What else actually is there?

Suppose​ a friend you trust more than any other, who taught you the meaning of friendship, lets you down suddenly, and then persistently ceases to fulfil the expectations you have come to have of them. Would you give up all your friends? Would you simply avoid that particular friend? Would you try to have it out, which probably wouldn’t work, but would, if you held your nerve, change your relationship to yourself as much as your understanding of the other, ‘a deepening in the notion one holds of friendship … learnt from possibly unintended mistakes’?

Of the many allegories of the philosophical task, as she saw it, scattered through Gillian Rose’s writings, this one, from Judaism and Modernity (1993), is my favourite. ‘One must be able to give and take from others, to acknowledge difference and identity, togetherness and separation, understanding and misunderstanding’: so think of thinking itself as a friendship, always dialectical, social and political and historical, always changing, never at rest. Exhausting, yes, demanding, frustrating and disappointing, heartbreaking, humiliating, a total pain: but what else actually is there? What else can any of us do instead?

‘The end of history’ was enormous when Rose was writing in the early 1990s, with Western liberal democracy triumphant and all the big geopolitical matters supposedly settled. As was ‘the end of philosophy’, as poststructuralism exposed the imperialism of Western rational thinking, its dominance and its dualism, and its sexism and racism too. A terrible friend, clearly, so clearly we had to dump it; except that once we have dumped it, what do we have left? ‘Difficulty with reason,’ Rose wrote, ‘leads to its being reneged altogether – with disastrous consequences for both reason and its purported Other(s) … You cannot give up all friendship, friendship as such, without damaging yourself.’

Suppose a philosopher, in her middle forties, is working at the height of her powers, with The Broken Middle (1992), the book she saw as her greatest achievement, just published. In February 1993, she delivers a triumphant inaugural lecture, ‘Athens and Jerusalem – A Tale of Three Cities’, at the University of Warwick, where she has been appointed professor of social and political thought; the weekend after, she feels a little ill. A couple of months later, advanced ovarian cancer is found, and although she is able to finish the papers that will be published as Mourning Becomes the Law (1996), she doesn’t feel strong enough to start another major book. A friend suggests she try writing more personally, the cancer spreads, her lover abandons her; but there is still ‘the work’, ‘the constant carnival’, ‘the revel of ideas and risk’. Love’s Work, the tiny book that tells this story, is published in February 1995, to great and continuing admiration. The philosopher continues reading and writing when she can through treatments and setbacks. She dies at the end of the same year.

There was​ no set reading list for Gillian Rose’s Kierkegaard lectures at the University of Sussex in 1986. But she would like us, she said, to see Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander if we could, and to read ‘The Immortal Story’ by Isak Dinesen, ‘whom I have since discovered has become rather trrrendy’ (a film had just been made of Out of Africa, the memoir Dinesen wrote under her real name, Karen Blixen, starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep). And she gave us handouts of Heinrich von Kleist’s inexhaustibly spiralling ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, photocopied from the TLS. I studied with Gillian for a year, we corresponded and met up sometimes in the 1990s, but I never asked her what she thought she was giving us with those three recommendations. I watch Fanny and Alexander over and over, at Christmas if I can manage it – the icy weir and the plenitude of presents. A lot of it, I think, was about giving us the most stupendously vast and lavish present, but I will never know.

One idea though, one basic thought, in basic language. We start life so full of life, with so much in us, so much more than we can ever comprehend. Then life itself knocks it out of us, and philosophy begins. Philosophy must always be a double movement, of devastating losses that are also gains, which means that doing it cannot be a linear matter of propositions and clarifications, problems, refutations – the ‘pernicious nonsense’ Rose felt she had been taught in the 1960s at Oxford, where she studied PPE. Facts, perceptions, ‘immediate Spirit’, all this is fine, as Hegel wrote in Rose’s beloved Phenomenology of Spirit; but ‘in order to become genuine knowledge … it must travel a long way and work its passage.’ You won’t learn much if you approach learning as an easy and straightforward matter, ‘shot from a pistol’ as Hegel put it. Learning is agonistic, deathly struggle. Learning is also life itself.

The young Rose chose to do her DPhil on Theodor Adorno, ‘attracted’, she wrote, ‘by the ethical impulse of his thought, but also by the characteristics of his style, the most notoriously difficult sentence structure and the vocabulary full of Fremdwörter’. Her ensuing first book, The Melancholy Science (1978), is written, she explained, ‘in standard expository format’, as is fitting for the introduction it claims to be, but you can feel the tension in the clipped, Oxford-trained sentences, the longing to pull the grammar backwards as well as forwards, to bring in metaphor and drama, break into aphoristic fragments, burst into song. Keep your mind in hell and despair not; you may be weaker than the whole world, but you are always stronger than yourself: it’s fine to read Love’s Work and its epigrams as good advice for living in extremis, but they also illustrate an approach to logic, speculation, dialectics.

Commodity fetishism, for example, the central category of Frankfurt School Critical Theory and so the central category of Marxist Modernism. How mad it is that under capitalist relations, the commodity seems more alive than the human beings who made it, that ‘we live in a society in which some things which seem to be comprehensible to us are not really, and some things which seem to be incomprehensible to us are really comprehensible.’ You could see this as tragedy – Oedipus, Antigone – or you could see it as a comedy of misrecognition, or you could follow Marx and see it as a phantasmagoria, a magic-lantern parade. Phantasmagorisch, the word Marx used, is usually translated into English as ‘fantastic’, but this is a translation of which Rose disapproved. ‘“Phantasmagoria” means a crowd or succession of dim or doubtfully real persons … The epithet “phantasmagoric” stresses the personifications as well as the strangeness of the form.’

Hegel himself, being a man of his time and place in this way as in so many others so much less attractive, was a huge fan of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels, which tell of a young burgher’s adventures among theatre folk, ruined castles, secret societies, as he seeks to find himself inside himself – Bildung means ‘formation, education or culture’, as Rose says in the Marxist Modernism lectures, ‘and experience in the sense of Bildung is a process which starts from the observation and partial understanding of aspects of everyday social life, and leads in stages of increasing self-knowledge to a grasp of the totality’ – and to find a place for himself in the emergent modern world. Rose read the Phenomenology, too, as a Bildungsroman,

which recapitulates the play of personae – the story of how natural consciousness acquired ‘personality’ – legal, aesthetic, moral – a story itself fitfully comprehended by philosophical consciousness which then proceeds unevenly through the stumbling blocks of personified aporia after personified aporia as each configured concept is mismatched to its object and corrected by a newly configured concept mismatched to its object, again – and then again.

For Rose, as for most teachers of Hegel for beginners, the central ‘stumbling block’ was the fabulously dramatic ‘Lordship and Bondage’ section of the Phenomenology, in which consciousness becomes aware of itself as consciousness not while sitting and studying in a little room, but out there in mortal struggle with another consciousness. ‘Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another’: Acknowledge me, you bastard, or I’ll kill you. No, you acknowledge ME, fuckface, or I’ll kill YOU. And so, for a while, the stronger one gets on top and forces the weaker to do all the work. ‘The satisfaction is itself only a fleeting one, however,’ as the bondsman, forced to work and ‘infected’ by fear of death, discovers that he is the one who can actually make things, that he ‘himself exists essentially and actually in his own right’. This moment is the crucial one for Marx and Marxists, for obvious reasons, and for the existentialists. It’s central too, in spite of Hegel’s many racist assumptions, to great thinkers of the African diaspora, W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, for example, Paul Gilroy.

But Rose was also interested in what Hegel, following the novel-within-a-novel in Wilhelm Meister, called the ‘beautiful soul’. Goethe tells of a young woman’s withdrawal from the outer world, which expects her to fulfil her duties as a wife and mother, in order to cultivate her inner religious piety; ‘but, in spite of her perspicacity, she fails to find any means of public expression … and dies.’ For Goethe and Hegel, Rose argues, this story dramatises ‘the unintended psychological and political consequences of … the Protestant doctrine of salvation’: obsession with and terror regarding the state of one’s soul, gradually decaying into anxiety and extreme self-interest, or as Rose puts it, ‘inner and outer violence’ – the boundless desolation we now call ‘neoliberal subjectivity’, which, history has shown us, all too easily turns to fascism. This became the urgent subject of Rose’s final talks. But it is also, so obviously that you might not notice it, one of the rare spots in the early modern European canon in which the life choices and interiority of a woman are being explored.

The beautiful soul returns in a central section of The Broken Middle, in which Goethe is read by another early modern woman, Rahel Varnhagen, who knew herself not to be beautiful and who, being Jewish, wasn’t susceptible to Christian piety, but whose femininity and Judaism did not allow her a place in public life either. So what did she do? She made a public sphere of her own, in her Berlin garret, where she read books, wrote wonderful letters, made friends with Goethe himself and hosted salons, attended by Schlegel, the Humboldts, Heinrich Heine and occasionally Hegel too. ‘From this coign of vantage, in letters as in life,’ Rose wrote, ‘she sustains … an extraordinarily modern Nicomachean ethic of friendship, philia, not eros or agape’: friendship, a social life between men and women based not on sex or marriage or Christianity, but on ‘the work’. ‘I discover that there is just nothing that I am,’ Varnhagen wrote. ‘No daughter, no sister, no lover, no spouse, not even a burgheress’: and yet, it was from that nothing, outside the bounds of respectable society, that modern life became possible, for women and for men.

My first meeting​ with Gillian, as I remember it, came at the door of her office at Sussex University in 1985. I had an English degree from the University of Edinburgh, but I wanted something bigger, broader, deeper, and I wanted to know about Marx and Hegel and Walter Benjamin – I had a crush on Benjamin, actually, as a result of the essay with which Hannah Arendt introduced her selection of his work in Illuminations, and Susan Sontag’s ‘Under the Sign of Saturn’ (1978). I would have liked to have gone to Columbia, to study comparative literature with Edward Said, but I had no way to make that happen. So I signed on, read books, went home to help my disconsolate mother, then discovered that the same now unimaginable fiscal laxity that allowed me to claim Supplementary Benefit, as it was then called, also entitled me to three years of Scottish Education Department postgraduate student grant. Sussex, I read, offered a one-year taught MA in philosophy, which included Marx and Hegel: the ideal conversion course. I applied, I was accepted, I had funding, off I went.

The University of Sussex, established in 1961, was the first of Britain’s so-called plate-glass universities – UEA, Kent, Essex were others, as was Warwick, to which Rose would move in 1989. It sat ten minutes by train from Brighton station, surrounded by rolling grassland. It was beautiful, I guess, concrete arches with red-brick infill, designed by Basil Spence, but it felt to me like a planet on Star Trek, peopled by students, cut off from the world around it. This weird enclosure and self-containment, however, was part and parcel of the utopianism that had brought me there, one of the best aspects of which was Modern European Mind, a course for third-year undergraduates that centred on Marx, Freud, Nietzsche. The 1979 lectures now collected in Marxist Modernism were originally delivered to an MEM audience, as were the Kierkegaard lectures I attended at Sussex in 1986. There was also a Social and Political Thought MA that ignored the ‘highly artificial’ separation between sociology and political theory, but being an English graduate, I didn’t know about it. And anyway the philosophy one, with Marx and Hegel in it, sounded fine.

When I went to register for my courses, however, it turned out that Marx and Hegel weren’t available after all. The man in charge looked hunted: they hadn’t expected so many new postgraduates. All the classes were already full. But there were five or six of us who had come specifically for the Marx and Hegel offer, each of us with urgent questions about socialism, feminism, the peace movement, each of us having seen something in the prospectus that seemed to point a way; but unlike me, the others weren’t Scottish, and had been saving up to fund themselves. We sat around a bit, being furious and writing an angry letter. We stomped the corridors from meeting to meeting in a little group.

Then someone said that somebody in sociology might help us: and there she was, small and neat and slightly hippyish, merry and aflame. She had a course on the Sociology of Knowledge that had Marx and Hegel in it, and yes of course she could squeeze us in. A class for us on Hegel’s Phenomenology? She beamed like an Intelligent Angel, as she referred to Edna in Love’s Work: it would be a joy. ‘Gosh, yes, she’s very … enthusiastic,’ the philosophy man said when we told him, looking even more unhappy; there was something terribly grudging, I remember thinking, in the way he said it, inadequate entirely to the generosity and excitement with which we had been met. It’s a grudge I sensed a lot back then, and often since, from more established professional philosophers, mostly older men; it makes sense that the ‘fulfilled love relationships’ Rose wrote about in Love’s Work were with younger ones, and that several of the male philosophers who have done the best work on her project have been former students, including Howard Caygill and Peter Osborne, who together now teach at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University. (Gilroy too was Rose’s student before he moved to Stuart Hall in Birmingham. She was a ‘great’ teacher, he has said, and he followed her in dismissing the ‘ventriloquist structuralism’ that was in fashion at the time.)

‘The Owl of Minerva has spread her wings,’ Rose wrote at the beginning of The Broken Middle – the figure comes from Hegel, the point being that philosophy ‘always comes on the scene too late’. ‘Our antiquity,’ she continued, ‘has yet to see … this subtle array, this … motile configuration’ of ‘grey in grey’. Gillian, to my memory, wore brown on brown, a thin brown polo-neck with a brownish waistcoat and some sort of brown and ordinary boots and skirt. Her hair was long and fair and unprocessed, parted in the middle – though she curled it, I remember, for that astonishing inaugural lecture at Warwick, which was also the only time I saw her wearing make-up before she got ill. I may be wrong in remembering her hair still wet from her daily mile-long morning swims, but I’m not misremembering that her face shone with the health and sensible living of which she was so proud in her personal writing. Health and sensible living and the ‘infinite intellectual eros’ she wrote about in the posthumously published Paradiso (1999), an ‘endless curiosity about everything’, which was, along with ‘the care of concentration’ and ‘acceptance of pathlessness – aporia’, all that a philosopher needs.

The editors of Marxist Modernism note ‘an almost paradoxical tone of both levity and severity’ in Rose’s published writings: ‘the facetious style – the mix of severity and irony, with many facets and forms, which presents the discipline of the difficulty’, as she herself once explained it. It helps, for readers less attuned to the Rose way of doing things, to know that she never used a word without having studied the full range and depth of its historical meanings, and when she used it she would spin or fan it to reveal its every shade. She did this in her writing, especially in The Broken Middle, which starts ‘From the Middle in the Beginning’ and has its preface at the end (‘Facetious in three ways which develop from each other: first, in the sense of “faceted”, many faces … the second, dominant sense taken from facetiae, old books of a humorous or erotic nature, where “facetious” means addicted to erotic humour … Finally, facetiousness, honest to its own failing.’ She is writing here about Thomas Mann). And she did it when she spoke, shifting pitch and tone and precise degree of suppressed hilarity: ‘You must eat orrrranges,’ when a student went down with a winter sniffle. ‘You must read Marianne Weber, then you will understand the trrragedy’ – to a student who claimed not to see the point of Max.

‘Andrew, with your Kant worrrrk’, ‘Sara, your labours with Krrristeva’, ‘Tony, with your worrrk on Fichte’: four or five of us took every class Rose would give us, and obviously, I called us the Rosettes. Ridiculous, I used to think, addressing our little projects and papers as ‘worrrrk’, as though any of us knew what we were doing, but it made you sit up, try harder, take yourself as seriously as she appeared to take us. You could feel her behind you sometimes, with her big round cheeks, blowing you forward, you with your arms raised in excitement that was also dismay. Her attitude, in short, was ecstatic, as Caygill has written, and ecstatic in its full array of historical meaning: ‘You must live at the frrront of your being.’ (I crumpled inside, I remember, when she said that: I can’t do that! I don’t know how to! You can’t expect us to do that! It’s all right for you!) ‘You can’t do that!’ I remember an academic friend spluttering, when I explained that Rose’s second book, Hegel contra Sociology (1981), exposes the gaping hole in the work of every social scientist ever, from Comte and Weber on. ‘You can’t just do that! This is why universities need walls!’

It’s striking, as Martin Jay writes in an afterword to Marxist Modernism, that despite Rose’s great interest and expertise in Marx and in Frankfurt Marxism, she worked ‘entirely outside’ the great debates on the intellectual left of the 1980s. Althusser she ‘only deigned’ to consider briefly in Hegel contra Sociology, to be ‘derided’, Gramsci was never mentioned and her work ‘did not appear’ in New Left Review. Jay had been friends with Rose since the early 1970s, he wrote in an essay from 1997, when she was working on Adorno and he had just published The Dialectical Imagination (1973), the first English-language history of Frankfurt-style Critical Theory; and yet, he wrote, ‘productive dialogue with her was difficult,’ because of her ‘extraordinary self-confidence, fondness for gnomic pronunciamentos, and hedgehoglike ability to incorporate every possible position into her own world-view’. ‘Hedgehoglike’, presumably, is a reference to Isaiah Berlin’s division of ‘writers and thinkers and, it may be, human beings in general’ into foxes – ‘their thought is scattered and diffuse’ – and hedgehogs, ‘who relate everything to a single, central vision … in terms of which they understand, think and feel.’ But ‘gnomic pronunciamentos’? I don’t know.

‘It is often remarked that [she] is a difficult thinker,’ Scott and Finlayson begin their introduction to Marxist Modernism, adding the words ‘esoteric’, ‘ironic’ and ‘poetic’, one more ‘difficult’ and then ‘difficulty’, twice, and that’s just in the opening paragraph. Is it unfair of me to sense a dismissiveness in all these ‘difficult’s, or is this just the way academics feel they have to write when chasing a student audience, given all the stories about students these days not being able to read books? I’m not saying Rose isn’t a ‘difficult’ thinker – it’s completely true that her work is uncommonly dense, allusive, structurally complex. But it’s like that because it has to be, because she considers, as she wrote of Adorno, that ‘the relation of a thought or concept to what it is intended to cover, its object, is problematic.’ Thus what Adorno called negative dialectics, a quest for knowledge in which nothing will ever add up.

For Rose, the problem was Kant, and the way he had both invented and destroyed modern philosophy, as she saw it, in his three Critiques: one of ‘pure’ reason and one of the ‘practical’ sort, and a third of ‘judgment’, as though thought and action and morality are not always bound up together, as though it would ever be possible for a mere philosopher to split reality at the joints. Hegel, she considered, was just about the only philosopher to understand this, and to come up with a way of writing that might deal with it, which she calls ‘the speculative proposition’: ‘To read a proposition “speculatively” means that the identity which is affirmed between subject and predicate is seen equally to affirm a lack of identity,’ so already you can see why this sort of thinking might necessitate an especially demanding sort of prose. Change, the lack of it and yet its necessity, its possibility and impossibility: the speculative proposition contains the full spectrum. The Owl of Minerva, somehow, flaps in many temporalities and dimensions, all at once.

Before​ I got to Sussex, I’d tried to get a grip on Hegel’s dialectic via Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy (1946): ‘First we say: “Reality is an uncle.” This is the thesis. But the existence of an uncle implies that of a nephew … [so] we must conclude: “The Absolute is a nephew.” This is the antithesis.’ And so ‘we are driven to the view that the Absolute is the whole composed of uncle and nephew. This is the synthesis.’ And so on. Rose, like Hegel, preferred to teach by immersion: ‘The examination of knowledge can only be carried out by an act of knowledge,’ as he wrote in the Lesser Logic. ‘To seek to know before we know is as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus, not to venture into the water until he had learned to swim.’ ‘Dialectic,’ Rose helpfully told her students in 1979, ‘is a very slippery word, and I’m not going to try to say what it means,’ and she doesn’t attempt to define it even in the useful ‘protreptic’ glossary at the back of The Melancholy Science. You get to know what dialectic means by struggling through it, resuming ‘reflexively what we always do: to know, to misknow and yet to grow’, as Rose writes in The Broken Middle. You want to know about Hegel, you read Hegel. You learn by learning to throw yourself in.

The same goes for Rose’s philosophy books too. ‘Validity and Values’, ‘Morality and Method’, ‘Self-Perficient Scepticism’, ‘The Grave of Life’: the edition we read of Hegel contra Sociology had the most parodically dowdy brown-on-brown cover, but you could tell just by looking at the headings on the contents page that you were holding something highly organised, punctiliously crafted, beautifully rhythmic, about fundamental issues in philosophy and social science, the basic problem from Kant onwards of seeking to know before we know, which in Rose’s later work she called the anxiety of beginning. I didn’t remotely understand – whatever that means – Hegel contra Sociology in the 1980s, having read very little of the writers it critiques, and if anything, I understand even less of it now. ‘Understanding’ itself, however, doesn’t signify much to the committed Hegelian; it is a start, maybe, but only one of many ways in. You need to read, then reread, then look things up and then forget them. You need to read Hegel, then you need to read all of Hegel’s sources, in German, then in Greek. Go out, watch films, eat Indian food, ‘golden-mustard in colour and silty with twelve fresh-ground spices’, as Camille Paglia described a soup Rose cooked on a visit to Bennington to see Jim Fessenden, her friend and former lover, in 1973. Go home and start rereading Hegel and all his sources and everything else again.

Like Russell’s Hegel, Rose’s Hegel saw reality in relation to the Absolute, but the Absolute not as God or Prussia, as in the traditional right-wing interpretations, not even as a favourite nephew of Uncle Bert. The conventional left riposte from Marx onwards is to replace God with revolution, Prussia with the commune, but Rose considers this move just as ‘abstract and ahistorical’ as the bourgeois philosophies it wants to overturn. Philosophers, including Marx, have omitted to ‘think the Absolute’, which can be done ‘by acknowledging … the limits on our thinking the Absolute’ – you have to think the Absolute, I would gloss this, because it’s doing this that reminds you you’re nowhere near it, and without it, it’s too easy for thought to be pleased with itself, to think it’s already gone as far as it needs to go. You think it as a speculative dialectic, a matter simultaneously of identity and non-identity, ‘disciplined by the difficulty’. This is partly what Rose is talking about when she talks about agon and aporia, broken middles, stony paths.

The big problem with Marx, Rose thinks, is that he never got round to thinking about culture or Bildung, consciousness and the way it learns things and mislearns them, and that this ‘resulted in gross oversimplification regarding the likelihood and the inhibition of change’. Orthodox Marxists in their turn were far too quick to think they knew how to make a revolution happen, and what the necessary revolution should consist in, which risked ‘recreating a terror, or reinforcing lawlessness, or strengthening bourgeois law’ (in The Broken Middle she calls this ‘destruction of the actual organisation of the world in the name of the organisation of the party’). Philosophers before Marx tried to interpret the world but not to change it; Marxists want to change the world, but fail to understand that they themselves, ‘revolutionary consciousness’ though they know themselves to be, live in accord with the world around them, much like everybody else. Is this just one of those inescapable dilemmas it’s better not to think about? Social theory, Rose thinks, may be able to give it the slip if it learns to ‘think the Absolute … quite differently’. Or it could be that this is impossible, and even Hegel is useless: ‘Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the Absolute cannot be thought.’

‘The likelihood and the inhibition of change’: this was, more or less, the question that had brought the Rosettes to Sussex, and that made them the core of ‘my itinerant university’, as Gillian called the ten graduate students who would follow her in 1989 in her ‘peregrinations’ from Sussex to Warwick. It was not a group that included me. ‘Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich’, every angel is terrible, as Rilke said.

Reading Love’s Work, it is easy to idealise Rose’s ‘Intelligent Angels’ in their picturesque imperfections, but actually, ‘dearest, doughty Edna’ and the green-tighted Yvette are equivocal figures, an alcoholic and a ‘monstrous’ sexual harasser, careless, we are told, of ‘the narrow border between child care and child abuse’ (‘Gillian’s account of Yvette,’ Caygill has written, ‘is paradoxically both perceptive and extremely unjust’). I was homesick, I hated Brighton, I had unfinished business with my mother; I told Gillian I needed time to catch up on Plato and Aristotle, but secretly I had applied for a place at teacher training college in Edinburgh and was planning to spend the rest of my grant there.

Even now that I have, unlike Rose, attained the oldish age and physical invisibility she longed for, I still struggle to reach the ‘observant intelligence’ and spiritual freedom she found in Agatha Christie’s ‘proper, fussy, inquisitive’ Miss Marple, whom she also identified with Kierkegaard’s ‘knight or lady of faith’. Back then, I was knight or lady of nothing. I loved Hegel, and philosophy, and studying with Gillian, but mainly I was scared.

‘Apitiful approach,’ Rose writes in Paradiso of Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo, the standard biography of another great philosophical life. ‘Every stage in the development of Augustine’s life and thought is attributed to the change in his age – to his youth, to his maturity, to his ageing’: an inadequate way of looking ‘at any life, ancient or modern, prophet, preacher or poet, that has been productive of a body of work challenging our reductive ideas of what a life can be’. Actually, she continues, ‘the meaning of the work opens up the meaning of life,’ a meaning, in all her writing, to do with ‘the ineluctable paradox displayed in every life of power and powerlessness, of appearing and remaining hidden’.

‘The dilemma of addressing modern ethics and politics without arrogating the authority under question’: that’s the way Rose chose to characterise ‘the ineluctable difficulty’ in a short preface she wrote to the 1995 edition of Hegel contra Sociology, published shortly before her death. ‘The recourse to a difficult style,’ as Caygill explained it, ‘reflected the working through of the intrinsic difficulty,’ which he followed Rose in describing as ‘a trauma within reason itself’; and it’s this trauma that is negotiated in ‘the deceptively not-difficult’ Love’s Work, with its angelology and its allegory of King Arthur, its scandalous academic gossip and blithe exposure of the hole through the middle of metaphysics with the mystery of Aristotle’s nose, a particular instance of a general category, yet also, in its irreducible snubness, irreplaceably itself.

Car journeys and the coming of television, boring family Seders and ‘dry, predictable biscuits’; the news that came from Poland in 1949, when Gillian was a toddler and her sister Jacqueline barely born, that fifty members of the Prevezer family – cousins and aunts and uncles of their mother, Lynn – had been murdered in the Holocaust. ‘My disastrous Judaism of fathers and family transmogrified into a personal, protestant inwardness and independence. Yet, as with the varieties of historical Protestantism … the independence gained … comes at the cost of the incessant anxiety of autonomy.’

Love’s Work is the ‘existential drama’ of a postwar Jewish British woman philosopher, born in London in 1947, who reads books, sits in meetings, falls in love, falls ill, faces death. But it also constructs a personal iconography, a highly wrought and interlocking pattern of images and emblems which whoosh you, if you let them, right into the middle of ‘the ineluctable difficulty’, ‘the trauma within reason itself’. Stones and Roses, for example, and centrally, Gillian’s decision at sixteen to change her surname from that of Leslie Stone, her ‘strict … stern’ biological father, to that of Irving Rose, the ‘kind, equanimous, humorous’ Irishman her mother married next; the fabulously ‘over-ripe’ interpretation she develops, the Rock of Zion and the Romance of the Rose, with the help of Joan Lindsay’s endlessly unsettling Picnic at Hanging Rock. In the 18th century, as she said in her inaugural lecture, Berlin, the capital city of the Enlightenment, was surrounded by a wall, with the Rosenthaler Gate one of only three places Jews and cattle might enter. ‘“Rosenthal” means valley of roses; it is my name – the name that one branch of my family adopted in order to enter German civil society. So with this I sign and conclude this lecture.’ I was there, it was as great a moment as she makes it sound. All of us knew it at the time.

Love’s Work has lots to say, and quite a lot of it quite hurtful, about Rose’s friends, lovers, family, colleagues, though over the decades since it was first published, much of the shock of that has faded. For me, it’s the allegory of the ‘Particles’ that really glows now, the personae of Rose’s own internal drama:

I was for ever accompanied by four wicked and energetic Particles, secret and clever companions, who never allowed me any inhuman innocence of beginning, and who kept me prodigiously busy. These imps were called ‘Im-’, ‘A-’, ‘Di-’ and ‘Dys-’: ‘Im-migration’, ‘A-theism’, ‘Di-vorce’, ‘Dys-lexia’. ‘Dyslexia’, the last of these genies, is really the first: for, by discovering from very early on that the desert of stony words could be made to bloom, that I could channel what I could not overcome, I acquired a puckish strategy for enchanting the agents of adversity. The fourth disability could be made to germinate the other three.

Throwing herself head-first into the most difficult texts she could find, presumably, was for Rose something the Dys imp had taught her: ‘Well, I am immersed. But if I am floundering, can I be saved by thrashing around?’ And, perhaps, the willingness to risk pain and feel it properly, to ‘prove the wound’, as she writes at one point, make the knots and whorls of trauma blossom too: be it ‘psychic distress, with which we are so doggedly familiar’, or the ‘bright, proud infoliation’ of her stoma, its ‘tight coils of concentric, fresh, blood-red flesh’. Postmodernists, I remember Rose extemporising in one of the Kierkegaard lectures, are always going on about ‘the return of the body’. ‘But the body has never been away.’

Di, the wicked little demon of Divorce, is all over Love’s Work, linking and splitting the Stones and the Roses – after Gillian and Jacqueline, Lynn had a third daughter, Alison, with Irving, and Leslie had two more children, Diana and Anthony Stone. It’s Di too who most strongly links and splits Love’s Work with the famously ‘forbidding’ The Broken Middle, in which it appears in a new guise as Di-remption, ‘modernity’s ancient predicament’, as Rose introduces it, ‘this diremption between law and ethics … always “recently” repeated’ – the fateful and recurring split in social and political theories between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. The broken middle itself, we are told, is ‘triune’, made up of ‘universal, particular and singular’ – the classic divisions of Aristotle’s metaphysics – but the trouble is, post-Kantian ‘common sense’ causes us to see it as a series of dualistic oppositions. ‘Made anxious by such inscrutable disjunctions, we invariably attempt to mend them, as will become evident, with love, forced or fantasised into the state.’

‘Diremption’ is an odd word, only occasionally used by A.V. Miller in the standard translation of the Phenomenology. Rose herself, I think I’m right in saying, never used it before The Broken Middle, but then came to use it a lot. ‘Diremption,’ she writes at a key point, ‘draws attention to the trauma of separation of that which was, however, as in marriage, not originally united’ – an idea that has something in it of Adorno’s ‘torn halves of an integral freedom to which, however, they do not add up’. My copy has, pencilled in the margin, OMG. ‘Yet for the child,’ she adds, ‘the marriage seems an original unity, and there exists no form of return to alleviate the trauma’ – on and on the moderns wander, orphans from a war, trying to repair a fantasy, a cosy corner, that was only ever real to them.

The Broken Middle starts – ‘From the Middle in the Beginning’ – by introducing the main ‘personae of the system’, who are Hegel and Kierkegaard, with smaller parts for Freud, Kafka, Franz Rosenzweig. Hegel, we know, is famous for his totalising system, Kierkegaard for the ironic personae with which he pseudonymously signed his books; Hegel’s speculative dialectic is one thing, Kierkegaard’s leap of faith quite another; besides which, Kierkegaard scattered all manner of mean remarks about Hegel across his work, ascribing ‘movement in Hegelian logic’ to ‘pixies and goblins’, accusing Hegel of ‘malpractice’ tantamount to medical neglect: ‘Hegel can manage much better with the dead, for they are silent.’ Kierkegaard, in short, is a fox who easily outruns Hegel; Hegel a hedgehog who rolls into a ball. As thinkers they are entirely incompatible. Except that Rose completely disagrees.

‘This work begins instead by exploring the diremption of law and ethics as it appears not between but within the conceptuality of Hegel and Kierkegaard’: the book is presented as a piece of philosophical theatre, with Hegel and Kierkegaard both the double act in the spotlight and the twin masks above the thick red curtains at the beginning of the show. The Phenomenology, Rose thinks, is entirely dramatic, ‘a play of personae’ within a single work; Kierkegaard’s personae – Johannes de Silentio, Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus and so on – are dramas that also enact a dialectic. The aim, moreover, ‘of both “authorships”’ is ‘to bring Revelation into philosophy … as triune or aporetic reason – universal, particular and singular’. Rose sees this as ‘the political difficulty par excellence: the opposition between particular and general will, to use Rousseau’s terms; or the struggle between particular and universal class, to use Marx’s terms; and the difficulty of representing this relation in terms of political institutions and aesthetic values’. The part about the ‘difficulty of representing this relation in terms of political institutions and aesthetic values’ will be taken up by Rose in the ‘analogies between the soul, the city and the sacred’ that structure Mourning Becomes the Law.

The second half of The Broken Middle turns to ‘the Revolution in the revolutions of 1989’ – the breaching of the 20th-century version of the wall around Berlin – which ‘has not destroyed Marxism so much as it has dismantled postwar state socialism … reopen[ing] … all the antinomies of modern state and society’ including, most presciently, ‘the connection between liberalism and fascism from which postwar state socialism has proved such a dangerous distraction’. Rose is worried by the ‘holy middles’ she sees being ‘forced or fantasised’ into politics, in liberal communitarianism, in postmodern Christian theology, in the Holocaust theology of Emil Fackenheim and in Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity, which breaks down completely with his response to the Israeli-sponsored massacre in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982. (‘But if your neighbour attacks another neighbour or treats him unjustly, what can you do?’ Levinas asks, exonerating ‘not only Israel in particular but also the whole political-historical structure of repetition backwards which he evasively identifies’, as Rose says, and ‘a fortiori … his own ethics’.)

But the broken heart of The Broken Middle began life as ‘Women, State and Revolution’, a series of lectures given at Sussex just before I got there, in 1985. The central chapter, I would say, of the book is called ‘Love and the State’, and the central section of that, ‘Droits de la femme/Droits de la citoyenne’, begins with the liberal-feminist theorist Carole Pateman’s classic account of Hegel, ‘the social contract theorists’ greatest critic’, being perfectly happy with marriage as an institution that forces women to stay at home. The trouble with this, Rose thinks, is that Pateman has walked straight into the neo-Kantian quagmire, offering a ‘feminist reading which knows what it is looking for before it looks’, overlooking ‘the ways in which the legal and social status of women, their dialectic of activity and passivity … is at the heart, or – to eschew a metaphor of the emotions – is the difficulty, the aporia, of the critique of Enlightenment’. It is the story of this ‘difficulty, the aporia’ that Rose proceeds to tell.

Rahel Varnhagen, salonnière and belletrist; Rosa Luxemburg, revolutionary and Marxist theorist; Hannah Arendt, immigrant to America and liberal darling: each, Rose believes, lived and worked through a critical moment in German history, and all three were ‘especially qualified witnesses of the equivocation of the middle’, doubly excluded, as Jews and as women, from the public lives of the states and societies of which they were a part. Varnhagen neither wrote books nor led a revolution and yet she both witnessed and hastened the rise of liberal modernity through her ‘interstitial … coign of vantage’. Luxemburg hastened, witnessed and was finally murdered over the crisis in German social democracy that followed the First World War. Arendt escaped the rise of fascism for America, to write The Origins of Totalitarianism, Parts 1 and 2 of which display a commendable ‘tension of middlewomanship’, while Part 3 – the pulpier totalitarianism section – begins the ‘retreat’ into the ‘judgmental, abstract and ahistorical’ nature of her later work.

The greatest middlewoman of the three is Luxemburg, whose lifelong stand against the ‘contrary barbarisms’ of both Bernsteinian revisionism and the supposedly democratic centralism of Lenin did not cause her to lapse into the ‘easy path’ of either centrism or ‘immediacy and spontaneity’. On the contrary, Rose’s Luxemburg is a skilled and courageous navigator of what Rose calls ‘a-poria, without a path’ and what Luxemburg herself called a ‘road … between … two rocks’, ‘betwixt and between the two dangers by which it’ – the revolution – ‘is constantly being threatened. One is the loss of its mass character; the other, the abandonment of its goal.’ Luxemburg, in other words, understands the risks one takes on embarking on a revolution, as outlined in Hegel contra Sociology: the risks of ‘recreating a terror, or reinforcing lawlessness, or strengthening bourgeois law in its universality and arbitrariness’. Rose’s Luxemburg, I feel like saying, is sort of Rose herself.

‘Socialist democracy,’ Luxemburg wrote in The Russian Revolution (1922), ‘does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators … The only way to a rebirth is the school of public life itself.’ In this text and in The Mass Strike (1906) Luxemburg is, ‘in effect’, Rose writes, ‘willing to be “premature”, to act on faith with what knowledge it can muster, to fail even, but thereby to gain in self-knowledge and self-consciousness’. She is willing, in short, to let people be themselves, learn from their mistakes, live through ‘the educative experience of political freedoms … in a radically democratic sense of opening up public space’ – ‘insisting,’ as Rose would later expand, ‘on the uncertain course of class struggle … the multiplicity of eventualities which might emerge between the extremes [of] “Barbarism or Socialism”.’ Though tragically, in Luxemburg’s case, the eventuality that happened was brutal repression and death.

The problem, as Luxemburg knew perfectly well, was that the German proletariat was too bound by ‘bourgeois parliamentarianism, bourgeois morality and civility’, to be capable of socialist revolution – in 1905 or in 1919. And so, towards the end of The Mass Strike, she tried to ‘project’ the rise of Russian revolutionary feeling, ‘with the grammar of providential futurity’, onto Germany, ‘a projection which nevertheless resounds counterfactually and with circularity’. Rose suggests, in fact, that the latter chapters of The Mass Strike be read ‘counter-suggestively’, as a ‘prophetic index of the counter-revolutionary politics that are likely to emerge when non-organised workers are not rallied and do not rally to the political and economic struggle’. An emphasis on the ‘publicity of spontaneity’, Rose continues, could result ‘not in mobilising the masses for socialism but for fascism’, as actually happened in Germany after Luxemburg’s death. ‘If Rosa Luxemburg’s authorship not only declares “Socialism or Barbarism” but contains the incipient insight that barbarism without “socialism” means some variety of fascism’: well certainly that’s what happened in 1930s Germany. Disaster triumphant radiating across the enlightened earth.

The fifth of the Marxist Modernism lectures is about Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), written by Adorno in collaboration with Max Horkheimer, the director of the Frankfurt Institute, during their wartime exile in the US. The ‘normal explanation’, as Rose says, of the emergence of fascism in Germany in the 1930s was that ‘you had a very rapid development of capitalism without a liberal-democratic political structure,’ leading to ‘the breakdown of civilisation’; but neither she nor Adorno-Horkheimer thinks this explanation is in itself enough. ‘It is capitalist rationality itself which produces and reproduces forms of barbarism,’ she writes. ‘Fascism cannot be seen as a breakdown unique to Germany … but is itself inherent in the logic of late capitalism.’ The rationalism of control over nature becomes, as she says, ‘weapons of destruction’. Enlightened forms of living, ‘new forms of enslavement’. ‘Instead of the autonomy of mind which had been promised, new ways of controlling the minds of others … new forms of propaganda and lies’. Enlightenment itself, the very idea and project, ‘new forms of myth’.

At​ the beginning of Love’s Work, it is 1991 and Rose is in New York to visit Jim Fessenden, who is now dying of Aids. In Chapter 7 she lists the wonders to which Jim had introduced her when they first met in 1970: Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schoenberg, cooking, hashish, the German language, and the list goes on. Where is Marx on this list? Is he missing because she knew Marx already, via Jean Floud perhaps, who ‘saved’ her by introducing her to sociology, or some more obviously ‘revolutionary’ form of ‘practice’; or was she not that much of a Marxist at all? ‘Instead of politicising academia,’ as she wrote in The Melancholy Science, the Frankfurt School ‘academicised politics’, and as an institution, ‘reaffirmed and reinforced those aspects of the intellectual universe which it criticised and aimed to change’. Did she, too, get stuck in the academicisation of politics, or could it be that the academicisation of politics simply suited her quite well?

Marxist Modernism collects transcribed tape recordings of seven lectures Rose gave to Sussex undergraduates in 1979, a year after the publication of the Adorno book, when she would have been deep into working on Hegel contra Sociology (1981). The tone is fact-filled but conversational, and includes, even, one of Rose’s mysterious ‘jokes’, so learned that only she found them funny – ‘I’ll explain more about that later on,’ she says, but I don’t think she does. As people often say about Adorno, too, it’s good to read lectures given by difficult thinkers, because that’s when you catch them less interested in stylistic perfection on the page than in getting their point across. The first lecture, for example, summarises the critique of Marxism from Hegel contra Sociology in two sentences: ‘Marx had no theory of culture as such. As I’ve said, Hegel did.’ Without a theory of culture, Marx’s thought ‘became rigidified into static, mechanistic and deterministic distinctions between the economic base and the ideological, legal and political superstructure’. It was this rigidity that the Marxist modernists set out to loosen up.

The figures under discussion are Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Brecht and Benjamin, Adorno selbst and Adorno-Horkheimer – Dialectic of Enlightenment, she says at one point, is ‘the most incredible book’. The Frankfurt School is given its historical background: the First World War and the revolutions after it; the rise of Hitler, which meant that Marxist, mostly Jewish, intellectuals in Germany had to get out. The lectures also introduce the basic aesthetic choices these thinkers made: classic realism, expressionism, proletkult and so on. Adorno’s much quoted ‘torn halves’ remark originally referred to avant-garde v. popular art, which he ‘insisted’ should be analysed together: ‘Both bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change … Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up.’ This claim was originally made in a 1936 letter to Benjamin, which can be found in Verso’s Aesthetics and Politics anthology. The two books work brilliantly together – Verso should put them in a box set.

It was Lukács who began the re-Hegelianising of Marxism for which the Frankfurt School became famous, with his minute examination of ‘the riddle of commodity structure’ as Marx presented it in the first chapter of Capital, especially the section on ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret’. The wage-slave works on a thing, but sees his work as alien, because he’s doing it for the lord of industry, who pays him a wage: ‘A definite social relation between men assumes the phantasmagoric form of a relation between things.’ ‘That’s the crucial sentence,’ Rose says. I looked it up in my own copy to check I understood it, and found it highlighted and further marked with a cigarette burn, so I guess she must have said that to us as well. ‘Marx is not saying, for example, that the illusions that arise out of commodity fetishism are wrong; he is saying that those illusions are necessary and real but nevertheless, they are illusions.’

Adorno and his Frankfurt colleagues followed Lukács in calling this ‘reification’ – not a word Marx ever used himself – and saw in it ‘a model for the relationship between social processes and social institutions and consciousness’ that granted ‘enormous liberty’ to different thinkers to do their Marxism in whichever way happened to suit: ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (Benjamin); The Theory of the Novel (Lukács); ‘Shouldn’t We Liquidate Aesthetics?’ (Brecht). Rose’s richest lecture is the last one, which is about Adorno, and the way you might produce the best and most rigorous art ever – ‘He was thinking of the music of Berg, Webern, Schoenberg, but also of the work of Kafka and Thomas Mann’ – and yet, because ‘the forces of production are displaced into high, quasi-privileged spheres, isolated … even when they incorporate true consciousness, [they] are also partly false.’ ‘Adorno’s thesis is that … many forms of radical activity – whether artistic, political, social, theoretical – are fated to display “the same disastrous pattern” which they seek to combat.’ In a footnote, the editors trace this cheery thought to a passage from Adorno’s Minima Moralia: ‘And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick.’

In​ 1985, Rose had just published her third book, Dialectic of Nihilism, which attacked the then fashionable French poststructuralists – Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault – for what she saw as a hideously self-destructive wrecking operation (‘The result … is that the world remains not only unchanged but also unknown. What is more, they invite us to celebrate such impotence at this hecatomb of all previous interpretations’). How, we used to wonder, did this anti-Foucault vehemence play out in the senior common room, given that Sussex in the 1980s was one of the main centres of Derrida and Foucault studies in Britain and that one of the star teachers on the much more poststructuralism-friendly Critical Theory MA was Gillian’s younger sister, Jacqueline Rose?*

I’d arrived in Brighton in a hurry, without having found a place to live, but one of the other Rosettes decided to leave, which meant I got his room. My new flatmate was doing the critical theory masters, and was as devoted to Jacqueline as I was to Gillian: we collected facts and compared notes, like Jenny Gray and Sandy Stranger with our respective Miss Jean Brodies. Jacqueline, we established, wore earrings and nail varnish, whereas Gillian did not. Was this the French influence as against the German? Gillian had dedicated her Hegel book to ‘the Intriguer’: much research was conducted in order to work out who this ‘Intriguer’ was. Jacqueline, then as now, was the serious scholar of Freud and Freudianism, but Gillian too could be quite Freudian in casual conversation – ‘Paraprrrrraxis!’ she would hiss, when a student claimed to have ‘forgotten’ a deadline – and she wrote about Freud in The Broken Middle, in which ‘“working-through” is the pivot’ on which it is decided if ‘repetition backwards, the repressed prototype’ can become ‘repetition forwards’, the ‘freely mobile ego’. But Jacqueline, from her collaboration with Juliet Mitchell on Feminine Sexuality (1982) onwards, clearly found in feminism a hospitable coign of vantage, whereas Gillian did not. ‘Feminism never offered me any help,’ she wrote, with tremulous bravado, in Love’s Work. ‘For it fails to address the power of women as well as their powerlessness, and the response of both men and women to that power.’ But maybe it could have done, if she had asked it? Why was it she didn’t want to? Is the way she presents feminism entirely fair?

It’s noticeable, if you like looking at writers’ acknowledgments, how often Gillian thanks men friends and male colleagues, how seldom women. Was this because Gillian worked in subjects that were historically less open to women? If so, the answer merely repeats the same question in a different way. You meet women – often feminists, or so they claim – who just don’t seem to like other women, but Gillian wasn’t like that. She was just Gillian, living the paradox of her singularity, ‘idea and act at once defin[ing] the angel, who is the unique instance of its species, without generation or gender’, as she wrote in Judaism and Modernity. ‘I don’t like it when people say, “I’m writing this book as a woman, as a Jew, as a Catholic, as a black,”’ she said, in an interview on Irish radio a week before she died. ‘Those are things that need to be explored in order to know what they are. We write in order to explore what they might mean.’

In the critique of Carole Pateman in The Broken Middle, Gillian explained why it makes no sense for the feminist scholar to lunge backwards into history, like a bull in a china shop, knowing what she looks for before she looks. She puts the same point more aphoristically towards the end of Love’s Work: ‘When I claim that women’s experience has been silenced by the patriarchal tradition, which represents itself spuriously as universal, from where do I speak? From women’s particularity? Then how could I speak? I could only stutter. From patriarchy? Would it want to unmask itself? From sceptical faith, shaky but persistent, in critical reason?’

Is it feminism, exactly, that Gillian objects to, or is it a trait in feminist scholarship – the sort that uses imprecise, essentialising, ahistorical metaphors to do with ‘silencing’ and ‘forgetting’ and ‘reclamation’, which inadvertently obscure more about patriarchal relations through history than they reveal? ‘Are there not better terms than “forgetting”, terms which might bring us closer to the psychic and political dynamics that result in the absence of women philosophers from the mainstream record?’ as Sophie Smith put the matter recently in the LRB.† ‘Terms, moreover, that do not encourage us to “forget” the writers, usually women themselves, who have fought to correct that record?’ So what might ‘sceptical faith, shaky but persistent, in critical reason’ have to offer instead?

‘For by “negative self-relation” woman is explicitly defined, and she may therefore have the advantage in coming to understand, in making the beginning,’ Rose wrote in The Broken Middle. Spend a bit of time with that book, and you will notice a few things. The ‘crisis’ of the beginning follows Kierkegaard in being a crisis not of an actor, but an actress. The pronouns the book uses for its universals are she/her. The knight of faith in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling ‘proves its immortality by making no distinction between man and woman’. De Silentio, its pseudonymous author, gets his name from ‘the legal term for inference from omission’, for reading the text between the lines. ‘GR said, men have to worry about losing whereas women have lost, so things can only start looking up,’ I wrote in my diary for 3/2/86. Women may see all sorts of things from such a coign of vantage. Why is it that so much of the time we don’t really want to look?

Rose’s first experience with both desire and gender, as she writes in Love’s Work, came with her unrequited passion for Roy Rogers, the television cowboy, whom she desperately wanted ‘to be and to have’. Her father ‘was not amused’ when she trained herself to urinate from a standing position. Her mother told her, ‘for reasons of her own (her fear of my burgeoning gender proclivities)’, that the closest she could get to Roy ‘was to become a milkmaid … Inauspicious beginning to the long, gruelling ordeals of love to come’.

Forty-odd years later, part of her colon was removed and the healthy part attached to her abdomen, leaving her with a stoma, an opening, below her waist. ‘I have trouble imagining, publicly or privately, that everyone is not made exactly as I am myself,’ she wrote in Love’s Work. ‘Suppose beings which solely urinate were all changed to beings which also defecate? The collective transition would be in effect no change at all. Suppose we all awoke one day with four faces, each one going straight forward’ – this, surely, is a deliberate echo of Plato’s allegory of gender in the Symposium. ‘It makes all the difference: it makes no difference at all,’ because souls inhabit bodies of all sorts in all sorts of different ways. ‘It becomes routine; my routine is unselfconscious about the rituals and private character of your routines. Thus, I handle my shit.’

Jacqueline Rose​ did not write in public about her sister until ten years after her death, in an essay you’ll find in The Last Resistance from 2007, ‘the year that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza reach[ed] its fortieth anniversary’. It begins with the observation that in the early 1990s, her own work, that of Gillian and that of their cousin the theatre director Braham Murray, all converged on the Holocaust: Jacqueline with her work on Sylvia Plath, Braham with a concentration camp version of Macbeth and Gillian with a chapter in The Broken Middle on the ‘New Political Theology – Out of Holocaust and Liberation’. Clearly, Jacqueline wrote, the convergence represented ‘a way of engaging a mostly unspoken part of our family history’. But each of them was also making a ‘plea: that Auschwitz should not become sacred, its victims ideal innocents, its perpetrators unthinkable monsters, equally beyond the pale; nor should it be seen as absolute, unrepresentable, horror, which can only therefore be countered by an equivalently absolute act of redemption by the Israeli nation state.’

For Jacqueline, Gillian’s key essay is the one on ‘Midrash and Political Authority’, written in 1993 and published in Mourning Becomes the Law: Jewishness seen not as a sacralised, sublime space, but as bound up with authority, domination, coercion, violence, as any other nation, despite and because of its terrible legacy. ‘Judaism and Jewish communities have always been more – not less – exposed to the equivocation of the ethical; the clash between meaning and configuration, the inversion of “generous” principles into outcomes of domination,’ as Gillian wrote in The Broken Middle. ‘Judaism, that is, has lived with especial intensity the problem of the relationship between authority – denied to the Jews by the outside world, all the more fiercely husbanded and enforced within their own polity – and ethics,’ as Jacqueline put it. ‘It has demonstrated,’ she went on, ‘and here I think we can hear her’ – Gillian’s – ‘critique of Israel today, the point where an attempt to guarantee your ethical life precisely because you are … an outsider, risks inverting itself into the most dangerous forms of self-legitimation and power.’

Mourning Becomes the Law has a subtitle, ‘Philosophy and Representation’, which sounds bland, but really isn’t. By ‘representation’, Rose is thinking about the word’s three main uses, to do with art, to do with politics, to do with philosophy, and a critique of all of them, in their ‘mutual entanglements in power’, ‘without … depending on any outworn metaphysical base’. It’s a faster, looser version of what Hegel contra Sociology painstakingly propounded as the speculative proposition, ‘the pathos of the Concept’ as dramatised by The Broken Middle, but shot from a pistol, for a change. ‘Alert to the critique of representation and to my own critique of that critique … I discuss architecture, painting, film and poetry in its representation of power, domination and the Holocaust.’ And so, it was to ‘the connection between liberalism and fascism’, disaster triumphant as she saw fascism’s post-Soviet re-emergence in the 1990s, to which her thoughts were turning in her final book.

Rose’s inaugural lecture at Warwick became the first chapter in Mourning Becomes the Law. The first joke comes in the title of the lecture. The third city turns out to be the secular city, from ancient Rome to the 1990s community architecture movement, as sponsored by Prince Charles, as if modernity had never happened – she had a slide to show us, of the heir to the throne, pictured in friendly communion with a group of ‘grubby, labouring lads’. The second joke came in her reading of Poussin’s painting of Phocion’s wife, gathering her unjustly executed husband’s ashes outside the wall of the ideal city. Rose had, she theatrically confided, entered into a correspondence with Sister Wendy, then a television art historian, on the subject of this painting. According to Plutarch, Phocion’s wife gathered the ashes to her breast; according to Sister Wendy, she mixed them with water and ate them. Either way, for Gillian the act was one of good-enough love and ‘a finite act of political justice’: ‘In these delegitimate acts of tending the dead … against the current will of the city, women reinvent the political life of the community.’ For Sister Wendy, it was simply ‘an act of perfect love’.

The third joke came in what is now the third act of the essay: a fourth city, Auschwitz, ‘emblem of contemporaneous Jewish history and now of modernity as such’. Readers of Love’s Work know that in 1990 Gillian became a consultant to the Polish Commission on the Future of Auschwitz, amid the post-Soviet redevelopment of Eastern Europe and with the Holocaust turned into what she calls ‘a civil religion’, especially for Americans, ‘with Auschwitz as the anti-city’ of the ‘American political community’, ‘the measure of demonic anti-reason’. At that time, she said, several Holocaust museums were being opened in America, and she and her colleagues discovered they had been bidding against one another to buy ‘the last remaining original wooden barrack from Auschwitz-Birkenau’: ‘We were horrified.’ No joke there.

‘Holocaust piety’, Rose calls this new religion in the book’s second chapter, ‘Beginnings of the day – Fascism and representation’. ‘To argue for silence, prayer, the banishment equally of poetry and knowledge, in short, the witness of “ineffability”, that is, non-representability, is to mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too understandable, all too continuous with what we are.’ Instead of piety she proposes ‘Holocaust ethnography’, exploring ‘the representation of fascism and the fascism of representation … across the production, distribution and reception of cultural works’. Thus, for example, Liam Neeson as the hero of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), bearing witness to the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto, ‘suspended in a saddle on a charger, overlooking from a promontory’. Thus, too, the ‘humane, temperate, restrained’ Primo Levi – not, Rose notes, that even this humaneness could save him from feeling ‘irrevocably contaminated’ by what he had witnessed.

Her most illuminating move is to compare Spielberg’s movie with the Merchant Ivory adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day from the same year, in which a monstrously repressed butler, played by Anthony Hopkins – ‘the servant, the bondsman’ – finds his life’s work in the unquestioning service he performs for Lord Darlington, an aristocratic English Nazi, played by James Fox. ‘Let us make a film in which the representation of fascism would engage with the fascism of representation,’ Rose writes. ‘A film, shall we say, which follows the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos, so that we empathise with him, identify with his hopes and fears, disappointments and rage … We have seen the film, read the book, which represents this story.’ The Remains of the Day is not set in Nazi Germany, yet Rose is surely right that it is ‘a Nazi Bildungsfilm’, though ‘not a representation of mobilised fascism, which breaks the barrier between the fantasy of revenge and the carrying out of murderous feelings on arbitrarily selected scapegoats’. (The internet was not on hand in the 1990s to supply this, but it certainly is now.) ‘Instead of emerging with sentimental tears, which leave us emotionally and politically intact, we emerge with the dry eyes of a deep grief, which belongs to the recognition of our ineluctable grounding in the norms of the emotional and political culture represented.’ To which you might say, but I don’t live in a big house, either as a lord or a bondsman. But we all live with what Rose calls ‘the nihilism of disowned emotions, and the personal and political depredations’ so caused.

A problem with Marxism, Rose continues, is that it tends to assume that intellectuals, or individuals, or classes, are ‘innocent of political practice’ except when they are ready to act politically, whereas actually, we are always ‘already politically active’, all the time. We are, therefore, ‘always staking ourselves in the representation of fascism and the fascism of representation’. (It’s ‘fascist’, for example, Rose said in her Irish radio interview, to write ‘as a woman, as a Jew, as a Catholic, as a black’, without caveat or exploration, and I see what she means, though I also think it’s too harsh just to say that without much more explanation. To try it in the language of the allegory with which we started: to stake your claim to a place in politics, philosophy, the world, on your own fixed sense of a fixed identity doesn’t give politics, philosophy, the world, a lot of leeway. To try to fix your place in politics is bad for politics and for yourself.)

For politics ‘does not happen when you act on behalf of your own damaged good, but when you act, without guarantees, for the good of all – this is to take the risk of the universal interest. Politics in this sense requires representation, the critique of representation and the critique of the critique of representation.’ We have now come far enough in our journey, I think, to know what she’s saying we have to do.

There’s​ a funny bit in one of the Marxist Modernism lectures in which Rose blames Arendt for ‘the infuriating stress on the personal aspects’ of Benjamin’s life. Of course, she didn’t live long enough to see the irony play out in readers’ responses to Love’s Work, and of course, it’s because she knew she wouldn’t that she was able to write it the way she did. But ‘representation, the critique of representation and the critique of the critique of representation’. How do Rose’s remarks about the fascism inherent in ordinary cultural practices apply to the ways we read her book?

Love’s Work has now been published as a Penguin Modern Classic, with an introduction by Madeleine Pulman-Jones, a poet, linguist and translator from Russian, Polish and Yiddish. In 2020 she was diagnosed with Stage IV Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and writes of cancer treatment as one more dull, hard language to be attended to and brought to life: ‘I began to wonder whether the language of cancer – the words that wind themselves in and out of one’s veins like chemicals – is a dialect of a more important language: love.’ Maybe, and it’s neither avoidable nor a bad thing that in the ever more precisely targeted publishing market, Love’s Work now stands as a classic memoir of mortal illness. But I was dismayed to see Pulman-Jones write that Rose ‘was committed to the agon – the creativity – of writing’. ‘Creativity’ – eugh – was not at all a Gillian thing. What I haven’t said about her but should for truthfulness is that she could be harsh with students she felt weren’t trying. I totally adored her, as must be obvious, but even now, thinking about her occasional harshness makes me wince.

It’s noticeable, as Jay has observed, that many of Rose’s most committed readers don’t like writing about her deathbed reception into the Church of England: Caygill didn’t mention it in his obituary in Radical Philosophy, and Jacqueline didn’t mention it in her 2007 essay, though she did in an interview with Giles Fraser for his Confessions podcast in 2019: ‘For Gillian Christianity was a continuation of her Jewishness, it was not a repudiation of it.’ As Rose’s literary executor, Caygill published the text of her final notebooks in a 1998 issue of Women: A Cultural Review, ‘not only as the continuation of … Love’s Work but also for the light they cast on her controversial conversion to Anglican Christianity’, and then Paradiso in 1999, which casts more.

The final notebooks have never been published in book form. ‘I would write “Breakfast Poems” not Lunch Poems (Frank O’Hara),’ she writes on Sunday, 3 December. ‘Whatever breakfast consists of – gruel and grit on an upturned beer barrel, the sky already parched – it welcomes the day, looks out toward the horizon, harbours expectation.’ The next entry reports on a vomiting attack. ‘All children needed more cuddles and kisses … Physical affection is so important.’ She makes notes about Ezekiel, the Psalms, J.H. Prynne, visits from family and friends and the bishop of Coventry – ‘That is why seeing now a rabbi this weekend is essential … I shall not lose my Judaism, but gain that more deeply, too.’

There’s no point in a reader feeling too guilty about her voyeuristic longing to read those final notebooks in full. To feel bad is just to repeat the self-destructive self-obsession of the beautiful soul. Her sentimentality, however? ‘The sentimentality of the ultimate predator’ is a phrase Rose uses when writing about Schindler’s List: ‘the sentimentality of the ultimate predator, whose complacency is left in place’. Neither sentimentality nor complacency stand up for long against the disturbing force of Rose’s late political writings, and they’re relatively short and conversational. You can’t keep pleading ‘difficulty’ as your excuse.

It’s politics that matters, which is where ‘representation, the critique of representation and the critique of the critique of representation’ comes in. ‘It is possible to mean well, to be caring and kind, loving one’s neighbour as oneself, yet to be complicit in the corruption of social institutions’ – but exactly how, and how, then, do we start to stop it? Well, we are sentimental, too, about our innocence ‘as modern citizens, protected … by the military might of the modern state’, so we might start by spoiling that. It is, however, ‘the very opposition between morality and legality – between inner, autonomous “conscience” and outer, heteronymous institutions – that depraves us’, a diremption that is also a trauma that can never hope to heal. Though it might just be comprehensible, ‘in all its anxiety and equivocation’, if we go on trying, as Edna did, ‘getting it all more or less wrong, more or less all the time’. ‘In this way, we may resume reflexively what we always do: to know, misknow, and yet to grow.’ And then, ‘rended not mended’, the broken middle may show.