“I may die before my time.” The English philosopher Gillian Rose (1947-1995) opened one of her final lectures with these words; soon after, she would die of cancer at the age of 48. Rose’s words were doubly prescient. While her reputation has long been overshadowed by that of her more famous sister, the literary critic Jacqueline Rose, Gillian’s time seems to have arrived at last. Earlier this year in the U.K. Penguin Classics reissued Rose’s forthright memoir Love’s Work (1995), for which she is best known. The book, with its intimate yet unsentimental portrayal of sex, illness and death—in response to her cancer diagnosis, the author reaches “for my favourite whisky bottle” and vows “not to cease wooing, for that is my life affair”—has captivated many of its readers. London’s literati gathered in April at the London Review Bookshop for an event on Love’s Work, and preparations are already underway to mark the thirty years that have passed since the book’s publication and Rose’s death.
But if Rose’s time has arrived, it seems that it is Rose the memoirist, not Rose the philosopher, whom the world is ready to meet. That’s a shame, in part because it is an all-too-familiar story for a female philosopher’s reception to foreground her personal life. It’s also a missed opportunity. Rose’s Hegelian philosophy of mourning provides a timely rejoinder to recent resurgences, in the face of high-profile electoral defeats and the rise of right-wing populism, of what Walter Benjamin has called “left melancholy.” Arguing that left-wing ideals can survive a political history of violence, Rose holds that the “nihilism” implicit in abandoning such ideals rests on a fantasy vision of politics. But Rose goes beyond issuing reprimands. Her writing on mourning reflects her view that political disappointment must be worked through philosophically. Doing this involves not only giving up on political fantasy but also regaining access to traditional and existing forms of value that have often been spurned by leftist intellectuals.
Later this year, Verso will publish a transcription of Rose’s lectures from 1979 entitled Marxist Modernism. Those lectures point us back to Rose’s six books of philosophy and critical theory, in which she showed herself to be an apt thinker for difficult times. Indeed, Rose loved the word “difficult”: this was both her preferred translation of “aporia” and the condition from which her work begins. Rose wants us to own up to the “difficulty of thinking in the wake of disaster,” which means resisting both the “fantasy of mending the world” and the temptations of “everlasting melancholia.” She works in an intense register, powered by the conviction that philosophy is an “existential drama,” whose contours she traces in her work on “inaugurated mourning” and the “damaged good.”
Rose was most interested in the difficulties that people can’t own up to. She was the granddaughter of Polish Jewish immigrants to London, and coolly recounts her mother telling her, but then later denying, the story of Rose’s grandmother learning in 1949 that fifty members of her family still living in Łódź had been killed. The events receive no comment; what bothered Rose is how her mother later denied that any of it happened. This, to Rose, is true despair: the “all-jovial unhappiness” of those who will not acknowledge the reality of their suffering, let alone examine its sources.
All-jovial unhappiness was, for Rose, more than a family drama. On Rose’s account, postmodern philosophers and modern Jewish thinkers alike respond to their horror over the “disasters of modernity” by trying to turn theory into a source of security—a set of principles that, when strictly followed, would guarantee justice and goodness. But this process could only culminate with one more set of lies, which give the illusion of evading the risk of violence that attends all political action.
Rose took her interlocutors’ errors to reflect a more general drive to make politics “safe”—safe not so much from physical danger as from becoming complicit in violence or oppression. She understood this tendency as a natural response to the horrors of the twentieth century, but also as a misleading way to conceptualize political life, which in turn perpetuates “a piety that separates itself from history.” “All-jovial unhappiness,” as a political and philosophical phenomenon, is a kind of collective fantasy of risk-free action that, on Rose’s view, actually undermines the possibility of concerted action. But moving past this kind of fantasy takes more than the intellectual apprehension of the error: it requires working through the horror that motivates it. Rose’s thinking is animated by the audacious conviction that she could force philosophy to acknowledge its inarticulate suffering, and thereby banish denial from a collective life she saw as haunted by its history of violence.
●
The lecture transcriptions in Marxist Modernism belong to Rose’s early phase, and sit squarely within the tradition of Frankfurt School critical theory. But Rose had to leave behind her first intellectual home in order to develop her own philosophical vision. She wouldn’t renounce Marxism or the Frankfurt School: Marx and Adorno were continual reference points throughout Rose’s books, and she writes in Love’s Work of pressing volumes of Marx on her surgeon “so that he might correct the vulgarity of his right-wing misapprehensions of the socialist theory of politics and society.” But Rose’s most original work, with its distinctive emotional and existential intensities, came from supplementing her radical training with more heterodox resources—in part, theological ones. Her newfound interests in Jewish and Protestant theology would also lead her to develop an idiosyncratic political outlook. Rose became that most chimerical creature, a left-wing traditionalist.
In the preface to Judaism and Modernity (1993), Rose swats away the thought of writing “‘as a woman’, ‘as a Jew’, and so on,” and offers instead this compressed manifesto: “If I knew who or what I were, I would not write; I write out of those moments of anguish which are nameless and I am able to write only where the tradition can offer me a discipline, a means, to articulate and explore that anguish.” While the word “anguish” rings loudly, it is “tradition” and “discipline” to which Rose affords the upper hand. These watchwords are the basis for Rose’s work on “law,” which centers around an effort to rehabilitate forms of authority that are grounded in history, tradition or custom. Rose sees these kinds of authority as the key to accessing a richer range of practices for acknowledging the boundaries and extremities of human life. In the burial customs of Polish Jews, for instance—as exemplified by the ornate gravestone decorations and inscriptions in the cemeteries of places such as Lubaczów and Lesko, which she describes as the “articulate stones” of the “necropolises” of Galicia—she finds a mode of expression adequate to how death confronts the “bare bones of each particular existence.”
Left-wing traditionalism is a tricky position to pull off, however; there are good reasons most Marxists don’t go in for it. A central problem for any left-wing traditionalist stems from the dismal track record of those forms of authority that bolster themselves using the word “tradition.” If divine commands include being told “go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have” (1 Samuel 15:3), you might take that as a decisive indictment of any effort to recuperate, say, theological forms of authority. The problem here is one that any modern person might face, if they were to go to a synagogue, church or temple and had to negotiate between their attraction to institutionalized religious life and their ethical convictions. How do you respond to the risk that the principles you would follow as a religious believer, or the forms of authority you would accept, might lead you to become the perpetrator of violence—or at least complicit in it?
This kind of question seems natural to get stuck on. But Rose thinks it’s misguided. In part this is because she considers it impossible to articulate any set of principles that meet such demands. Where we go wrong, on Rose’s view, is not by accepting the wrong kind of authority; it’s rather by demanding the wrong kind of security. The risk of becoming a perpetrator of violence isn’t special to traditional authority. Rather, it is the risk of politics itself.
Rose builds this case indirectly, using an almost psychoanalytic strategy to show how fantasies of safety and security distort philosophical thinking even when it is not focused on “tradition.” Post-structuralism becomes Rose’s first major analysand, in Dialectic of Nihilism (1984). Rose wrote this book when Foucault’s star was at its zenith, and capital-T Theory was on the ascendancy in literature departments. But Rose was not impressed. She accuses Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault of indulging in a “despairing rationalism without reason,” which compensates for political disappointment over the failure to achieve ideals of justice and rationality by discrediting the underlying ideals. In the preface to The Order of Things, Foucault wrote that Borges’s famous “Chinese encyclopedia” moved him to a “laughter that shattered … all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought.” Rose reads Foucault’s project as one of “smash[ing]” the underlying “table” that orders modern thinking: a nihilistic fantasy par excellence. When Foucault writes in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” of “sacrific[ing] the subjects of knowledge,” Rose sees “an ecstasy of blind laughter or blinding tears, which … is simply that old familiar despair.” Post-structuralist “nihilism” is portrayed, in such examples and others, as a kind of tantrum in which thinkers misdirect their anger over an irrational society by lashing out at rationality itself.
On Rose’s view, the “nihilist programmes” of post-structuralism stem from confused disappointment over how principles of “reason” do not banish violence from politics, but rather witness violence committed in their name. Rather than turn reason into a scapegoat, Rose advocates a conception of it that is compatible with such disappointing outcomes: a view of it as “gradually rediscovering its own moveable boundaries.” Post-structuralist and postcolonial criticisms of “universal notions of justice, freedom, and the good” for “colonising and suppressing their others with violence consequent on the chimera of correspondence” were based, according to Rose, on a faulty conception of what action inspired by such universals should be expected to accomplish. Her suggestion that one might “take the risk of the universal interest” is a reminder that the possibility of failing to live up to a “universal notion” does not discredit the notion itself. The fates of “reason” and of “tradition,” on Rose’s view, turn out to be intertwined, insofar as the rejection of both rests on a common error: that of wanting thought and action to be safe. And once we acknowledge that neither politics nor philosophy is ever risk-free, then tradition is back on the table.
●
Rose’s left-wing traditionalism rests on a vision of the relationship between philosophy and politics whose stakes go beyond supporting her own idiosyncratic politics. In The Broken Middle (1992) Rose makes her most sustained case for that vision. Jacqueline Rose reports that Gillian regarded The Broken Middle (1992) as her masterpiece. It is certainly her hardest book. Here Rose takes on Kierkegaard, modern Jewish philosophy and theology, and literature and theory ranging across Kafka, Mann, Girard, Arendt and Luxemburg. The book revolves around a contrast between two metaphors: the “holy middle” and the “broken middle.” A “holy middle” is a kind of theoretical fairy tale, a place where the risk of perpetuating violence has been banished. The “holy middle” isn’t something anyone intends to create, but on Rose’s view, it’s what most post-Kantian philosophers have wound up fabricating. Rose reads Levinas’s writing on the “infinity of paternity” in Totality and Infinity as one example—an effort to theorize the existence of something perfectly pure and good and safe, that can then be the ground of an ethics without risk. Rose wants Levinas to own up to the “violent exclusivity in one’s desire for infinity,” to recognize the ways in which his own work is already implicated in the violence he seeks to flee.
As in Dialectic of Nihilism, in The Broken Middle Rose uses close readings of her interlocutors to show how, without realizing it, they pursue impossible and confused “philosophical purifications.” Rose puts forward the “broken middle” as her alternative. There are no abstract guarantees of justice and goodness. It’s a meta-philosophical thesis: philosophy cannot decide in advance of politics which courses of action will turn out to be genuinely violent.
If Rose’s diagnosis is correct, one might wonder why any thinker would create a “holy middle”—isn’t there something a bit obvious about the point that philosophy can’t protect us from political risk? For Rose this point is obvious, when simply stated as an abstract thesis, but philosophers don’t always realize what drives them. On Rose’s reading, both postmodern nihilists and the modern Jewish philosophers of the “holy middle” are haunted by a disquiet that they cannot always make clear to themselves. The Holocaust stands behind much of Rose’s most abstract writing, although she rarely names it directly, speaking instead of modernity’s “broken promises” and “broken heart.” Pursuing an impossible vision of intellectual security is one kind of “all-jovial unhappiness” into which a thinker might fall when they cannot accept proximity to risk and loss. To combat this kind of denial, however, it may not be enough just to point out the mistake: some ways of being haunted are too deeply rooted, too all-encompassing. The question of how one might move past an attraction to faulty ideals and flawed standards for theorizing leads to the culmination of Rose’s thought.
In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel narrates the history of philosophy as a series of reason’s failed efforts to know itself. In Mourning Becomes the Law (1996), Rose uses Hegel’s story as her inspiration for telling the history of modern thought as a series of failed efforts to mourn. Rose proposes that modern thinkers had previously been stuck in a condition of “aberrated mourning” for a set of impossible philosophical ideals: the “philosophical purifications” of postmodernist nihilism, the “holy middle” of modern Jewish thought (Rose follows Hegel in understanding “modernity” as an era uniquely beset by “diremption,” or division, and hence on Rose’s reading uniquely tempted to indulge in spurious fantasies of unification). For Hegel, reason can only complete its quest for self-knowledge once it becomes conscious that it has been trying to know itself, and not an external object, all along. This is what Hegel calls “absolute knowing.” For Rose, the mourning can only complete itself once the mourners realize that they’ve been mourning their own impossible fantasies all along. That’s how Rose thinks it might finally be possible to let go of the quest for safety and security. Rose’s “existential drama” is a story about the history of philosophy as a history of mourning. Her role in that drama is to help move it toward fulfillment by bringing it to an awareness of itself. In the place of Hegelian absolute knowing, we get Rosean absolute mourning.
●
Gillian Rose was an iconic thinker. She’s one of those philosophers, like Simone Weil or Alasdair MacIntyre, whose name calls to mind a unique and immediately recognizable way of thinking. Or at least, Rose’s name would do that, if she were better known. Like Weil and MacIntyre—or, for that matter, Foucault—Rose is the kind of thinker you could fall in love with, or fall out of love with, or feel wildly ambivalent about. She’s the kind of thinker who could shape your whole outlook—and not only your philosophical outlook—if you came across her on a syllabus.
It’s no accident that Rose shares this profile with Weil and MacIntyre, who are likewise traditionalists of a left-wing or (in MacIntyre’s case) politically idiosyncratic sort. Rose, Weil and MacIntyre all write in a searching manner reflecting a shared dissatisfaction with liberal modernity. Each in their own way charges modern society and modern thought with failing to offer individuals a meaningful, or even a workable, form of life. Without giving up on their political commitments, or a critical perspective on the histories in which they are implicated, their left-wing or idiosyncratic traditionalism attempts to make accessible to their readers a broader array of sources of meaning.
For Weil, for instance, it is not enough to have a seminar-room revelation that “created things” are “intermediaries leading to God”; rather, “we have to experience them as such.” This demand not just to know but to live the truth would lead Weil to revive a kind of mystical asceticism. Prayer and hunger became her “method[s] of purification,” rendering her more at home in the monastery than in modernity. She was also a committed leftist with no patience for pious resignation. To Weil, tradition wasn’t inquiry’s termination so much as its own mode of exploration; a perspective summed up in her claim that “the tree is really rooted in the sky.” This was one of Rose’s favorite lines from Weil, which resonated with her own view that accessing the existential resources within Jewish law (Halacha) required seeing how “Talmudic argument rehearses a rationalism which constantly explores its own limits without fixing them.”
But one might also wonder if this talk of “tradition,” even in the open-ended manner preferred by Rose and Weil, is really just a mask for nostalgia. Might the leftist traditionalist be accused of idealizing the putative glory days of some bygone medieval era—an era one suspects that Rose, Weil or MacIntyre would in fact have disliked, had any of them actually lived in it? MacIntyre, whose own efforts to revive what he calls the “tradition of the virtues” has courted such a charge, provides the first plank of a defense. He argues that there is no such thing as a nontraditional form of life: everyone winds up embracing at least one tradition, whether they realize it or not. Even the modern liberal who self-defines against “the tyranny of tradition” has in fact merely given themselves over to one more tradition, with its own historically transmitted and locally specific forms of activity, its own canon, its own “contingency and particularity.” Tradition is the ground on which everyone stands, Marxist and monk alike. The concomitant risk of complicity in tradition’s tyrannies is therefore everyone’s problem.
None, then, are without sin. But the Rosean leftist traditionalist can say more than that. A capacity to appreciate forms of value caught up in compromised histories has particular relevance to the leftist, whose uniquely demanding vision of a transformed world is susceptible to giving way to a uniquely dispirited outlook. Living with disappointment over the political history of one’s ideals is a key aspect of Rose’s account of the “broken middle” and of her philosophy of mourning, which is not a counsel of resignation but rather its opposite. By giving up faulty conceptions of our ability to distance ourselves from risk and violence, Rose thinks we regain the political aspirations that the “nihilist” abandons.
Although Rose may have loved the words “difficult” and “broken,” her political and philosophical vision is one of abundance. In Judaism and Modernity (1993), Rose describes reason itself as “full of surprises,” and as that which “persists in the pain of staking itself, with the courage to initiate action and the commitment to go on and on.” She associates this conception with Paul Klee’s odd, bulky Angelus Dubiosus. Here Rose finds a humor lacking in Benjamin’s adoption of Klee’s Angelus Novus as the “traumatized Angel of History.” The broader point of Rose’s left-wing traditionalism is not to exhort every good Marxist to take up a religious practice so much as to model a standpoint capable of seeing the coexistence of disappointment and plenitude.
Rose’s corpus is also plenitudinous: it comprises seven books, plus Marxist Modernism and the posthumous Paradiso (an incomplete sequel to Love’s Work). Those interested in Rose as a critical theorist might prefer the early studies on Adorno and Hegel. Her most original philosophical work is best introduced via the essays collected in Judaism and Modernity (1993) and Mourning Becomes the Law (1996). But it’s hard to call even these comparatively accessible volumes introductory; an “easy Rose” is something of a contradiction in terms. That’s by Rose’s own design. It also means that, nearly thirty years after Rose’s death, her reception is perhaps just getting started.
Love’s Work has dominated that reception so far, and for understandable reasons: in her memoir, Rose brings to life the point of view from which there is beauty in “the gravelly laugh roused by the whimsical poetry of the incongruous in one who has damaged lungs.” But although Rose claims in Love’s Work that “love” is not opposed to “law,” it is love that has all the best lines. Love’s Work is not explicit about what Rose means by law, or what she thinks it has to do with the “sensual, intellectual and literary eros” that animates her memoir. Although Love’s Work is the fruit of tradition, discipline and mourning, it covers over the roots from which it grows. Only by turning to her more argumentative writing can fans of Love’s Work trace back Rose’s literary and existential accomplishment to the philosophy of law and tradition that provides its hidden source.
Rose is buried in London’s Hampstead Cemetery, where her pale gray headstone is marked with both a Star of David and a cross (Rose converted to Anglicanism shortly before her death). Her headstone also bears another pairing: the words “Love’s Work” and “Philosopher.” Rose’s reception is heavily weighted toward the former at the expense of the latter. There can be no simple opposition between Rose the philosopher and Rose the memoirist, since Rose’s life and thought were so deeply intertwined. Still, the juicy anecdotes and earthy wisdom of Love’s Work point beyond themselves, to the ambitious interlocking structure of a set of views Rose developed over decades. In her writing on what is at once broken and bountiful, she wrote for an age whose difficulty might finally prepare readers to receive her intensities. Rose knew that she would die before her time; she also knew that her time would come.
Photo credit: DES E GERSHON / Alamy Stock Photo
“I may die before my time.” The English philosopher Gillian Rose (1947-1995) opened one of her final lectures with these words; soon after, she would die of cancer at the age of 48. Rose’s words were doubly prescient. While her reputation has long been overshadowed by that of her more famous sister, the literary critic Jacqueline Rose, Gillian’s time seems to have arrived at last. Earlier this year in the U.K. Penguin Classics reissued Rose’s forthright memoir Love’s Work (1995), for which she is best known. The book, with its intimate yet unsentimental portrayal of sex, illness and death—in response to her cancer diagnosis, the author reaches “for my favourite whisky bottle” and vows “not to cease wooing, for that is my life affair”—has captivated many of its readers. London’s literati gathered in April at the London Review Bookshop for an event on Love’s Work, and preparations are already underway to mark the thirty years that have passed since the book’s publication and Rose’s death.
But if Rose’s time has arrived, it seems that it is Rose the memoirist, not Rose the philosopher, whom the world is ready to meet. That’s a shame, in part because it is an all-too-familiar story for a female philosopher’s reception to foreground her personal life. It’s also a missed opportunity. Rose’s Hegelian philosophy of mourning provides a timely rejoinder to recent resurgences, in the face of high-profile electoral defeats and the rise of right-wing populism, of what Walter Benjamin has called “left melancholy.” Arguing that left-wing ideals can survive a political history of violence, Rose holds that the “nihilism” implicit in abandoning such ideals rests on a fantasy vision of politics. But Rose goes beyond issuing reprimands. Her writing on mourning reflects her view that political disappointment must be worked through philosophically. Doing this involves not only giving up on political fantasy but also regaining access to traditional and existing forms of value that have often been spurned by leftist intellectuals.
Later this year, Verso will publish a transcription of Rose’s lectures from 1979 entitled Marxist Modernism. Those lectures point us back to Rose’s six books of philosophy and critical theory, in which she showed herself to be an apt thinker for difficult times. Indeed, Rose loved the word “difficult”: this was both her preferred translation of “aporia” and the condition from which her work begins. Rose wants us to own up to the “difficulty of thinking in the wake of disaster,” which means resisting both the “fantasy of mending the world” and the temptations of “everlasting melancholia.” She works in an intense register, powered by the conviction that philosophy is an “existential drama,” whose contours she traces in her work on “inaugurated mourning” and the “damaged good.”
Rose was most interested in the difficulties that people can’t own up to. She was the granddaughter of Polish Jewish immigrants to London, and coolly recounts her mother telling her, but then later denying, the story of Rose’s grandmother learning in 1949 that fifty members of her family still living in Łódź had been killed. The events receive no comment; what bothered Rose is how her mother later denied that any of it happened. This, to Rose, is true despair: the “all-jovial unhappiness” of those who will not acknowledge the reality of their suffering, let alone examine its sources.
All-jovial unhappiness was, for Rose, more than a family drama. On Rose’s account, postmodern philosophers and modern Jewish thinkers alike respond to their horror over the “disasters of modernity” by trying to turn theory into a source of security—a set of principles that, when strictly followed, would guarantee justice and goodness. But this process could only culminate with one more set of lies, which give the illusion of evading the risk of violence that attends all political action.
Rose took her interlocutors’ errors to reflect a more general drive to make politics “safe”—safe not so much from physical danger as from becoming complicit in violence or oppression. She understood this tendency as a natural response to the horrors of the twentieth century, but also as a misleading way to conceptualize political life, which in turn perpetuates “a piety that separates itself from history.” “All-jovial unhappiness,” as a political and philosophical phenomenon, is a kind of collective fantasy of risk-free action that, on Rose’s view, actually undermines the possibility of concerted action. But moving past this kind of fantasy takes more than the intellectual apprehension of the error: it requires working through the horror that motivates it. Rose’s thinking is animated by the audacious conviction that she could force philosophy to acknowledge its inarticulate suffering, and thereby banish denial from a collective life she saw as haunted by its history of violence.
●
The lecture transcriptions in Marxist Modernism belong to Rose’s early phase, and sit squarely within the tradition of Frankfurt School critical theory. But Rose had to leave behind her first intellectual home in order to develop her own philosophical vision. She wouldn’t renounce Marxism or the Frankfurt School: Marx and Adorno were continual reference points throughout Rose’s books, and she writes in Love’s Work of pressing volumes of Marx on her surgeon “so that he might correct the vulgarity of his right-wing misapprehensions of the socialist theory of politics and society.” But Rose’s most original work, with its distinctive emotional and existential intensities, came from supplementing her radical training with more heterodox resources—in part, theological ones. Her newfound interests in Jewish and Protestant theology would also lead her to develop an idiosyncratic political outlook. Rose became that most chimerical creature, a left-wing traditionalist.
In the preface to Judaism and Modernity (1993), Rose swats away the thought of writing “‘as a woman’, ‘as a Jew’, and so on,” and offers instead this compressed manifesto: “If I knew who or what I were, I would not write; I write out of those moments of anguish which are nameless and I am able to write only where the tradition can offer me a discipline, a means, to articulate and explore that anguish.” While the word “anguish” rings loudly, it is “tradition” and “discipline” to which Rose affords the upper hand. These watchwords are the basis for Rose’s work on “law,” which centers around an effort to rehabilitate forms of authority that are grounded in history, tradition or custom. Rose sees these kinds of authority as the key to accessing a richer range of practices for acknowledging the boundaries and extremities of human life. In the burial customs of Polish Jews, for instance—as exemplified by the ornate gravestone decorations and inscriptions in the cemeteries of places such as Lubaczów and Lesko, which she describes as the “articulate stones” of the “necropolises” of Galicia—she finds a mode of expression adequate to how death confronts the “bare bones of each particular existence.”
Left-wing traditionalism is a tricky position to pull off, however; there are good reasons most Marxists don’t go in for it. A central problem for any left-wing traditionalist stems from the dismal track record of those forms of authority that bolster themselves using the word “tradition.” If divine commands include being told “go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have” (1 Samuel 15:3), you might take that as a decisive indictment of any effort to recuperate, say, theological forms of authority. The problem here is one that any modern person might face, if they were to go to a synagogue, church or temple and had to negotiate between their attraction to institutionalized religious life and their ethical convictions. How do you respond to the risk that the principles you would follow as a religious believer, or the forms of authority you would accept, might lead you to become the perpetrator of violence—or at least complicit in it?
This kind of question seems natural to get stuck on. But Rose thinks it’s misguided. In part this is because she considers it impossible to articulate any set of principles that meet such demands. Where we go wrong, on Rose’s view, is not by accepting the wrong kind of authority; it’s rather by demanding the wrong kind of security. The risk of becoming a perpetrator of violence isn’t special to traditional authority. Rather, it is the risk of politics itself.
Rose builds this case indirectly, using an almost psychoanalytic strategy to show how fantasies of safety and security distort philosophical thinking even when it is not focused on “tradition.” Post-structuralism becomes Rose’s first major analysand, in Dialectic of Nihilism (1984). Rose wrote this book when Foucault’s star was at its zenith, and capital-T Theory was on the ascendancy in literature departments. But Rose was not impressed. She accuses Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault of indulging in a “despairing rationalism without reason,” which compensates for political disappointment over the failure to achieve ideals of justice and rationality by discrediting the underlying ideals. In the preface to The Order of Things, Foucault wrote that Borges’s famous “Chinese encyclopedia” moved him to a “laughter that shattered … all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought.” Rose reads Foucault’s project as one of “smash[ing]” the underlying “table” that orders modern thinking: a nihilistic fantasy par excellence. When Foucault writes in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” of “sacrific[ing] the subjects of knowledge,” Rose sees “an ecstasy of blind laughter or blinding tears, which … is simply that old familiar despair.” Post-structuralist “nihilism” is portrayed, in such examples and others, as a kind of tantrum in which thinkers misdirect their anger over an irrational society by lashing out at rationality itself.
On Rose’s view, the “nihilist programmes” of post-structuralism stem from confused disappointment over how principles of “reason” do not banish violence from politics, but rather witness violence committed in their name. Rather than turn reason into a scapegoat, Rose advocates a conception of it that is compatible with such disappointing outcomes: a view of it as “gradually rediscovering its own moveable boundaries.” Post-structuralist and postcolonial criticisms of “universal notions of justice, freedom, and the good” for “colonising and suppressing their others with violence consequent on the chimera of correspondence” were based, according to Rose, on a faulty conception of what action inspired by such universals should be expected to accomplish. Her suggestion that one might “take the risk of the universal interest” is a reminder that the possibility of failing to live up to a “universal notion” does not discredit the notion itself. The fates of “reason” and of “tradition,” on Rose’s view, turn out to be intertwined, insofar as the rejection of both rests on a common error: that of wanting thought and action to be safe. And once we acknowledge that neither politics nor philosophy is ever risk-free, then tradition is back on the table.
●
Rose’s left-wing traditionalism rests on a vision of the relationship between philosophy and politics whose stakes go beyond supporting her own idiosyncratic politics. In The Broken Middle (1992) Rose makes her most sustained case for that vision. Jacqueline Rose reports that Gillian regarded The Broken Middle (1992) as her masterpiece. It is certainly her hardest book. Here Rose takes on Kierkegaard, modern Jewish philosophy and theology, and literature and theory ranging across Kafka, Mann, Girard, Arendt and Luxemburg. The book revolves around a contrast between two metaphors: the “holy middle” and the “broken middle.” A “holy middle” is a kind of theoretical fairy tale, a place where the risk of perpetuating violence has been banished. The “holy middle” isn’t something anyone intends to create, but on Rose’s view, it’s what most post-Kantian philosophers have wound up fabricating. Rose reads Levinas’s writing on the “infinity of paternity” in Totality and Infinity as one example—an effort to theorize the existence of something perfectly pure and good and safe, that can then be the ground of an ethics without risk. Rose wants Levinas to own up to the “violent exclusivity in one’s desire for infinity,” to recognize the ways in which his own work is already implicated in the violence he seeks to flee.
As in Dialectic of Nihilism, in The Broken Middle Rose uses close readings of her interlocutors to show how, without realizing it, they pursue impossible and confused “philosophical purifications.” Rose puts forward the “broken middle” as her alternative. There are no abstract guarantees of justice and goodness. It’s a meta-philosophical thesis: philosophy cannot decide in advance of politics which courses of action will turn out to be genuinely violent.
If Rose’s diagnosis is correct, one might wonder why any thinker would create a “holy middle”—isn’t there something a bit obvious about the point that philosophy can’t protect us from political risk? For Rose this point is obvious, when simply stated as an abstract thesis, but philosophers don’t always realize what drives them. On Rose’s reading, both postmodern nihilists and the modern Jewish philosophers of the “holy middle” are haunted by a disquiet that they cannot always make clear to themselves. The Holocaust stands behind much of Rose’s most abstract writing, although she rarely names it directly, speaking instead of modernity’s “broken promises” and “broken heart.” Pursuing an impossible vision of intellectual security is one kind of “all-jovial unhappiness” into which a thinker might fall when they cannot accept proximity to risk and loss. To combat this kind of denial, however, it may not be enough just to point out the mistake: some ways of being haunted are too deeply rooted, too all-encompassing. The question of how one might move past an attraction to faulty ideals and flawed standards for theorizing leads to the culmination of Rose’s thought.
In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel narrates the history of philosophy as a series of reason’s failed efforts to know itself. In Mourning Becomes the Law (1996), Rose uses Hegel’s story as her inspiration for telling the history of modern thought as a series of failed efforts to mourn. Rose proposes that modern thinkers had previously been stuck in a condition of “aberrated mourning” for a set of impossible philosophical ideals: the “philosophical purifications” of postmodernist nihilism, the “holy middle” of modern Jewish thought (Rose follows Hegel in understanding “modernity” as an era uniquely beset by “diremption,” or division, and hence on Rose’s reading uniquely tempted to indulge in spurious fantasies of unification). For Hegel, reason can only complete its quest for self-knowledge once it becomes conscious that it has been trying to know itself, and not an external object, all along. This is what Hegel calls “absolute knowing.” For Rose, the mourning can only complete itself once the mourners realize that they’ve been mourning their own impossible fantasies all along. That’s how Rose thinks it might finally be possible to let go of the quest for safety and security. Rose’s “existential drama” is a story about the history of philosophy as a history of mourning. Her role in that drama is to help move it toward fulfillment by bringing it to an awareness of itself. In the place of Hegelian absolute knowing, we get Rosean absolute mourning.
●
Gillian Rose was an iconic thinker. She’s one of those philosophers, like Simone Weil or Alasdair MacIntyre, whose name calls to mind a unique and immediately recognizable way of thinking. Or at least, Rose’s name would do that, if she were better known. Like Weil and MacIntyre—or, for that matter, Foucault—Rose is the kind of thinker you could fall in love with, or fall out of love with, or feel wildly ambivalent about. She’s the kind of thinker who could shape your whole outlook—and not only your philosophical outlook—if you came across her on a syllabus.
It’s no accident that Rose shares this profile with Weil and MacIntyre, who are likewise traditionalists of a left-wing or (in MacIntyre’s case) politically idiosyncratic sort. Rose, Weil and MacIntyre all write in a searching manner reflecting a shared dissatisfaction with liberal modernity. Each in their own way charges modern society and modern thought with failing to offer individuals a meaningful, or even a workable, form of life. Without giving up on their political commitments, or a critical perspective on the histories in which they are implicated, their left-wing or idiosyncratic traditionalism attempts to make accessible to their readers a broader array of sources of meaning.
For Weil, for instance, it is not enough to have a seminar-room revelation that “created things” are “intermediaries leading to God”; rather, “we have to experience them as such.” This demand not just to know but to live the truth would lead Weil to revive a kind of mystical asceticism. Prayer and hunger became her “method[s] of purification,” rendering her more at home in the monastery than in modernity. She was also a committed leftist with no patience for pious resignation. To Weil, tradition wasn’t inquiry’s termination so much as its own mode of exploration; a perspective summed up in her claim that “the tree is really rooted in the sky.” This was one of Rose’s favorite lines from Weil, which resonated with her own view that accessing the existential resources within Jewish law (Halacha) required seeing how “Talmudic argument rehearses a rationalism which constantly explores its own limits without fixing them.”
But one might also wonder if this talk of “tradition,” even in the open-ended manner preferred by Rose and Weil, is really just a mask for nostalgia. Might the leftist traditionalist be accused of idealizing the putative glory days of some bygone medieval era—an era one suspects that Rose, Weil or MacIntyre would in fact have disliked, had any of them actually lived in it? MacIntyre, whose own efforts to revive what he calls the “tradition of the virtues” has courted such a charge, provides the first plank of a defense. He argues that there is no such thing as a nontraditional form of life: everyone winds up embracing at least one tradition, whether they realize it or not. Even the modern liberal who self-defines against “the tyranny of tradition” has in fact merely given themselves over to one more tradition, with its own historically transmitted and locally specific forms of activity, its own canon, its own “contingency and particularity.” Tradition is the ground on which everyone stands, Marxist and monk alike. The concomitant risk of complicity in tradition’s tyrannies is therefore everyone’s problem.
None, then, are without sin. But the Rosean leftist traditionalist can say more than that. A capacity to appreciate forms of value caught up in compromised histories has particular relevance to the leftist, whose uniquely demanding vision of a transformed world is susceptible to giving way to a uniquely dispirited outlook. Living with disappointment over the political history of one’s ideals is a key aspect of Rose’s account of the “broken middle” and of her philosophy of mourning, which is not a counsel of resignation but rather its opposite. By giving up faulty conceptions of our ability to distance ourselves from risk and violence, Rose thinks we regain the political aspirations that the “nihilist” abandons.
Although Rose may have loved the words “difficult” and “broken,” her political and philosophical vision is one of abundance. In Judaism and Modernity (1993), Rose describes reason itself as “full of surprises,” and as that which “persists in the pain of staking itself, with the courage to initiate action and the commitment to go on and on.” She associates this conception with Paul Klee’s odd, bulky Angelus Dubiosus. Here Rose finds a humor lacking in Benjamin’s adoption of Klee’s Angelus Novus as the “traumatized Angel of History.” The broader point of Rose’s left-wing traditionalism is not to exhort every good Marxist to take up a religious practice so much as to model a standpoint capable of seeing the coexistence of disappointment and plenitude.
Rose’s corpus is also plenitudinous: it comprises seven books, plus Marxist Modernism and the posthumous Paradiso (an incomplete sequel to Love’s Work). Those interested in Rose as a critical theorist might prefer the early studies on Adorno and Hegel. Her most original philosophical work is best introduced via the essays collected in Judaism and Modernity (1993) and Mourning Becomes the Law (1996). But it’s hard to call even these comparatively accessible volumes introductory; an “easy Rose” is something of a contradiction in terms. That’s by Rose’s own design. It also means that, nearly thirty years after Rose’s death, her reception is perhaps just getting started.
Love’s Work has dominated that reception so far, and for understandable reasons: in her memoir, Rose brings to life the point of view from which there is beauty in “the gravelly laugh roused by the whimsical poetry of the incongruous in one who has damaged lungs.” But although Rose claims in Love’s Work that “love” is not opposed to “law,” it is love that has all the best lines. Love’s Work is not explicit about what Rose means by law, or what she thinks it has to do with the “sensual, intellectual and literary eros” that animates her memoir. Although Love’s Work is the fruit of tradition, discipline and mourning, it covers over the roots from which it grows. Only by turning to her more argumentative writing can fans of Love’s Work trace back Rose’s literary and existential accomplishment to the philosophy of law and tradition that provides its hidden source.
Rose is buried in London’s Hampstead Cemetery, where her pale gray headstone is marked with both a Star of David and a cross (Rose converted to Anglicanism shortly before her death). Her headstone also bears another pairing: the words “Love’s Work” and “Philosopher.” Rose’s reception is heavily weighted toward the former at the expense of the latter. There can be no simple opposition between Rose the philosopher and Rose the memoirist, since Rose’s life and thought were so deeply intertwined. Still, the juicy anecdotes and earthy wisdom of Love’s Work point beyond themselves, to the ambitious interlocking structure of a set of views Rose developed over decades. In her writing on what is at once broken and bountiful, she wrote for an age whose difficulty might finally prepare readers to receive her intensities. Rose knew that she would die before her time; she also knew that her time would come.
Photo credit: DES E GERSHON / Alamy Stock Photo
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.