Issue 186, February 2025
Critical Theory, Aesthetics and Speculative Philosophy: A Special Edition on the Thought of Gillian Rose
Guest Editors: Michael Lazarus and Daniel Andrés López
This special edition of Thesis Eleven focuses on the thought of British philosopher and critical theorist Gillian Rose. With contributions focusing on Rose’s political thought, her literary and aesthetic philosophy, and her engagement with Hegel, this edition hopes to further establish Rose’s work as part of the canon of late 20th century philosophy. Additionally, this issue also contains an interview with New School critical theorist Jay Bernstein, who was close friends with Rose, as well her previously unpublished lecture, “Does Marx Have a Method?”
Articles:
Does Marx have a method?
This previously unpublished lecture was delivered by Gillian Rose in 1987 at the University of Sussex, as part of a multi-lecturer series called Sociological Theory and Methodology. In it, Rose explores the concept of ‘method’ in Marx’s work and its broader implications for philosophy and social theory. Against the tendency to interpret and employ Marx’s thought instrumentally or dogmatically, Rose emphasises its dialectical character. Unlike traditional notions of method as a set of rules or procedures for inquiry, Rose defines Marx’s method as a process that ‘follows the path’ (from the etymology of method: meta-hodos) from what we perceive as immediate experience to its social mediations, showing how specific concrete relations give rise to systematic subjective illusion. The lecture concludes by describing the ‘paradox’ of sociological reason: ‘The general statement of rules always presupposes the results which are to be explained. They are an essential and deadly exercise. […] Sociology must be disciplined or methodological in order to be rational. But equally, it must recognise its inherent tendency to lose its object if it becomes excessively instrumental. Hence, it must constantly radicalise its methods.’ In typical fashion, Rose challenges us to resist the allure of abstract methods, fixed positions or any other form of intellectual comfort, and offers a stark warning of the dangers of such complacency.
Where is the Cross? On Gillian Rose: Interview with JM Bernstein
Michael Lazarus and JM Bernstein
In this interview with Michael Lazarus, Jay Bernstein reflects on the history of his intellectual friendship with Gillian Rose—until her early death, his dearest friend. It was a friendship rooted in a shared passion for Hegel’s philosophy as the ground origin and abiding source of Marxist Critical Theory. In the course of the interview, Bernstein comments on the role of speculative propositions in Rose’s reading of Hegel; her modernist understanding of the meaning of style even after her critique of Adorno on style; on her obsession with critiquing post-structuralism; her continuing allegiance to Marxism; his understanding of her turn to political theology; the significance of Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” for her and him; the meaning of law in Rose’s thought as well as in his; the power and courage of her last book, Love’s Work, its work of affirmation. He concludes with a reflection on his sense that she is a thinker whose fate is to be loved, studied, forgotten, and then discovered anew.
Reification in the age of climate catastrophe: After Gillian Rose’s critique of Marxism
In The Melancholy Science and the lecture series Marxist Modernism, Gillian Rose reconstructs Theodor W. Adorno’s critical theory of society through the exposition of his theory of reification. Strikingly, Rose argues that it is Nietzsche and not the Hegelian Marxism of Georg Lukács that is the engine of Adorno’s theory. Although she argues that Adorno’s critical theory is an advance beyond what preceded it, she contends in Hegel Contra Sociology that it finally collapses into a form of abstract neo-Kantianism, a propounding of what ought to be in isolation from what is. This forces her to abandon reification theory and hence Marxism as the essence of a critical theory of society and turn to Hegel’s speculative philosophy. In the age of climate catastrophe as the constituting crisis of our time, the abandonment of reification theory must be contestable. This paper argues that Lukács’ fellow Galileo Circle comrade, Karl Polanyi, propounds a theory of reification in which the account of the meaning of the commodification of land, labor, and money precisely answers to the need for a critical theory in the age of climate catastrophe.
Philosophy in the severe style: Method and value in Rose’s Hegel and Marx
In Hegel Contra Sociology, Gillian Rose argues that Hegel’s political theory is written in the “severe style,” marking speculative thinking as the appropriate mode of exposition of capitalist modernity. By taking distance from Hegel, she maintains, Marx and Marxism retain a distinction between thought and actuality that forecloses a proper account of capital. I argue that Marx pursues speculative thinking when accounting for capital’s logic of self-valorization. Speculative thinking in Rose’s sense allows us to move beyond production, linking self-valorization to the historical coming to be of capital. Stephanie Smallwood’s work is decisive, moving beyond the commodification of labor power for the extraction of surplus value in free labor, tracing the genesis of the capital relation and the money-form itself to the circulation of African people as commodities in the trade. This is not the prehistory of capital, a primitive accumulation, but the totality of conditions that articulate capital’s movement.
Economy and state: The politics of citizenship and universality in Gillian Rose, Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemburg
This article examines Gillian Rose’s understanding of the relationship between universality and diremption in the capitalist economy and the capitalist state. Adopting Rose’s triadic discussion in The Broken Middle, I contrast her thought with Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemburg. Rose’s investigation of the ‘political diremption’ of the modern state is conducted via a critical appraisal of Arendt’s oeuvre. While Arendt is one of the most celebrated thinkers today, Rose’s analysis has been virtually ignored. Strikingly, Rose makes a novel distinction between the problematic of diremption between economy and state in Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and the idealism of The Human Condition. Rose argues that Arendt’s shift is ahistorical and betrays the radical potential of her best insights. This critique helps assess current debates over universal human rights and the relation between the capitalist economy and nation-state. Identifying the exclusions of citizenship, Rose advances a politics of universal freedom from ‘the broken middle’.
Substance is subject is style: On the speculative poetics of Gillian Rose
This article proposes a reading of philosopher Gillian Rose’s works as predominated by the question of literary style. In contrast to Rose’s professed antipathy for the linguistic and structuralist turns in 20th-century philosophy, this article contends that her thought makes recourse to distinctions of literary form (i.e. poetics) to resolve problems of philosophical expression. The contours of this poetics are traced from Rose’s first works on the respectively ‘ironic’ and ‘severe’ styles of Adorno and Hegel, through to her final published work and its experimentations with the formal limitations of philosophical writing. Following Hegel’s theorisation of the ‘speculative proposition’ as a statement of formal difference belying a conceptual unity, Rose’s poetic thought is designated as a speculative poetics, which seeks a stylistic unity that does not efface the non-identity of its terms.
Tragic landscapes: TJ Clark and Gillian Rose on modernity and the future
This essay places the work of the art historian TJ Clark in relation to the social and political philosophy of Gillian Rose. It develops an interpretation of the ideas that inform his art history, and of the ways in which they inform his advocacy of a ‘tragic’ approach to what he calls ‘Left’ politics. The latter approach is intended to avoid the dangers that Clark takes to be inherent in the Left’s classical focus on shaping the social conditions of the future. The essay shows that Rose’s philosophy is also sensitive to such concerns, and that it echoes aspects of Clark’s position. In her work, however, this does not come at the cost of abandoning an orientation to the future. These points are developed via a discussion of the two writers’ respective conceptions of modernity, and via a consideration of their differing readings of two paintings by Nicolas Poussin.
The anxiety of beginning
To shoot from a pistol: this essay explores the anxiety of beginning through a reading of Hegel and Gillian Rose. Hegel is anxious about philosophical beginnings and the presuppositions which they might take for granted. Yet he is also anxious to begin, to not waste time securing the beginning in advance, which would indefinitely forestall beginning altogether. For Hegel, one must take the risk of beginning, without any guarantees, if only to discover in retrospect the beginning’s shortcomings and failings. Gillian Rose takes this up in her reading of the philosophical canon. Past works are not dogma, unquestionable authorities which tell us what to think, but the work of authorships which, if followed, open up a space for self-reflexive and self-corrective thinking. She also takes it up in her conception of identity. She does not write ‘as a woman’ or ‘as a Jew’, for that would presuppose and fix those identities in advance as a beginning without anxiety. Instead, writing is the means of anxiously developing these identities and discovering their plasticity. Furthermore, Rose takes up the anxiety of beginning in her critique of those philosophies which infer from our failure to think the absolute that the absolute itself is a failure. For Rose, the failure to think the absolute must be recognised as a failure determined by its beginning in the middle of bourgeois property law (or capitalism). In this, I mount a Rosean critique of Slavoj Žižek who transforms the determined failure to think the absolute into an undetermined metaphysics which says that the absolute is a failure. Finally, she takes it up in her notion of justice. Unlike Derrida, for whom justice is a messianic promise outside the law, Rose argues that justice may only be realised through the anxiety of beginning, through the risky activity of the assuming and exercising of power for the sake of the universal interest, activity arising from a comprehension of actuality. This essay will recover the essential point that the (broken) middle for Rose is not only a spatial term, but a narratological or temporal term, naming the passage between the beginning and the end, which at once undoes the certainty of any beginning or end. The essay ends with some reflections on the anxiety of beginning in Palestine.
Divine comedy in the work of Gillian Rose
Daniel Andrés López
This article reconstructs Gillian Rose’s idea of ‘divine comedy’, from its first articulation in Hegel Contra Sociology (2009) to the development of the idea in later works; most importantly, Love’s Work (1995). This analysis demonstrates that Rose implicitly shifted away from her earlier, pessimistic, Hegelian account of the end of art and her insistence on the ‘severe style’. Divine comedy, it is argued, may satisfy the requirements that Rose articulates for speculative thought, by traversing the constitutive dichotomies of modern life – for example, between universal and particular, or between law and love – in light of individual experience. By reading Love’s Work as an exemplary modern divine comedy, this article argues for the ongoing viability of the ‘ideal style’, which Rose had previously dismissed. This, in turn, suggests a novel reading of Rose’s oeuvre and affirms the possibility of a speculative poetics.
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