Thinking Against the End of Thought

Rose’s philosophy is important to the Left not only for her commitment to face and think through tragedy. Beyond that, throughout her life, she retained her commitment both to Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism and to criticizing the aporias, failures, and dogmatisms of the Left. Given the times through which she lived and thought, this work was both difficult and crucially important.

In the 1980s and 1990s, when Rose published the majority of her work, she found herself in an intellectual and political culture desperate to discredit and discard all of the usual preoccupations of philosophy and the Left — reason, truth, justice, freedom — for the role they were said to play in the horrors of recent history. She diagnosed this postmodernist rejection as a despairing response to three key factors: “the Holocaust, Heidegger’s Nazism, [and] the disintegration of Communism.”

As Rose argued, postmodern intellectuals declared that truth and reason themselves were complicit in domination, oppression, and failure. Consequently, academic philosophy and the Left alike abandoned these coordinates for easier, more comforting alternatives: difference, otherness, or abstract notions of love. In political terms, for Rose, this amounted to giving up “on communism — only to fall more deeply in love with the idea of ‘community.’”

But while these alternatives may seem to be less complicit with the violence of the world, Rose argued that they are pursued at the expense of critical thinking. To insist upon the abstract ideal of “community,” for instance, is to prioritize something small and local, which considers itself apart from the messy struggle for a truly liberated society. For Rose, however, all philosophical thought and all political action carry risks of error, exclusion, and violence, including when disavowed. In contrast, only by acknowledging these risks and learning from our errors — a process that, in essence, defines reason itself — might we conceive of a justice adequate to the losses of the past and the ongoing present.

Who Was Gillian Rose?

“I was never an innocent child,” Rose writes in Love’s Work, “forever accompanied” by four characteristics that set her apart and caused her difficulty: “‘Im-migration,’ ‘A-theism,’ ‘Divorce,’ ‘Dys-lexia.’” Instead of being hindrances, however, Rose found motivation and even empowerment in these difficulties. Dyslexia, in particular, spurred her to the discovery that “the desert of stony words could be made to bloom,” while allowing her to see that “I could channel what I could not overcome.” In a letter to a friend whose son was himself struggling with dyslexia, she wrote: “As a dyslexic child myself, I know how easy it is to judge abstractly that one cannot do something and then to find that risk precedes capacity not the other way round.” In anecdotes like this, we can see how a philosophy born of taking risks lies at the heart of Rose’s work.

As a teenager, thanks to this productive experience of dys-lexia — literally “difficult-speech” — Rose found herself fascinated by difficulties in the writings of Blaise Pascal and Plato. This motivated her decision to study philosophy at the University of Oxford. Oxford philosophy, however, was deeply disenchanting. As Rose described in an interview with RTÉ (the Irish national broadcaster), “I was being asked to read in a very narrow way, a very destructive way, a way that didn’t correspond to any of the things that I thought philosophy was about.” Oxford philosophy, she said, teaches people to be “clever, destructive, supercilious, and ignorant. . . . It doesn’t feed the soul.” It was only when visiting New York that Rose was introduced to Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and, most importantly for her, Hegel.

Rose went on to write her PhD on the philosopher and critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno, under the supervision of Leszek Kołakowski, who is best-known today for his three-volume history, Main Currents of Marxism. Kołakowski derided Adorno as a “second-rate thinker,” but for Rose, his work fed “an inexorable inner need to experience my dyslexia.”

In part, this was due to the stylistic and conceptual difficulty of Adorno’s writing. But perhaps more importantly, for Rose, Adorno’s work is difficult because it identifies the inherent difficulties of modern life under capitalism — difficulties that cannot be simply overcome or transcended, difficulties with no obvious, easy answers. Rose’s PhD dissertation was eventually published as her first book, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, although, as her friend, British philosopher Howard Caygill notes, “readers looking to be introduced were quickly dismayed.”

Rose’s Marxist Modernism

Perhaps Rose best articulates her understanding of Marxism, in light of its difficulties, in her early lectures on the Frankfurt School. Delivered in 1979 to undergraduates of the University of Sussex, where she held her first academic job, these lectures were published in 2024 under the title Marxist Modernism. Their appearance in print has coincided with a wider resurgence of interest in the Marxist bases of Rose’s thought.

On one level, the lectures in Marxist Modernism offer some of the best introductions to the first decades of critical theory — or “critical Marxism,” as Rose also calls it — and are especially concerned with the Frankfurt School’s debates on politics and art. But more importantly, the lectures express Rose’s early preoccupation with the necessity of illusion in modern society, a theme that shapes her entire body of her work.

In Marxist Modernism, Rose defines Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism as the idea that in capitalist exchange, “a definite social relation between men assumes the phantasmagoric form of a relation between things.” Beyond this, she gives an account of how the Frankfurt School radicalized Marx’s idea, extending it to encompass all social processes as well as subjectivity.

Following Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács, the Frankfurt School theorists called this “reification.” Etymologically, “reification” means “thing-ification,” from the Latin “res” for “thing.” So, the theory describes how relationships, ideas, and even individuals are misrecognized under capitalism, and come to be regarded as objects or “thing-like.”

For the Frankfurt School theorists, reification permeates every level of culture, politics, and daily life making social structures and power relations seem natural and immutable, thus preventing radical change. Crucially, although reification gives rise to illusions, or “phantasmagoria,” that mask the true operations of capitalism, it cannot simply be dispelled by a shift in consciousness. Rather, reification is a real and necessary illusion inherent in capitalist relations.

To Think the Absolute

In her next book, the formidable Hegel Contra Sociology (1981), Rose took the Frankfurt School’s theory of reification and developed it through a radical reading of Hegel. In this work, she argues that even in its most basic conceptual schemas, modern sociology unwittingly reproduces the reified or “thing-ified” dichotomies and dualisms of capitalism, for example,  object/subject, politics/ideology, practice/theory, and so on. It’s not that these dyads are fictitious or nonexistent. Rather, they are really existing structures and relationships that shape life and our thinking of it — and, at the same time, they are also the historical products of the society and social practices that give rise to them.

The sociological tradition, in Rose’s argument, reproduces these dichotomies — sometimes critically — but without attempting to overcome them or go to their root. And this, she argues, overlooks Hegel’s central insight. For Hegel, the determining force of bourgeois private property and labor relations (in today’s language, capitalism) is such that we cannot avoid thinking in these dichotomies: they are necessary illusions. Despite this, we can still think critically because we have the capacity to account for the illusions produced by reification by situating them historically, as necessary features of capitalism. This is important as, for Marxism, criticism only becomes radical insofar as it is linked with and informed by attempts to practically overcome capitalism.

At several points throughout the book, Rose asserts, “Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the absolute cannot be thought.” In this context, “the absolute” refers to a figure of thought that overcomes these dichotomies. The twist of her argument, however, is that the absolute cannot be fully thought because of the “continuing domination of the relations of bourgeois private property and law.” The effort to overcome the dichotomies of bourgeois society necessarily depends on the idea of a new, revolutionary, post-capitalist society that ought to exist. But, as Rose understood –– following Hegel — every idea of what ought to be is grounded in what is. Therefore, to think the absolute presupposes a socialist or communist future that has yet to materialize.

Does this mean, then, that Hegel’s thought has no social import, no political relevance? No — for Rose, Hegel fails to think the absolute — but he fails to think it better than those who think that the illusions of capitalist society can be escaped by way of a particular way of life, idea, method, or style. As Rose argues, it’s Hegel’s ability to account for this failure that gives his thinking of the absolute its profound significance. Hegel not only reveals that we are prone to error, but why. By demonstrating how capitalism dominates even our ways of thinking, Rose argues that Hegel “urges us to transform ethical life,” that is, to transform not only how we think about abstract concepts but also the property and labor relations that shape them.

For Rose, this sobering argument means there are no guarantees in either philosophy or political action. Indeed, they are inherently prone to mistakes and unexpected outcomes. All philosophy must operate within false dichotomies; all revolutions “risk recreating a terror, or reinforcing lawlessness, or strengthening bourgeois property law in its universality and arbitrariness.”

What’s unique about Rose’s thought, however, is that she not only acknowledges these risks but also offers us resources for thinking about them while we take them. And when things do not go as planned, she offers the critical tools for taking stock, learning, and risking thought and action once again. As Rose writes,

[P]olitics does not happen when you act on behalf of your own damaged good, but when you act, without guarantees, for the good of all — this is to take the risk of the universal interest.

This reading of Marx and Hegel is emblematic of her approach to the canon of philosophical and political works. Rose reads writings by Marx, Hegel, and others not as textbooks for political action but challenges to think more critically, to think through our conceptual inheritance without dogmatism. The point of philosophy for the Left, is not that it tells us, in Lenin’s words, “what is to be done.” Nor does it guarantee on the correct line. Rather, it opens the space for self-reflexive critical thinking, which may in turn make us better political actors.

Rose’s Critique of Israel

Beyond her account of sociology, Hegel, and Marx, there are other important strands of Rose’s work that became more prevalent in her later books The Broken Middle (1992), Judaism and Modernity (1993), and the posthumous essay collection Mourning Becomes the Law (1996). In these works, Rose turns her attention to legal, aesthetic, ethical, and theological themes, although with a constant eye to how they inform political thinking. Particularly exemplary — and prescient — are her critiques of how we think about the Holocaust and Israel.

In 1990, Rose became a consultant to the Polish Commission on the Future of Auschwitz. The commission sought to reconsider how Auschwitz and the Holocaust more broadly should be thought about, represented, and communicated to the public. As she later bluntly reflected in Love’s Work, “We were set up.”

Rose was particularly disturbed by what she saw as the attempt to exploit the Holocaust, which she described as an enterprise dedicated to “sacralizing, commercializing, and elevating [it] into raison d’état.” As she argues, instead of trying to understand the historical conditions that allowed it to happen — and facing the political risk of doing so — this only had the effect of mystifying the Holocaust beyond comprehension.

Rose called this attitude “Holocaust piety,” and argued that it served to mystify and justify the violence of the Israeli state. For Rose, the ideology of Israel perpetuates the myth that because one has been a victim, one is incapable of being a perpetrator. To counter this, Rose offers another sobering aphorism: “no one and no community is exempt from the paradoxes of ‘empowerment.’” One example of this, as Adam Kitaji has argued, is the fact that the largest Holocaust museum in the world is built on the ruins of Deir Yassin, a village that was totally eliminated after a massacre of its residents by Zionist militia during the Nakba.

For Rose, contrary to the founding illusions of Zionism, “to survive — to live again — demands a new tale: a new prayer to be found, a new polity to be founded.” This polity would be founded “not as a sanctified, holy Israel,” and not on any other exclusive group or interest, but would instead take the risk of founding the universal.

Gillian Rose Today

What Rose calls the necessity of illusion in modernity — the inescapable propensity to get things wrong — does not entail that mystification is necessary. As she repeats throughout her Marxist Modernism lectures:

[W]e live in a society in which some things which seem to be comprehensible to us are not really, and some things which seem to be incomprehensible to us are really comprehensible.

The task of critique is to take the risk of knowing the difference.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza since October 2023 is perhaps the most extreme case this century where the abstract — and therefore easy — ideals of love, peace, and community are repeatedly affirmed against the concrete and difficult work of reason, truth, justice, and freedom. Abstract affirmations like these can too easily become myths concealing their opposite: for the sake of love, peace, and community, liberal commentators are silent or else supportive of an Israel that hates, wages war, and commits genocide.

For those who do express some sentiment about the violence, there is often a tacit prohibition on any attempt to comprehend it. It’s seen as too much to acknowledge even the basic fact that the Zionist regime is responsible for tens of thousands, possibly over a hundred thousand deaths, the majority of whom are women and children, as well as for the near-total destruction of civilian life in Gaza. Analysis from the Lancet medical journal estimates that the death toll by the end of June 2024 was 64,260, 40 percent higher than official numbers –– and this only takes into account deaths due to traumatic injury.

This prohibition on knowledge is in evidence even in language. The passive voice is frequently employed: Palestinians are found dead. Or else, the perpetrator is omitted. Palestinians starve. They have lost their limbs. In Keir Starmer’s statement on the cease-fire, for example, he talks of Hamas as “brutal terrorists” and of Israelis being “brutally ripped from their homes,” “massacred,” and “murdered,” and has likened the events of October 7 to the Holocaust. Palestinians, meanwhile, have simply “lost their lives.”

Likewise, the recently resigned Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, when pressed about Palestinian casualties, claimed, “You don’t have to say someone is evil but that this is an eruption of evil in our world.” From this you’d think that the deaths resulted from incomprehensible natural — or even supernatural — forces. For Rose, this “witness of ‘ineffability’” — the refusal to think or judge in the face of catastrophe — is “to mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too understandable.” It is to mystify the sobering truth that those who have been subjected to near-total devastation are capable of subjecting it on others.

To adequately mourn, for Rose, requires that we try to understand. Only then might “mourning become the law,” as she titles her last posthumous essay collection. Which is to say, only with understanding might mourning become a response to loss that lays the foundation for a Left that can make a new political beginning.