“While men proceed on their developmental way,” the late Australian feminist academic, Dale Spender, once observed, “women are confined to cycles of lost and found”.
Spender’s analysis of the way female scholars — and particularly, female philosophers — are excluded from history is one that, regrettably, still rings true over 40 years after it was first published. That being said, the unholy alliance of literary magazine columnists, publishing houses, and university students procrastinating their final exam study, have a funny way of rediscovering such authors at the precise political and cultural moment that their work is most needed. For our times, that person is Gillian Rose: English philosopher, critical theorist, and chair of Social and Political thought at the University of Warwick until her death from ovarian cancer aged just 48.
Rose is a notoriously difficult thinker. Fellow philosopher Howard Caygill’s preface to her first book, An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, noted that “readers looking to be introduced were quickly dismayed”. She draws upon an unwieldy array of sources from philosophy to theology, legal theory to the Sturm und Drang literary movement. Reading Rose feels like walking with a friend who is always a couple of paces ahead of you. She takes her readers seriously, enthusiastic about their ability to grapple with her ideas. But at the end of the page, you’ve either kept pace with her or you haven’t. She doesn’t wait for stragglers.
What initially drew me to Rose was not her work, but rather her understanding of the learning process itself. “You need to read Hegel, then you need to read all of Hegel’s sources, in German, then in Greek”, according to former student Jenny Turner’s account of Rose’s pedagogical instructions in the London Review of Books. “Go out, watch films, eat Indian food. Go home and start rereading Hegel and all his sources and everything else again”, Turner noted.
This idea of learning as a long, thicketed process that loops back in on itself feels nostalgic in the age of the corporate university. Exam-ready scaffolds and AI summaries of course content are a pervasive, if unedifying, way to pass units, as are the several weeks that pass without reading a page of fiction or seeing friends at this pointy end of the semester. For that reason, it feels all the more vital. As Hegel — the subject of a great deal of Rose’s work — observed in Phenomenology of Spirit, genuine knowledge “must travel a long way and work its passage” before it can be acquired. The fact that you can’t learn anything of value from copying and pasting lecture slides is a wonderful evolutionary trait, and one that I hope we don’t lose anytime soon.
In 2024, two new editions of books by Rose were issued by major publishing houses. Marxist Modernism, published by Verso, is a compilation of a 1979 series of introductory lectures Rose gave on the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Love’s Work, published by the Penguin Modern Classics imprint, is a memoir of Rose’s life written between her cancer diagnosis and death in 1995. What seems like an unusual pairing of works makes perfect sense when viewed in the context of Rose’s final lectures, which warned of the fascistic risks that come with choosing to engage in nostalgic introspection over concrete political action. This argument has undeniable roots in the Frankfurt School, most obviously in the notion of ‘Left-Wing Melancholy’ developed by Walter Benjamin.
Left-wing melancholy is the idea that revolutionary movements can become impotent, backwards-looking versions of their former selves in the wake of political defeat. Benjamin coined the term in a review of the purportedly left-wing poetry of Erich Kästner, where critiques of social inequity just amounted to treating political struggle as a sentimentalised plot point. Benjamin is a recurrent character in Marxist Modernism, but Rose’s use of his ideas and others emanating from the Frankfurt School was expanded, at times controversially, by her recourse to theological sources.
For Rose, the dangers of a political movement gripped by its own mythology were exemplified by Hegel’s concept of ‘the beautiful soul’, taken from a chapter of the same name in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. In Goethe’s account, the beautiful soul is a young, married woman who perishes, after withdrawing from the world to pursue religious piety. Even as her demise becomes obvious in the final pages of the chapter, the beautiful soul believes that her “conduct is approximating more and more to the image I have formed of perfection”.
While originally intended, and read by Rose, as a criticism of the “protestant doctrine of salvation”, the development of a theory of left-wing melancholia concerning the inner life of young women has particular political utility in today’s climate. The first time I read Confessions of a Beautiful Soul, I was struck by the similarities between Goethe’s account of religious piety and contemporary strands of dissociative feminism. The term, coined in 2019 by author and critic Emmeline Klein, explains how modern feminist writing focuses on “interiorising [women’s] existential aches and angst, smirking knowingly at them, and numbing ourselves to maintain our nonchalance”. In other words: patriarchy is never actually combated, but rather coped with through a turn to nihilistic and extreme introspection.
Dissociative feminism is benign at best. It is actively harmful when it manifests itself in coquettish aesthetics that tie frilly bows around lobotomy jokes and deifies an ill-defined, sentimental concept of ‘girlhood’ which lacks meaningful political expression beyond being Instagrammable. As Rose would argue (and as anyone who has been on TikTok in the last two years would know), misplaced nostalgia is not just a pathway, but the precondition to facism. It is fomented by a retreat into the self, and mitigated by accepting one’s place in the world, no matter the difficulty that may bring.
“I will stay in the fray, in the revel of ideas and risk”, Rose promises in the final paragraph of Love’s Work.
“Learning, failing, wooing, grieving, trusting, working, reposing — in this sin of language and lips.”
