Our mutual entanglements: Gillian Rose and the critical theory of fascism
It is an unfortunate problem of modern history that the necessity to think fascism is insistently cyclical. This essay revisits, contextualizes and presents an interpretation of Gillian Rose’s scattered late interventions into the theory of fascism as a partial analysis of one such cycle. It has two principal aims.
Taking cues from some recent scholarship on Rose,1 the first of these probes at the commonplace sketch of Rose’s oeuvre that separates it into two distinct phases: an early, critical-theoretical phase, in which she established herself as one of the first anglophone commentators on Theodor W. Adorno, an ardent critic of sociological reason and a thinker concerned with producing a ‘critical Marxism’; and a late phase, characterized by her turn to the religious and the theological as well as to questions of ‘faith, inwardness and an ethic of singularity’.2 According to such a division, which I will grant is not without some general interpretative merit, particularly with respect to splits within the Rose reception and scholarship, the earlier of these two phases runs until the publication of Dialectic of Nihilism in 1984, or thereabouts, and the second from around 1990 through to her death in 1995. My counterproposition here is that in her late interventions historical circumstance encouraged Rose not only to extend and deepen her trenchant critique of the critique of representation and to renew her sustained attacks on poststructuralist thought, but also to reappraise key philosophical, sociological and psychoanalytic concepts and ideas developed, principally, by Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Rather than announcing a high point of her second phase, then, The Broken Middle from 1991 might rather be read as part of a series of interconnected texts through which Rose re-evaluates the actualities and shortcomings of the critical-theoretical tradition that so overtly influenced her early work.
If this first aim proposes a way in which we can situate Rose’s late interventions in the theory of fascism within her broader trajectory, the second proposes to interpret the content of such interventions as outlining a sustained critique of the modern liberal subject. Whilst her late work on fascism is now most widely circulated and utilized for her searing criticisms of ‘Holocaust piety’ – a term she introduces to characterize the trite representation of historical Fascism and a memorialization of Auschwitz which seeks to mystify the catastrophe rather than understand it3 – their central thrust, as I develop here, mobilizes a turn to ‘aesthetics’ and ‘aestheticization’ as a way of focusing her exposition of the confluence of the liberal subject with fascism. When Rose thus inserts herself into ‘the battle over Benjamin’,4 presenting what she claimed to be a synthetic interpretation of his oeuvre, her proper ambitions are rather to position Benjamin as a thinker of post-Protestant, Counter-Reformation subjectivity and its violent, affective structure. And with the turn to aesthetic concerns, with the realization that she had to rethink narrative and cultural representation, she developed an exposition of an emergent liberal–fascist psychological ‘type’. In doing so, she covertly and critically rehabilitates the mid-century psychological, sociological and philosophical model that Adorno and his colleagues advanced.
Whilst I offer no pretence that Rose’s essays are an adequate analysis of contemporary sociopolitical fascist tendencies and no suggestion, either, that they should be defended without qualification or that they evade critical scrutiny,5 we cannot countenance the view that they essentially amount to ‘an anti-fascist cultural politics that is more concerned with attacking liberal and moral social consciousness than fascism itself’, as Tony Gorman suggests.6 Such an interpretation not only misconstrues that Rose’s turn to cultural and aesthetic concerns is not a terminus but a route into a more incisive theory of fascism and its resistance; it also misconstrues Rose’s basic position that liberalism, even if analytically distinct, is a precursor to and entirely confluent with fascism.7 Her attack on liberalism and the liberal subject, both of which she understands herself to be objectively imbricated with, is thus not a distraction from the attack on fascism but a necessary component of it. In turning to Rose’s late essays, what we find and should seek to recover is a provisional critical-theoretical framework that sought to undermine liberal accounts of the preconditions of fascism, a set of arguments that ask us to abandon the false theoretical dualisms that separate those free of fascist tendencies from those contaminated by them, a barbed attempt to have us reject any propensity to melancholic resignation, and a heuristic that presses us to explore ‘our mutual entanglements’ – the guiding idea of all Rose’s interventions, with cyclical fascist social impulses and tendencies.8
The new seizure of power
As it presented itself to Rose in the early 1990s, in post-Thatcher Britain, the problem of fascist resurgence was essentially conditioned by a combined set of political, cultural and theoretical contingencies. Politically, the dominant issues that determined the field were marked by the reunification of Germany, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the swelling organized and successful far-right political currents. In Rose’s view, such transformations in the political field both required and facilitated the thinking of fascism, as she notes in the introduction to The Broken Middle:
The Revolution in the revolutions of 1989 has not ‘destroyed’ Marxism so much as it has dismantled post-war state-Socialism. We have been given back the last two hundred years – in life and in letters. All the debates, all the antinomies of modern state and society addressed since Hobbes, Smith and Rousseau, have been re-opened as well as the opportunity to resume examination of the connection between liberalism and Fascism from which post-war state-Socialism has proved such a dangerous distraction.9
With the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the opening of various archives, so too emerged a cultural reckoning with the histories of Fascism, work that Rose found herself directly involved in. As she writes in Love’s Work, she accepted an invitation to join ‘a number of Jewish “intellectuals” chosen to advise the Polish Commission on the Future of Auschwitz’.10 Though it is clear she took much from the experience, not least the opportunity to critically engage with Robert Jan van Pelt’s scholarship on the architectural and infrastructural design of the Auschwitz camp;11 it was also an invitation, one suspects, that Rose partially regretted. In her musings on the official visit to Poland and the work of memorialization, she thus remarks:
What vain posturing! Scientific status, superimposed on the even more dubious notions of cerebral and cultural ethnic identity! We were set up. Enticed to preen ourselves as consultants, in effect, our participation was staged. Conscripted to restructure the meaning of ‘Auschwitz’, we were observed rather than observing, the objects of continuous Holocaust ethnography, of Holocaust folk law and lore.12
Theoretically, Rose’s interventions are best viewed as occurring in the wake of the Historikerstreit, the highly inflammatory 1980s German debates concerning the historical incomparability and uniqueness of Auschwitz as well as the varying philosophical, theological and sociological arguments for or against such incomparability.13 Rather than adopting, affirming and advancing a position within this, Rose’s contribution was to identify, with the help of the psychoanalytic notion of resistance, an antinomy that separated the knowable from the ineffable, an antinomy that she took to stunt the basic terms of the debate. That is, neither should we remain content with the trivializing or vulgarizing depictions of Auschwitz that we commonly find in popular film, depictions that leave us reassured in our safe, projected subject positions, nor should we insist on mystifying it as something beyond the realms of knowing. The task, rather, is to navigate the shortcomings of representability without succumbing to the pitfalls of those positions that advance representation’s total critique. Thus, remarking on Jürgen Habermas’s claim that ‘Auschwitz altered the conditions for the continuation of historical life contexts – and not only in Germany’,14 Rose asserts that this ‘passage from Habermas indicates a trauma, a loss of trust in human solidarity, that marks the epoch which persists. In this way, the search for a decent response to those brutally destroyed is conflated with the quite different response called for in the face of the “inhuman” capacity for such destruction. 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 – human, all too human.’15
In so far as she does not produce a systematized socio-critical account of its origins and actuality, in so far as she forgoes a complete analysis of historical and contemporary manifestations, Rose’s claims and insights do not coalesce into a ‘theory’ of fascism or its recurrent tendencies.16 Her ambition, rather, was to pursue a set of ideas that arose through an assessment of the historical transition from an ‘endemic fascism’ of the post-war period to its ‘new seizure of power’.17 At the centre of these interventions, which occupy a significant portion of her late work, lay a rather remarkable turn in her writing towards ‘aesthetic’ concerns. Such is promised the reader of Rose in her short remarks contributing to ‘The Future of Auschwitz’ symposium in May 1990 in which she states that recent ‘“aesthetic” explorations of implication need to be developed and completed by critical reflection. Philosophical reflection and sociological analysis return us, however, to aesthetic questions, questions of representation.’18 She thus turns to a reassessment of narrative works of twentieth-century film and literature as well as to questions of cultural remembrance and architectural theory as the primary avenues for assessing the dominant fascist tendencies of her own moment. Rose, I believe, saw in ‘aesthetic’ questions and found in works of film and literature a problematic that could, if adequately examined, draw the theories of fascism out of the impasse into which she believed it had fallen, troubling liberal, subjective gratuitous complacency and the dirempted juridical categories of guilt and innocence, a dialectic of mutual imbrication that she believed overdetermines our thought. Among the first and most significant attempt at this is her highly unorthodox revisionist interpretation of Benjamin.
Incomplete mourning and unending melancholy
Let us begin where Rose concludes. In the closing lines of her essay on the significance of Judaic categories in Benjamin’s thought, Rose offers ‘three, potentially disturbing theses: that Benjamin’s account of the origin of Fascism is contained in his exploration of seventeenth-century Baroque drama; that our tendency to melancholy, however intellectual and passive, is violent; that Benjamin analyses, or breaks down, but he also fixes what he discerns.’19 For readers of the Origin of the German Trauerspiel, the pertinence of his analysis of early modern drama to the theory of historical Fascism will likely be hardly evident. To arrive at her theses, the first two of which I will focus on, Rose’s reconstruction relies on interpretative-philosophical manoeuvres that situate Benjamin within a rather atypical line of thought in order to draw out certain features and ideas in his corpus.
Initially, then, Rose constructs a tradition that treated, as she writes, ‘the unintended psychological and political consequences of Protestant Innerlichkeit (inwardness) and worldly asceticism’.20 In her characteristically truncated sweep through intellectual history, Rose here places Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, G.W.F. Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard and Max Weber in an ‘agon of authorship’21 whose work is jointly understood to pursue the socio-subjective transformation of the Protestant doctrine of salvation into a twofold ‘hypertrophy of the inner life’ and ‘atrophy of political participation’.22 In recognition of historical secularization and competing Catholic doctrine in Europe, Rose charts a diminishing belief in the Protestant notion of salvation whilst the inner anxiety associated with it is maintained – both of which combine ‘with worldly opportunism and ruthlessness’; a heady ‘combination of anxiety and ruthlessness amounts to the combination of inner and outer violence’.23 This is a suffering that cannot comprehend its loss and thus compensates through a violent externalization. As Gorman correctly identifies, Rose is here not so much interested in the Protestant moment in the historical genesis of modernity as she is in maintaining ‘that the significance of the Protestant Reformation does not lie in the event itself, but rather in its aftermath’.24 In essence, that is, she looks to construct and extend a line of thought that interrogates the politics of post-Protestant modernity, inflected through the moment of the Counter-Reformation and within which she locates Benjamin.
Though Rose’s essay is ostensibly an interpretation of Benjamin’s entire oeuvre, taking in everything from ‘the early philosophical fragments and short essays to the Arcades work and to the so-called theses on the concept of history’,25 her reconstruction of his thought is one properly predicated on three textual centres: ‘Toward the Critique of Violence’, Origin of the German Trauerspiel and the ‘Work of Art’ essay. More specifically, Benjamin’s famous concluding claims in the last that fascism practises ‘the aestheticizing of politics’26 is, in Rose’s hands, a hermeneutic through which to retroactively reframe his work as an extended treatment on the concept and actuality of divine violence, sovereignty, the rule of law and, ultimately, what she terms ‘the Baroque ethic and the Spirit of Fascism’. Where Rose had, in her 1970s lectures, positioned Benjamin’s work on the German Trauerspiel as offering the pre-Marxist origins of his theory of reification via the concept of allegory, she now positions this work as a post-Weberian treatment of a fundamental shift in the religiously inflected historical structure and character of experience as it proceeds from Protestantism and the Counter-Reformation through to French Catholicism and Jewish modernity. Through this sequence, the successive forms of inwardness come to be
correlated with the transition from worldly asceticism to worldly aestheticism, from worldly renunciation to worldly ornamentation (the Baroque ethic of worldly aestheticism persists from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century). They are also correlated with the transition from the end of politics in the spirit of capitalism to aestheticized politics in the spirit of Fascism.27
There are at least two supplementary elements to Rose’s line of argument that lend it some plausibility, though these are left unremarked upon in the essay. First, we must recall that though the movements were still somewhat nascent and yet to gain popular appeal, the history of European Fascism had some of its earliest eruptive moments just as Benjamin was drafting his Trauerspiel work.28 Given that in Weimar Germany electoral politics often played only an ancillary role in the groundswell of fascist movements in its earliest days, such moments do not necessarily register at the ballot box but are crystallized in open displays of street violence and spectacle, such as the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in November 1923. Even as early as 1924, then, Benjamin would find himself an unwilling observer of Italian Fascist street parades, writing to Gershom Scholem about his witnessing of their ‘display of power’ in Florence.29 Second, as an art-historical category, there is also some truth to the claim that the baroque occupies a share in the history of Fascism, including within the German context. With its precursors in mid-nineteenth century theories of ‘Jesuit style’,30 the early art history of the baroque saw it disregarded as little more than the aesthetic emanations of the late-Renaissance period of decline, beginning in the early sixteenth century, that would usher in a decadent architectural turn towards the peculiar, the unfamiliar, and the extraordinary, to borrow some adjectives from one of Benjamin’s prized art historians, Alois Riegl.31 Indeed, as Evonne Levy has demonstrated, one of the central issues of the study of the baroque in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the domination of a ‘politically overdetermined formalism that had at its centre a socio-political question about the relation of subordinated and coordinated parts’,32 questions that would be given, within the hands of art historians such as Hans Sedlmayr and A.E. Brinckmann, a very particular inflection during Fascist Germany. Even if we must observe that Rose was relatively uninterested in providing sufficient intellectual historical justification for her interpretation and that her notion of aesthetics is one broadly lacking any art-historical determination, it would perhaps be somewhat trivializing to fault Rose for not developing an account of either front, for the aim of her short essay is neither a total reconstruction of Benjamin nor a complete extrapolation of the baroque aesthetic.
What primarily interests Rose is the baroque as the expression of an ethic that partly determines forms of social relations and interpersonal behaviour in post-Protestant modernity. If, that is, Weber’s sociological account of Protestantism and its various denominations sought to underscore its ethic of worldly asceticism, if it sought to derive an ethic through the social extrapolation of Protestant ‘maxims for everyday economic conduct’,33 if it sought to demonstrate the psychological effects of a rationality that abjured temptations of the flesh, Benjamin is here viewed as interrogating the artistic and literary expressions of a subsequent Counter-Reformation ethic of worldly aestheticism. Where, in accordance with an ethic of asceticism, the visual language of Protestantism is articulated through an emphasis on iconoclastic reservation and visual renunciation, the baroque employment of ornamental excess and decorative embrace is thus the historical and stylistic counterpart to an ethic that, following the atrophying of a belief in salvation, ‘evinces a created and creaturely world with the aspiration but without the promise of redemption’.34 Though Benjamin himself does not quite claim to write such a diagnostic account and readers of his early work would be hard pressed to discover in it much overt reference to Weber,35 it is true that at the level of self-conception, he understood the analysis undertaken in Origin of the German Trauerspiel as treating ‘the work of art as an integral expression of the religious, metaphysical, political, and economic tendencies of its age’.36 Indeed, he even concludes the ‘Epistemo-Critical Foreword’ – which Rose took to be the centre of a book to which the rest provides an extended introduction – with the suggestion that the historical German baroque contains within it an ‘inordinate artistic expression of tendencies related to those of the present day’.37 In Rose’s hands, then, Benjamin’s Trauerspiel text becomes a contribution to the tendential analysis of a fascist outpouring of spectacular violence and destruction ‘derived from the change in the structure of experience – the subjectivity which issues from and responds to the atrophy of substance’.38
The brief reference here to the theory of subjectivity is telling, I would suggest, not only of Rose’s interpretation of Benjamin, but also of her own broader analysis of fascism’s resurgence. Such is to say, when read alongside her contemporaneous essays and interventions, we can see that Rose here is not exclusively concerned with the purported framework of the essay – unearthing the Jewish sources of Benjamin’s thought – but with generally situating and enlisting Benjamin into a broader exposition of, as Gorman once phrased it, ‘the “untruth” of modern subjectivity’.39 Hence, whilst Rose’s constructive claims in the essay derive from an interpretation of Benjamin’s corpus as elaborating on the baroque ethic and the spirit of Fascism (her first ‘disturbing thesis’), the critical impetus rather targets the affective tendency of a deficient mourning and protracted melancholy as a complicit, ultimately entangled, subjective response (the content of her second thesis). It is only in this way that we can adequately make sense of Rose’s passing remark elsewhere that Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book offers – in his description of the lack of an eschatology in the baroque, the emptying of the beyond of ‘everything in which even the slightest breath of world can be felt’, and the configuration of death and the beyond ‘as vacuum, in a condition to swallow up the earth one day with catastrophic violence’40 – one of the most concrete images of a ‘political psychology of fascism’.41 Subtly drawing Benjamin into an extrapolated Freudian psychoanalytic framework,42 on this account, an incomplete, self-inhibited mourning becomes the lament of unending melancholy as the subjective psychological and behavioural reaction that results from an experience of a world lacking in redemption but abundant in signification. In the baroque ethic, the loss of salvation becomes an unmourned object, lingering as a collective post-Protestant modern melancholic suffering that expresses itself in an outward ‘ornamentation without truth’ and mobilization of spectacularized violence.43
Rose’s reappraisal of Benjamin’s oeuvre properly marks her earliest significant entry into a critical theory of fascism and establishes much of the overarching narrative and many of the subsisting ideas that will return in her subsequent essays. Indeed, though Benjamin played a role in influencing some of her earliest work and is foregrounded and examined in her lectures, it is not properly until and after this essay that he becomes someone whom Rose thinks with and through. So much so, I would suggest, that Mourning Becomes the Law is entirely unthinkable without accounting for the manner in which Benjamin influences her late critique of postmodern thought and the account of fascism contained therein. Furthermore, in attempting to analyse the exigencies of fascism and in examination of Benjamin, Rose finds additional occasion for a return to other resources in the critical-theoretical tradition. The key essay for this and perhaps Rose’s most important and best-known singular contribution to the theory of fascism is ‘Beginnings of the Day – Fascism and Representation’. First given as a lecture and then published in Mourning Becomes the Law, this essay is prompted by and turns on a comparativist account of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List and the reception that it triggered. This is not an essay that, as Gorman once suggested, makes a case ‘for an anti-fascist cultural criticism’, but designates Rose’s most developed turn to film and literature as a means of articulating an anti-fascist political philosophy, her most thoroughgoing attempt at a politicization of aesthetics inflected through a concrete single-figure typology of a liberal–fascist subject and its affective structure.
Typologies of fascism
In one of his contributions to The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno mounted a rather remarkable defence of psychological typology, the methodological approach to the study of individuality that identifies and constructs character types.44 Already by 1950, the year in which the study was published, such a method had been heavily attacked both for allowing the ‘unique’ to elude it and for producing results that were overly generalized, ‘not statistically valid and do not even afford productive heuristic tools’.45 At once, the critics argued, typology repeats in method a dehumanizing tendency and simplifies, to the point of crude abstraction, highly complex and very particular psychological mechanisms. Adorno’s anticipatory response is, of course, a Freudo-Marxist one, arguing, as Rose summarized, that the ‘production of value in exchange and the concomitant mode of domination in late capitalism give rise to “typed” behaviour which tends to be generally or universally prevalent’.46 Types are true not in that they provide a composite, ideal average image that summarizes a group of individuals, but because social standardization compels psychological and behavioural conformity to a rigid and inflexible model. They provide a critical image of stereotypy that results from present social relations. ‘People’, Adorno states, ‘form psychological “classes,” inasmuch as they are stamped by variegated social processes. … Individualism, opposed to inhuman pigeonholing, may ultimately become a mere ideological veil in a society which actually is inhuman and whose intrinsic tendency towards the “subsumption” of everything shows itself by the classification of people themselves.’47 Importantly, the goal of psychological typology in The Authoritarian Personality was not the production of these types as particular images to which individuals correspond, but their construction as an analytic measure of a propensity to standardization, a readiness for narcissistic identification, and a disposition to conformism. Thus, Adorno states:
Here lies the ultimate principle of our whole typology. Its major dichotomy lies in the question of whether a person is standardized himself and thinks in a standardized way, or whether he is truly ‘individualized’ and opposes standardization in the sphere of human experience. The individual types will be specific configurations within this general division.48
As Rose recounts in her ‘introduction’ to Adorno’s thought,49 and as she reiterates just one year later in her Marxist Modernism lectures, the meaning of Adorno’s contributions to The Authoritarian Personality could only be grasped if it was seen within the Institute for Social Research’s broader ambitions to demonstrate the necessity of thinking fascism with recourse to philosophy, sociology and psychoanalysis. Concretely, this meant to see the study as contiguous with the broader American Jewish Committee’s ‘Studies in Prejudice’ series, with that psychoanalytic approach outlined in essays such as Adorno’s ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, with the ‘macro-theory’50 of antisemitism sketched in Dialectic of Enlightenment, and, we should add, with the subsequent study of public opinion, Group Experiment. Across these various works, Max Horkheimer, Adorno and their Institute colleagues offered prefigurative models and theoretical extrapolations of typological study. Hence, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, for instance, we find a concept of fascist ‘ticket thinking’ as part of the production of reactionary conformity, and, in an earlier Horkheimer essay, we read a provisional list of various antisemitic types such as the born antisemite, the religious and philosophical antisemite, the backwoods or ‘Sectarian’ antisemite, the vanquished competitor, and so on.51 Though the socio-theoretical complexity of these studies, conducted after the conclusion of the war and within the USA and West Germany, cannot be reduced to a single claim or idea, we should understand them as broadly driving the conviction that fascism was to be thought and studied beyond its historical and geographical limits. Such is to say that these works broke with the view that fascism was a political aberration from ‘democracy’, and was rather a socio-political tendency that could subsist within it. As Adorno famously and publicly warned:
National Socialism lives on, and even today we still do not know whether it is merely the ghost of what was so monstrous that it lingers on after its own death, or whether it has not yet died at all, whether the willingness to commit the unspeakable survives in people as well as in the conditions that enclose them. […] I consider the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy. Infiltration indicates something objective; ambiguous figures make their comeback and occupy positions of power for the sole reason that conditions favour them.52
However, as indicated above, the question as it posed itself to Rose was no longer that of the post-war survival of fascism, no longer that it was socially endemic,53 but that it appeared to be again gaining and seizing power. Under these altered historical circumstances, to ask after the preparedness of individuals to join and support fascist movements, to ask after their propensity towards authoritarianism, Rose thought, would be to assess incorrectly the political problem. It would, as it were, be altogether ‘too late’. Instead, Rose’s oblique and unarticulated question focused not on propensity but on imbrication. Though this lineage is not openly recognized by Rose and though she had, of course, no comparable empirical project, she is, I would suggest, nonetheless reliant on these early critical-theoretical contributions in her parallel construction of a new ‘type’ of liberal-fascist individual and in her sketches for a theory of ongoing subjective structures of narcissistic identification. In ‘Beginnings of the Day’, then, Rose’s criticism of ‘Holocaust piety’ provides a way of further determining her philosophical account and critique of modern subjectivity through the quiet rehabilitation of the Institute’s basic post-war methods for interrogating fascist tendencies. Thus she addends an emergent type produced by and complicit in neo-fascist seizures of power that she terms the ‘ultimate predator’, whose sentimentality Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, one of the central filmic and literary focuses of the essay, ‘depends on’.54 Nothing risked and little gained, the ‘obscene excess of voyeuristic witness’ that permeates this film, the frequent moments of gratuitous, ornamental violence, relies on a strategy of complacent consolation. It is easy, Rose ventures, for viewers of this film to apply their sympathy to the victims of such displays of violence; easy to find it in Manichaean parallels and dualisms embodied in the protagonists; easy, that is, to rehearse that basic diremption of juridical reasoning which separates the guilty from the innocent, only to reassure ourselves that we would never side with evil. She writes:
Such plasticity of history, such pragmatics of good and evil, such continuity between the banality of Schindler’s benevolence and the gratuity of Goeth’s violence, should mean that the reader, and, pari passu, the audience, experience the crisis of identity in their own breasts. Instead, we enjoy vicarious revulsion at the handsome sadist, Goeth, who appears invincible in the film, but is imprisoned much earlier on in the book, and we applaud the bon-vivant Schindler in his precarious outwitting of him.55
Rose’s figure of the ‘ultimate predator’ enters here as an explanatory type produced by and confluent with manipulated liberal accounts of the historical and moral distance of a Fascist past. This figure, Rose continues, ‘can be sentimental about the victimhood of other predators while overlooking that victim’s own violent predation; and she may embellish her arbitrary selectivity of compassion in rhapsodies and melodramas’.56 To read in this some sort of apologetics, a straight inversion of the guilt–innocence juridical paradigm, or an unconventional plea for ‘coldness’ would be a gross misinterpretation of the claim. In resuming an ‘examination of the connection between liberalism and Fascism’, as she wrote in The Broken Middle, Rose rather seeks to underscore how fascist predation inheres in liberal compassion; how a contingent and manipulable sympathy secures the conditions it appears to abhor. Schindler’s List renders this cinematic, betraying ‘the crisis of ambiguity in characterization, mythologization and identification, because of its anxiety that our sentimentality be left intact. It leaves us at the beginning of the day, in a Fascist security of our own unreflected predation, piously joining the survivors putting stones on Schindler’s grave in Israel. It should leave us unsafe, but with the remains of the day. To have that experience we would have to discover and confront our own fascism.’57 As she develops, such narrative cultural products thus often produce a post-Fascist historical fantasy in the viewer, in the case of film, or reader, in the case of literature, that reinforces a delusional and gratuitous sense of liberal self-security. We ‘good people’ cannot imagine that we would have been anything other than on the side of the innocent, not only neglecting the sociological reality of historical Fascism, which was constituently reliant on the support and participation of the liberal bourgeoisie, but also mystifying and exceptionalizing that reality. Structures of identification and narrative empathy therefore often leave ‘the identity of the voyeur intact, at a remove from the grievous events which she observes. Her self-defences remain untouched, while she may feel exultant revulsion or infinite pity for those whose fate is displayed.’58 Here, the representation of Fascism dialectically accords with the fascism of representation, the manner in which culture functions to produce a type that is embroiled in neo-fascist gains in political traction, however much it might feign its innocence. However unsettling this thought might be, in this line of argument Rose implores us to find ourselves as she found herself in the type that she identifies, to catch ourselves as she caught herself in this image of innocuous, nefarious complicity.
To think a generalized fascism through the construction of a socio-psychological type, to locate it in a set of seemingly insipid traits and characteristics, places Rose within a distinct critical-theoretical lineage, which, with some brevity, I have here tried to sketch. As the above suggests, however, she also makes a very distinct departure from this lineage, both refusing to separate herself from the type that she diagnoses and seeking to define where the disruption of self-misrecognition internal to a type could instruct an anti-fascist politics. In Adorno’s cautious defence of the Institute’s application of the typological method, the productive practical application of the concepts arises in their ‘translation’, in allowing their crude model of psychological reality, their simplistic classification of character, to illuminate socio-political patterns and relations. However, whilst their methodology repeats reified social relations in order to combat such relations, it also risks rigidifying them. By contrast, Rose’s single-figure typology serves different purposes. With the image of the ultimate predator, Rose tries to pose an idea that would allow not only for socioanalytic intervention, but also for correct self-recognition prompted through an experience of subjective crisis. As such, her reintroduction of typology not only occurs, as was true of the 1950s, after it had already been broadly attacked within the disciplines of psychology and sociology, but also after such attacks were functionally successful, all but eliminating this as a viable method. What I mean by this is that Rose’s typological intervention draws in the historical critique of it as method in so far as it constructs an analytic type in order to set up its practical-political dissolution. This is to suggest that she adopts it as a methodological approach to begin abandoning it as a methodological necessity. The type that she sets up proposes that we, as her readers, might not only grasp her theoretical constructs and coordinates, but also recognize ourselves as mutually entangled in her critique, as perhaps identifying where we too have succumbed to its baroque allure. Rose’s plea for the experience of the crisis of identity, that is, aims not at a figure ‘out there’ per se, but directly addresses the audience of her lecture and readers of her essay.
What remains?
Rose, we have to admit, cannot be readily adopted by the anti-fascist partisan. Her writing offers little in the way of clear instruction, little of a positive programme that could be straightforwardly applied to combatting this enduring socio-political tendency. For those reading from the left, returning today to her burgeoning exposition of neo-fascist seizures of power and her diagnostic of its subjective correlates, written through sometimes quite direct, sometimes fairly oblique, reappraisals of the critical-theoretical tradition, is an unsurprisingly ‘difficult’ endeavour. Such difficulty arises not only because of its ‘severe’ or ‘facetious’ style, its employment of heavy abridgement, its severe conceptual compression, its barbed decisive statements, its partial recalcitrance, and its occasional turn to irony, for which Rose’s writing is so well known. The difficulty, that is, is not only of comprehension and interpretation, which we cannot but acknowledge; it is also a difficulty of meeting Rose’s demand for self-recognition at a moment of political confrontation, of meeting her demand to induce a crisis in that individual unable to break with their own – which is our own – complicity. Though we may not find a great deal of ‘hope’ in such an account, what we can locate in her caustic critique, and why we may find resource for returning to her ideas, is the incisive yet incomplete analytical remains of the impossible conditions within which and from which we think and act.
Footnotes
1. For one account of the division and an argument for troubling it, see Adrian Wilding, ‘Review of Gillian Rose, Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory’, Historical Materialism, available online: www.historicalmaterialism.org/gillian-rose-marxist-modernism-introductory-lectures-on-frankfurt-school-critical-theory; accessed 3 September 2025. ↩
2. Tony Gorman, ‘Gillian Rose and the Project of a Critical Marxism’, Radical Philosophy 105, January/February 2001, pp. 25–36; here p. 25. ↩
3. I follow Rose’s lead in her capitalizing the word ‘fascism’ when referring to its historical mid-century manifestations and leaving it in lower case when referring to it as an ongoing sociopolitical current. Further, I follow the reasoning offered by Enzo Traverso in here opting for ‘Auschwitz’ as the most appropriate term to employ as a metonym for ‘Hitler’s murderous system’. Avoiding ‘Holocaust’ because of its overly theological intonation and ‘Shoah’ because of its ideological functionalization, the term ‘Auschwitz’ has the advantage, Traverso suggests, in so far as it ‘recognises the specificity of the Jewish genocide without isolating it, since it refers at the same time to the broader context of the world of the Nazi concentration camps’. Enzo Traverso, Understanding the Nazi Genocide: Marxism After Auschwitz, trans. Peter Drucker, Pluto Press, London, 1999, p. 8. ↩
4. Gillian Rose, Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory, ed. Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson, Verso, London, 2024, lecture four. ↩
5. In an interview, Alberto Toscano identifies some of the shortcomings of Rose’s account: ‘in explicitly delinking fascism from questions of imperialism, Orientalism, and class in the closing pages of her chapter [‘Beginnings of the Day’], I think she misses the profound and complex entanglements of fascist subjectivities and individualisms – especially those of a petty sovereign straddling the border or frontier between legitimate and non-legitimate – with the history and structure of colonial racial capitalism.’ Alberto Toscano in Edwin Nasr and Lama El Khatib, ‘Aspects of Evil: A Conversation with Alberto Toscano’, Makhzin 4, January 2024, special issue on ‘Counterlexicons’, available online: www.makhzin.org/issues/counterlexicons/aspects-of-evil-a-conversation-with-alberto-toscano; accessed 3 September 2025. My thanks to Rosie Woodhouse for directing me to Toscano’s comments. ↩
6. Anthony Gorman, ‘Gillian Rose’s Critique of Violence’, Radical Philosophy 197, 2016, pp. 25–35; here p. 26. ↩
7. See, for instance, Ishay Landa, The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism, Brill, Leiden and Boston MA, 2010. ↩
8. Gillian Rose, ‘Introduction’, in Mourning Becomes the Law, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 1–14; here p. 13. ↩
9. Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992, p. xi. ↩
10. Gillian Rose, Love’s Work, Chatto & Windus, London, 1995, p. 8. ↩
11. See, for instance, ibid., pp. 84 ff.; and Gillian Rose, ‘Architecture after Auschwitz’, in Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays, Verso, London, 2017, pp. 241–57. ↩
12. Rose, Love’s Work, p. 8. ↩
13. See her various comments on Jürgen Habermas, Emil Fackenheim and Zygmunt Bauman in Gillian Rose, ‘The Future of Auschwitz’, in Judaism and Modernity, pp. 33–6; and Gillian Rose, ‘Beginnings of the Day – Fascism and Representation’, in Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 41–62. ↩
14. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Historical Consciousness and Post-Traditional Identity: The Federal Republic’s Orientation to the West’, in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1989, pp. 249–67; here p. 252. ↩
15. Rose, ‘Beginnings of the Day’, p. 43. ↩
16. In the sense demanded in, for instance, Reinhard Kühnl, ‘Problems of a Theory of German Fascism: A Critique of the Dominant Interpretation’, trans. Anson G. Rabinbach, New German Critique 4, Winter 1975, pp. 26–50. ↩
17. Rose, ‘Beginnings of the Day’, p. 59. ↩
18. Rose, ‘The Future of Auschwitz’, p. 34. It is conceivable that in this statement Rose (and certainly some of those listening to her) also had in mind Saul Friedlander’s conference on the question of Fascism and representation, which had taken place at UCLA just a week prior. For a collection of the papers presented, see Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1992. ↩
19. Gillian Rose, ‘Walter Benjamin – Out of the Sources of Modern Judaism’, in Judaism and Modernity, pp. 175–210; here p. 190. ↩
20. Ibid., p. 180. ↩
21. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 173. ↩
22. Rose, ‘Walter Benjamin – Out of the Sources of Modern Judaism’, p. 180. ↩
23. Ibid. ↩
24. Gorman, ‘Gillian Rose’s Critique of Violence’, p. 27. ↩
25. Rose, ‘Walter Benjamin – Out of the Sources of Modern Judaism’, p. 184. ↩
26. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version)’, in Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935–1938, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, ed. Michael W. Jennings and Howard Eiland, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2002, pp. 101–33; here p. 122. Tellingly but not surprisingly, Benjamin’s counterclaim that to fascism, ‘[c]ommunism responds by politicising art’ (ibid.) is entirely absent from Rose’s considerations. ↩
27. Rose, ‘Walter Benjamin – Out of the Sources of Modern Judaism’, pp. 180–81. ↩
28. For an interesting overview of the early German reception of Benjamin’s The Origin of the German Trauerspiel during the Nazi period, see Jane O. Newman, ‘Baroque Legacies: National Socialism’s Benjamin’, in Wolfgang Bialas and Anson Rabinbach, eds, Nazi Germany and the Humanities: How German Academics Embraced Nazism, Oneworld, London, 2014, pp. 238–66. ↩
29. Walter Benjamin, letter to Gershom Scholem, 12 October–5 November 1924, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL, 1994, pp. 252–55; here p. 254. ↩
30. Evonne Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2004, pp. 28 ff. ↩
31. Alois Riegl, The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome, trans. and ed. Andrew Hopkins and Arnold Witte, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles CA, 2010, p. 95. ↩
32. Evonne Levy, Baroque and the Political Language of Formalism (1845–1945): Burckhardt, Wölfflin, Gurlitt, Brinckmann, Sedlmayr, Schwabe Verlag, Basel, 2015, p. 311. ↩
33. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, Routledge, London and New York, 2001, p. 102. ↩
34. Rose, ‘Walter Benjamin – Out of the Sources of Modern Judaism’, p. 181. ↩
35. For an account of the Weberian elements in Benjamin’s work, see Elettra Stimilli, ‘Gillian Rose, Interpreter of Walter Benjamin: The “Unintended Consequences” of Asceticism’, in this present volume. ↩
36. Walter Benjamin, ‘Curriculum Vitae (III)’, trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 1: 1927–1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2005, pp. 77–9; here p. 78. ↩
37. Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, trans. Howard Eiland, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2019, p. 39. As Howard Caygill remarks on this closing claim: ‘The connecting theme is of course the development of capitalism, and this is a theme which he will analyse further in the Arcades Project. For this reason it is important not artificially to separate the Origin of the German Mourning Play from the later work on nineteenth-century capitalism. The two projects are complementary: one analyses the culture of nascent capitalism, the other the culture of high capitalism.’ Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience, Routledge, London and New York, 2005, p. 57. ↩
38. Rose, ‘Walter Benjamin – Out of the Sources of Modern Judaism’, p. 181. ↩
39. Gorman, ‘Gillian Rose’s Critique of Violence’, p. 25. ↩
40. Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, pp. 50–51. ↩
41. Gillian Rose, ‘O! untimely death. / Death!’, in Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 125–46; here p. 131. ↩
42. Cf. Gillian Rose, ‘The Comedy of Hegel and the Trauerspiel of Modern Philosophy’, in Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 148 n3. For a developed account of the Freud–Benjamin connection, though one which does not draw on Rose, see Betty Schulz, The Fractured Subject: Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud, Rowman & Littlefield, London, 2023. ↩
43. Rose, ‘Walter Benjamin – Out of the Sources of Modern Judaism’, p. 189. ↩
44. Adorno’s defence of this is not, however, without much earlier precursors within the Institute for Social Research. Though it would require a more detailed methodological and theoretical comparison, here we may think of the psychoanalytic claims outlined in Erich Fromm, ‘Psychoanalytic Characterology and Its Relevance for Social Psychology’ (1932), in The Crisis of Psychoanalysis: Essays on Freud, Marx, and Social Psychology, Holt, Reinhart & Wilson, New York, 1970, pp. 135–58. ↩
45. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Types and Syndromes’, in Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, Norton, New York, 1969, pp. 744–83; here p. 744. ↩
46. Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, Verso, London, 2014. ↩
47. Adorno, ‘Types and Syndromes’, p. 747. ↩
48. Ibid., p. 749. ↩
49. As Caygill rightly suggests, The Melancholy Science is a work that only ‘masqueraded as an introduction to the thought of T.W. Adorno’. Much like her ‘deceptively not-difficult Love’s Work’, it is incumbent upon readers of The Melancholy Science to parcel out where Adorno’s thought ends and Rose’s begins. Howard Caygill, ‘Preface’, in Gillian Rose, Paradiso, Shearsman Books, Bristol, 2015, pp. 7–8. ↩
50. Rose, The Melancholy Science, p. 134. ↩
51. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 2002, pp. 170–72; and Max Horkheimer, ‘Sociological Background of the Psychoanalytic Approach’, in Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, ed. Ernst Simmel, International Universities Press, New York, 1946, pp. 1–10. ↩
52. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Meaning of Working through the Past’, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, Columbia University Press, New York, 2005, pp. 89–103; here pp. 89–90. For some early thoughts on the place Adorno’s interventions had in the burgeoning theory of German Fascism, see Anson G. Rabinbach, ‘Toward a Marxist Theory of Fascism and National Socialism: A Report on Developments in West Germany’, New German Critique 3, Autumn 1974, pp. 127–53. ↩
53. I find Rose’s dismissal of theories of ‘endemic’ fascism as ‘all dramatic overstatements, designed to defamiliarize modern familiarities’ (Rose, ‘Beginnings of the Day’, p. 59) highly objectionable. Whilst she is correct to want to underscore the dissimilarities in fascism’s relative social and political position, stressing, that is, that we need to produce analytical tools that are adequate to historical shifts, for the sake of analytic clarity she is overly ahistorical in trivializing the contributions made to the theory of fascism and its compact with liberal democracy in the post-war period. ↩
54. Rose, ‘Beginnings of the Day’, p. 47. ↩
55. Ibid., p. 46. ↩
56. Ibid., p. 48. ↩
57. Ibid. ↩
58. Ibid., p. 54. ↩
Cite this article
Louis Hartnoll. Our mutual entanglements: Gillian Rose and the critical theory of fascism. Promise & perdition in the thought of Gillian Rose, 2026. CRMEP Books, London, UK.