The Plague: Living Death in Our Time

Jacqueline Rose's slim, heartbreaking, and rousing new book tells the story of the pandemic via an unlikely historical trio.

In early 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began to infiltrate the public consciousness, sales of The Plague, the classic novel by the French philosopher Albert Camus, skyrocketed. At the same time, the virus's death toll surged exponentially. Sequestered at home, we sensed a glimmer of possibility amid the harrowing loss--the potential for radical empathy wrought by shared experience. But of course the experience was really never shared, and indeed served to solidify the divisions of class, race, gender, and citizenship that organize our world.

What do we get from returning to a novel published in 1947? Can Camus's tale--at once an allegory of Nazi occupation, human folly, and climate catastrophe--show us the truth of the present? And if so, how could we begin to bear that truth?

Jacqueline Rose's trenchant new book unravels recent history via the lives and works of three people--Camus, Sigmund Freud, and Simone Weil. Their politics, private griefs, and triumphs fling open a window into our present crises. Rose, one of the most scathingly intelligent thinkers on politics and psychoanalysis alike, has written a story of unusual range, spanning from World War II to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, from the Spanish influenza to Omicron, from Boris Johnson's deranged optimism to Vladimir Putin's megalomania. The Plague enacts a psychic reckoning for our time and for the future that we might forge in its aftermath.