The Risk of Action

Thinking and acting, for Gillian Rose, are a matter of risk. The outcomes of critical rationality, political action, even a love affair, cannot be secured or guaranteed in advance. Instead, they can only be discovered ‘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’.¹ Both theory and practice involve the ‘risk of positing and failing and positing again’.² Politics in particular, she writes, ‘does not happen when you act on behalf of your own damaged good, but when you act, without guarantees, for the good of all – this is to take the risk of the universal interest’.³

Unlike for Kant, for whom the critique of pure reason is an exercise in risk minimization, of getting one’s tools in order, anticipating the pitfalls, ensuring the correct outcomes before getting going, and arguably forestalling the beginning altogether, Rose follows Hegel, who begins instead with the question: ‘Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself?’⁴ His phenomenology proceeds by taking the risk that things might go terribly wrong, that there may be unexpected eventualities, but that when these occur they can be learned from when we resolve to begin all over again – to return, as Rose puts it in Love’s Work, to ‘the fray’, to ‘the revel of ideas and risk’.⁵ It is for this reason that Rose writes in Hegel Contra Sociology that Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology is not a success, it is a gamble’.⁶ Reading it is not about the achievement of some predetermined result, but the risky, difficult work of committing to a position, risking both loss and gain, and learning through the process. It means following a path into and out of seemingly endless dead ends – not because knowledge is an infinite maze in which we are irrevocably lost and disoriented, but because its movement demands repeated engagement, exposure and return.⁷

In this sense, we might say, in Kierkegaardian terms, that the Phenomenology is a work of faith. This is a term Rose later defines as both a ‘negative capability’ – ‘as Keats puts it, the capacity of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reasons’ – and a ‘positive capability’ – an idea ‘not developed by Keats’, but understood as ‘the enlarging of inhibited reason in the domain of praxis, of practical reason, Aristotle’s phronesis’.⁸ Faith in this double sense is, once again, the willingness to dwell in uncertainty, to take the risk of action, and to learn from the outcome. Indeed, in The Broken Middle, Rose brings Hegel and Kierkegaard together arguing that, in spite of their commonly perceived incompatibility, both pursue an education in risk through the risk of failure: through unflinchingly and repeatedly coming up against the violent confrontation between intentions and outcomes. They both ‘suspend the ethical’, to use Kierkegaard’s term, and in doing so, as Rose puts it,

both authors are able to bring a formation, an education (Bildung), into representation as a struggle – agon – in which ‘violence’ is inseparable from staking oneself, from experience as such – the initial yet yielding recalcitrance of action and passion. Without ‘violence’, which is not sacrifice but risk, language, labour, love – life – would not live.

This insistence on taking risks without guarantees, for the good of all, including the risk of violence, might recall similar claims made by Slavoj Žižek, whose books frequently include a call for what he variously terms an ‘abyssal’ or ‘real-impossible’ act; a ‘pure voluntarism’ or ‘free decision to act against historical necessity’⁹ – a revolutionary political act without the guarantee of success or the authorization of any big Other, taken without calculation, reflection or strategic deliberation, but which might sufficiently disrupt the status quo to provide the opening for something new. Marcus Pound, for instance, has equated the political space created and sustained by such an act – ‘in which, without any external guarantee, ethical decisions are made and negotiated’ – to Rose’s figure of the broken middle.¹⁰ Žižek also frames this act, like Rose, in both Hegelian and Kierkegaardian terms. He reads Hegel’s Christology as affirming the death of the God of the beyond (the death of the big Other, the death of guarantees) which thereby opens up a radical abyss of terrifying, groundless freedom – a freedom to act;¹¹ and he understands this act as akin to Kierkegaard’s notion of ‘the leap of faith’, one which requires a full subjective engagement for its cause, the truth of which ‘is perceptible only to those who accomplish this leap, not to neutral observers’.¹² And just as Rose’s conception of the risky act requires the Kierkegaardian repetition of ‘positing and failing and positing again’, Žižek’s abyssal act ‘is not a gradual progress, but a repetitive movement, a movement of repeating the beginning again and again’ – of ‘failing again and failing better’, as he likes to put it, with reference to Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho.¹³

Despite these Hegelian and Kierkegaardian signifiers, though, Žižek’s theory of the abyssal act – and perhaps, as Peter Osborne has argued, his broader philosophical project – owes its greatest debt to Alain Badiou, for whom the naming of the event – the affirmation, after the fact, that something transformative has taken place; and the declaration of fidelity to it as a cause – is strictly ‘illegal, supernumerary, drawn from the void’: ‘illegal in that it cannot conform to any law of representation’.¹⁴ In other words, transformation, whether in thought or in action, emerges from the abyss (in Žižek’s terminology) or the void (in Badiou’s). It marks a pure beginning from outside the law, something strictly ‘unnameable’ in the language of the present situation, and totally unrecognizable except to those who have been transformed into a subject by it. For Žižek in particular a political act is not the product of deliberation and reflection, or an informed, critical engagement with actuality, but instead the product of an uncompromising engagement with one’s own subjective commitments, and following them to their end: ‘[T]he decision is purely formal’, he writes, ‘ultimately a decision to decide, without a clear awareness of what the subject is deciding about; it is a non-psychological act, unemotional, with no motives, desires or fears; it is incalculable, not the outcome of strategic argumentation; it is a totally free act. … Only afterwards is this pure act “subjectivized”, translated into a (rather unpleasant) psychological experience.’¹⁵

If your Rosean alarm bells weren’t ringing already, perhaps they are now. Throughout her work, Rose consistently challenges claims of radical novelty or ruptures with the past by seeking to expose the illusions and presuppositions of such ostensibly pure beginnings, which take themselves to be im-mediate – or, etymologically, ‘not-in-the-middle’. She is particularly critical of philosophies that claim to effect or else demand a break with the question of law – whether law is conceived as necessity (as opposed to freedom), as legality and institutionality (as opposed to morality), or even as commandment (as opposed to grace). This critique is not grounded in a defence of the law as something to be simply obeyed, but instead in an argument that an act which seeks to transgress or transform hegemonic systems of law must at some point come to confront how it is already implicated in and configured by them; that this implication and configuration cannot be simply overcome through an act of recognition or an act of will; and that any attempt to do so can only have the effect of obscuring social reality and keeping it the same.

While Rose’s affirmation of risk was largely motivated by what she perceived as a contemporary philosophical and political tendency to avoid risk at all costs – an abandonment of Old Athens for the hope of a risk-free New Jerusalem – the other side of this dialectical coin (represented by Žižek, for instance) would be a philosophy for which risk should be taken blindly. With the former, violence and risk are disavowed; with the latter, they are fetishized. One offers us sainthood; the other ‘the pathos of self-inflating and posed heroism’ – a tragic gesture which, as Robert Pippin scathingly puts it, ‘belongs in the Hegelian zoo along with The Beautiful Soul, The Knight of Virtue and especially the Frenzy of Self-Conceit’.¹⁶ In either case, for Rose, whether sainthood or heroism, the relation to and complicity with the violence of the law of the situation is not escaped but simply buried.

In the rest of this essay I will argue that Rose’s philosophy provides a historically thoroughgoing conception of the political will and act as historically impure. I will also argue, however, that it is only through the risk of such an action, through the suspension of the ethical, that this impurity becomes visible. Only through the repetition of this act, which Rose terms a ‘struggle’, might we repeat forwards, might risk be educated, and might the law itself transformed. This argument will be in two halves: with regard to Hegel and Kierkegaard, respectively. First, I will elaborate, through Rose’s reading of Hegel’s critique of Kant and Fichte, why it is for Rose that an appeal to the purity of the will or of the act as a means of disrupting historical necessity is an illusion – an illusion which re-presents social reality while simultaneously obscuring it. And then, with reference to her reading of the retelling of the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac by Johannes de silentio (one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorships), I will develop Rose’s theory of the act which is repetitively risked in spite of its impurity.

Hegel

Hegel’s early essay on natural law begins with a critique of empirical theories of natural law, criticizing them in particular for their appeal to state-of-nature myths as if they were empirical observations. These theories often begin with the accurate, if rather banal, observation that social relations, customs and historical institutions are contingent and transitory. They then assume, however, that once these historical contingencies are stripped away, what remains is the basic truth of human nature. Hegel points, for example, to Hobbes’s depiction of the state of nature, stripped of governance, where individuals ‘without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall’, as ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’ – what Rose describes as ‘the chaos of individuals’.¹⁷ But he could equally have referred, for instance, to Rousseau’s theory of humanity’s natural state as one of peaceful, isolated, self-sufficient individuals.

In some ways this could be compared to an argument made in a more recent book by David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, which criticizes pop-political philosophers such as Francis Fukuyama, Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari for uncritically repurposing these state-of-nature myths, drawn from Hobbes or Rousseau, to explain or even justify the emergence of inequality and political hierarchy.¹⁸ Hegel, however, arguably goes a step further than Graeber and Wengrow, for he not only reveals that such state-of-nature myths are fictional and misleading about early human history; he also demonstrates how they are themselves shaped by present conditions – how they smuggle in the assumptions of the very social order they claim to explain and, in doing so, naturalize and obscure the present. As Rose writes, Hegel shows how empirical natural law theory is

‘empirical’ in a sense which it does not acknowledge. … Instead of deriving the political unity of society from an imagined state of nature as it claims, empirical natural law ‘derives’ the real, observed, superficial lack of unity in bourgeois society from an observation of particular fragments of social life which are analysed as if they constituted the fundamental elements of the whole.¹⁹

In other words, empirical natural law theories observe the occasional ‘chaos of individuals’, or conversely the occasional formal freedom and self-sufficiency of individuals, within the present formation of society, and elevate these historically contingent phenomena to the status of a priori truths.

After criticizing empirical theories of natural law, Hegel turns to their apparent opposite: the idealist theories of Kant and Fichte. While, as Rose writes, ‘Kant and Fichte were opposed to empirical natural law … in Hegel’s eyes, they represent its culmination.’²⁰ This is because, by rejecting the empirical content of natural law entirely and by strictly separating the moral realm of freedom and the autonomous rational will from the empirical realm of historical necessity, Kant and Fichte not only preserve the foundational structure of these earlier theorists, they re­inforce them. By elevating a particular principle to the status of an a priori, they formalize the very abstraction they seek to transcend and, in doing so, they obscure the extent to which this a priori is itself socially and historically mediated. For Hegel, both empirical and idealist theories of natural law are grounded in the same presupposition: they ‘posit the being of the individual as the primary and supreme being’. This conception, he argues, reflects not a universal truth but a historically specific feature of property relations. Yet it is only ‘in the idealism of Kant and Fichte’, in Hegel’s words, that this is raised to the level of ‘pure abstraction’.²¹ Bourgeois property relations, as Rose puts it, ‘make people into competing, isolated, “moral” individuals who can only relate externally to one another, and are thus subjected to a real lack of identity’, and then Kant’s and Fichte’s philosophies presuppose and stabilize this fractured social condition: they assume ‘individuals in this relation to each other, relative ethical life, and fixes them in it. Like empirical natural law, Kant and Fichte abstract from all specific historical aspects of social life, and thus reaffirm an abstracted, “moral” individual who only represents one part of it.’²² This conception of the individual, therefore, both obscures and re-presents existing social relations. It ‘soars above the wreckage of the world’ (as Hegel puts it in his essay on Faith and Knowledge), while remaining shaped by it in a way that it disavows.²³

At first glance, this may seem at odds with the Introduction to the Philosophy of Right, in which Hegel begins with the free will and the self-determination of the ‘I’, which is then developed and realized within a collective social and political context. Indeed, Peter Hallward argues that, ‘After Fichte, Hegel complements the voluntarist trajectory initiated by Rousseau and Kant … when he identifies a free collective will – a will that wills and realizes its own emancipation – as the animating principle of a concrete political association.’²⁴ Hallward supports this reading with a passage from near the beginning of the Philosophy of Right, in which Hegel writes that the will is nothing other than ‘thinking translating itself into existence…. The activity of the will consists in cancelling and over-coming [aufzuheben] the contradiction between subjectivity and objectivity and in translating its ends from the subjective determination into an objective one.’²⁵

However, this mistakes the opening of Hegel’s exposition for its result, reading as an endorsement of a voluntarist view of the will what, for Rose, is only an abstract and provisional starting point. As she puts it, it is ‘an abstract statement of the prevalent philosophical concept of the will couched in Fichtean terms. … Hegel is restating this abstraction, not endorsing it; it is the beginning not the result of the exposition of ethical life.’²⁶ This claim forms part of Rose’s broader argument that the Philosophy of Right has a phenomenological form; that, like the Phenomenology of Spirit, it traces the illusions and experiences of natural consciousness as it confronts and overcomes its own limitations and pre­suppositions, and the obstacles to doing so. ‘Unfortunately’, she notes, ‘the mistakes of natural consciousness which Hegel was exposing have frequently been attributed to him.’²⁷ The fact that Hegel begins with the abstract will does not, for Rose, mean that it serves as the foundation of his concepts of freedom and right. On the contrary, it functions much like ‘sense-certainty’ in the Phenomenology, as the most immediate and illusory form of the concept in question. It is not a truth to be affirmed, but a position to be worked through.

This is to say that a theory of the risk of action, for Rose, cannot be predicated on a primordial or foundational notion of freedom understood as freedom from necessity. Such a notion of freedom as primary is not, as Žižek might suggest, the capacity to disrupt or rupture the historical present, but rather an abstraction from it – a re-presentation of the present that disavows its own conditions. Such a freedom appears autonomous, un­affected by the dynamics of capitalism, when in fact it is precisely those dynamics that have made this abstract notion of freedom possible. Far from being a transcendental capacity, the imagined purity of this freedom is the ideological form of freedom specific to capitalist modernity.

Admittedly, things are not looking good. If concepts like freedom, will and agency are shown to be always-already implicated in in the legal structures of bourgeois society – particularly in the framework of property law – then it might seem as though thought and action not only risk failure but are destined for it. This implication extends to philosophy itself, which, as Rose notes, arises ‘in a society where real recognition has not been achieved’ while at the same time positing the ‘concept of real recognition’. In doing so, it ‘reinforces the primacy of the concept, and falls into the terms of the dichotomy which it seeks to transform’. This is central to Rose’s claim that all philosophy, even Hegel’s, ‘contains an abstract imperative, a moment of Sollen [ought]’, even in spite of Hegel’s insistence that philosophy should not prescribe or legislate that anything ought to be the case.²⁸ By tracing the necessary failures to think the absolute, to achieve real recognition, or to institute freedom – failures which are necessary not in the Kantian sense (as structural limits of reason), but in the historical sense (as limits embedded in social formations) – Hegel’s philosophy inevitably points beyond itself. It implies, however obliquely, the possibility of an alternative world in which these concepts are not merely, abstractly posited but realized.

Rose argues that this is ‘to think the absolute and to fail to think it quite different from Kant and Fichte’s thinking and failing to think it’ – less a closure than a reflexive exposure of philosophy’s own historical conditions and limits.²⁹ Yet, as Peter Osborne argued in his early review of Hegel Contra Sociology, this might feel like ‘something of a Pyrrhic victory, both sociologically and practically. For while the acknowledgment and explanation of an unjustifiable element of Sollen in speculative experience reasserts its theoretical consistency, it also serves to emphasize both its theoretical and practical impotence.’³⁰ In this reading, philosophy can show us why freedom is unrealized, but not how to make it real.

As Rose herself acknowledges, while Hegel can think the identity of revolutionary consciousness and its social determinations – a consciousness that, as she writes, ‘will re-form the ethical without being re-formed by it’ – he can only do so abstractly.³¹ Absolute ethical life (what Marx would later call communism) remains thinkable but historically unrealized, precisely because ‘it has never existed in history’.³² Philosophy, in this sense, necessarily fails – but it fails in a way that reveals the dominance of abstraction under capital and therefore urges us to transform that which has determined it. This, for Rose, is philosophy’s critical force. Its modern task is not to prescribe a new order, but to present the contradictory relations between substance and subject, or capital and culture, in order to link an analysis of the economy to the subjective conditions and obstacles for revolutionary practice. Yet for Osborne this is unsatisfactory, for ‘philosophy cannot specify concretely what this new mode of transformation is’. And while ‘the reiteration of such a position may clear our philosophical consciences … it remains impotent in the face of contemporary reality’.³³

Kierkegaard

Geoffrey Hill writes in his poem in memory of Rose that this is ‘a bleak ontology / to have to contemplate; it may be all we have’.³⁴ Can we move beyond this bleakness; this concession that there is no way out? Perhaps this is why, in Paradiso, the unfinished sequel to Love’s Work, Rose writes that one of the things you need to be a philosopher is ‘acceptance of pathlessness (aporia): that there may be no solutions to questions, only the clarification of their statement’.³⁵ Perhaps philosophy offers no exit, but only a deeper understanding of why we remain stuck where we are.

And yet my argument to end this article is that Rose’s turn to Kierkegaard in The Broken Middle does not mark a retreat from radical commitments. It is not, as Anthony Gorman has argued from opposing perspectives, either a turn towards ‘inwardness and an ethic of singularity’ or a dangerous politics for which ‘Everything is ruled in; nothing is ruled out.’³⁶ Nor does it signal, as Martin Jay suggests, an abandonment of ‘the promise of a different future contained in aesthetic form’ in favour of the belief that ‘eternity exits in the here and now for those with faith’.³⁷ Nor, finally, does it amount to quiet abandonment of Marxist categories in favour of a ‘much more general project’, as Osborne contends in his retrospective account of Rose and Marxism – a shift towards ‘(re)thinking the political potential of the European philosophical tradition’.³⁸

Instead, I argue that Rose’s turn to Kierkegaard builds directly on the argument first developed in Hegel Contra Sociology that Hegel’s philosophy harbours an implicit unphilosophical Sollen – a moment of subjective commitment without guarantees, emerging from philosophy’s own demonstration of the domination of abstraction which cannot be overcome through thought alone. In Hegel Contra Sociology, this Sollen remains largely formal and abstract: a general imperative to transform ethical life. In The Broken Middle, however, this imperative is reconfigured into a kind of phenomenology of revolutionary commitment and education – one in which the absolute is not finally thought but repeatedly staked, represented and risked. As Bogdan Ovcharuk, the only other commentator to argue this point directly, puts it: Rose’s engagement with Kierkegaard’s philosophical authorship is an attempt ‘to address the problem of Marxist revolutionary subjectivity – specifically its tendency towards abstract intentions’.³⁹ If the central motif of Hegel Contra Sociology was the repeated claim that ‘Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the absolute cannot be thought’, the central claim of The Broken Middle could be that Kierkegaard’s philosophy has no social import if the absolute cannot be concretely risked, in a way that exposes the mediated relationship between subjectivity and social reality.⁴⁰ Rose’s wager is that philosophy’s impasses – its necessary failures – end not in resignation but in the re­activation of political commitment at the point where conceptual resolution breaks down. This is not a withdrawal from Marxist critique, but its transformation into a mode of lived dialectical risk.

This is most clearly demonstrated in Rose’s reading of Fear and Trembling, in which Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship of Johannes de silentio retells the biblical story of Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his only son in obedience to God. There is, of course, Abraham’s own risk: the terrifying wager that God will return Isaac, even as he prepares to lose him. But de silentio also takes a risk of his own – one that often goes unnoticed – by speculatively rewriting Abraham’s act from within and in tension with an ethical or juridical community – a middle – that is not Abraham’s own. As Rose notes, ‘de silentio distinguishes Abraham from the tragic hero who is saved by the middle term, the ethical’ – that is, from figures like Agamemnon (the Greek king), Jephthah (the Israelite judge) and Brutus (the Roman consul), all of whom also sacrifice their children. In these cases, however, their ‘communities are able to understand the killing of their offspring and hence to grieve with them and for them’ – there exists a middle term that renders their sacrifice legible, however tragic.⁴¹ Abraham, by contrast, stands outside any such mediation. His act is performed in a world without a middle – in ‘a holy nomadic community which has not yet even received the written covenant or Torah’.⁴² For the Abraham of Genesis, there is no so-called ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’ because there is, quite literally, no ethical life to suspend. This is why Abraham inspires what Rose calls ‘holy terror’ – not simply because of what he does, but because his act cannot be justified, shared or received.⁴³ In this sense, uniquely, it is what Žižek describes as an abyssal act.

Rose argues, however, that the figure of Abraham is ‘plundered’ by de silentio,⁴⁴ not to model acting blindly (which arguably is the predicament of Abraham in the biblical story), but instead to develop the figure of the knight of faith: one who takes the risk of action within a broken middle, under conditions where ethical terms are fractured, uncertain, but nonetheless actual. This marks the difference of the knight of faith from the tragic hero and from the Abraham of Genesis. The violence committed by Agamemnon, Jephthah and Brutus is tragic but socially and politically legible and legal; Abraham’s threat of violence, by contrast, is holy but illegible and illegal – or even purely non-legal, as it precedes the law. The knight of faith, meanwhile, acts in an uncertain relation to both legibility and legality: the outcome, reception and ethical significance of the act are not guaranteed. And yet the knight takes this risk – and then, after reflection on the now-known outcomes, takes it again, and so on – precisely in order to bring these into view: to bring the repeated acts, which we might term a struggle, into terms of legibility and legality, so that they might be shared, so that mourning might become the law.

For this reason, its violence is risky, but not abyssal: it suspends the ethical, but it does not abolish it. As Rose insists: ‘To posit that the ethical is “suspended” is to acknowledge that it is always already presupposed.’ While the notion of an abolition of the ethical through an abyssal act, through a kind of Benja­minian law-destroying divine violence, may have a certain romance, it necessarily involves the illogical positing of ‘a time outside time, or a social reality outside reality’.⁴⁵ The suspension of the ethical, meanwhile, for Rose, incessantly returns us to time and to reality. As she writes in an essay in Judaism and Modernity: ‘The suspension of the ethical may be transhistorical but it is not suprahistorical’ for it returns us ‘in an instant’ to our ‘stake in the struggle of particular and universal’.⁴⁶ It is an act which does not oppose itself to the world absolutely – which would be an act of disavowal – but one which discovers time and again how it is a part of it, a discovery which is a condition of transforming it.

If we only read Hegel Contra Sociology, then the conclusion of Osborne’s early review may be correct: that Rose’s focus on philosophy’s implicit Sollen lends theoretical consistency but signals practical impotence. Yet this is precisely why it must now be read in the context of her later work, in which this non-philosophical moment is transformed from a mere abstract imperative into a concrete risk; a shift from aporia or impasse to agon or struggle.

Change does not come from the abyss or the void, or from an act of willpower alone; and appeals to these in their characterless purity serve only to obscure reality and keep it the same. As Rose writes in Dialectic of Nihilism: ‘political voluntarism erupts to affirm the … “beyond”, which Foucault calls the “until now” and which will most surely repeat just that’.⁴⁷ The fantasy of a forced rupture from outside or against history – a Žižekian abyssal act – becomes not a vehicle of transformation but a cycle of repetition. To imagine freedom as a freedom from historical constraints is therefore not only misleading, but disempowering. It veils the conditions and contradictions through which genuine action and transformation might occur. As Rose puts it, ‘The very struggle to keep one’s autonomy separate from one’s heteronomy robs “morality” of the knowledge and of the politics which might reorient this predicament.’ It denies the subject the very terrain upon which freedom might be realized.

This dialectic is borne out in many of the most prevalent Western political movements of recent decades, from Occupy to BLM, the gilets jaunes and XR. These movements were more or less disorganized on principle – resisting leadership, clear programmes and institutions, often favouring spectacular but largely symbolic demonstrations, aimed at influencing political power rather than claiming it – but also, and relatedly, grounded in a notion of political subjectivity that imagines itself apart from the impasses of capitalist reality and time, symbolized by their carnivalesque occupation of large open spaces. Coupled together, these tendencies may begin to account for why, despite moments of impact, such movements were ultimately short-lived and failed to develop into a sustained struggle and substantial political programme. This is to commend not collusion with the tyranny of the city but an uncompromising struggle within its walls: a politics which reckons with, rather than disavows, the necessary negotiations of power and violence – both of one’s enemies and of one’s own.

This is just one reason why Rose’s thought demands more careful engagement than ever. Her conception of risk entails a politics which refuses all intellectual and political comfort and complacency, all heroes, saints, beautiful souls, holy mended middles, New Jerusalems and promised lands; a refusal of all locations outside the city – not because the city is just or good enough, but precisely because, when we imagine ourselves apart from the city, we disavow the ways in which we are shaped by and implicated in its injustice, and miss the latent possibilities for justice which might be discovered within it. To take the risk of returning to the city, then, is to be constantly returned to the actuality of a committed struggle against, through and with the violence and love of what William Wordsworth describes as

the very world, which is the world

Of all of us, – the place where, in the end,

We find our happiness, or not at all!⁴⁸

Footnotes

1. 1. Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p. 38. I am grateful for the organizers and attendees of the Gillian Rose Memorial Lecture Conference 2025, where an earlier version of this essay was presented. I am thankful too to Peter Hallward and Nigel Tubbs, whose comments and questions helped shape the argument in important ways. ↩

2. 2. Ibid., p. 13. ↩

3. 3. Ibid., p. 2; emphasis in original. ↩

4. 4. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977, p. 47, §74. For a more developed argument on Rose, Hegel and beginnings, see Robert Lucas Scott, ‘The anxiety of beginning’, Thesis Eleven, vol. 186, no. 1, 2025, pp. 137–52. ↩

5. 5. Gillian Rose, Love’s Work, New York Review of Books, New York, 2011, p. 144. ↩

6. 6. Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, Verso, London, 2009, p. 168. ↩

7. 7. For Rose’s elaboration of a dialectical notion of method as ‘following the path’, see Gillian Rose, ‘Does Marx Have a Method?’, in Robert Lucas Scott, ed., Thesis Eleven, vol. 186, no. 1, 2025, pp. 3–12. For a more detailed elaboration of the experiential content of reading Hegel and its import for a theory of critical reading more generally, see Robert Lucas Scott, Reading Hegel: Irony, Recollection, Critique, University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL, 2015. ↩

8. 8. Gillian Rose, Paradiso, Menard Press, London, 1999, pp. 31–2. ↩

9. 9. ‘What the inexistence of the big Other signals is that every ethical and/or moral edifice has to be grounded in an abyssal act which is, in the most radical sense imaginable, political’. Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Verso, London, 2010, pp. 963. ‘The circle is thus (almost) closed: humanitarian charity participates in the universe which creates victims; eco-sustainability reproduces the very ecological problems it claims to resolve; reforms of capitalism make it more efficient… The circle is almost closed: it is impossible to break out of it, which means one can do it by means of a real-impossible act.’ Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute, Bloomsbury, London, 2020, p. 458. ‘[W]hat alone can prevent such calamity is, then, pure voluntarism, in other words, our free decision to act against historical necessity.’ Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Verso, London, 2009, p. 154; emphasis in original. ↩

10. 10. Marcus Pound, ‘Rose contra Girard: Kenotic Comedy and Social Theory (Or, Žižek as a Reader of Rose)’, in Joshua B. Davis, ed., Misrecognitions: Gillian Rose and the Task of Political Theology, Cascade Books, Eugene OR, pp. 67–86, here p. 85, with quotation from Žižek, Less Than Nothing, p. 963. ↩

11. 11. See for instance: ‘What dies on the cross is not an earthly representative or messenger of god, but as Hegel put it, the god of the beyond itself, so that the dead Christ returns as Holy Ghost which is nothing more than the egalitarian community of believers …. This community is free in the radical sense of being abandoned to itself, with no transcendent higher power guaranteeing its fate. It is in this sense that god gives us freedom – by way of erasing itself out of the picture.’ Slavoj Žižek, Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2024, p. 3. ↩

12. 12. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Afterword: Lenin’s Choice’, Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917, by V.I. Lenin, ed. Slavoj Žižek, Verso, London, 2002, pp. 165–336, p. 187. ↩

13. 13. Slavoj Žižek, ‘How to Begin from the Beginning’, The Idea of Communism, ed. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, Verso, London, 2010, pp. 209–26; p. 210; emphasis in original. ↩

14. 14. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham, Continuum, London, 2007, pp. 206, 205; emphasis in original. See Peter Osborne, ‘More than Everything: Žižek’s Badiouian Hegel’, Radical Philosophy 177, Jan/Feb 2013, pp. 19–25. ↩

15. 15. Slavoj Žižek, Foreword to the second edition, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, Verso, London, 2008, p. xli. ↩

16. 16. Robert B. Pippin, ‘Slavoj Žižek’s Hegel’, Interanimations: Receiving Modern German Philosophy, University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL, 2015, pp. 91–116; p. 106. ↩

17. 17. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 56; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, p. 89. ↩

18. 18. David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, Penguin Books, London, 2022, pp. 1–27. ↩

19. 19. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 56. ↩

20. 20. Ibid., p. 57. ↩

21. 21. G.W.F. Hegel, Natural Law: The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Law, trans. T.M. Knox, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia PA, 1975, p. 70. ↩

22. 22. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 60. ↩

23. 23. Quoted in ibid., p. 107. For a more detailed account of Rose’s appropriation of Hegel’s critique of Kant and Fichte for smuggling historical categories of law into their apparently ahistorical philosophies, see Robert Lucas Scott, ‘Phenomenology of Necessary Illusion: Gillian Rose on Personification and the Failure to Think the Absolute’, Radical Philosophy 2.19, Summer 2025, pp. 25–41. ↩

24. 24. Peter Hallward, ‘The Will of the People: Notes towards a Dialectical Voluntarism’, Radical Philosophy 155, May/June 2009, pp. 17–29; p. 25. ↩

25. 25. G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, §4A, §28; quoted with modified translation in Hallward, ‘The Will of the People’, pp. 25–6. ↩

26. 26. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 85. ↩

27. 27. Ibid., p. 54. ↩

28. 28. Ibid., p. 84. ↩

29. 29. Ibid., p. 218. ↩

30. 30. Peter Osborne, ‘Hegelian Phenomenology and the Critique of Reason and Society’, Radical Philosophy 32, Autumn 1982, pp. 8–15; pp. 13–14. ↩

31. 31. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 195. ↩

32. 32. Ibid., p. 214. ↩

33. 33. Osborne, ‘Hegelian Phenomenology’, pp. 14–15. For a more developed engagement with Osborne’s criticisms of Rose, see Scott, ‘Phenomenology of Necessary Illusion’, pp. 26–7, 35–6. ↩

34. 34. Geoffrey Hill, ‘In Memoriam: Gillian Rose’, in Love’s Work, by Gillian Rose, pp. 147–50; p. 150. ↩

35. 35. Rose, Paradiso, p. 42. ↩

36. 36. See Tony Gorman, ‘Gillian Rose and the Project of a Critical Marxism’, Radical Philosophy 105, January/February 2001, pp. 25–36; p. 25; and Anthony Gorman, ‘Gillian Rose’s Critique of Violence’, Radical Philosophy 197, May/June 2016, pp. 25–35; p. 35. ↩

37. 37. Martin Jay, Afterword to Gillian Rose, Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory, ed. Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finalyson, Verso, London, 2024, pp. 129–43; p. 143. ↩

38. 38. Peter Osborne, ‘Gillian Rose and Marxism’, Telos 173, 2015, pp. 55–67; p. 55. ↩

39. 39. Bogdan Ovcharuk, ‘Faith and Revolution in Gillian Rose’s Critical Marxism’, Political Theology, February 2025, pp. 1–21; p. 18. ↩

40. 40. See Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, pp. 45, 98, 218, 223. As Ovcharuk puts it: ‘the social import of Kierkegaard’s thought is the realization that one cannot do away with the subjective representation of the absolute’. Ovcharuk, ‘Faith and Revolution’, p. 14. ↩

41. 41. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 17. ↩

42. 42. Ibid., pp. 17–18. ↩

43. 43. Ibid., p. 17. ↩

44. 44. Ibid., p. 18. ↩

45. 45. Ibid., p. 148. ↩

46. 46. Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays, Verso, London, 2017, p. 172. ↩

47. 47. Gillian Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-Structuralism and Law, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1984, p. 207. ↩

48. 48. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850), ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, Penguin, London, 1995, p. 443. ↩