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The Guardian (11th December 1995)

It was sent to me by a close friend – since disappeared – shortly after Professor Rose’s passing. It was read once, perhaps twice, and filed away until last night. I thought I ought to share it. Click on the image to see an expanded version. (A pdf version is available here)

You may be similarly interested in John Milbank’s obituary written for The Independent (13th December 1995), located here. (A pdf version is found here)

Professor Howard Caygill’s obituary written for Radical Philosophy is found here. Perhaps one day he will compose her intellectual biography.

Gillian Rose

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the passing of Gillian Rose, philosopher, scholar and teacher. She is much missed by all whom she graced.

London Consortium is holding a special conference today to discuss the legacy and impact of her life’s thought. Unfortunately, there is not much substantial material on the web that deals with her writings. I encourage everyone to sign up on the Wikipedia site to help build a page on Gillian Rose.

There is even less audio material. I don’t recall many of her students taping her infrequent lectures, but I have found a pair of interviews that Gillian did with RTE, an Irish radio station, shortly before her death. Click here to access the (Dialogue) programme’s page then scroll down and click on the relevant dates (April 9th and 16th).

Politics begins not when you organise to defend an individual or particular or local interest, but when you organise to further the ‘general’ interest within which your particular interest may be represented – Mourning Becomes the Law p 16

This is an oft-asked question, and an erroneous one.

For one, reproduction – and reproducibility – culls this inquisitiveness: every single book is replaceable. The contemporary world of the bibliophile is without loss; that is what we come to expect in the age of commodity reproduction. The book as thing.

It is odd that such a duplicitous question does not occur in the pre-history of the modern. No Renaissance writer would thus be provoked. The temerity of modern logic lies in the very posing of this question: despite knowing its omnipresence, its role in disseminating the Thing everywhere and always, it attempts to salvage a trace of tangible immediacy, of feigned authenticity – by asking the question. It is as if the question wishes to convince us of the value of the Thing. But if this is its goal, are we not correct to treat the question with the seriousness it deserves?
Thus the question is dishonest in that it is designed to solicit an answer not to the question “What is your favourite book?” but “What book would you risk you life to save from fire?” Thus posed, the question turns on the meaningfulness of the book in question as opposed to the literary merits of the text itself. The thing-for-us, not the thing-in-itself, so to speak. It becomes purely a manner of dissecting the subject’s personal trajectory as opposed to the literary merits of the book itself or its historical trajectory.

This, however, begs the question: as the meaningfulness of the thing is therefore imbued by the interviewee, so the question’s and answer’s universal applicability is curtailed.

if your house was burning down (or caught in a hurricane or other Natural disaster), which book would you take with you?

My copy of Love’s Work, signed and inscribed by Gillian Rose.

variations on a theme

“So, what would you burn?” That’s the question The New Statesman asked.

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.