Gillian Rose

In 2019, The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London established an annual Gillian Rose Memorial Lecture. The inaugural speaker was professor of philosophy and comparative literature Rebecca Comay.

Two special issues on Gillian Rose have appeared from scholarly journals. The first, "The Work of Gillian Rose," appeared in 1998 in volume 9, issue 1 of the journal Women: A Cultural Review. It contained contributions from students and friends, including Laura Marcus, Howard Caygill, and Nigel Tubbs, as well as an edited transcription of "two W. H. Smith exercise books containing the notes and observations that [Rose] had been writing...until shortly before her death" in hospital. An essay by literary critic Isobel Armstrong, which appeared alongside but not as a part of the special issue, turns on Rose's concept of "the broken middle" and presents a careful and appreciative reading of her work. In 2015 the journal Telos released a special issue on Rose, gathering responses and critiques to her work from Rowan Williams, John Milbank, Peter Osborne, and Tubbs.

Gillian Rose was born in London into a non-practising Jewish family. 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: A Reckoning with Life (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'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." 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." 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'" 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."

Already in 1995, Rowan Williams commented, "Gillian Rose's work has had far less discussion than it merits." In the decades following Williams' statement others have reiterated the sentiment. Indeed, scholar of religion Vincent Lloyd comments:

Rose was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1993. She died in Coventry at the age of 48. She made a deathbed conversion to Christianity through the Anglican Church. (Andrew Shanks notes that "there is evidence, among the papers left behind from her final illness, that at one point [Rose] seriously considered the alternative of Roman Catholicism.") She left to the library of Warwick University parts of her own personal library, including a collection of essential works on the History of Christianity and Theology, which are marked "From the Library of Professor Gillian Rose, 1995" on the inside cover. Rose is survived by her parents, her sister, the academic and writer Jacqueline Rose, her half sisters, Alison Rose and Diana Stone, and her half brother, Anthony Stone.

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:

Nevertheless, Rose's work has made more explicit inroads among a number of important thinkers, not the least of them Williams, whose revaluation of Hegel in the 1990s has been attributed to Rose's influence. On the philosophy of Hegel, in a text of 1991, Slavoj Žižek writes, "one has to grasp the fundamental paradox of the speculative identity as it was recently identified by Gillian Rose." Žižek here refers to Rose's second book Hegel contra Sociology (1981); subsequently, his Hegelianism was dubbed "speculative" by Marcus Pound. In turn, Howard Caygill observes of Hegel contra Sociology: "This work revolutionized the study of Hegel, providing a comprehensive account of his speculative philosophy that overcame the distinction between religious ('right Hegelian') and political ('left Hegelian') interpretations that had prevailed since the death of the philosopher in 1832." And the work is still cited in Hegel scholarship.

Two of Rose's students, Paul Gilroy and David Marriott, have emerged as key thinkers of critical race theory and have acknowledged her influence. When John Milbank published Theology and Social Theory in 1990, he cited Rose as one of the thinkers without whom "the present book would not have been conceivable." Marcus Pound recently found that "Rose was the Blackwell reader for Milbank's Theology and Social Theory. The Rose archives at Warwick include the letters Milbank and Rose exchanged on the subject. In particular she pushed him to clarify the nature of the subject which underpinned Theology and Social Theory. In response Milbank wrote 'The Sublime in Kierkegaard'."

Rose's career began with a dissertation on Theodor W. Adorno, supervised by 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 Cohen and Walter Benjamin, singling out his notion of the "mystical foundation of authority" as centrally problematic.

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. She held her position at Warwick until her death in 1995.

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, amongst others.