Thanks for coming, everyone. Most of you, unless you started out with very bad directions,

will already be familiar with Jacqueline Rose and with her work as a writer and theorist.

She's professor of English at Queen Mary here in London.

And over the past 35 years, her writings have included definitive contributions to feminism,

film theory, psychoanalytic theory.

There's been a groundbreaking analysis of Sylvia Plath and studies of countless for the writers and thinkers from

Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt to David Grossman and James Cotcier. There's been a rewriting

of Proust. And alongside, often in and through all that, she's produced meditations on some of the most challenging arenas in modern history and politics, South Africa and Israel-Palestine in particular.

Among her many essays for the London Review of Books, she's written unforgettably about suicide bombing and about honour killing

because we like to give her the easy subjects. Now, any introduction that would attempt to take

in the breadth and depth of Jacqueline's career would have to be very glib indeed. So I'm not

going to attempt that. But since the occasion for our conversation this evening is the publication of

this very elegant reader of her work from Duke, I'm hoping that the preoccupations and complexities

of her career and also my preoccupations with the complexities of her work will emerge as we

talk this evening.

So I'm going to jump straight here, if I may.

And I want to start with a question that refers to something you've only just written

in the essay that Laura just referred to, but which bounces us right back to the start of your work in the mid-1970s.

In a piece that very few people here will have read,

it's a review of Rosa Luxembourg's letters,

based on a letter you gave recently at the LSE,

you say that without your knowing it,

...