at least partly belongs in the unconscious (no one is fully innocent in their dreams; forbidden thoughts are the property of everyone). Or, in the words of a southern Baptist woman, asked on BBC television how she could vote for Trump given his moral failings: “We are all sinners.”
 
“Why”, asked German columnist Hatice Akyün in the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, after the murder in June 2019 of Walter Lübcke, a member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party (CDU), “are the people of my country not flooding to the streets in disgust?” Lübcke had been killed by a neo-Nazi as revenge for his sympathetic stance on migration. In October 2019, a video was released by a pro-Trump group with connections to the White House, which depicted Trump killing opponents and political journalists (in one sequence, the faces of all those shot, stabbed and punched were covered with the logo of CNN). When challenged, the organiser of the website insisted that the video was merely “satirical”: “Hate-speech is a made-up word. You can’t cause violence with words.”
 
There is a poison in the air, and it is spreading. This world of sanctioned violence, violence elevated to the level of licensed pleasure, is by no means exclusive to Trump and Johnson – even if, by general recognition, they similarly combine the qualities of self-serving autocrat and clown. The glow of attraction between them rivalled that of Reagan and Thatcher, whose belligerent neoliberalism in the 80s prepared the ground for so much of the destructive global order that has followed. But the rise of dictators across the world who boast of their prowess and nurse their distastes – in Hungary, Turkey, Poland, Brazil, India – suggests that we are living, or may be on the verge of living once more, what Arendt described as temptation gone awry.
 
In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro has proclaimed that he will finish the task of the military regime that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. In 2003, he told Maria do Rosário, a fellow member of congress, that he would never rape her because “you do not deserve it”. Perhaps most telling of all, he once quipped that only a “moment of weakness” can explain why one of his five children “came out a woman”. The formulation “came out a woman” is the real giveaway, as if an infant’s sexual destiny as woman were fixed from the beginning and she has no right to any other ideas. His words resonate with potential sexual violence, not just because he clearly holds all women in such brazen contempt. Ensuring that women will be women and nothing else, pinning them down as women, can be seen as one of the core motives of rape, which is why all rapes, not only those targeted at lesbian women, should be defined as “corrective” (In Brazil, a woman is the victim of physical violence every 7.2 seconds.)
 
Trans experience, also the target of violence, belongs here, too, as it clearly binds the issue of sexuality to that of political struggle – freedom achieved and withheld. Despite being far more widely accepted than ever before, transgender people are still being killed for daring to present the world with the mostly unwelcome truth that sexual identity is not all it is cut out to be. Not everyone comfortably belongs on the side of the inaugurating sexual divide where they originally started, or to which they were first assigned.
 
Some cross from one side to the other, some see themselves as belonging on neither side, others on both (these options are by no means exhaustive). Sexuality creates havoc. Kicking it back into place – a doomed project – is one way in which an oppressive culture tries and fails to lay down the law. Bolsonaro has explicitly stated that removing “gender theory” from the university curriculum is a chief objective of his educational reforms.

Repeatedly, we see what intimate companions political and sexual coercion can be. In Spain, the ultra-right Vox party made huge gains in the country’s 2019 elections, entering congress for the first time. Visiting Madrid in April that year, I was handed one of its flyers, which specifically targeted “supremacist feminism”, “radical animal rights activists” and the LGBTQ lobby. “Supremacist feminism” is the sister term to “feminazis”, coined by the late US rightwing radio host Rush Limbaugh to describe radical feminists – who, he claimed, “want to see as many abortions as possible”.

 In fact, the rise of Vox in Spain was propelled by the increased visibility of feminist protest against sexual violence, notably the nationwide demonstrations that followed the infamous “wolf-pack” rape of a young woman in Pamplona in 2016, and the trial that took place two years later. When two of the judges ruled that the men were not guilty of rape as there had been no violent coercion, and a third absolved the defendants completely of the charge, thousands of protesters filled the streets. A year later, in September 2019, protesters in more than 250 towns and cities across Spain declared a “feminist emergency” after a series of high-profile rape cases and a summer in which 19 women were murdered by current or former partners (the worst figures for more than a decade).

This is the context in which Vox agitates for the repeal of laws tackling gender-based violence, for the removal of all gender reassignment and abortion procedures from public health services, and for the dissolution of all federally funded feminist organisations. They have also called for the abolition of the Law of Historical Memory, which was designed to ensure that the legacy of Franco is not forgotten, to be replaced by a ministry to protect the rights of the “natural family” as an institution prior to the state, and for the building of a frontier wall to halt illegal immigration “encouraged by globalist oligarchies” – child migrants were presented as a special menace. Each one of these is an unabashed incitement to violence – against women, migrants, and against historical memory, which is being wiped off the page.

 Far-right parties do not all hold the levers of power, but they stalk its corridors, releasing their ugly permissions into the mental and social atmosphere. “We’re only saying what everyone is thinking” is the common justification and refrain. They wrap themselves in the mantle of redemption, as if they were saving the world from burning injustice (righteousness raised to the pitch of frenzy is the particular skill of the far right). “Hate can exist without any particular individuals,” comments the narrator of Edouard Louis’s bestselling 2016 novel History of Violence, which narrates the story of his rape after a casual encounter on the Paris city streets. “All it needs is a place where it can come back to life.”

 It is a paradox of human subjectivity that knowing you are capable of violence – recognising it as your problem, instead of blithely assigning it to someone else (of another race, class, nation or sex) – reduces the chances of making it happen. The idea of crushing violence – stamping it out or eradicating it from the Earth – simply increases the quotient of violence we have to face. We have seen this before, at the centre of 20th-century Europe, in the belief that the first world war would be the war to end all wars, a delusion that allowed that same war and its aftermath to carry on silently laying the groundwork for the next.

 We are all subjects of violence, not least because we are embedded in a violent social world. There is always a point in any ethical position or turn – the struggle against injustice, the fight for a better, less violent order – where it starts and stutters, trips and breaks, before setting out on its path once more. At the beginning of The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt writes: “What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think about what we are doing.”

 If there is one thing of which writing about violence has convinced me, it is that if we do not make time for thought – which must include the equivocations of our inner lives – we will do nothing to end violence in the world, while we will surely be doing violence to ourselves.

 An edited extract from On Violence and On Violence Against Women by Jacqueline Rose, published by Faber , 2021.

 Damage: the silent forms of violence against women. By Jacqueline Rose. The Guardian, March 30, 2021.

 

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by feminist critic Jacqueline Rose to discuss her new book, On Violence  and On Violence Against Women. Rose addresses the prevalence and persistence of violence through the analytical lenses of feminism, history, psychoanalysis, politics, and literature. She argues that violence in our time thrives on a kind of mental blindness, and elucidates its relationship to the rise of politicians like Bolsonaro and Trump.  Los Angeles Review of Books,  May 14, 2021.

 

Jacqueline Rose joins PTO to talk about her new book, On Violence and on Violence against Women. We discussed how psychoanalysis can help us grasp the mental states that make male violence possible, where Jacqueline parts company with the radical feminist perspectives of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, and how the experience of trans women illuminates more broadly the nature of male violence against women. Finally, we talked about the violent history of South Africa - from the the colonial and apartheid eras up to the present day. Politics Theory Other, May 21, 2021.

What a pair they made: Marcel Proust and his Papa.
 
Adrien Proust was the renowned epidemiologist who pioneered the use of the cordon sanitaire to sequester infectious disease — the 19th century’s version of social distancing. He was a man who boasted about how well he washed his hands.
 
His son, meanwhile, became the laureate of licentious trespass (on the page, at least), the great interloper of consciousness. No other writer has dedicated himself so exuberantly to “the porousness of boundaries between self and other, both as pleasure and as danger,” the critic Jacqueline Rose has written.
 
Proust is totemic to Rose. See, too, her fondness for the words “cobweb” and “tangle,” and her deep suspicion toward anything touted as “natural” or “sanitized.” Rose has written widely: on psychoanalysis, motherhood, the cult of celebrity, Sylvia Plath, Israel and Peter Pan. Every one of her books could be subtitled “In Praise of Shadows” — cribbing from Junichiro Tanizaki, another writer important to her.
 
“Rather than the idea of light triumphing over darkness,” she wrote in “Women in Dark Times,” “confronting dark with dark might be the more creative path.” She champions a “scandalous feminism,” an embrace of all the shameful, derided aspects of our nature, a refusal to fear or shun our own thoughts. Without it, we will continue to outsource our anxieties and aggression onto other people, onto entire other populations (today’s chief targets, she argues, include mothers, migrants, trans people, Palestinians).
 
Rose’s new book “On Violence and On Violence Against Women” arrives at a moment marked by a “visible increase” in violence against women in countries like India, Brazil and South Africa. The Covid lockdowns have also unleashed a “shadow pandemic” of domestic violence and femicide according to the United Nations. Rose asks how violence first takes root in the mind; what problems does it seem to solve?
 
Can we even recognize it? Rose begins her book with a photograph. “A group of identical-looking white men in dark suits” flank President Trump as he signs an executive order: the “Global Gag Rule,” which banned American funding to any organization in the world offering abortion or abortion counseling. The men look distracted, a bit bored. “These men are killers,” Rose writes. Their actions would increase illegal abortions by thousands. “But their murderousness is invisible — to the world (illegal abortions belong to the back streets) and to themselves.”
 
It is on this point that her book turns: how elaborately we conceal our violence from ourselves; how efficiently violence flourishes in those blind spots.
 
Rose has written about the “Global Gag Rule” photograph before, in “Mothers.” From book to book, she revives certain themes — testing, twisting, dilating them. She thinks alongside Proust always, as well as Rosa Luxemburg; Hannah Arendt; Toni Morrison; Freud, inescapably; Marilyn Monroe, somewhat unusually. Through Luxemburg she again explores the violence that goes unseen — the “quiet conditions” of suffering, which testify, Rose writes, “to the skill with which capital cloaks its crimes.”
 
Rose also examines here the relationship between violence and blindness that she has narrated before in her own story. Her grandmother’s family was killed in the Chelmno concentration camp. She was raised in an environment with a strict cordon sanitaire of its own — a “defensive form of Jewishness closed in on itself,” she has said. What does such defensiveness occlude, she asked in “Proust Among the Nations,” her analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict — what “makes it perhaps uniquely hard for Israel as a nation to see itself ever as the agent of the violence of its own history”?
 
“Victimhood is something that happens, but when you turn it into an identity you’re psychically and politically finished,” she has said.
 
Rose roves widely in this book. She considers sexual harassment, Harvey Weinstein, student protests in South Africa, depictions of violence in contemporary fiction. Her centerpiece essay, on the murder trial of Oscar Pistorius, weaves in disability politics, South African gun culture, apartheid-era architecture, the shower scene in “Psycho” and, again, the price others must pay for our belief in our own innocence. (“Expelling dirt is as self-defeating as it is murderous. Someone — a race, a sex — has to take the rap.”) She returns frequently to violence’s encroachment on the inner life of the victim. “Harassment is always a sexual demand, but it also carries a more sinister and pathetic injunction: ‘You will think about me,’” she writes. In a close reading of Anna Burns’s Booker Prize-winning novel, “Milkman,” Rose quotes the protagonist, who is being stalked by an older man. “My inner world had gone away,” the girl says.

 
It is an incalculable loss, this theft of mental freedom. Rose cites the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s beautiful concept of “epistemophilia.” The infant’s strongest impulse, our native impulse, is to know.
 
For all that Rose reveals, her book might be most intriguing in its strictures and refusals. She will not, for example, list examples of atrocities — “feminism is not served by turning violence into a litany” — or add to the spectacle. She shies away from cheap pathos and struggles to avoid turning victims into figures of timeless suffering and “raw pity,” thereby obfuscating “human agency, the historical choices and willful political decisions.” What does it mean to report on violence, she asks, when it only “itches” the consciences, offers titillation or, worse, spurs support for the perpetrator? Donald Trump, Rose writes, “was adulated in direct proportion to the wrong which he clearly could do.”
 
These questions aren’t purely ethical. Rose searches for the modes that allow us to think more clearly and creatively. Literature becomes critical: “It is for me one of the chief means through which the experience of violence can be told in ways that defy both the discourse of politicians and the defenses of thought.” Unspeakable violations force new words and forms into being: Toni Morrison’s concept of “rememory”; what Burns in “Milkman” calls “numbance”; the broken, nursery rhyme horror-patter of Eimear McBride’s novel “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing.”
 
For all her attraction to unruliness, 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.
 
Despite drawing on Luxemburg’s “quiet conditions” of violence, Rose primarily attends to individuals, not systems. It’s a disposition that can invite charges of solipsism — thus sailing past her entire point. Where Proust dedicated himself to the “the porousness of boundaries between self and other,” Rose examines the porousness of the self and the state. She points out that the French technical term for the forcible repatriation of migrants is “refoulement” — “pushing back” or “repulsing” — the very word used for the concept of psychological repression.
 
“Reckoning with the violence of the heart and fighting violence in the world are inseparable,” she writes. 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.
 
A New Book Thinks Clearly and Creatively About Violence Against Women.  By Parul Sehgal. The New York Times,  May 12, 2021
 

In Women in Dark Times (2014), the British literary and cultural critic Jacqueline Rose proposed that one reason for misogyny is women’s “ability to force to the surface of the everyday parts of the inner life—its visceral reality, its stubborn unruliness—which in the normal course of our exchanges we like to think we have subdued.” Unearthing those unruly, visceral realities is the project of psychoanalysis. It is also Rose’s project as a feminist. “Psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a patriarchal society, but an analysis of one,” wrote Juliet Mitchell in 1973, in the canonical Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Along with Mitchell and a distinguished roster including Dorothy Dinnerstein, Jane Gallop, and Judith Butler, Rose is a seminal force in recuperating Freud for feminism and enriching Freudian theory with feminism.
 
Among the things that psychoanalysis and feminism share are the objects to which they return: sexuality and violence. Freud posited these as antagonistic instincts, sex and death. In her thirteenth book, On Violence and On Violence Against Women, Rose extrapolates from these two terms, and then flips the Freudian axiom on its head: behind sexual violence, she says, lies compulsory sexual difference. They are “blood brothers.”
 
To arrive at this provocative and generative thesis, Rose begins with some commonplaces of non-essentialist feminism, Lacanian feminism, critical race and masculinity studies, and radical queer and trans theory. The enactment of violence, particularly sexual violence, is gendered. Men commit most of it, and women and femmes are most often its victims. But violence has no innate gender—it is no more male than victimhood is written on the XX chromosome. Like Butler, Adrienne Rich, Monique Wittig, bell hooks, or, for that matter, your average nonbinary-identifying teenager, Rose presents gender itself as violence—a mass “frogmarch” in two straight, separate lines.
 
Of course, the penalties of gender are not equally distributed. The classic feminist reading of Freudian castration focuses on the girl, who is forced to renounce the wild, open promise of childhood to “mature” into femininity, which is then enforced by a world of social restrictions. But, says Rose, psychic self-mutilation is not only for girls. Paradoxically, to assume the mantle of masculine power, the boy must amputate the frailty that makes us human, and human to each other. Seen this way, castration is “the axe that must fall for both boy and girl” on the way to gender “normality” and compulsory heterosexuality.
 
If femininity is an open wound, masculinity is chronic vertigo. As Lacanian feminists tell us, the lowly penis can never do the job of the all-powerful phallus. Rose adopts Arendt’s phrase “the impotence of bigness,” an apt descriptor for men in the #MeToo era, teetering between residual self-adulation and women’s ridicule, between enduring societal dominance and fear of professional demotion and social irrelevance. Enter the “blood brothers” violence and gender difference. “If sexual abuse is designed to remind the girl or woman of what she is,” writes Rose, “it is also intended to confer on the mostly male agents who carry it out a similarly fraudulent authority about a masculinity no less unsteady and unconvinced by itself.”
 
Those who can’t or won’t march in a gender-designated line are punished. Rose reports on the disproportionately high rates of sexual assault and murder of trans and nonbinary people, particularly among the most marginalized—people of color, street youth, sex workers, and prisoners. But there is no true “cis” gender, no perfect ease in one’s originally sexed skin. Trans is reviled not for its deviance, but because it speaks the anxious, repressed truth of “normality.” “For psychoanalysis, it is axiomatic, however clear you may be in your own mind that you are a man or a woman, that the unconscious knows better,” writes Rose. She quotes the trans writer and provocateur Kate Bornstein: “Everyone has to work at being a man or a woman. Transgender people are probably more aware of doing the work.”
 
If some of these ideas seem familiar, On Violence gives them intriguing new life. As always, Rose recombines the philosophical DNA of her greatest influences. For example, she teases out the Freudian and the feminist in Arendt, who famously snubbed both affiliations, and finds the “radical streak” in Freud. In this book she opens herself, born in 1949, to the challenges of the youngest activists, such as American and British student anti-rape feminists and the still-unfree “born-free” generation of Black South Africans. Although her moral position is unwavering, her psychoanalytic gaze prohibits the political pieties of the feminist, anti-racist, and anticolonial left, the expectation of virtue in the downtrodden and stunned silence in the traumatized. In some of its finest chapters, On Violence introduces a global shelf of novelists—including the Naga Indian Temsula Ao and the Irish Eimear McBride—who invent a language of violence in which, as McBride puts it, “pure is indivisible from its reverse.” Theirs is a kind of rejoinder to the feminist certainty that innocence lies a safe distance from guilt. “Violence,” says Rose, “is part of the psyche”—everyone’s psyche.
 
The carnage perpetrated by masculinity in hysterical self-defense is compounded by the anxiety of waning white supremacy. If you add the hidden injuries of ableism to this mix, you have the ingredients of the 2014 trial of South African Paralympic runner Oscar Pistorius for the murder of his girlfriend, law student and model Reeva Steenkamp. The trial exemplifies the thesis of On Violence and makes for a tour de force of Rosean psycho-political analysis.
 

At issue in the trial was not whether Pistorius’s acts resulted in Steenkamp’s death. He confessed that he shot four bullets through the bathroom door of his home; the bullets struck and killed Steenkamp behind it. In dispute were Pistorius’s thoughts and feelings—his motive, if he had one at all. Around these questions slithered phantasms of gender and race. Pistorius, dubbed the “Blade Runner,” is revered for his physical prowess, courage, and discipline and rendered an image of heroic masculinity. Yet, in the trial, his defense feminized him to attempt to showcase him, preposterously, as the victim. Neighbors reported hearing a woman’s screams; Pistorius’s lawyers argued that they were his screams, their pitch heightened by fear. Evidence also suggested that the runner abused Steenkamp. However, the defense made the case that his disability, and the lifetime of indignities it attracted, made him psychologically an abused woman who finally snapped. Here is a man, writes Rose, “going to the furthest lengths he can go, including sacrificing the image of himself as a man, to make absolutely sure that no one hears the voice of a woman crying out in fear for her life.”
 
There was also another voice that remained unheard, both in Pistorius’s exculpatory narrative and in the rationale of the judge (a Black, disabled woman) in deciding he was guilty, but not of premeditated murder. The defendant claimed that he fired the gun (which he kept under the bed) in unthinking terror when he was awakened by the sound of what he thought was an intruder in the bathroom. But who was this intruder?
 
Rose focuses on the scene of the crime: the bathroom, “a place of purity and danger,” where the excrement of Black and white bodies in apartheid South Africa was obsessively kept from mingling. The judge dropped the charge of dolus eventualis, the determination that a “reasonable person” would and should have known that his act would cause injury. Of course, when Pistorius shot a nine-millimeter handgun at close range through a permeable door, he must have intended to kill the (presumably Black) intruder. “In the white racist imagination” the only Black African allowed in a white bathroom is a dead one. But Pistorius was indicted for the murder of Steenkamp; and, according to the judge, if he did not know that he was killing her, there was no malice aforethought. The Black body “slip[ped] syntactically under the bathroom door,” writes Rose.
 
 
In a companion chapter on South Africa, the inheritance of trauma, the imperative of remembering, and the role of justice in the “interminable” process of healing, Rose writes that she learned that “political and psychic struggle can be one and the same thing.”
 
Of course, she already knew this—it defines her work. But the political and the psychic, the concrete and the unconscious, can also struggle against one another, even when they share a goal. The core tension in On Violence and On Violence Against Women is between masculine violence on the ground, “a crime to be detested and cast off,” and psychic violence, which is genderless and must be considered tenderly.
 
“The best way for feminism to counter violence against women . . . is to speak of, to stay and reckon with, the extraordinary, often painful and mostly overlooked range of what the human mind is capable of,” writes Rose. Yet to cast off the crime is to risk perverting that psychological reckoning. When feminism “repudiates, renders unthinkable, shuns beyond the remit of the human. . . [it] finds itself replicating that part of the mind which cannot tolerate its own complexity. It thereby becomes complicit with the psychic processes which lead to the enactment of violence itself.”
 
This dilemma for feminism is also a dilemma for Rose. In her humanist vision, “the mind” includes the minds of men, who are also prisoners of gender and its potential resisters. But what if the man in question might be the perpetrator of sexual harm?
 
On Violence begins with a chapter probing the controversies over procedures to investigate sexual assault allegations on U.S. college campuses as an obligation of the Civil Rights Act’s Title IX. For facts and context, Rose relies almost entirely on one source: Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus, by journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis. To demonstrate “sexual harassment in close-up,” the chapter’s title, Rose also adopts a touchstone of Blurred Lines, the case of Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia University student who accused fellow student Paul Nungesser of anal rape, then in protest of the university’s failure to find him guilty carried a mattress around campus in a performance that gained international renown. In Grigoriadis’s telling, Nungesser doesn’t get a break. He was “plotting,” hiring a “wily” lawyer and creating “quite a lovely profile” to show he was not a rapist. On the other hand, the accuser (about whom the author wrote glowingly in New York in 2014) was unimpeachable. For instance, Grigoriadis finds it “highly possible” that Sulkowicz’s text “fuck me in the butt” actually meant “Oh my god, i’m so annoyed,” as she claimed.
 
How do we know the truth? “Evidence is always key,” Rose writes. But in this sexually, politically, and racially biased terrain, it “is not neutral.” Of course it isn’t. That’s why diligent reporters, such as Cathy Young and Robby Soave in Reason and The Daily Beast, further investigated the case—and returned more skeptical, nuanced verdicts. Their skepticism is echoed by respected feminist attorney-journalists  and legal scholars, such as Harvard Law professor Janet Halley, who document the overreach, denial of due process, and steep biases against the accused in what Halley’s colleagues, Jeannie Suk Gersen and Jacob E. Gersen, call the “sex bureaucracy.” In the Harvard Law Review, Halley warns of the perils of “governance feminists”—“advocates [who] turn their rhetorical tools and social-movement protest into institutional government,” like the Title IX bureaucracies. Prejudices about diverse cultural mores, drinking and drugs, and marginalized sexual practices reinforce ideologies about gendered sexual power and agency, resulting in the imposition of “serious moral stigma and life-altering penalties on men who may well be innocent”—and, I’d add, excessive penalties on those who are guilty, too.
 
Rose consults none of these critics. Instead, she states that cases like the one at Columbia transpire in “the murky world of sexuality where all bets are off, where desire and a change of heart can persist in one and the same breath.” “Someone has to decide” who is telling the truth—but it won’t be Rose. She simply states that Grigoriadis believes Sulkowicz’s version of the story, even though the accused man challenged it “down to every last detail.”
 
After swimming in the maelstrom of interpreting conflicting evidence of an offense that usually takes place out of sight, Rose reiterates the indisputable: if a woman says or shows she doesn’t want sex, it is rape. But what if the signals or the circumstances are inconclusive? This question lies at the vortex of feminist debates about rape. The courts say acquit. Much anti-rape politics says convict, or at least discipline or expel from college.
 
An increasing number of queer and trans activists and feminists of color who have experienced the ravages of criminal “justice” refuse this either/or approach. To confront interpersonal violence, they eschew policing and caging yet demand accountability and repair. In a brief passage, Rose links prison abolitionist activism to critiques of the Title IX bureaucracy that acknowledge racial bias, concluding that “no struggle for emancipation can afford to be co-opted by discriminatory and death-dealing state power.”
 
In South Africa Rose finds the roots of individual and state violence in the deluded belief that some people—Black men in particular—are predatory beasts. Carceral anti-rape feminism proceeds from a kindred belief: that men in general—and, not far from the surface, Black men in particular—are naturally, incorrigibly bestial. Rose rejects that essentialism. However, her enthusiasm for the U.S. anti-rape movement on college campuses works to minimize its carceral impulses and suggests that racist state institutions might be reformed to be less discriminatory. “Sexuality collides with the law. The only available options, at least to date, seem to be too much legal intervention or not enough,” Rose concludes without concluding.
 

In the United States, when sexuality collides with the law, the crash is fiery and sometimes fatal. In Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, Northwestern University media professor Laura Kipnis writes about Daniel DePew, a man lured to a hotel room by police, who egged him on to indulge in the fantasy of a snuff film involving the kidnapping and killing of a child. DePew was sentenced to thirty-three years for “a crime that never happened,” says Kipnis. Rose scoffs: “It sounded more to me as if he had been caught making a plan.”
 
In other words, Emma Sulkowicz might have entertained a fantasy of anal sex that she had no wish to fulfill in the flesh. But DePew’s fantasy—this monstrous specter that might appear in anyone’s unconscious, especially when aroused by an insistent interlocutor—is rational, intentional: “a plan.” It’s as if Rose has decided abruptly to toss out the delicate tools with which she sorts the vagaries of unconscious violence and reach for her gun.
 
Rose spends an inordinate amount of space rebutting Kipnis. It’s a weird choice of principle antagonist, since Unwanted Advances, like all of Kipnis’s polemics, is bent on outrage and impervious to inconvenient realities, such as the sexual abuse of power. She wins little respect even from feminists who basically agree with her. Nevertheless, instead of returning fire, two years after the publication of Unwanted Advances and soon after DePew’s release from prison, Kipnis, perhaps unwittingly, tipped her hat to Rose. In a detailed (and to me persuasive) account of the sting for The New York Review of Books, Kipnis describes DePew as “someone who’d always felt like a failure at masculinity, which loomed, grail-like and unattainable, in his psyche”—a strikingly close rendering of Rose’s wellspring of male violence, and also of those violent and universal human fantasies that will never be realized. DePew did realize them—consensually. The gay son of a homophobic father, he grew up to pursue adults-only S&M, in which he liked to play bottom. Federal agents dragged him into their scheme, without evidence of pedophilia, to build a conspiracy case against someone else. DePew served twenty-nine years, and then, a month later, died of a blood clot that had gone untreated in prison.
 
Perhaps, because she is British, Rose is unacquainted with the costly, baroque, and unremitting tactics with which the enforcers of U.S. sex law recruit otherwise law-abiding deviant thinkers into compromising, illegal positions. She may not know that child pornography convictions, with or without real children, carry longer sentences than physical child abuse. Of DePew’s three-decade incarceration, Rose states no opinion. As for unloosing the repressed in order to face down sexual violence, this is unwise in the United States, where every psychotherapist is a mandated reporter. If a patient divulges fantasies of harming a child, even to try to prevent realizing those fantasies, the therapist must construe them as “a plan” and report the patient to the police. College professors on most campuses are mandated reporters, too, who must inform the Title IX office of suspected sexual misconduct even if it is disclosed in confidence.
 
The Buddhist psychoanalyst and writer Mark Epstein has written that psychoanalysis is a methodology of understanding unhappiness, whereas Buddhism is a practice of attaining happiness. The same could be said of psychoanalysis and politics. One draws puzzles, the other works to solve them; one reflects, the other acts. Consonant with Rose’s gifts, On Violence and On Violence Against Women is more about how to think and feel about violence than it is about what should be done. If the sinuous thread of her argument gnarls when she moves from the consulting room to the street, well, she is not alone. Feminists, psychologists, educators, families, clergy members, and community organizers have been trying to figure out what to do about sexual violence forever, and so far no one has solved the problem. Perhaps because violence slides between the unconscious and the real, it will always be a subject of what the late, great feminist public intellectual Ann Snitow called “the feminism of uncertainty.”
 
It is possible that where I see a caesura between the psychoanalytical and the realpolitikal, where I imagine Rose retreating to the “murky” unconscious to avoid taking a stand, she is simply expressing political opinions with which I disagree—say, in the Sulkawicz-Nungesser case, where she proposes that history and ongoing inequality demand that the accuser be given more benefit of the doubt than the accused.
 
Still, On Violence and on Violence Against Women is a work of intellectual virtuosity and moral vigor. We would be wise to heed Rose’s exhortation “to hold on to two insights” at once: that “sexual abuse is real,” and also that “sexuality is aberrant. It is no man’s servant.” It can be no woman’s either. 
 
 
Violence Has No Gender. By Judith Levine. Boston Review, May 21, 2021. 

In one of the first scenes of the recent Oscar-nominated British film Promising Young Woman, Cassandra (Carey Mulligan) appears drunk to the point of incapacitation. Slumped in her seat in the corner of a nightclub, her head drooping, she is bundled into a taxi by an apparently concerned male stranger. He takes her to his flat, lies her on the bed, and begins assaulting her while she murmurs repeatedly: “What are you doing?” Once he has removed her underwear, her eyes snap open, and she sits up straight. “Hey,” she says, with perfect clarity. “I said, what are you doing?”
 
The revelation of Cassandra’s sobriety, and the immediate change of power dynamics in the scene, make for a satisfyingly pulpy twist. But, in a film marketed as a rape-revenge thriller, it’s also curiously moderate retribution. Cassandra does not challenge, punish or humiliate the multiple would-be rapists who take advantage of her beyond asking them this single direct question: “What are you doing?”
 
For Jacqueline Rose, though, this question is of paramount importance. In her new book, On Violence and On Violence Against Women, the literary critic and psychoanalytic thinker argues that “violence against women is a crime of the deepest thoughtlessness”; one that can only be combated by deliberately naming it, confronting it and thinking about it. She urges her readers to “stare straight in the eye of the perpetrator still at large who knows, but takes no responsibility for, what he has done”, but also to look inward and reckon with the violent impulses that live within all of us. Her title echoes Hannah Arendt’s On Violence (1970), and a quote from Arendt acts as a guiding principle for Rose’s book: “What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think about what we are doing.”
 
The inside cover proclaims this book “a formidable call to action”; actually, it’s a call to thought. Over the course of nine standalone chapters, Rose makes the case that reaching a clearer understanding of violence as our own responsibility – not viewing it as a problem that only exists in the lives of others, glimpsed in gruesome news stories and global statistics, but an impulse that lurks inside us all – might help us to prevent it. The book aims to encourage her readers to “struggle against” violence and to understand it as an “inner force”.
 
Rose opens by describing a photograph of Donald Trump – surrounded by other “white men in dark suits” – signing an executive order to block US foreign aid for international groups that offer abortions, abortion counselling, or advocate for the right to seek abortions. “These men are killers,” Rose observes plainly. But not even “in their wildest dreams, I would imagine, does it occur to them that their decisions might be fuelled by the desire to inflict pain”. Because they refuse to see it, their own violence remains invisible to them; and so they are able to inflict it.
 
Rose sees male violence as motivated by men’s insecurity and fear of fragility: it is an “act through which a man aims to convince his target… that he is the one with the power”, behaviour she describes – quoting Arendt again – as symptomatic of “the impotence of bigness”. She persuasively argues that a delusional belief in absolute power and a shattering fear of its limitations are central to the worst tropes of masculinity displayed by figures such as Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein and Oscar Pistorius.
 
But she also sees this masculinity as fraudulent, a “stultifying ideology” that tells us what men should be, not what they are. “It is crucial”, she writes, that just as feminists reject the stereotypes of femininity foisted upon women, so too must feminists permit “individual men the potential gap between maleness and the infinite complexity of the human mind”, allowing them “the same internal breathing space”.
 
Many of these chapters began life as essays in the London Review of Books. Rose has drawn on an intimidatingly wide range of references and themes in her previous works, which have taken Sylvia Plath, Zionism, Peter Pan, Proust and, most recently, motherhood as their subjects. Here, Rose considers a diverse range of topics including sexual harassment on campus, the #MeToo movement, transphobic misogyny, the killing of the South African model Reeva Steenkamp by Pistorius in 2013, and the struggles facing migrant women.
 
In an essay on literary fiction, she rightly identifies the Irish novelists Eimear McBride and Anna Burns as today’s foremost writers of sexual violence. Another chapter compares sexual harassment, which she sees as a patriarchal tool used to reinforce the gender binary, with trans existence, which rebels against that binary. She is a daring thinker, willing to make bold statements and take imaginative leaps.
 
These disparate topics are linked by her belief that feminism can only counter violence if it is willing “to speak of, to stay with, and reckon with” the most vicious impulses of the human mind. Violence cannot be stopped as long as it “continues to be something which people turn away from, blot from their minds, prefer – at least as far as they personally are concerned – not to talk or think about”. For Rose, thought can be its own form of action: “political and psychic struggle can be one and the same.”
 
Here, Rose is specifically referring to psychoanalysis: if violence is enacted out of blind fear and shame, then analytic thought is its inverse, bringing “mental life, however troubled, out of its dark shameful corners and into the light”. The book’s bright red cover is unadorned except for a dramatic black diagonal slash – the stroke of a knife, or the annotator’s strike-through? – while her prose is cool and surgically precise, as she dissects masculinity with her own sharp blade. Throughout, the book’s most radical suggestion is that psychoanalytic concepts of the unconscious might play a useful political role in the day-to-day struggle for gender equality.
 

It’s a proposition that Rose makes very persuasively; and it’s true that a psychoanalytic framework can provide useful tools for approaching male violence. (I am reminded of the feminist psychoanalyst Harriet Lerner – mother of the novelist Ben – who responded to obscene, misogynistic phone calls by saying politely, “I’m so sorry, I can’t hear you. Could you say that again, and speak a little louder?” The callers, embarrassed by their own words, would eventually hang up.)
 
But there are limits to how far it might help women suffering the effects of male violence, both in an immediate, practical sense and in terms of broader structural solutions. We do not really expect the stuttering, defensive young men in Promising Young Woman to be fundamentally changed by the question “What are you doing?”

Rose at times acknowledges this. In one of three chapters on South Africa, at a conference at Stellenbosch University, where apartheid survivors and perpetrators gathered together to discuss the painful legacy of apartheid, she observes how it quickly became apparent that, in order for the country to begin to recover from these atrocities, “thinking was not enough”. Thought, and even genuine remorse, cannot enforce accountability or justice – only legislation and collective action can.
 
In chapters on campus rape and the trial of Pistorius, Rose is refreshingly alert to the problems of relying on flawed (not to mention racist and sexist) legal systems. She is alive to the hypocritical voyeurism of much writing on sexual assault: just as lingering shots in Promising Young Woman and the crime drama The Fall can be seen as complicit in the violence they depict, so too in critical writing is there “always a risk… of turning sexual violence into the crime we love to hate”. She also pays painstaking attention to the pitfalls of modern feminism: for example, the ignorance of those who alienate trans women.
 
But I longed to see her unique mix of bracing scepticism and intellectual curiosity applied to large-scale political or structural possibilities. At times, in the face of so much pain and trauma, the gains can feel dispiritingly small: when Rose locates “hope” in the consulting room, or in the world of literary fiction, it is hard not to wonder where the marginalised women experiencing violence here and now might find theirs.
 
These are not questions any one book can answer. Instead, Rose offers a lucid and fresh approach to a problem that has no straightforward solutions. “Violence is not a subject,” she writes, “about which anyone can believe, other than in a state of delusion, that everything has been said and done.”
 
  
Reconsidering violence against women. By Anna Leszkiewicz. New Statesman , May 26, 2021.