Gillian Rose Against the Holy Middle

Remembering Britain's Greatest Post-War Philosopher

Maya Krishnan, in an article for The Point (‘The Risk of the Universal’, 3 June 2024). has contributed a substantial and readable introduction the writings of Gillian Rose (1947-1995).

Gillian Rose said that the collapse of state-socialism couldn’t kill Marxism, because 'all the antinomies of modern state and society addressed since Hobbes, Smith and Rousseau, have been reopened.’ Furthermore, the antinomies raised the question of the ‘connection’ between liberalism and fascism, which might have seemed otiose in the 1990s, but certainly doesn’t now.

Rose recalls the words of the young Marx, writing in On the Jewish Question,

‘,,,the perfection of the idealism of the state is at the same time the perfection of the materialism of civil society. The shaking-off of the political yoke was at the same time the shaking-off of the bonds which had held in check the egoistic spirit of civil society. Political emancipation was, at the same time, the emancipation of civil society from politics, from even the appearance of a universal content.’

In Rose’s interpretation, Marx here exposes the ‘breaking of the middle’. In the pre-capitalist world, the guilds, statuses and privileges which determined the rights and duties of individuals, formed the legal estate in the ‘middle’ of the old feudal order. With the sweeping away of these institutions, the post-feudal individual is ‘naturalized as “egoism” and allegorized as “ethical”.’

Following the post-Hegelian ‘disasters of modernity’ – stalinism, nazi-ism and imperialism – we see the post-modern attempt to bypass the dichotomies by dismissing the whole Enlightenment project – and rational critique generally - as implicated in power relations.

Foucault’s monolithic concept of ‘power’ conflates actual power and knowledge in a way that ‘underwrites the Nietzschian drive toward a nihilist abandonment of reason itself’. Philosophic truth-claims are seen as ‘mere by-products of the will-to-power vested in figural language.’ In the ‘linguistic turn’ of post-modernism, rhetoric is privileged over reason: concepts and categories are entirely determined by the various signifying codes and systems that make up a given ‘discourse’. In Krishnan’s view, Rose’s critique of post-structuralism, in The Dialectic of Nihilism exposes ‘a kind of tantrum in which thinkers misdirect their anger over an irrational society by lashing out at rationality itself.’

As Krishnan suggests, the problem with the ‘Peoples of the Book’ – Jews, Moslems and Christians – isn’t so much that they have to negotiate between their ethics and the ‘voice of authority’ which issued the ‘god-given’ order: ‘go and smite Amalek’:

‘Where we go wrong, on Rose’s view, is not by accepting the wrong kind of authority; it’s rather by demanding the wrong kind of security. The risk of becoming a perpetrator of violence isn’t special to traditional authority. Rather, it is the risk of politics itself.’

What Rose calls the ‘fantasy of mending the world’ is the realm of the ‘Holy Middle’, in which it is imagined that following a set of principles will guarantee security. In the Middle discourse and principles displace political action of the universalist kind, because the latter has had violent consequences. Hence, post-politics is imagined to be risk-free, not just as regards personal safety, but also from the guilt of complicity in the violence of the system.

The political implications are summed up by Krishnan as follows:

‘None, then, are without sin. But the Rosean leftist traditionalist can say more than that. A capacity to appreciate forms of value caught up in compromised histories has particular relevance to the leftist, whose uniquely demanding vision of a transformed world is susceptible to giving way to a uniquely dispirited outlook. Living with disappointment over the political history of one’s ideals is a key aspect of Rose’s account of the “broken middle” and of her philosophy of mourning, which is not a counsel of resignation but rather its opposite. By giving up faulty conceptions of our ability to distance ourselves from risk and violence, Rose thinks we regain the political aspirations that the “nihilist” abandons.’

Rose takes off from Hegel’s understanding of modernity not as factor of unification, but of diremption, or division. According to Rose in Hegel Contra Sociology, ‘Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the Absolute cannot be thought.’ Inasmuch as Marx’s philosophy does have social import – i.e. if the new society (the absolute) is immanent in the actuality of everyday life – it must also be thought. However, Rose continues,

‘A society’s relation to nature, to transformative activity determines its political and property relations, its concept of law, and its subjective or natural consciousness... as long as these relations and law prevails the absolute can only be thought by an abstract consciousness...’

The domination of abstract consciousness in commodity production is underwritten by the predominance of abstract labour. The problem of inversion is tackled in Marx’s Capital:

‘The theory of commodity fetishism is the most speculative moment in Marx’s exposition of capital. It comes nearest to demonstrating in the historically specific case of commodity-producing society how substance is (mis-)represented as subject, how necessary illusion arises out of productive activity.’

In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the history of reason’s determinations and self-(mis)understandings, begins with natural consciousness. Eventually, reason recognises that all along reason has been trying to know itself, rather than an external object. In modernity what Rose calls ‘aberrated mourning’ is the failure to recognise that what we have been mourning  is our own fantasies of mending the world. What Rose calls ‘inaugurated mourning’ would recognise the potential for challenging the abstract rationalism of bourgeois society, for which any traditional social forms either have to be destroyed or taken over (or recuperated) to render them relatively harmless. I say relatively, because traditional forms harbour their own fantasies of mending the world, and their own denials and evasions of the past.

Krishnan points out that Alisdair MacIntyre (another British philosopher) sees ‘tradition’ similarly to Rose. For MacIntyre,

‘… there is no such thing as a nontraditional form of life: everyone winds up embracing at least one tradition, whether they realize it or not. Even the modern liberal who self-defines against “the tyranny of tradition” has in fact merely given themselves over to one more tradition, with its own historically transmitted and locally specific forms of activity, its own canon, its own “contingency and particularity.” Tradition is the ground on which everyone stands, Marxist and monk alike. The concomitant risk of complicity in tradition’s tyrannies is therefore everyone’s problem.’

‘I may die before my time’, wrote Rose in one of her last lectures before she died, aged 47 in 1995 from ovarian cancer. Maya Krishnan summarizes:

‘In her writing on what is at once broken and bountiful, she wrote for an age whose difficulty might finally prepare readers to receive her intensities. Rose knew that she would die before her time; she also knew that her time would come.’

Penguin Classics have published a new edition of Love’s Work, an unfinished illness narrative which contains Gillian Rose’s reflections on life, death and personal relationships, all delivered with wry humour combined with deadly seriousness. Later this year, Verso will bring out a perviously unpublished a transcription of Rose’s lectures from 1979 entitled Marxist Modernism.