Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice

188 Pages·2012·0.625 MB·English

by  Kate Schick

Gillian Rose:
A Good Enough Justice
Titles in the Taking on the Political series include:
Polemicization: The Contingency of the Commonplace
Benjamin Arditi and Jeremy Valentine
Post-Marxism Versus Cultural Studies
Paul Bowman
Untimely Politics
Samuel A. Chambers
Speaking Against Number: Heidegger, Language and the Politics of
Calculation
Stuart Elden
Democratic Piety: Complexity, Conflict and Violence
Adrian Little
Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy,
Lefort, Badiou and Laclau
Oliver Marchart
Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice
Kate Schick
Cinematic Political Thought
Michael Shapiro
www.euppublishing.com/series/totp
Gillian Rose:
A Good Enough Justice
Kate Schick
# Kate Schick, 2012
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF
Typeset in 11 on 13 Sabon by
Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
A CIP record for this book is
available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 3984 7 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 5558 8 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 0 7486 5560 1 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7486 5559 5 (Amazon ebook)
The right of Kate Schick to be
identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
Part 1: Speculative Philosophy
1 Speculative Dialectics 17
2 The Broken Middle 36
Part 2: Speculative Politics
3 Trauma, Memory and the Political 57
4 Cosmopolitanism, Difference and Aporetic Universalism 81
5 Between Tragedy and Utopia 105
Conclusion 127
Notes 131
Bibliography 163
Index 175

Acknowledgements
ThisbookhasitsgenesisinmyyearsattheUniversityofStAndrews,
whereNicholasRenggerintroducedmetoGillianRose.Ioweahuge
debtofgratitudetoNick,withoutwhomthisjourneywouldnothave
begun. I would also like to thank the New Zealand Tertiary Educa-
tion Commission for funding my PhD study and the Economic and
Social Research Council for funding my postdoctoral fellowship,
PTA–026–27–1925,bothundertakenattheUniversityofStAndrews.
Themonographwaswrittenduringmyfirstthreeyearsoflecturingat
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and I am grateful
for the support and encouragement from colleagues and friends,
including Kathryn Sutherland and my fellow DSH travellers, Lydia
Wevers, Robbie Shilliam, Megan Mackenzie, Fiona Barker, Kate
McMillan, Michael Hemmingsen and Catherine Trundle.
Thisprojecthasbenefittedfromtheinputofnumerousmentorsand
friends. I am grateful to Kimberly Hutchings, Patrick Hayden, John
Milbank,BenjaminArditi,JeremyValentine,BrentSteeleandAman-
daBeattiefortheirsubstantiveengagementwithearlierversionsofthe
text.ParticularthanksgotoBenandJeremyfortheirencouragement
and shaping of the book project in their role as series editors and to
the anonymous reviewers and reader for their helpful comments and
direction. I would also like to thank Roderick Thirkell-White and
Bronwyn Schick for carefully editing the final drafts. Last, but not
least, I thank Ben Thirkell-White for his unstinting support and
encouragement throughout the journey.
Some of the material in this book has been previously published.
Chapter 3 is a heavily revised version of an article published in the
Review of International Studies 2011 (37: 4) as ‘Acting out and
working through: trauma and (in)security’, with permission from
viii Acknowledgements
Cambridge University Press. There are also brief extracts from an
articlepublishedinInternationalPoliticalTheory2009(5:2)as‘‘‘To
lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth’’: Adorno and
International Political Thought’, with permission from Edinburgh
University Press. Finally, there are extracts from a chapter published
in Human Beings and Freedom: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, as
‘Against Overcorrection: Risking the Universal’, with permission
from J. L. Shaw and Michael Hemmingsen (eds).
Introduction
Gillian Rose is an important, but neglected philosopher. She is
neglected partly because she is a difficult thinker, who revels in the
difficulty of her philosophy, and partly because she is a creative
thinker, who falls outside established and easily defined schools of
thought.ThisbookmakesacaseforthetimelyinterventionofRose’s
thought and introduces readers to its central themes, without strip-
ping her work of the crucial element of struggle that is at its core.
Rose’s writing is not easily accessible; however, it rewards extended
engagement and has important things to say to the contemporary
Left. While, like many on the Left, Rose is acutely aware of the
povertyandhubrisofliberalism,shedoesnotallowthedominanceof
liberal thought to lead her into resignation. She refuses to let frustra-
tion with the liberal order push her into the pathways that other
thinkershavetaken,offeringanacutecritiqueofthosewhoadvocate
amelancholicencirclingoftrauma,aresignedacceptanceoftragedy,
an inward-looking celebration of alterity or a messianic interruption
of linear historical time. Instead, Rose draws on idiosyncratic read-
ingsofthinkerssuchasHegel,AdornoandKierkegaardtounderpina
dogged insistence that rather than abandoning law or reason, we
should pursue an agonistic negotiation of actuality with Hegelian
inauguratedmourningatitscore.Inshort,RoseisoftheLeft,butalso
sharplycriticalofmuchLeft-wingthought,insistingthatitshirksthe
workofcomingtoknowandriskingpoliticalaction,inthehopethat
we might instantiate a ‘good enough justice’.1
Rose’s unusual sources of philosophical inspiration and idiosyn-
craticreadingsofthosephilosophersmeanthatonecannotsimplypick
up her work and engage with it through familiar categories and
theoretical concepts. She develops a speculative interpretation of
2 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice
thinkerssuchasHegelandKierkegaardthatlaysthefoundationforher
engagement with more contemporary debates. The first part of the
book,therefore,providesaholisticoverviewoftheintellectualrootsof
Rose’s work, introducing her overall philosophical perspective and
some core themes of her thought. It does not seek to evaluate her
speculative interpretation of key thinkers in light of alternative inter-
pretations;instead,itunpacksthecentralthemesthatemergeinlayers
of exposition and critique, in order to apply these to contemporary
debatesinPart2.Inthesecondpartofthebook,IdrawouthowRose’s
coreconcernsspeaktothreecentraldebatesinsocialtheory,engaging
withthinkerssuchasZˇizˇek,Derrida,Butler,HonigandBenjaminon
the way. In each debate – trauma and memory, exclusion and differ-
ence,tragedyandutopia–aRoseanperspectiveeschewseasyanswers,
refusing prescription in the unceasing promotion of a struggle-filled
negotiation of social and political actuality.
Like other critics of Enlightenment thought, Rose maintains that
liberalism is an impoverished discourse that is too far removed from
actuality. An emphasis on the codification and bestowal of abstract
rights upon individuals promotes an overly simplistic vision of the
world that fosters forgetting by ignoring particular experience and
socio-historical context. Liberalism adheres strongly to a rational,
problem-solving perspective that attempts to solve the world’s ills
through the accumulation of data and technical expertise mobilised
for the universal good. This apolitical pursuit of progress too often
fails to examine the mismatch between Enlightenment promises and
the socio-political actualities of domination, exclusion and suffering.
In short, it disguises the operation of power.
Although Rose’s critique of liberalism has much in common with
radical critiques that point to a paucity of the political in liberal
thought, she emphatically resists the temptation to leap from the
critiqueofliberalismtotheabandonmentofreasonanddemonisation
of law. Broadly, poststructural theorists seek to replace liberalism’s
disembedded and disembodied rationality with approaches more
attuned to particularity and difference.2 These approaches take
several forms, including a melancholic refusal to work through
trauma, a postmodern celebration of difference and a messianic
rending of the given order and promotion of otherworldly justice.
Conservative legal theorists seek to revive awareness of the political,
arguing that law merely disguises the ever-present possibility of
conflict. Rose maintains that despite their stated intentions, each of