Jacqueline Rose is Co-Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in London. Her most recent book is Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty. (October 2019)
How, Jia Tolentino asks, did the idea take hold that “ordinary personhood would seamlessly adjust itself around whatever within it would sell”? How did our basic humanity come to be “reframed as an exploitable viral asset”? We are in danger, as she quotes Werner Herzog saying of psychoanalysis, of losing “our dark corners and the unexplained,” of making ourselves “uninhabitable.” “It’s as if we’ve been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world,” Tolentino writes, “and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection.”
