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Gillian Rose's Critique of Violence Gillian Rose’s critique of violence Anthony Gorman The crisis of the legitimacy of the liberal democratic derivations. From this point of view, it follows that state is being posed today with an urgency and acuity the moral subject is a hindrance, not a stepping stone, not seen since the debates over the legitimacy of to the accomplishment of universal mutual recogni- Weimar parliamentary democracy. Its constitutive tion. Indeed, for Rose, the unmasked moral will is claim to be able to satisfy both the values of justice revealed to be essentially fascistic in nature. Hence, and pluralism appears to be coming apart at the it must be dismantled and reconstructed before it can seams. Far Right movements are on the rise, and it is become capable of recognizing other subjects in their likely that they will become stronger, more vociferous universality and singularity. Furthermore, this work and more violent in the future. These developments of destruction will take the form of exposing the would have come as no surprise to Gillian Rose. In violence of the modern subject to itself. the Preface to The Broken Middle, published in the This Nietzschean dimension of Rose’s project is immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, at much more salient in her late works, in which the the very height of liberal triumphalism, she refused concept of violence plays a more dominant role than to join in the chorus. The dismantling of Soviet- in her earlier writings. It receives its most concen- style socialism, Rose confidently pronounced, will trated expression in both its psychological and its neither destroy Marxism nor resolve the antinomies political dimensions in Love’s Work. One might say of modern state and society. It would, however, open that Love’s Work combines a ‘therapy of desire’ with a ‘the opportunity to resume examination of the con- potted genealogy of modernity. The result is a deeply nection between liberalism and Fascism’.1 traumatized concept of the subject, which Rose takes It is against this background that I return to to be the truth, or, one could say, the ‘untruth’ of examine Rose’s works, with a view to finding answers modern subjectivity in general. However, I shall to two specific questions. How does Rose understand contend that this is a distorted view of the modern the connection between liberalism and fascism? What subject, based on a one-sided view of the history resources does Rose’s political theology provide for of modernity; that is, one which largely ignores its developing an effective anti-fascist strategy? However, emancipatory dimension. in pursuing these questions, I have had cause to ‘Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.’ Rose revise some of my previous assumptions about Rose’s adopts this dictum in Love’s Work as a rule for dealing work, particularly with respect to her interpretation with her illness. However, it could equally be inter- of the genesis of modernity and her understanding preted as her rule for life in modernity. Despite the of modern subjectivity. In short, my previous essays fact that Rose’s account of modern subjectivity is overestimated the importance of Hegel and under- almost unremittingly pessimistic, she still enjoins us estimated the influence of Walter Benjamin (and to be ‘yea-sayers’, to stay with the world and to remain Nietzsche).2 Hegel Contra Sociology appears to present politically engaged. Rose provides two grounds for a Left-Hegelian–Marxist interpretation of Hegel’s not despairing – noticeably she never uses the word social and political philosophy. On this reading, there ‘hope’. First, work, by which she primarily means the is a mismatch between the rational modern subject, intellectual work of speculative critique and genea- conceived in broadly Kantian terms, as a free, rational, logical reconstruction. Second, faith, taken over from independent, reflexive and self-determining agent, Kierkegaard, which allows for a ‘suspension of the and the non-rational institutions of the modern ethical’, a way of comprehending the oppositions of state. This opens the space for a politics aimed at modernity without being comprehended by them, overcoming this incongruity. However, Rose’s Nietzs- and which opens up a space for ethics. Speculative chean conception of the moral will as a disguised critique is supposed to ground the suspension of the form of egoism undercuts this notion of a Hegelian ethical in the actuality of existing social relations, political praxis, in both its reformist and its Marxist enabling a balance between realism and utopianism. RadicaL PhiLosoPhy 197 (may/june 2016) 25 However, I shall argue that Rose is not able to Tom Ratekin, in his book Final Acts, takes up the retain this balance because her radical distrust of challenge of providing such a reading. It is valuable modern subjectivity entails that her notion of the because it succeeds in identifying the central, redemp- suspension of the ethical has no basis in socio- tive drama driving the text as a therapy of desire. But political reality, rendering it an essentially mythic its shortcoming is that it does not place this drama construct. In so far as it takes on a visible political within the wider theologico-political context of the form, it has two effects, both of which are inimical work. Ratekin suggests that ‘Love’s Work is a text, like to a progressive politics. First, if restricted to a form Sophocles’ Antigone, that is propelled by the death of political and cultural critique, it tends to display and the sublime beauty of its heroine’, and that its an anti-bourgeois ire. This has particularly deleteri- difficulty lies not in its stylistic features, but in ‘not ous and divisive effects with respect to combatting providing familiar forms for addressing trauma’.6 The fascism, for it results in an anti-fascist cultural work is construed as a psychoanalytical text in its politics that is more concerned with attacking liberal own right and its contents are interpreted on the and moral social consciousness than fascism itself. basis of four tropes adapted from Lacan’s Four Dis- Second, it is open to appropriation as a justification courses: Master (knowledge), Hysteric (self-division), for ‘spontaneous’ or ‘divine violence’. The centrality Analyst (identification with symptom) and Jouissance of the concept of violence to Rose’s political theology (identification with desire).7 Although these ‘stages’ exposes it to the same objections that have been are not presented as a chronological narrative, they registered against Sorel and Benjamin in this respect. nonetheless chart the key events in Rose’s life as she Rose is acutely aware of this and goes to great pains reports them: her alienation from and resistance to distance her own theology of violence from that to the power structures of Oxford University and of Benjamin. However, these pains are ineffective the ‘master signifiers’ of Oxford-style Philosophy, because her notion of the suspension of the ethical through to becoming a ‘master’ herself; the struggle is so poorly socio-politically grounded. In sum, Rose’s in her childhood and youth to overcome her ‘hysteric’ analysis of fascism and how to fight it reproduces or self-divided subjectivity, culminating in the col- many of the same errors that so fatefully destroyed lapse of the ‘phantasm’ of her investment in the the unity of the German Left in the 1930s, resulting ‘symbolic’ order (symbolized by hearing her own dis- in the collapse of the Weimar Republic, with all its associated howl while witnessing a wedding party); catastrophic consequences.3 her affair with a Catholic priest and the survival of its In this article, I shall focus exclusively upon delin- breakdown, not by retreating into her old ‘ego-ideal’ eating the negative implications of Rose’s political but by casting it off; and finally her illness, how she theology in general and as a means of combatting lived by learning to love it, so that in the last months fascism in particular, and not offer an alternative of her life, despite its ravages, she found a new vitality aetiology of fascism or how to combat it. The first and exuberance. Dwelling, Antigone-like, in the space part of the article offers a reading of Love’s Work that located between the symbolic death already suffered draws out Rose’s concept of violence and its relation and the physical death to come, her ‘naked soul’ is to her political theology. It then turns to a critical released to celebrate life in a language of silence, review of Rose’s direct reflections on the nature of prayer and praise. Thus, Rose finally converges with fascism, how it is to be represented and combatted. her chosen persona of Miss Marple: passing unno- ticed, she is able to take an infinite view of things, but Violence and love still retain her curiosity and passion for life. Love’s Work evidently belongs to the genre of autobi- Ratekin presents Rose’s life-narrative as a series of ography, but beyond that it is not easy to classify. It collisions between her unconscious and her ego, with would appear to be a memoir, an ‘autothanatography’, each collision signalling both a dispossession of her a ‘spiritual exercise’, a ‘confession’ and an ‘apologia ego and a subsequent expansion of its contents, as she vita sua’, all in one.4 To make matters even more gains ever deeper insights into the workings of her perplexing, we have to contend with Howard Caygill’s own unconscious. This presents a sympathetic and statement that, appearances to the contrary, Love’s perceptive reading of Rose’s spiritual development, Work is Rose’s ‘most difficult and esoteric act of indi- but Ratekin remains on the exoteric surface of the rect communication’.5 If so, the work has a hidden text and fails to apprehend its esoteric meaning – and meaning, buried beneath the surface of the text, for the simple reason that he mistakes the character requiring an esoteric reading to bring it to light.
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