Gillian Rose passed away nine years ago. A passage from Love’s Work:
Metaphysics, which in Aristotle’s technical terms, is concerned with the relation between the universal ‘nose’ and the sheer snubness of a nose, which no term can capture, this remote-sounding metaphysics is the perplexity, the aporia, at how to find the path from the law of the concept to the peculiarity of each instance, from ‘the nose’ to the snub. If metaphysics is the aporia, the perception of the difficulty of the law, the difficult way, then ethics is the development of it, the diaporia, being at a loss yet exploring various routes, different ways towards the good enough justice, which recognises the intrinsic and the contingent limitations in its exercise. Earthly, human sadness is the divine comedy - the ineluctable discrepancy between our worthy intentions and the ever-surprising outcome of our actions. This comic condition is euporia: the always missing, yet prodigiously imaginable, easy way
Daniel Traister has a short review of Love’s Work on his home page.
Gillian Rose has written a memoir entitled Love’s Work: A Reckoning With Life (New York: Schocken, 1996). Rose is a philosopher who finds herself travelling (”New York, Auschwitz, Jerusalem. My three Cities of the Dead”) and confronted by mortality–her own mortality, as well as that of far too many others. The book sounds as if it ought to be something you don’t want to pick up; it is, instead, something you cannot bear to put down. It is also a book about which–aside from recommending it very highly–one fears trying to say much. It feels light, it looks tiny, and (although it is actually neither) one worries about bruising it too easily. Not, it turns out, a real worry: this is a tough little book, as well as an extraordinarily beautiful one. The grimness of Rose’s themes are, perhaps surprisingly, not as tough as her thought; and the pleasures of this slender volume, perhaps because they are so thoroughly unexpected, would be difficult to exaggerate.
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