Gillian Rosemary Rose (née Stone; 20 September 1947 – 9 December 1995) was a British philosopher and writer. Rose held the chair of social and political thought at the University of Warwick until 1995. Rose began her teaching career at the University of Sussex. She worked in the fields of philosophy and sociology. Her writings include The Melancholy Science, Hegel Contra Sociology, Dialectic of Nihilism, Mourning Becomes the Law, and Paradiso, among others.
Notable facets of her work include criticism of neo-Kantianism, post-modernism, and political theology in tandem with what has been described as "a forceful defence of Hegel's speculative thought," largely with the ambition of philosophically substantiating and extending the critical theory of Karl Marx.From the back cover of the 2009 Verso Books reprint of Hegel contra Sociology.
Early life and education Gillian Rose was born in London into a secular Jewish family. She was the elder sister of the British academic Jacqueline Rose. Shortly after her parents divorced, when Rose was still quite young, her mother married another man, her stepfather, with whom Rose became close as she drifted from her biological father. These aspects of her family life figured in her late memoir Love's Work (1995). Also in her memoir, she writes that her "passion for philosophy" was bred at age 17 when she read Pascal's Pensées and Plato's Republic.Rose, Gillian (1995). "Love's Work". The New York Review of Books. p. 128.
Rose attended Ealing Grammar School and went on to St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she read PPE.Caygill, Howard (2004). "Rose, Gillian Rosemary (1947–1995)". In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. Taught philosophy by Jean Austin, widow of the philosopher J. L. Austin, she later described herself as bristling under the constraints of Oxford-style philosophy. She never forgot Austin remarking in class, "Remember, girls, all the philosophers you will read are much more intelligent than you are."Rose (1995). p. 129. In a late interview, Rose commented of philosophers trained at Oxford, "It teaches them to be clever, destructive, supercilious and ignorant. It doesn't teach you what's important. It doesn't feed the soul."Lloyd, Vincent (2008). "Interview with Gillian Rose". Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 25 Issue 7/8. p. 207. Sociologist Jean Floud helped keep Rose's passion for philosophy alive in her final year at Oxford.Bernstein, J.M. (1995). "A Work of Hard Love," The Guardian, December 11, p. 12" Rose graduated with upper second-class honours. Before beginning her Doctor of Philosophy at St. Antony's College, Oxford, she studied at Columbia University as a Ford Foundation Fellow and at the Free University, Berlin. While in Germany, she was introduced to Hegel by Dieter Henrich.
Work Rose's career began with a dissertation on Theodor W. Adorno, supervised by Steven Lukes and the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, who wryly spoke to her of Adorno as a third-rate thinker. This dissertation eventually became the basis for her first book, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (1978). She became well known partly through her critiques of postmodernism and post-structuralism. In Dialectic of Nihilism (1984), for instance, she leveled criticisms at Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Later, in her essay "Of Derrida's Spirit" in Judaism and Modernity (1993), Rose critiqued Derrida's Of Spirit (1987), arguing that his analysis of Heidegger's relation to Nazism relied in key instances on serious misreadings of Hegel, which allowed both Heidegger and Derrida to evade the importance of political history and modern law. In an extended "Note" to the essay, Rose raised similar objections to Derrida's subsequent readings of Hermann CohenDerrida, Jacques (1991). "Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German". New Literary History 22. pp. 39–95. and Walter Benjamin,Derrida, Jacques (1990). "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority,'" in two Parts. Cardozo Law Review vol. 11, 5–6. pp. 919–73; 973–1039. singling out his notion of the "mystical foundation of authority" as centrally problematic.Rose, Gillian (1993). Judaism and Modernity. Blackwell. pp. 79–87.
In the early 1990s there was a really interesting intellectual context [in England]. There were people like Gillian Rose, David Wood, Jay Bernstein and Geoff Bennington—there was a very high level of intellectual activity. And really good younger people, like Howard Caygill, Peter Osborne, Keith Ansell Pearson, Nick Land and many others. People were really pushing the envelope, thinking hard about deep issues and the standard was extremely high.
--Simon Critchley, 2010Critchley, Simon (2010). How to Stop Living and Start Worrying: Conversations with Carl Cederström. Polity Press. p. 22 Her first academic appointment was as a lecturer in sociology in 1974 at the School of European Studies (the University of Sussex). In 1989, Rose left Sussex for the University of Warwick when a colleague was unexpectedly promoted over her. Inquiring about the promotion with economist Donald Winch, the then pro-vice-chancellor, he told her that her future at the institution was not bright: "He said to me that I was working in a contextual manner and that the future belonged to those whose work was acceptable to the Government, to industry and to the public." Her chair at Warwick in Social and Political Thought was created for her and she was encouraged to bring her funded PhD students with her.Williams, Elaine (1995). "'Keep your mind in hell and despair not,'" The Times Higher Education Supplement, issue 1171, April 14, 1995, p. 15. She held her position at Warwick until her death in 1995.
As part of her thinking into the Holocaust, Rose was engaged by the Polish Commission for the Future of Auschwitz in 1990, a delegation which included theologian Richard L. Rubenstein and literary critic David G. Roskies, among others. She wrote about her experience of this commission in her memoir Love's Work and in Mourning Becomes the Law and Paradiso. One of her colleagues on the commission, Marc H. Ellis, has written about Rose's experience as well: At a crucial moment in our deliberations on the historical knowledge of the Polish guides, Rose spoke, out of turn and off the subject, of the nearness of God. This was a violation of etiquette, and worse. Rose was suggesting that the anger of these delegates, for the most part Holocaust scholars and rabbis, was a retrospective one that, paradoxically sought the Holocaust past as a safe haven from inquiries of the present conduct of the Jewish people.Ellis, Marc H. (2000). "Questioning Conversion: Gillian Rose, George Steiner, and Christianity." In Revolutionary Forgiveness: Essays on Judaism, Christianity, and the Future of Religious Life. Baylor University Press. p. 231.
Love's Work (1995) Rose's memoir, Love's Work, detailing her background, maturation as a philosopher, and years-long battle with ovarian cancer, was a bestseller when it was published in 1995. "She has, hitherto, been a respected, weighty, but lone voice among a specialised readership," wrote Elaine Williams at the time, "[but] she has, since her illness, been driven to write philosophy which has created ripples of excitement among a wider critical audience."Williams (1995). p. 15. Marina Warner, writing for the London Review of Books, said "[Love's Work] provokes, inspires and illuminates more profoundly than many a bulky volume, and confronts the great subjects...and it delivers what its title promises, a new allegory about love."Warner, Marina (1995). "Fierceness," London Review of Books vol. 17, 7, April 6, 1995, pp. 11. In a review in The New York Times, upon the publication of the U.S. edition of the book, Daniel Mendelsohn wrote, "'Love's Work' is a raw but always artfully wrought confrontation with the 'deeper levels of the terrors of the soul'"Mendelsohn, Daniel (1996). "Keep Your Mind in Hell," The New York Times, January 21, 1996, S7, pg. 34. Love's Work was re-published by NYRB Books in 2011, in the NYRB Classics series, with an introduction by friend and literary critic Michael Wood and including a poem by Geoffrey Hill, which he had dedicated to her. In a review of the re-publication, in The Guardian, Nicholas Lezard commented, "I struggle to think of a finer, more rewarding short autobiography than this." In 2024, Penguin re-published Love's Work in the Penguin Modern Classics series.
Philosophy
The Melancholy Science (1978) Rose's first book, The Melancholy Science, is a text that shows Adorno's most significant contribution to the sociology of culture is a Marxist aesthetic. Rose traces Adorno's Marxist critique of philosophy through the works of various philosophers such as Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger and essays on Kafka, Mann, Beckett, Brecht and Schönberg. She posits that Adorno offers a ‘sociology of illusion’ that rivals structural Marxism as well as phenomenological sociology and that of the Frankfurt School. In 2014, The Melancholy Science was republished by Verso Books.
Hegel Contra Sociology (1981) Her second book, Hegel Contra Sociology, argues that all the major sociological traditions derive from neo-Kantian philosophy and fail to grasp the radical significance of Hegel's critique of Kant. The book sets out Rose's understanding of Hegel, in particular her view that Hegel's is a 'speculative' rather than a 'dialectical' philosophy. Speculative philosophy is concerned with non-identity as much as identity and in this way Hegel was able to pre-empt and disarm many of the charges (not least Popper's charge of justifying totalitarianism) leveled at him. The book has twice been republished: first, in 1995, with a new preface, by Athlone Press, the original publisher; and then in 2009, by Verso Books.
Dialectic of Nihilism (1984)