‘Return to the city’? Gillian Rose and the pluriverse
Gillian Rose urges us always to start from where we are – to pay attention to the here and now in all its rich and storied particularity. 1 Rose’s twofold ethics of mourning and political risk invites a dogged and risk-filled engagement with everyday politics that comes to understand and mourn the brokenness of our political contexts and ‘return[s] … to the city, renewed and reinvigorated for participation’.2 In the context of multiple intersecting local and global crises, Rose’s insistence that we keep our minds in hell, and despair not, continues to be an urgent call to political engagement.3 As Donatella di Cesare recently remarked, the contemporary political landscape is too often characterized by ‘apparent wakefulness which in fact conceals a catastrophic sleepwalking’: ‘it’s time for philosophy to return to the city’.4
In returning to Rose’s work after a hiatus, one of the questions at the forefront of my mind has been how to read Rose from my settler colonial context – and how Rose might speak to this context in turn. As a settler-educator living and working in Aotearoa New Zealand, I have in much of my work in recent years grappled with what it means to write and teach from this place, on Indigenous land.5 In reflecting on the notion of a ‘return to the city’ from this complex land, one of the questions that has troubled me is: How do we conceive of returning to ‘the city’ in the context of multiple entangled worlds?6 What does a ‘return to the city’ look like if we take pluriversality – the idea that our world is comprised of many worlds – seriously?7
In what follows, I think through the notion of ‘returns’ to political engagement by putting Rose’s work in conversation with Bonnie Honig’s recent work on refusal, which centres the idea of a return to the city through her retelling of the Bacchae, and literature on the pluriverse, which challenges the concept of a ‘one-world world’ and thereby complicates the notion of a ‘return’. The essay has three parts. First, I explore Honig’s conception of refusal ‘as an arc and not an act’, with particular emphasis on the obligation to return to everyday life that completes her agonistic formulation.8 Second, I trouble the notion of a return via literature on pluriversality, asking who has an obligation to return and to what. Third, I turn to Rose’s meditations on a political work of mourning to navigate the tensions between these different visions of political engagement. I argue that reading Rose alongside Honig deepens and enriches Honig’s notion of a return to the city via her writings on recognition, failure and faithful re-engagement with everyday politics. In the face of multiple intersecting worlds, however, the idea that political actors must all ‘return to the city’ needs interrogating. I argue that while a return to political engagement might look like re-engagement with the structures and institutions of modern political entities on their own terms, it could also look like an unravelling of modern law and institutions via exchanges between worlds. Moreover, I argue that political engagement can also take the form of a partial or thoroughgoing refusal of modern law and institutions whereby political actors ‘build elsewhere’, where people return to the institutions and laws that structure their own pre-existing but evolving and richly populated worlds.
In arguing for a more expansive notion of what it might mean to return to political engagement, I acknowledge that I am complicating Rose’s thought, which focuses on debates arising out of and centred in modern Europe and, as Jay Bernstein recently remarked, does not engage with colonialism or the emerging climate catastrophe.9 Rose speaks to and from modernity, starting from the assumption that ‘we are moderns’ and reaching towards a ‘hesitant universality’.10 A broken modernity sits at the centre of her work, informing her critique of the ‘easy paths’ of liberal modernity and postmodern critique and her pursuit instead of philosophy’s ‘grey in grey’.11 However, in what follows I argue that despite its rootedness in modernity, Rose’s grounded and aporetic ethos can help us to think more expansively about how we might conceptualize and navigate returns in the context of entangled worlds.
Honig’s feminist theory of refusal and a ‘return to the city’
Bonnie Honig’s A Feminist Theory of Refusal articulates a rich conception of refusal via an exploration of the figure of Agave in Euripides’ play the Bacchae. Her rereading of the Bacchae takes Agave and the bacchants seriously as political actors instead of writing them off as ‘misguided, manipulated or insane’.12 This radical counter-reading informs Honig’s reformulation of feminist refusal as an arc comprising three interrelated refusal concepts – Giorgio Agamben’s inoperativity, Adriana Cavarero’s inclination and Saidiya Hartman’s fabulation – arguing that the three concepts are intertwined and dependent on one another and can be understood as ‘moments on an arc of refusal’.13 In what follows I briefly sketch Honig’s arc of refusal in relation to the Bacchae before focusing on the last part of Honig’s arc with its theme of returning to the city.
Euripides’ Bacchae tells the story of the introduction of the cult of Dionysus to the city of Thebes. Pentheus, king of Thebes and Agave’s son, forbids the women of Thebes from joining the followers of Dionysus and instructs them instead to care for their children. The women refuse to obey and Agave and her sisters lead groups of women (known as baccants or maenads) out of the city to Cithaeron, in what is the first moment in Honig’s arc of refusal – inoperativity or the suspension of use.14 In Cithareron, the women feast and dance, working together to build a heterotopian community that displaces the patriarchy of the city. This is the second moment of Honig’s arc of refusal – inclination, whereby the baccants lean into a ‘new moral geometry of relationality and care “completely apart” from the autonomous verticalism of the city’.15 The baccants then kill Pentheus in a tragic move that is both regicidal and filicidal, before returning to the city to claim their place in the third moment in Honig’s arc of refusal – fabulation. The city refuses to receive them, however, and, after a failed attempt by Cadmus to restore the women to their domestic roles as wives, mothers and daughters, they are banished and exiled by Dionysus.
The notion of a return to the city is crucial to Honig’s conception of refusal and is the provocation for this essay. The baccants’ heterotopia on Cithaeron has allowed them to explore new ways of being and doing, insulated from the city. Honig notes that ‘when they succeed for a time, heterotopia valuably serve as spaces or times of rehearsal where alternative forms of life can be tried out and explored’.16 In Hartman’s refusal concept, fabulation, she renarrates the tragic stories of ‘riotous black girls, troublesome women, and queer radicals’ who find a deep sense of belonging through ‘membership in a chorus’.17 However, Honig notes that there is no return to the city for Hartman’s chorus and thus ‘the escape and collectivity offered by the chorus are short-lived’.18 For refusal to be truly political, Honig argues, it cannot remain insulated from the structures and institutions of the city: ‘If refusal is to be a politics, and fabulation part of a feminist theory of refusal, then returning to the city to claim it is key.’19
In Honig’s refabulation of the Bacchae, she narrates the return to the city after the women’s time on Cithaeron, saying:
They achieve the limited but splendid freedom of fugitivity and something approximating the jubilation of jubilee. But something was missing. It all felt somehow unreal and maybe also temporary. What was missing was … the fabulation provided by the polis of remembrance… the women of the Bacchae, who want stories told of their courageous equality, look to the city, too. Agave aims to establish the equality of women in the polis as its norm and not just outside it for an exceptional moment. It is, we may say using Arendt’s words, as though the women who returned from Cithaeron ‘had wished to make permanent the space of action which had arisen from their deeds and sufferings, to prevent its perishing with their dispersal and return to their isolated’ households. They want to be real.20
The desire to return to the city, according to this reading, is tied to a desire ‘to be real’, to return with their whole selves to ‘remake’ themselves and the city alike. Tragically, though, neither the women nor the city are ready for their return and Dionysus exiles the bacchants, along with Cadmus and his wife, from the city. Honig’s Arendtian rereading of this failed return sees it as a ‘tragedy of the city’, where a return has the power to disturb and reconfigure the everyday practices of the city and, in so doing, ‘inaugurate a politics’ beyond fugitivity.21 In their collective unreadiness for a return, the work that might have been achieved via the women’s disruption of taken-for-granted structures and practices fails to be done. This failure to challenge and reconfigure the city is the tragedy missed by conventional readings of the story.
The failure of the bacchants’ return highlights the risk involved in returning to the city. Honig speaks of double unreadiness – the unreadiness of the women and the unreadiness of the city. The unreadiness of the women is illustrated by how quickly Agave loses her newfound understanding of herself and her role as a leader outside patriarchal structures. The unreadiness of the city is illustrated by its unwillingness to receive the women as anything other than wayward transgressors needing to be reabsorbed back into the fold, into pre-existing and unchanged structures. At stake in this drama is a struggle over what is and what could be. By clinging to structures- and politics-as-usual, the city refuses to take the risk of thinking anew or imagining otherwise. For the women, their new understandings, new stories, new worlds are put at risk via a return to the city. As Honig puts it: ‘The risk of the return to the city is absorption into the city’s conflicts and the loss of our bearings. It is against this that we rehearse.’ For Honig, however, despite the very real risk of failure, the return to the city is deeply important because it is in the return that the ‘promise of refusal as a world-building practice’ lies – where lives come up against other lives, where we find our way towards living together.22
In her conclusion to A Feminist Theory of Refusal, Honig references a speech by Bernice Johnson Reagon in which she exhorts women at a music festival to take what they have experienced over the course of the weekend, ‘digest it’ and ‘apply it … every day you get up and find yourself alive’.23 Honig uses Reagon’s reflections on returning to everyday life after a music festival to illustrate the arc of refusal in a different context and to highlight its importance as a ‘world-building practice’ that can shape everyday life. She argues:
You have the right to leave, the right to build elsewhere, but you also have an obligation to return because we are all depending on each other. We may succeed or fail. But we are in it together. This commitment is not for everyone all the time. But it is part of the promise of refusal as a world-building practice, and this makes of refusal a politics far larger than political theory’s old debates about civil disobediance and more daunting even than the heroic politics to which we build monuments.24
For Honig, a return to the city opens space for disruptive and generative politics, a commitment to collectively challenge oppressive structures and practices and build worlds that arc towards justice.
The pluriversal challenge:
Whose return and whose responsibility?
Honig argues that in order for a politics of refusal to be truly political, it cannot remain outside the city, insulated from unjust institutions and laws. We have a ‘right to build elsewhere’ but ‘an obligation to return’. The narrative that emerges in this refusal story is one that hinges on a return to the same political context that has been left and a strong commitment to engage with and trouble the laws, norms and institutions of that political entity. In that sense, while it is a challenging vision it is also a tidy vision; the narrative speaks of political actors leaving and returning to a political system that is their own, however flawed. In what follows I explore the ways in which this vision is complicated where different laws and institutions and different ways of knowing and being coexist on the same land. I trouble the notion of an obligation to return to the city by asking ‘whose return, and to where?’ I argue that the notion of a return is complicated by the existence of ‘multiple, distinct, yet intertwined’ worlds characterized by different ways of knowing and being.25 I suggest that building elsewhere – outside the context of the ‘one-world world’ – can, in fact, be deeply political in the context of the modern world which itself refuses Indigenous ways of being, knowing and acting.26 In the context of a planet in peril and global politics in turmoil, building elsewhere and otherwise can be not only deeply political but even imperative. In troubling the notion of a return, I do not suggest that building elsewhere is something that can happen in isolation from other worlds; the pursuit of purity belies the inevitable impurity of political engagement and risks. However, in the spirit of more deeply engaging with the contours of justice and injustice where we are, it is crucial we take the pluriverse and its complication of everday politics seriously.
The notion of the pluriverse calls into question the necessity of a ‘return to the city’, where the city is understood as the modern world.27 The concept of the pluriverse acknowledges that we do not live in a ‘single container world’ in which a reified reality is populated by peoples with different beliefs and cultures; instead, we live in a ‘multiple world of different enactments’ in which the worlds themselves are characterized not only by different understandings, or different stories, but different realities.28 As Maggie FitzGerald puts it,
on the one hand there is one world – we share a material existence, we are connected in and through relations of power, and we also often share concepts, language practices, and other aspects of our collective forms of life. At the same time, however, there are many worlds; there are different collective worlding practices that enact different worlds, and these worlds are sometimes in excess of each other … there are different ways of being/knowing.29
An understanding of the world characterized by a complicated entwining of different but connected worlds calls us to ‘dwell in the messy entanglements that connect worlds and pay attention to the ways in which the enactments of certain worlds are prevented or disparaged through these entanglements’.30 This more nuanced account of contemporary global politics complicates social and political engagement and shifts justice talk away from simple ‘inclusion’, recognizing that in the context of the pluriverse ‘[t]here is no “overarching”’ – and therefore difference is not something that can simply be ‘included’ in an ‘all encompassing reality’ or mediated via higher order liberal institutions.31 Instead, as Law puts it, understanding that the world is plural invites us to ‘craft [encounters] that are themselves contingent, modest, practical and thoroughly down to earth’.32
The pluriverse is deeply and inescapably political. Comprising different worlds situated in a ‘relational web of ontoepistemologies’, it is characterized by radical differences in terms of power, recognition and access to resources. Indeed, as FitzGerald argues, when these relations are ‘arranged as a hierarchy of domination, certain worlds exist outside of “politics”; they are rendered invisible or incomprehensible by the logic of the dominant world’.33 The dominant world – modernity – has actively sought to erase other worlds through colonization and through the expansion of a capitalist logic that has, for many, become a ‘commonsense’ outside which it is difficult to think otherwise. As Simon Barber argues, capitalism constrains our imaginations, asserting the commodity-world ‘as the only possible reality’. Relationships between capitalism and other worlds are characterized by domination, marked by a ‘readiness to refuse, extinguish or flatten other modes of life’ as well as by a desecration of Papatūānuku, the earth on which we reside.34 In this narrow vision, ‘the world of the powerful’ is a world in which ‘only one world fits’.35 It is also a world under threat, as the commodification of nature wreaks destruction on our planet. In this context, Law speaks of the urgency of challenging the ‘one-world metaphysics’ that dominates contemporary global politics via the enacting and re-enacting of ‘one-world realities’. He argues further that in doing so we must urgently ‘inquire about the practices that enact Other multiple world realities’ and ‘pick through the practices within the North that multiply realities’, acknowledging that the ‘North’ itself is not uniform despite its capture by modern capitalism.36
In the face of persistent erasures of rich and complex ways of knowing–being–doing outside modernity, the notion of a ‘return to the city’ becomes troubling. I argue that where ‘the city’ represents the modern world we must complicate the obligation to return. Honig herself recognizes that a commitment to return is ‘not for everyone all the time’,37 and the concept of the pluriverse helps us to understand the limits of this call, particularly in contexts where modern political environments actively suppress and harm other worlds, as in settler colonial contexts. Troubling and displacing the notion of a return to ‘the city’ opens a wider horizon of political engagement and creates space for a more thoroughgoing refusal where worlds collide. This more expansive arc of refusal remains agonistic: it invites us simultaneously to think otherwise and to return to everyday politics, wherever that is located.
Starting from the middle: brokenness, failure, faith
In this final section I explore the notion of returns to political engagement in the context of entangled worlds via Gillian Rose’s writings on mourning and political risk. Although Rose’s writings are rooted in modern Europe and take modernity as given, I argue that her work can help us to think through a more complicated political landscape because of her dogged commitment to start with what is – to begin ‘in the middle’.38 She emphatically rejects utopian short cuts to heaven, be they via the epistemic certainty of progressive rationalism and its claim to ‘absolute and universal authority’ or messianic visions of postmodernism that hold space for alternative futures but invite a ‘counsel of hopelessness’ in the here and now.39 Speaking from and to modernity, Rose directs our attention to the brokenness of modernity and its manifestations ‘in history, in polity, in institutions, in dominium’. Working towards justice, she argues, must always be grounded in a commitment to come to better understand the ‘broken but locatable’ middle. In the face of this brokenness, she insists that we come to better understand its contours – via a political work of mourning – and that we commit to aporetic engagement in the political life of the city, ‘without a path’. It is this faithful commitment to risky engagement with political actuality that makes Rose’s work so powerful in the context of thinking about ‘returns’. 40
The epigraph to Rose’s philosophical memoir Love’s Work is ‘keep your mind in hell, and despair not’.41 This epigraph goes to the heart of Rose’s response to the brokenness of modernity, urging us to stay with the difficulty – to ‘keep [our] mind[s] in hell’ – and to journey towards a deeper understanding of the structures and practices of misrecognition that shape our social and political worlds. She enjoins us to ‘despair not’ in the face of suffering and injustice, however – to refuse tragic resignation or despair in response to continued abuses of power and privilege. In the place of easy paths that would abscond responsibility and avoid the difficult work of everyday politics, Rose invites us to a political work of mourning that
returns the soul to the city, renewed and reinvigorated for participation, ready to take on the difficulties and injustices of the existing city. The mourner returns to negotiate and challenge the changing inner and outer boundaries of the soul and of the city; she returns to their perennial anxiety.42
Like Honig, then, Rose is committed to agonistic (re)engagement with the proverbial city, insisting on a dogged engagement in everyday politics that makes injustice and suffering ‘visible and speakable’ and takes the risk of political action in response.43
In her reflections on a return to the city, Honig remarks that ‘we may succeed or fail’, gesturing towards the likelihood that failure may accompany our attempts to re-engage with the life of the city. However, Honig does little to develop the theme of failure. The notion of failure is deeply woven throughout Rose’s work and can resource engagement with the more complex political landscape that the pluriverse entails. In Hegel Contra Sociology, Rose emphasizes the ‘re-’ of Hegel’s Anerkennen or ‘re-cognition’, the need to revise our understanding or ‘know again’ after inevitable misrecognition. Recognition invites us to re-examine what we think we understand – ‘the familiar or well known’ – in order to better understand our social world.44 To start with what is, for Rose, is to embark on a difficult journey towards recognition marked by repeated failures and faithful re-engagement as we trace the brokenness of modernity. Beginning in the middle invites us to political engagement, to risk ‘the anxiety of beginning’ despite not knowing what will eventuate. Rose argues that ‘[l]earning … works precisely by making mistakes, by taking the risk of action, and then by reflecting on its unintended consequences, and then taking the risk, yet again, of further action, and so on’.45 Her ethos of political engagement in the face of complexity and through failure deepens and enriches Honig’s notion of a return to the city. It also helps us to think through a more nuanced notion of returns to political engagement in the context of the pluriverse.
Rose and the pluriverse
As I acknowledged earlier, putting Rose’s work in conversation with literatures on pluriversality complicates her thought, taking it outside modern Europe and unsettling its ‘hesitant universality’. A pluriversal lens unsettles the obligation to return to the bounded political entity of the modern state and economy in contexts where worlds collide. While there is a tidiness to narratives centred in modernity, such narratives fail to reflect the complexity and multiplicity of global politics; nor do they reckon with the harm wrought by the continuing dispossession of non-modern worlds through colonization and the embedding of capitalist modernity. I argue that a Rosean aporetic sensibility can help us to stay with the difficulty of thinking and acting in the context of multiple worlds. Rose’s invitation to inaugurated mourning – which comes to know and risks uncertain but grounded political action – can open up multiple possibilities for coming to better understand and mourn ‘what is’ in our ‘world of many worlds’, including interrogating the complexity and brokenness of the dominant world, traversing the middle between worlds, and refusing modernity and ‘building elsewhere’.
Rose’s insistence that we embark on the difficult work of ‘recognizing and pressing against what is broken in modern life’ already makes her a powerful interlocutor for reckoning with colonialism and the marginalization of non-dominant worlds.46 Working towards a deeper understanding of the laws and institutions that shape the dominant modern world necessitates interrogating the violence those laws and institutions have enacted not just in the past but in ongoing ways. In the context of modernity, Rose urges us not to remain ‘strangers to ourselves as moral agents and as social actors’, a sensibility that encourages those of us from the modern world to better understand the damage modernity has wrought not only on others but also on ourselves as we work towards a deeper understanding of our intertwined pasts and present.47 In the context of settler colonial states, such as Aotearoa New Zealand, coming to better understand ourselves as moral agents and social actors requires collective grappling with difficult histories, land dispossession and cultural suppression, and the continued marginalization of Indigenous ways of being, knowing and acting.48 Without a deeper understanding of our entangled pasts and present, we do indeed remain ‘strangers to ourselves’, unwilling to do the difficult work of wrestling with social and political actuality.
Rose’s invitation to tarry in the middle can also help us understand and navigate the broken middles that emerge between our entangled worlds, which sit always in relation – leading, at times, to exchanges that unravel the edges of modernity in various ways. One prominent example is the bestowal of legal personhood on the Whanganui River, Te Awa Tupua, in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2017. This remarkable achievement was hard won after over a century of struggle by the Whanganui iwi (local Māori tribe) on behalf of the river and offers the river ‘significant protections’ as well as ‘opening the law up to far more dynamic and creative processes than have previously been available to it’.49 The recognition of the river as a living entity – as an ancestor to mana whenua, people of the land – represents an unravelling at the edge of the dominant world in Aotearoa. The 140-year struggle by local iwi and hapū brought ‘into relationship two incommensurable logics: their own knowledge of the river as kin and the view of nature as property that in part constitutes modernity’.50 The hard-won protections are a partial victory in that they remain firmly located within a capitalist framework. However, in bringing together the two worlds via this legal struggle, the local iwi was able to ‘make visible that which was invisible, namely their relationship with the river, and more fundamentally, the world which this relationship in part enacts’.51
Finally, a Rosean sensibility can also help to think about responses that refuse modernity and seek instead to ‘build elsewhere’, noting that such endeavours must not be understood as apolitical attempts to build anew but as deeply political returns to engagement in worlds already richly populated with laws and institutions. The concept of the pluriverse understands the world as comprising many worlds sitting in relation to each other. Worlds-in-relation cannot be subsumed into a Eurocentric one-world vision that simply includes other ways of knowing, being and acting. There must be room for building elsewhere in ways that centre, uphold and celebrate different onto-epistemologies – to think and act otherwise is to continue to ‘refuse, extinguish or flatten other modes of life’.52 In a conversation about Indigenous refusal practices, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson highlights the limitations of justice-oriented practices that centre ‘inclusion and recognition’ and fail to make meaningful structural change. In response, Simpson argues that Indigenous peoples need not only to ‘refuse the violence of the colonial world’ but ‘also to build and maintain scaffoldings of care for our communities’. Building scaffoldings of care can take the form of ‘temporary spaces of joy and freedom’ within the existing state; they can also take place elsewhere, outside existing state structures.53
Audra Simpson’s ethnography of Mohawk nationhood and citizenship speaks to the thoroughgoing refusal of the Kahnawà:ke who have ‘refused the authority of the state at almost every turn’. Instead of returning to the city and engaging with damaging state laws and institutions, the Kahnawà:ke have built alternative, community-led institutions ‘structured in the present space of intracommunity recognition, affection and care, outside of the logics of colonial and imperial rule’.54 This approach centres collectivity and institution-building – it is deeply political and engaged – but does so in a way that refuses the harm of settler colonial structures and honours the ways of being and knowing that characterize the Kahnawà:ke world.
Rosean politics
Rose’s invitation to ‘begin in the middle’ invites a sensibility that can help us to navigate our multiple world, be it via returns, exchange and/or refusal. These different forms of political engagement will inevitably be fraught with missteps, misrecognition and failure as they work toward better understanding and better justice. Rather than be paralysed by the fear of getting things wrong, however, a Rosean sensibility encourages us to ‘begin in the middle’, to take the risk of coming to know our complex relational and political actuality, and to start from there.
For me personally, reading Rose from Aotearoa invites a deeper understanding of the histories that have shaped that land and the ongoing colonial encounter that suppresses Te Ao Māori, the Indigenous world, and that buttresses the modern state. It invites an interrogation of Aotearoa’s institutions in light of these entangled worlds – our parliamentary structures, laws, schools and universities, our economy and property rights – and asks: whose worlds are reflected in these institutions and whose interests are served? Reading Rose has encouraged me, as a settler with long history in Aotearoa, on my own journey of interrogation, as I have come to better understand the ways that I am ‘implicated in and benefit from’ a history of colonial dispossession.55 I continue to wrestle with what this means for how and what I teach as I attend to the politics of my discipline, my institution and the academy. Reading Rose encourages me to see the classroom as a site of political engagement in which I take pedagogical risks despite the inevitability of getting things wrong. Reading Rose encourages me to stay in the fray – and to despair not.
Footnotes
1. Huge thanks to Peter Osborne, Howard Caygill and Tom Vaswani for hosting and funding my participation in this project. I benefited enormously from conversations at CRMEP’s Gillian Rose memorial lecture conference (London, June 2025), the Broken Middles Seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association (May 2025, with special thanks to Robert Lucas Scott, Robert Freeman, George Mather and Kieran Brown), as well from work-in-progress sessions at Women Writing Away retreats (Tauhara, June 2024, February 2025, with special thanks to Barbara Grant). I am grateful to Maggie FitzGerald, Claire Timperley and Ben Thirkell-White for their comments on draft versions of this chapter. ↩
2. Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p. 36. ↩
3. The epigraph to Love’s Work is: ‘Keep your mind in hell, and despair not’. Gillian Rose, Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life, Schocken Books, New York, 1995. It is attributed to Staretz Silouan, 1866–1938. ↩
4. Donatella Di Cesare, It’s Time for Philosophy to Return to the City, CRMEP Books, London, 2022, p. 18. ↩
5. Kate Schick, ‘Oceania: Aotearoa/New Zealand “Teaching IR Theory in Aotearoa New Zealand: Relational and Place-Based Pedagogical Shifts”’, in The Palgrave Handbook on the Pedagogy of International Relations Theory, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2024, pp. 839–51, https://doi.org/10.1007/978–3–031–72072–7_66; Kate Schick, ‘Uncertain Pedagogies: Cultivating Micro-Communities of Learning’, in Kate Schick and Claire Timperley, eds, Subversive Pedagogies: Radical Possibility in the Academy, Routledge, London, 2021, pp. 92–107. ↩
6. ‘The city’ can be understood as a ‘bounded political entity’. See Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 16. ↩
7. Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, eds, A World of Many Worlds, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2018; Maggie FitzGerald, Care and the Pluriverse: Rethinking Global Ethics, Bristol University Press, Bristol, 2022, https://academic.oup.com/policy-press-scholarship-online/book/45181. ↩
8. Bonnie Honig, A Feminist Theory of Refusal, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2021, p. 103, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1jpf62p. ↩
9. J.M. Bernstein, ‘Reification in the Age of Climate Catastrophe: After Gillian Rose’s Critique of Marxism’, Thesis Eleven 186, 2025, p. 35, https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513625 1314516. ↩
10. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 54. ↩
11. Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society Blackwell, Oxford, 1992, p. xi. ↩
12. Honig, A Feminist Theory of Refusal, p. xii. ↩
13. Ibid., p. xiii. ↩
14. Ibid., p. 16. ↩
15. Ibid., p. 4. Honig pushes Cavarero’s concept of inclination beyond the maternal to the sororal, exploring inclination in the Bacchae ‘not as maternal care, not only, but also as agonistic sororal action in concert’, a conception that leaves more room for the intertwining of love and volence. Ibid., p. 58. ↩
16. Ibid., p. 71. ↩
17. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, W.W. Norton , New York, 2019. ↩
18. Honig, A Feminist Theory of Refusal, p. 74. ↩
19. Ibid., p. 95; emphasis mine. ↩
20. Ibid., p. 93. ↩
21. Ibid., p. 95. ↩
22. Ibid., pp. 103–4. ↩
23. Bernice Johnson Reagon, ‘Coalition Politics: Turning the Century’, Feministische Studien, vol. 33, no. 1, 2015, pp. 115–23, https://doi.org/10.1515/fs-2015–0115. ↩
24. Honig, A Feminist Theory of Refusal, p. 104. ↩
25. FitzGerald, Care and the Pluriverse, p. 3. ↩
26. John Law, ‘What’s Wrong with a One-World World?’, Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, vol. 16, no. 1, 2015, pp. 126–39, https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2015.1020066; Simon Barber, ‘Māori Mārx: Some Provisional Materials’, Counterfutures 8, 2019, p. 71, https://doi.org/10.26686/cf.v8i0.6348. ↩
27. Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2015; De la Cadena and Blaser, A World of Many Worlds; FitzGerald, Care and the Pluriverse. ↩
28. Law, ‘What’s Wrong with a One-World World?’, p. 127. ↩
29. FitzGerald, Care and the Pluriverse, p. 3. ↩
30. Ibid., p. 7. ↩
31. Law, ‘What’s Wrong with a One-World World?’, pp. 127–8. ↩
32. Ibid., p. 128. ↩
33. FitzGerald, Care and the Pluriverse, p. 8. ↩
34. Barber, ‘Māori Mārx’, p. 71. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Papatūānuku is the land and the earth mother. Wife of Ranginui, sky father, Papatūānuku gives birth to all living things. See https://teara.govt.nz/en/papatuanuku-the-land. ↩
35. De la Cadena and Blaser, A World of Many Worlds, p. 3. ↩
36. Law, ‘What’s Wrong with a One-World World?’, p. 128. ↩
37. Honig, A Feminist Theory of Refusal, p. 104. ↩
38. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 153. ↩
39. Rose, Love’s Work, p. 128; Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 70. See also the discussion in Kate Schick, ‘“Keep Your Mind in Hell, and Despair Not”: Gillian Rose’s Anti-Pelagianism’, in Vassilios Paipais, ed., The Civil Condition in World Politics: Between Tragedy and Utopianism, Bristol University Press, Bristol, 2022, pp. 75–94. ↩
40. Rose, The Broken Middle, pp. 288, 201. ↩
41. Rose, Love’s Work. Attributed to Staretz Silouan, 1866–1938. ↩
42. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 36. ↩
43. Ibid. ↩
44. Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, Athlone, London, 1981, p. 71. See also Kate Schick, ‘Re-cognizing Recognition: Gillian Rose’s “Radical Hegel” and Vulnerable Recognition’, Telos 173, 2015, pp. 87–105. ↩
45. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 159; Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 38. ↩
46. Michael Lazarus, ‘Economy and State: The Politics of Citizenship and Universality in Gillian Rose, Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemburg’, Thesis Eleven, vol. 186, no. 1, 2025, p. 93, https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136251314511. ↩
47. Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays, Blackwell, Oxford, 1993, p. 36. See also Kate Schick, ‘From Ambivalence to Vulnerability: Recognition and the Subject’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, vol. 52, no. 4, 2022, pp. 595–608, https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12351. ↩
48. Pounamu Jade William Emery Aikman, ‘Indigenous Rights: Colonial Chimera? The Illusion of Positive Peace in a Settler Colonial Context’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Positive Peace, ed. Katerina Standish et al., Springer, Singapore, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1007/978–981–16–0969–5_27. Schick, ‘From Ambivalence to Vulnerability’; Robbie Shilliam, ‘Who Will Provide the West with Therapy?’, in Amanda Russell Beattie and Kate Schick, eds, The Vulnerable Subject: Beyond Rationalism in International Relations, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2013. ↩
49. Barber, ‘Māori Mārx’, p. 70. ↩
50. FitzGerald, Care and the Pluriverse, p. 10. ↩
51. Ibid. ↩
52. Barber, ‘Māori Mārx’, p. 71. ↩
53. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Dionne Brand, ‘Temporary Spaces of Joy and Freedom’, Literary Review of Canada, vol. 26, no. 5, 2018. ↩
54. Simpson, ‘On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, “Voice” and Colonial Citizenship’, Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue 9, 2007, pp. 73 and 76. ↩
55. Shilliam, ‘Who Will Provide the West with Therapy?’ ↩
Cite this article
Kate Schick. ‘Return to the city’? Gillian Rose and the pluriverse. Promise & perdition in the thought of Gillian Rose, 2026. CRMEP Books, London, UK.