E-Book, Englisch, 416 Seiten
Rose Women in Dark Times
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80427-172-8
Verlag: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 416 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80427-172-8
Verlag: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Jacqueline Rose is internationally recognized as one of the most important living feminist and cultural critics. She is the co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, a co-founder of Independent Jewish Voices, and a fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Literary Society. Rose is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books and the Guardian, among many other publications. Her books include Sexuality in the Field of Vision, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, States of Fantasy, Women in Dark Times, Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, On Violence and On Violence Against Women and, also published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, The Plague: Living Death in Our Times.
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Weitere Infos & Material
‘Here is the rose, dance here!’
—Luxemburg, Social Reform or Revolution
‘I had to hold on with both hands to the wires of the cage, and this must certainly have strengthened the resemblance to a wild beast in the zoo.’
—Luxemburg, letter from Wronke prison, 8 February 1917
‘A cage went in search of a bird.’
—Franz Kafka, Third Octavo Notebook, The City of K.: Franz Kafka and Prague
Rosa Luxemburg has become a heroine for our times. She herself would not have predicted it, not least of all because she saw unpredictability as lying at the heart of politics. For Luxemburg, we are the makers of a history which exceeds our control, as well it must if we are not to descend into autocracy and terror. Her vision of politics is suffused with something ungraspable, an idea that struck fear into her allies and critics alike. This does not mean that she was without purpose. Her targets were inequality and injustice and she had an unswerving idea of how they had to be redressed. She was a Marxist. This is just one of the reasons for returning to her today when the increasingly blatant ugliness of capitalism has given the language of Marx new resonance. She was – crucially – a woman, whose eloquence and militancy were fired from the heart, and who more than once found herself the target of the most vicious misogyny. And she was Jewish, a foreigner wherever she went, as she slipped back and forth across national borders – from Poland, to Switzerland, to Germany – for much of her life. Rosa Luxemburg was intrepid to a fault. As a young woman of nineteen, already at risk of arrest for her association with underground revolutionary groups in Warsaw, she left Poland hidden under straw in a peasant’s cart. A local Catholic priest agreed to organize her flight when he heard that a Jewish girl wishing to be baptized in order to marry her Christian lover had to flee to avoid the violent opposition of her family.
Un-belonging was her strength. It must surely have played its part in helping her to soar mentally beyond the walls of the prisons where she often found herself, as her writings – her letters, pamphlets, journalism, political tracts – so amply testify (she wrote many of her finest letters and essays behind bars). ‘The fire of her heart melted the locks and bolts and her iron will tore down the walls of the dungeon,’ wrote her close friend, the socialist feminist Clara Zetkin, ‘[gathering] the amplitude of the coursing world outside into the narrowness of her gloomy cell.’ A revolutionary thinker, Luxemburg shows us how constraint, notably the constraint suffered by women, can be the ground for the wildest imaginative reach. ‘As a woman, I have no country,’ Virginia Woolf famously wrote in 1938 in the face of advancing fascism. ‘As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’ For both of these women, despite the years that separated them, nationalism was a scourge. ‘The law of England denies us, and let us hope long will continue to deny us,’ Woolf declared, ‘the stigma of nationality.’ Luxemburg did not live to see the rise of Hitler. But Woolf can be seen as one of her heirs, forging a link which Luxemburg embodied even if she did not explicitly make it herself: between being a woman at odds with the world and the struggle against the fanaticism of nations.
But if Rosa Luxemburg has become a heroine for our times, it is also because her revolutionary moment, spawned in those first decades of the twentieth century, now echoes with our own. It is hard to imagine today what it would have been like to be thinking about Luxemburg if the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya of 2011 – together with all that has followed – had not taken place. As we watched the peoples of these countries pour on to the streets, sometimes as though from nowhere, their revolutions seemed to have come halfway to meet her, calling her out of the past. ‘A month before, a week before, three days before,’ wrote Ahdaf Soueif in Cairo, My City, Our Revolution, ‘we could not have told you it was going to happen.’ ‘It was’, insisted Wael Ghonim, also in Cairo, ‘all spontaneous, voluntary.’ As if we had gone back in time, even as time seemed to be pressing forward with a forcefulness that many of us had never witnessed before. For Luxemburg, such fragile, determined urgency would be welcome. She knew – she made it the core of her life and her work – that spontaneity was the only way that genuine transformation, in both the private and public world, could be born. Luxemburg is often talked about as if her private world was simply the backdrop to her politics, showing us the humane, real woman behind a will of iron. The gender stereotype is as glaring as it is inappropriate. Luxemburg was perfectly capable, when occasion required it, of being steely in her personal life. More important, as we will see, she lifted her deepest political insights out of the dark night – what she called the ‘bruises’ – of the soul. To cite the first epigraph of this book, ‘Just imagine,’ she writes to Jogiches in 1898, ‘it was precisely those bruises on my soul that at the next moment gave me the courage for a new life’.
Today we know that the promise, so vivid on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere in those heady days of 2011, has not been fulfilled. Especially for the women who played such a crucial part in the uprising and who are now fighting to preserve their precarious freedom. During the second revolution of July 2013 – which turned out to be no revolution but the return of rule by the military – women were surrounded and assaulted by groups of men who seemed to have descended on Tahrir Square with no other purpose. This has been a regular feature of the uprisings. In December 2011, Hend Badawi was violently accosted on the square as she was protesting against the interim military government. She is famous for shouting at Field Marshal Tantawi, de facto ruler and then leader of Egypt’s military council, when he visited her in hospital: ‘We don’t want your visit. We are not the ones who are the thugs.’ Now spurned by the elders of her family, she continues struggling to complete her education and find her own path in the world. For Badawi, the revolution is as ongoing as it is radically incomplete. But Luxemburg would surely have recognized her description of the upheaval as something that plunged into the deepest core of her life: ‘I had the opportunity to mix my inner revolution with the revolution of my country.’
As Marwan Bishara has put it, those who asked too much of the Arab Spring at its outset were as misguided as those who, at the first hurdle or disappointment, pronounced the revolution dead, as many were quick to do before it had barely begun (his book is subtitled the ‘promise and peril of the Arab revolution’). We need to reckon, he argued, with two propositions that do not sit comfortably together in the mind – that things can always get worse, and that the world has changed forever. In fact it is a peculiarity of revolutionary moments that they force us to revise our sense of time, stretching us between past and future more acutely than usual, as we comb backwards for the seeds, the first signs of the upheaval, and look forwards, in exhilarated and terrified anticipation, to see what is to come. For many observers, mainly those in power, such uncertainty is a way of stalling the movement of revolution, curbing its spirit by calling it to account in advance for a future that it cannot possibly foretell. These are the harbingers of doom, the fear-mongers, who point to a range of possible outcomes – say, anarchy or Islamic control – as a way of discrediting what is happening in the moment; who manipulate the dread of a monstrous future – and the future may always be monstrous – to dull the sounds of freedom.
Luxemburg was not one of them. Writing to Luise Kautsky on 24 November 1917 from Breslau prison, where she had been imprisoned for opposition to the First World War, she praised her for still holding on to the ‘groping, searching, anxious’ young woman inside her – Kautsky was sixty-three at the time. When she had visited Luxemburg in prison in May, her inner torment, her ‘restless, dissatisfied searching’ had been transparent in her eyes, which were, Luxemburg insists, younger than the rest of her by twenty years: ‘How I love you precisely for that inner uncertainty!’ For Luxemburg this was as much a political as a personal form of virtue. ‘Far from being a sum of ready-made prescriptions,’ she wrote in her 1918 essay on ‘The Russian Revolution’, also written in Breslau prison, ‘[socialism] is something which lies completely hidden in the mists of the future.’ There was, for Luxemburg, something radically unknowable at the core of political life. She could herself be tyrannical in her dealings with friend and foe, but – or rather for that very reason perhaps – she...
