On Gillian Rose’s facetious style

Gillian Rose did not fully succeed in the way she hoped. Although she succeeded in some of her aims and was very influential on some, she did not transform the general intellectual culture among (let’s call them) ‘continental’ thinkers.¹ She did not shift the intellectual mood from ‘aberrated’ to ‘inaugurated’ mourning,² or gain widespread acceptance of her vision of reason or philosophy.³ A standard reason given for this is that her texts are very difficult to read.⁴ I think this is true, and I want to focus on a related matter: Rose’s facetious style. Although Rose’s aims for her works were logically coherent, I will argue that they pull apart along their speculative and therapeutic dimensions. While her stylistic choices were clearly intentional, those of her books written in the ‘facetious style’ often fall between two stools: neither detailed enough for her speculative aims, nor narrative enough for her therapeutic aims. In saying this, I do not intend the larger claims that her facetious style never works, or that literature and philosophy must be or are completely distinct; nor do I want to make any claims about the success or otherwise of other stylish philosophers, such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche or Adorno. Whilst I am sympathetic to the idea of using a difficult and/or literary style in philosophy, it carries a high risk of failure: it ended up limiting the reception of Rose’s work.

The Melancholy Science and Hegel Contra Sociology are not written in the facetious style, so I will mostly ignore them (though they are in their own ways difficult).⁵ Except for her final works, Love’s Work and Paradiso, Rose’s audience was primarily other scholars. The different ‘contract’ between author and reader in scholarly publications and presentations entails different conventions, demands and expectations that bear on style. Yet in many ways her popular and scholarly works are on a spectrum of stylistic devices rather than being completely different from one another, because they are animated by many of the same concerns.

In Judaism and Modernity Rose describes the ‘facetious style’ as a ‘mix of severity and irony, with many facets and forms, which presents the discipline of the difficulty’.⁶ This style is characterized by allusions to texts from a whole range of traditions; a refusal to define terms; word play and alliteration; a very condensed form of argumentation that requires a great deal of work from the reader to unpack; and close readings of texts that paradoxically require knowledge of the original texts in order to evaluate or even fully follow the readings, since they prosecute complicated arguments with the texts without much explanation of the context or aims of those texts.⁷ These works are written for specialists; even so, the range of figures with whom she deals goes beyond most people’s specialisms, making them a challenge to follow.

Jay Bernstein recently said there is not a single Rosean style; instead, each book has its own style that seeks to be adequate to the matter under discussion, and is a specific intervention in a debate of that moment.⁸ Whilst there is truth to this view, I think the fact that Rose labels her style,⁹ alongside the commonalities just mentioned, make it possible to discuss productively the facetious style at a certain level of generality.

Rose does not explicitly set out the reasons for adopting her style beyond saying her ‘speculative method of engaging with the new purifications whenever they occur, in order to yield their structuring but unacknowledged third, involves deployment of the resources of reason and of its crisis, of identity and lack of identity.’¹⁰ Nevertheless, we can extrapolate her reasons for her stylistic choices from some of her major sources. Although Rose claimed her style was largely influenced by the Financial Times,¹¹ it is the influence of Adorno, Kierkegaard and Hegel that are most important.¹² From Kierkegaard, Rose took, among other things, the approach of indirect communication,¹³ the aim of inducing the reader to work on herself, an interest in irony and the importance of not ‘arrogating authority’.¹⁴ From Adorno, I think she took the idea of writing a type of philosophy with the aim of generating a certain experience in readers to help them encounter the world afresh; a rejection of philosophical systems; the need for philosophy not only to understand things but to respond to them (or, philosophy and writing as aspects of critical practice); that philosophy must be maximally critically self-reflexive by reflecting on its own preconditions and reception; and that philosophy is animated not only by concepts or reason but by emotions and attitudes such as love, guilt, loss and mourning. Hegel’s phenomenological procedure – of bringing readers to recognize their misrecognitions in order to move them to a more comprehensive view – is often at play; and Rose was of course a speculative thinker, trying to loosen rigidified concepts and dichotomies in order to allow for different ways of thinking.

Further, it seems reasonable to infer that Rose identifies with the aims she attributes to Kierkegaard and the three women of The Broken Middle, chapter 5: an attempt to address each reader and call them to action in awareness of the incomplete nature of theoretical accounts of politics and action; to help them ‘come to learn their own implication’ and ‘formation in the culture’.¹⁵ A few pages later, we find one of the rare moments of limpid prose in the book, some from Kierkegaard and some from Rose herself,¹⁶ which prose we are told is merely able to ‘reflect abstractly’ the matter under discussion. Rose thus deliberately eschews a transparent account in order to provoke ‘attention dialectically’. She seems to affirm Goethe’s ‘therapeutic facetiousness’ that brings ‘into representation … the paradox’ of the changes and reversals of emerging social forms.¹⁷

Rose sought to weave together style and subject matter, so the former cannot be assessed without a sense of the latter.¹⁸ Each of her books obviously had its own aims and tasks, but I think there are nine common aims that run through them all from Dialectic of Nihilism onwards. She wanted

1. To show that ‘the most existential moment of ethical suspension is the most consistent witnessing of the history of ethical and political authority.’¹⁹

1. To interpret Hegel and Kierkegaard as both simultaneously conceptual and existential, or, put otherwise, to show that ‘repetition and critical reconstruction are not incompatible’.²⁰

1. To show ‘that it is possible to have faith and knowledge and politics in a way that does not require dogmatic reason or lead to existential scepticism or despair’.²¹

1. To ‘restore [our awareness of] the political history of ethical life’²² – especially the changing diremption between law and ethics, and between state and civil society – in order to allow us a greater freedom with respect to what shapes us.

1. To help us to accept our complicity in the necessities of legitimate violence, and thereby be willing to risk action for the universal interest.²³

1. To shift the prevailing attitude among certain thinkers about reason and philosophy, from aberrated to inaugurated mourning.²⁴

1. To persuade us of a different reading of the post-Kantian European philosophical tradition as concerned with ‘the dilemma of addressing modern ethics and politics without arrogating the authority under question’.²⁵

1. To offer a speculative and aporetic reading of philosophy and philosophers, of reason and of social and political life.²⁶

1. To retrieve the concepts of recognition and appropriation for social theory, on the understanding that appropriation is akin to Kierkegaard’s view that we must take on board the truth in order to become a ‘single individual’ or a proper self.²⁷

As is clear from these aims, Rose set herself a complex task. She is not merely trying to change her readers’ opinions, but to prompt them to work on themselves, to reassess their views and values in light of political and intellectual history; a therapeutic process of existential self-work that will gird them for the risk of political and/or moral action.²⁸ This is one of the ways in which much of her work is meta-philosophical. It is simultaneously about philosophical theories and the unrecognized attitudes driving the thinking of the theorists. Rose pursues, in the words of Maya Krishnan, ‘an almost psychoanalytic strategy to show how fantasies of safety and security distort philosophical thinking’.²⁹ She regarded many postmodern thinkers as (Krishnan again) throwing ‘a kind of tantrum in which thinkers misdirect their anger over an irrational society by lashing out at rationality itself’.³⁰ As Hegel remarks in the Encyclopaedia Logic: some philosophers are like adolescents, thinking everything is bad; some are like believers in Providence, accepting the status quo too easily.³¹ His own position is like an adult negotiating limits and imperfections in order to improve things. In so far as Rose wants to urge certain thinkers to grow up³² (whether fairly or not), she has to bring them to this realization for themselves. She tries to do this through detailed readings of their texts, trying to show their reliance on factors they have missed, which is meant to induce both a more comprehensive view (the speculative dimension) and a change in attitude (the therapeutic dimension). My guess is the attempt to shift attitudes is one of the reasons for the poetic, allusive nature of the facetious style.³³ My feeling, however, is that, in many instances, the speculative and therapeutic dimensions end up working against one another.

To simplify somewhat, when Rose discusses speculative philosophy, she often concentrates on two things: first, understanding the political history that shapes ethical life and the current diremptions that shape contemporary theory, especially those that are undertheorized and/or overlooked;³⁴ second, coming to a more comprehensive view of a topic or theory or oneself – or all three.³⁵ The two are often synthesized in Rose’s language of ‘converging on a third’. In the chapter in Judaism and Modernity on speculative and dialectical thinking, Rose argues that Nietzsche can be seen as a speculative thinker on the grounds that he, like Hegel, historicizes philosophy; narrates the emergence of morality in relation to legal concepts; sees both the ‘enabling and constricting’ components of the current legal epoch; is ironic about knowledge; and aims to educate the reader, to facilitate Bildung. They both thereby encourage the reader’s self-work in light of the political history of ethical life. In the same chapter she claims that Lukács has a speculative exposition of capitalism as a social structure because he treats the commodity as a way in to seeing the whole, the totality and its mediations.³⁶ Indeed, she uses the word ‘comprehensive’ almost as a synonym for speculative thought.³⁷

Clearly, then, Hegel is not the only speculative thinker, and we can find speculative moments even in thinkers who are not consistently speculative. Equally, this shows that we do not necessarily have to go through a phenomenological series of conceptual breakdowns in order to arrive at a speculative view. That may have been necessary when Hegel published his Phenomenology of Spirit, but in a post-Hegelian age in which sociology is an established discipline, the need for a comprehensive view to refer to social and political contexts and their histories is not in dispute. How precisely that occurs is what matters and where the power of an argument resides: Rose quotes Hegel’s line, ‘everything depends on how they are determined’.³⁸ Yet most of Rose’s own work lacks this detailed exposition about society and politics.³⁹ Perhaps this is partly down to the fact that she saw a continuity in her works, and in Hegel Contra Sociology she had relied on Hegel’s reading of history – especially the shift from Greece to Rome as the introduction of private property law and then persons and subjectivity and representation, followed by the fates of Christianity and the Reformation, Enlightenment and Romanticism. The importance of Roman law for Western philosophy recurs throughout her work, as do the diremptions between law and ethics and state and civil society. Yet indispensable as these historical layers and structural features of society are, how they are construed and configured in detail matters, for at least three reasons.

The first is that what sounds plausible initially can turn out, on closer inspection, not to be the case, as I think happens with Rose’s argument that Kant’s philosophy depends essentially on the categories of Roman law.⁴⁰

The second reason is the attempt in speculative philosophy to interweave the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history makes philosophical arguments vulnerable to changes in historical and/or sociological accounts.⁴¹ For instance, Rose characterizes contemporary society as evincing the ‘inner anxiety and outer ruthlessness’ of Weber’s Protestants, and the ‘individual inwardness inverted into the ruthlessness of social institutions’ of Hegel’s spiritual-animal kingdom – and no doubt there is truth there.⁴² But to take only one recent example, Joseph Henrich’s research shows that

WEIRD [Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic] people from market-based societies tend to have the fairest, most cooperative, most trustworthy and least selfish behaviour of all, acting less purely in their own self-interest than one might expect. The more a society becomes structured towards a market economy … the more generous the offers that people made, on average, in behavioural economic experiments.⁴³

Partly because

[o]nly with relative economic security and political stability could the emancipatory values of equality, inclusion and freedom – those values so closely associated with moral progress – assert themselves.⁴⁴

This is not to say Henrich is right or even that we must choose between these accounts; rather it is to highlight the importance of the detail which alone can help us navigate what Rose wants to – the way through the aporia and changing shape of the diremptions.

This relates to the question of how we know something is wrong. Martin Jay remarks that it could be difficult to have productive dialogue with Rose, partly due to her ‘fondness for gnomic pronunciamentos, and hedgehog-like ability to incorporate every possible position into her own worldview’.⁴⁵ The former is one characteristic of her prose – even if the refusal to define her terms was a conscious inheritance from Nietzsche and Adorno. Perhaps the latter was a reason she didn’t feel she needed to argue in too much detail – perhaps she thought the detail was included in her views anyway.⁴⁶ I don’t mean this in an ad hominem way; only to argue that speculative comprehension requires a type of detail that seems to be lacking in her works. She often tells us what to do more than she shows us how to do it.⁴⁷

The third reason we need detail for speculative philosophy is that, if we want a ‘determinate negation’⁴⁸ of what’s wrong or distorted in current ethical life and theory, in order to advance to a more comprehensive view without imposing a Sollen, we need enough detail about what is going wrong to see where the negation leads. Exemplary here, in my opinion, is Jay Bernstein in both Torture and Dignity and Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. If we take the latter as an example, Bernstein offers a detailed account of ethical life’s current situation and possibilities, based on a careful reading of its status as disenchanted. Bernstein called this ‘dry speculative’ philosophy,⁴⁹ probably because of its detail and clarity in spelling out its argumentative steps. The ‘predicament of ethical life’, for Bernstein, is ‘a consequence of the overlap and convergence of the domination of scientific rationality in intellectual life and … the bureaucratic rationalization of practical life in the context of indefinite economic (capital) expansion’.⁵⁰ To make this case, Bernstein pursues simultaneously sociological and philosophical readings of European history, in order to show how exactly theoretical reason has become sceptical and practical reason has become instrumental. It is this depth and level of argumentation that make persuasive his argument against Kant’s moral philosophy on the basis that ‘each of its fundamental gestures can be interpreted as both a response to the disenchantment of nature and the rationalization of reason, and, at the same time and despite itself, a further work of disenchanting and rationalizing.’⁵¹ This in turn allows an argument about how we should think morally now. This seems to me a paradigm of ‘suspending the ethical’ in order to bring in the plasticity of speculative thought, but it only works via the detailed interleaving of sociology, political history and philosophy.

Where Rose does have more detail, it is focused on theory rather than society. Rose thought of Dialectic of Nihilism and The Broken Middle as providing detailed arguments about the breakdown of conceiving law and ethics in much philosophy and social thought.⁵² And, of course, analysing social theory is one way of analysing society, since the theories conceptualize society. But Dialectic of Nihilism is an argument that various thinkers misconceive ethics because they ignore law, or use legal categories uncritically, and it does not include much detail about the nature of society beyond the broad claim about the diremption of law and ethics. And, as Jay Bernstein puts it, The Broken Middle is a ‘phenomenology of modern theory that works within the dialectic of ethical life rather than being about it’.⁵³ Once again, the focus is on theory more than society, which again feels as if it tells us what we ought to do without showing us how it can be done. In neither case is there the sort of detailed reading of society and politics that would enable Rose to show us how to suspend the ethical.

Bernstein’s ‘dry speculative’ arguments show us fundamental aspects of the political history of our ethical life, but, in contrast to Rose, he leaves what we do with it up to us, rather than seeking to induce a specific existential response from the reader. Bernstein offers what he calls ‘an argumentative reconstruction’ of Adorno in a ‘form that enables its fuller appreciation and ideally its further extension and elaboration’.⁵⁴ This is now a standard procedure among Adorno scholars (for example, Brian O’Connor, James Finlayson, Martin Shuster, Owen Hulatt) – reconstructing and spelling out his arguments in analytic ways – which suggests not merely that most people cannot write like Adorno, but that there’s something incomplete about such work: it actually needs to be reconstructed in a different format in order to be assessed and accepted. That in turn implies that most people are able to absorb the implications, both personal and general, when philosophy and literary elements are separated a little more clearly.

This, I suspect, is the reason Love’s Work is one of Rose’s most successful books – ‘successful’ not merely in the sense of having been more widely read, but in achieving her aims of having readers work on themselves and rethink what philosophy and reason are: because it employs narratives. Research across pedagogy, neuroscience, evolution and politics shows the multiple ways in which humans respond to narratives, but this seems to work by encountering the narrative itself, with discussion and clarification of the narrative as a separate step. This is the sort of procedure one finds in Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge. Nussbaum argues there are ways of making sense and understanding that are best done and only done in narrative, but the philosophical discussion of such narratives can help draw out and cement the sense-making of experiencing the narrative. As Nussbaum puts it, the head and heart need one another as allies.⁵⁵

Rose herself links the facetious style and narrative in The Broken Middle:

‘Fictions’, theoretical and literal, are themselves facetious forms which configure the double danger as it changes historically: aporia of the universal and agape of the singular. … Fiction and facetiousness maintain this tension, this aporia of the universal, and prevent it, even when personified and characterised, from succumbing to the contrary danger: from representing the agape of the singular, the inwardly piteous, outwardly pitiless individual, or the clockwork love-community set in an authoritarian locality. … Facetious form not ‘grand narrative’ sustains this double agon of authorship, which seeks to examine authority without arrogating it, to suspend the ethical and not abolish it.⁵⁶

Love’s Work is probably also Rose’s most therapeutically successful book,⁵⁷ not only because it uses narratives but because it doesn’t employ too much technical detail. And this is important because it reveals another place where it is very easy for the detail needed for speculative philosophy and the emotional charge needed for the therapeutic to oppose one another. David Foster Wallace was interested in writing the type of fiction that had the capacity ‘for making heads throb heartlike’, of combining ‘cerebration & emotion, abstraction & lived life’; but, equally, he thought novels of ideas are ‘pretty dreadful’ when they become too similar to the clarificatory style of philosophy, because the technical exposition of ideas weighs down and hinders the narrative drive and living quality of the characters.⁵⁸ Randy Ramal labels the combination of philosophical ideas, existential challenge and therapeutic possibilities in Wallace’s work ‘narrative philosophy’⁵⁹ – whether that be his fiction or his creative non-fiction such as ‘Consider the Lobster’ or ‘This is Water’. The reception of Wallace’s work suggests it was more successful along the existential or therapeutic dimension than Rose’s, partly because it more successfully balances narrative and detail, and it does this precisely by not having the level of detail we require from expository or clarificatory philosophy.

My invocation of Wallace is not arbitrary. He and Rose shared many preoccupations: the importance of irony and the danger of its tendency to degenerate into despair and nihilism; the tightrope of connecting with, versus manipulating, readers; the importance of and problems with ‘the post-structural problematization of language and representation’;⁶⁰ wanting to use philosophical ideas to encourage therapeutic or existential work by the reader; and the importance of taking the risk to stake oneself in moral commitment.⁶¹ Jon Baskin even thinks Wallace helps us discern the tendency of ‘artists and intellectuals [to] cycle so reliably between utopian evangelism and ironic anti-politics’, which is close to Rose’s diagnosis of the double danger of evading the broken middle.

Another similarity between the two is their anticipation of their works’ reception. Rose anticipated her works’ reception by deliberately making them difficult,⁶² and Wallace thematized the problem of the reception of his works, the tensions between honesty and manipulation, between being liked and moral communication. Wallace’s fiction dramatizes the reception problem through many characters who ‘manipulate the conditions of their own reception by seeming to level with the reader [or other characters] about their skill at manipulation’.⁶³ This problem is perhaps most intensely expressed in the story ‘Octet’. It is impossible to decide from ‘Octet’ considered in isolation whether Wallace is playing a metafictional game with readers or genuinely trying to communicate something to them. ‘Octet’ draws the reader into an infinite regress or recursion.⁶⁴ For Wallace, there was no way to forget or ignore the difficulties of irony in postmodern fiction; he had to seek a way through them. Yet even Wallace began to look for other, simpler ways of connecting with the reader, worrying that his style had degenerated into a tic.⁶⁵ We can read the Chris Fogle sections of The Pale King in this way, although they are only one part of a text containing metafictional techniques, so Wallace by no means abandons his commitment to working through the difficulties of the literary tradition. Nevertheless, the contrast with Wallace shows the risk that difficult styles run, almost to the point of being self-defeating, and it is suggestive that both writers’ late styles are more lucid, even if much of this might be down to a change in personal circumstances.

What objections might there be to the view I’ve outlined here? One is Rose’s view that if the intellectual and therapeutic, like style and substance, are inseparable, then the difficulty of the texts is not a sign of the speculative and therapeutic pulling apart, but is intrinsic to their functioning. One response to this objection is that the texts are so hard to read they start to lose their therapeutic function, because more energy is expended on trying to understand the text than on appropriating it in a therapeutic manner.⁶⁶ Another response is that subject matter can be to some extent distinct from style – otherwise nobody could talk about the same subject matter. And if part of the purpose is to communicate ideas, there has to be some precision about that as well – literature often asks questions and provokes reflection, but it rarely puts forward a precise thesis – which is not to say all philosophy has to do so, but, as we’ve seen, it must do so at points.

Perhaps Rose was worried that providing a comprehensive speculative tome would freeze the movement or plasticity essential to speculative thought.⁶⁷ She advocates an ‘unsettled and unsettling approach, which is not a “position” because it will not posit anything, and refuses any beginning or end’, which can nevertheless ‘induce repetition forwards’.⁶⁸ But there has to be something to unsettle; there has to be a positive position for speculative thought to loosen from its rigidity; there has to be somewhere from where one can risk action.⁶⁹ Rose should accept this, for she says, ‘Philosophy issues, too, out of this diremption and its provisional overcoming in the culture of an era – without “disowning” that “edifice”, it (philosophy) steps away to inspect its limitations.’⁷⁰ Another response to this worry is that the work makes sense and has the necessary detail so long as one knows or has read the works under discussion, which may in some cases be true.⁷¹ But it seems a least a tactical error to assume readers will be familiar with the whole range of writings under dis­cussion, and it still leaves the question of why there is not a more up-to-date example, and/or why Rose does not herself show us how to do it.

Perhaps these replies assume too much and we can press the objection again: the difficulty is intrinsic and necessary. For one thing, difficulty is only a tactical error if the aim is to be widely read. Isn’t criticizing Rose for writing difficult texts analogous to asking T.S. Eliot to write more straightforwardly? For another, struggling through a text can itself enhance experience, even if it can be difficult to articulate precisely what one gains from it.⁷² This could defeat my argument if one reads the objection as seeing my argument as misdirected by asking Rose to do something different from what she set out to do. But my argument is not that Rose should have written in an analytic style rather than the facetious style, but that for the purposes of her own aims the balance of her style tips too far towards the obscure. That is, the texts are more difficult and obscure than they need to be, even accepting the necessity of difficulty, and precisely thereby undermine their own aims.

Perhaps showing us how to suspend the ethical (and so on) would arrogate authority when a main purpose of Rose’s writings is to have the reader live philosophically by deciding for themselves how to go about navigating the broken middle.⁷³ In some sense this is true, but Rose does seek to offer some examples in The Broken Middle and in Love’s Work, so it cannot be the whole truth; and again the problem is being too obscure. Bernstein wrote in the reader’s report for The Broken Middle that the book works within the dialectic of ethical life rather than being about it, which in Rose’s terms would be to say it is not an abstract reflection on the dialectic of ethical life but an attempt to reveal it at work or playing out; though she does this in theories more than in people’s lives or social or political movements. This is a perfectly valid thing to do, but the feeling gradually accrues that we are being repeatedly told what to do (or, more often, what not to do) rather than being shown how it could be done. The three women of chapter 5 of The Broken Middle are meant to be largely positive examples of suspending the ethical and remaining with the anxiety of beginning and awareness of double danger, but to what does this amount? Admittedly an interesting way of reading the oeuvre of each, but in substance it seems to be largely a matter of (1) being aware that concepts and distinctions have a history and therefore should not be used unreflectively (this seems to be Rose’s pejorative use of ‘judging’) – yet we still have to be able to use concepts in order to stake a position and risk action; (2) exploring changing diremptions – though for that we would need detailed examination of society and politics, which Varnhagen, Luxemburg and Arendt do more than Rose; (3) accepting the imperfections of politics and working with what is to hand, without turning to spurious use of universals or the immediacy of community. But do we really need the elaborate apparatus for this? Phrases like ‘equivocation of the ethical’ are neat slogans for capturing a kind of theoretical know-how, but by the end one has a reservation well put by John Milbank’s remarks on The Broken Middle,⁷⁴ that Rose risks a ‘dialectic without issue’, which is very close to the Derridean deconstruction she spurned. The emphasis on the implied totality, broken though it is, does not really come through. And this means there is little said about actual praxis rather than theoretical know-how. Yet why cannot practical solutions be seen as a speculative move of reaching for a version of the totality? Zygmunt Bauman felt the book conflates authorship and actorship, making writing and the intellectual into the paradigm of action, despite its intentions.⁷⁵

A different problem for my account is that narrative is not the only mode of the therapeutic; poetry or aphorism can serve a similar function – and we do find those modes in Rose’s writing, so it’s worth repeating that I think she does sometimes succeed in her aims. But what Rose calls the ‘drama’ and ‘comedy’ of misrecognition in a phenomenology do have a narrative dimension – and it is this that I think is sometimes lacking.

Another objection can be expressed in the words of Gregory Marks:

Speculative thought is not given in a statement, but must be drawn out by interpretative practices that do not prejudge the object of the severe style or presuppose a unity of the object given ironically. … Indeed, throughout Rose’s works it is the process of misrecognition that informs her thinking on style and may best serve as the principle for her poetics of philosophical writing.⁷⁶

Certainly this is an important way of getting to speculative thought, and one that Rose in some ways seeks to achieve. But, as I noted earlier, Rose herself identifies other ways of presenting speculative thought to readers, so perhaps this objection conflates phenomenology as a method and speculative thinking as an outcome.

At this point in history, do all speculative works have to have a phenomenological propaedeutic?

Footnotes

1. 1. J.M. Bernstein interviewed by Michael Lazarus, ‘Where is the Cross? On Gillian Rose’, Thesis Eleven 186, 2025, ed. Michael Lazarus and Daniel Andrés López, pp. 1–17. ↩

2. 2. Cf. Carolin Emcke, Weil es sagbar ist. Über Zeugenschaft und Gerechtigkeit, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 2015; and the comments in Andrew Brower Latz, ‘More Sayable Than you Think’, Open Letters Monthly, 1 September 2016, www.openlettersmonthlyarchive.com/olm/more-sayable-than-you-think. ↩

3. 3. Maya Krishnan, ‘The Risk of the Universal’, The Point Magazine, 3 June 2024, https://thepointmag.com/politics/the-risk-of-the-universal. ↩

4. 4. See, for example, Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson, ‘Editor’s Introduction: Gillian Rose and the Difficulty of Critical Theory’, in Gillian Rose, Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Verso, London, 2024, pp. vii–viii, citing similar views from Howard Caygill, Peter Osborne, Andrew Shanks and Jacqueline Rose. Cf. Jenny Turner, ‘What Else Actually Is There?’ London Review of Books, 46:21, 7 November 2024, www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n21/jenny-turner/what-else-actually-is-there. ↩

5. 5. In Reading Hegel: Irony, Recollection, Critique (Chicago University Press, Chicago IL, 2025, p. 121), Robert Lucas Scott echoes his view from the Editors’ Introduction to Marxist Modernism that Hegel Contra Sociology is unfairly neglected because of its dense and difficult style. Gregory Marks, in ‘Substance is Subject is Style: On the Speculative Poetics of Gillan Rose’ (Thesis Eleven 186, 2025, pp. 97–115), considers The Melancholy Science and Hegel Contra Sociology as written in the severe style and other works of Rose to be in the ‘ideal style’ discussed in HCS. Here, however, I use Rose’s own term for her style from the ‘Preface’ to Judaism and Modernity. ↩

6. 6. Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity, Blackwell, Oxford, 1993, p. xi. Rose labels Kierkegaard’s style as ‘facetious’ in The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992, p. 94. Cf. Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-Structuralism and Law, Blackwell, Oxford, 1984, p. 178, where she describes critically self-reflective writers as ‘preoccupied … with the connection with the place from which they speak and the form of their speaking’ – a position she attributes to Weber and Durkheim. It is fair to say that Weber and Durkheim wrote more standard academic prose, however. ↩

7. 7. Cf. Andrew Shanks, Against Innocence: Gillian Rose’s Reception and Gift of Faith, SCM Press, London, 2008, p. 48. ↩

8. 8. Bernstein, ‘Where is the Cross?’ ↩

9. 9. As she does also in The Broken Middle, p. 240; cf. p. 245. ↩

10. 10. Judaism and Modernity, pp. x–xi. That sentence itself is an example of the facetious style, because to take a stab at knowing what the ‘third’ is, we have to look back a page or two to infer it means modern private property law based on ancient Roman law, and the separation of state and civil society in modern politics. ↩

11. 11. Letter to the editor of the Financial Times dated 20 February 1992. Rose sent them a copy of The Broken Middle to review because of its ‘social and political argument which may be of interest to your readers. However, it also comes to you with a certain amount of gratitude and fondness – for I am aware that my style – even thought – owes much to the FT and its consummate use of English prose. Apart from swimming, there is nothing I do as regularly as read the FT.’ Gillian Rose Archive, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, MSS.377, box 36. ↩

12. 12. See Marks, ‘Substance is Subject is Style’, and Daniel Andrés López, ‘Divine Comedy in the Work of Gillian Rose’, Thesis Eleven 186, 2025, pp. 153–69. ↩

13. 13. Letter to Tom and Barbara, 10 February 1995, Rose archive, box 14. ↩

14. 14. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 213, describes the facetious style as ‘the only non-legislative authorship’, which shows that its irony is not equivalent to being unserious or withholding oneself from the risk of staking a position. ↩

15. 15. Ibid., pp. 154, 245. ↩

16. 16. Ibid., pp. 163 and 164 respectively. ↩

17. 17. Ibid., pp. 153, 195. Cf. the description of Weber’s ‘facetiousness’ in ibid., p. 177, and Luxemburg’s in ibid., pp. 206, 210–213. ↩

18. 18. López, ‘Divine Comedy in the Work of Gillian Rose’; Marks, ‘Substance is Subject is Style’. ↩

19. 19. The Broken Middle, p. 39. ↩

20. 20. Letter to Robert Jan van Pelt, 14 August 1992, Rose archive, box 16, about The Broken Middle. ↩

21. 21. Ibid. ↩

22. 22. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 152. ↩

23. 23. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, pp. 1–10; Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 1–14. ↩

24. 24. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 70. ↩

25. 25. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, ‘Preface’ for the 1995 Verso reprint, p. viii. ↩

26. 26. Rose, Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life, Chatto & Windus, London, 1995, pp. 124 ff; Judaism and Modernity, pp. xi, 2–5. ↩

27. 27. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 45. ↩

28. 28. I take this to be the primary meaning of Rose’s phrase ‘arrogating authority’, since in modernity each person must assess not only the reasons for their views but the reason for accepting those reasons too. Cf. Tom Bunyard, ‘Tragic Landscapes: T.J. Clark and Gillian Rose on Modernity and the Future’, Thesis Eleven 186, 2005, pp. 116–36. ↩

29. 29. Krishnan, ‘The Risk of the Universal’. ↩

30. 30. Ibid. Cf. the Introduction to Mourning Becomes the Law; and Jenny Turner, ‘What Else Actually is There?’ ↩

31. 31. G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, Part I: Science of Logic, trans. and ed. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010, §234 Addition. ↩

32. 32. Cf. Alistair J Smith and Gerald Midgley, ‘Accommodation and Critique: A Necessary Tension’, Systems Research and Behavioural Science 42, 2025, pp.23–50. ↩

33. 33. López, ‘Divine Comedy in the Work of Gillian Rose’, suggests Rose sought to affirm an ‘aesthetic dimension to speculative experience’ that ‘combines philosophy and poetry’ (pp. 167–8). As Bartholomew Ryan remarked after the presentation of this paper, the different forms, the engagement of emotions and the sense of failing into oneself are all taken from Kierkegaard as goads to philosophical living, to working on oneself. ↩

34. 34. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 223: the ‘overall intention of Hegel’s thought is to make a different ethical life possible by providing insight into the displacement of actuality in those dominant philosophies which are assimilated to and reinforce bourgeois law and bourgeois property relations.’ Cf. the introduction and first two chapters of Judaism and Modernity. ↩

35. 35. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, ch. 6. This can occur through speculative experience, which a phenomenology can provide. Cf. Hegel Contra Sociology, pp. 48–50. ↩

36. 36. Cf. Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 232, on commodity fetishism as Marx’s most speculative moment because it shows the necessary illusions of subject and substance. ↩

37. 37. Cf. ibid., p. 49: ‘This “whole” can only become known as a result of the process of the contradictory experiences of consciousness which gradually comes to realize it.’ ↩

38. 38. Ibid., p. 119. ↩

39. 39. This is true even when Rose is being straightforwardly explicit about the ethics/law diremption causing failures in theorizing; for example, in Judaism and Modernity, p. 21, where the claim is asserted rather than argued. Reference is made to classical sociology and Weber but no argument is provided. ↩

40. 40. Andrew Brower Latz, ‘Ideology Critique via Jurisprudence: Against Rose’s Critique of Roman Law in Kant’, Thesis Eleven 133, 2016, pp. 80–95. ↩

41. 41. Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism, p. 3, notes Hegel ‘suspends the history of philosophy within the philosophy of history, and the philosophy of history within the history of philosophy’. ↩

42. 42. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 68; The Broken Middle, p. 164. ↩

43. 43. Hanno Sauer, The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality, trans. Jo Henrich, Profile Books, London, 2024, p. 209. ↩

44. 44. Ibid., p. 243. ↩

45. 45. Martin Jay, ‘The Conversion of the Rose’, Salmagundi 113, 1997, pp. 41–52. ↩

46. 46. Although Bernstein, ‘Where is the Cross?’ (p. 12), suggests perhaps Rose had more principled objections to certain types of detail. ↩

47. 47. For example, The Broken Middle, pp. 169 and 217. In the former, she criticizes Booth and Nygren for ‘abolishing the ethical’, but doesn’t show us what it would mean instead to be ‘simultaneously suspending and releasing it’. In the latter, she criticizes Arendt for failing to suspend the ethical but Rose doesn’t herself ‘explore this diremption in the experience of the individual’ – which is what suspending the ethical is supposed to allow us to do. Cf. Michael Lazarus, ‘The Legacy of Reification: Gillian Rose and the Value-form Theory Challenge to Georg Lukács’ (Thesis Eleven 157, 2020, pp. 80–96; 88), who points out that Rose identifies a problem in Marxism’s use of Marx’s theory of value without then providing a ‘substantial positive account’ to make good on the failure. ↩

48. 48. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 228. ↩

49. 49. Bernstein, ‘Where is the Cross?’ ↩

50. 50. J.M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, Cambridge University, Cambridge, 2001, p. 3. ↩

51. 51. Ibid., p. 36. ↩

52. 52. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 26. ↩

53. 53. J.M. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory, Routledge, London, 1999, p. 185. ↩

54. 54. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, p. 39. ↩

55. 55. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990, p. 283. ↩

56. 56. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 164; cf. pp. 14–15. ↩

57. 57. Cf. ‘Love’s Work: James Butler, Rebekah Howes, Rowan Williams’, 10 April 2024, www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/podcasts-video/podcasts/love-s-work-james- butler-rebekah-howes-rowan-williams. ↩

58. 58. David Foster Wallace, ‘The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress’ in Both Flesh and Not, Little, Brown, London, 2012, p. 46. ↩

59. 59. Randy Ramal, ‘Beyond Philosophy: David Foster Wallace on Literature, Wittgenstein, and the Dangers of Theorizing’, in Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb, eds, Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy, Bloomsbury, London, 2014, pp. 177–98. ↩

60. 60. Robert L. McLaughlin, ‘Wallace’s Aesthetic’, in Ralph Clare, ed., The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2018, pp. 159–60. ↩

61. 61. Jon Baskin, ‘David Foster Wallace’s Final Attempt to Make Art Moral’, The New Yorker; accessed 10 February 2025. ↩

62. 62. Bernstein, ‘Where is the Cross?’ ↩

63. 63. Lee Konstantinou, ‘Wallace’s “Bad” Influence’, in The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace, p. 51. For instance, Orin Incandenza in Infinite Jest. ↩

64. 64. Cf. Rose, The Broken Middle, pp. 27–8: ‘Since the Phenomenology of Spirit is historical, genealogical and futural, once the flight into thought has occurred the conflict can never be unmediated again. The “secret” of the Phenomenology … lies in the challenge of expounding its own flights into thought – thereby risking further flight, yet taking that risk for the sake of provoking instead renewed negotiation of thought and its others – “the world”.’ ↩

65. 65. D.T. Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, Granta, London, 2012, p. 281. ↩

66. 66. Stephen Howe, ‘Pardon?’, New Statesman & Society, 28 February 1992, p. 46. ↩

67. 67. Cf. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §60–65, where Hegel speaks of the need to show the movement of thought and warns against mixing up ‘the speculative with the ratiocinative methods’ because it is necessary to exclude the normal way of thinking in order to grasp the speculative/properly philosophical way of thinking to ‘achieve the goal of plasticity’. We may ask, however, whether Rose’s situation is different from Hegel first introducing speculative thought in the Phenomenology ahead of its more rigorous exposition in the Logic, given two subsequent centuries of speculative thought. ↩

68. 68. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 155. ↩

69. 69. Cf. Brian O’Connor, Adorno, Routledge, London, 2013, p. 22, and Rachel Pafe, ‘Aporetic Marxism’, Radical Philosophy 2:18, Spring 2025, p. 66. ↩

70. 70. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 286. ↩

71. 71. Michael Lazarus, ‘Economy and State: The Politics of Citizenship and Universality in Gillian Rose, Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemburg’, Thesis Eleven 186, 2025, pp. 1–11. ↩

72. 72. These are both points made by Robert Lucas Scott in response to this paper. ↩

73. 73. As Bartholomew Ryan suggested after the presentation of this paper. ↩

74. 74. MSS 377/box 36, 5 April 1991, ‘On The Broken Middle: A Commentary in the Severe Style’. ↩

75. 75. Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Philosophy for Everyday – But Not for Everyone’, Economy and Society, vol. 22 no. 1, 1993, pp. 114–122. ↩

76. 76. Marks, ‘Substance is Subject is Style’, p. 105; cf. López, ‘Divine Comedy’, p. 154 (though López is really talking only about Love’s Work, which is somewhat different from the facetious style of earlier works by being easier to understand and less specialized). Scott, Reading Hegel, p. xix, argues one must misread a speculative proposition before one can read it properly. See also Lazarus, ‘The Legacy of Reification’. ↩