Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice 9780748655588

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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

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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 ISBN ISBN ISBN

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Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

vii 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

This book has its genesis in my years at the University of St Andrews, where Nicholas Rengger introduced me to Gillian Rose. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Nick, without whom this journey would not have begun. I would also like to thank the New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission for funding my PhD study and the Economic and Social Research Council for funding my postdoctoral fellowship, PTA–026–27–1925, both undertaken at the University of St Andrews. The monograph was written during my first three years of lecturing at 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. This project has benefitted from the input of numerous mentors and friends. I am grateful to Kimberly Hutchings, Patrick Hayden, John Milbank, Benjamin Arditi, Jeremy Valentine, Brent Steele and Amanda Beattie for their substantive engagement with earlier versions of the text. Particular thanks go to Ben and Jeremy for their encouragement 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 article published in International Political Theory 2009 (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. This book makes a case for the timely intervention of Rose’s thought and introduces readers to its central themes, without stripping 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 poverty and hubris of liberalism, she does not allow the dominance of liberal thought to lead her into resignation. She refuses to let frustration with the liberal order push her into the pathways that other thinkers have taken, offering an acute critique of those who advocate a melancholic encircling of trauma, a resigned acceptance of tragedy, an inward-looking celebration of alterity or a messianic interruption of linear historical time. Instead, Rose draws on idiosyncratic readings of thinkers such as Hegel, Adorno and Kierkegaard to underpin a dogged insistence that rather than abandoning law or reason, we should pursue an agonistic negotiation of actuality with Hegelian inaugurated mourning at its core. In short, Rose is of the Left, but also sharply critical of much Left-wing thought, insisting that it shirks the work of coming to know and risking political action, in the hope that we might instantiate a ‘good enough justice’.1 Rose’s unusual sources of philosophical inspiration and idiosyncratic readings of those philosophers mean that one cannot simply pick 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

thinkers such as Hegel and Kierkegaard that lays the foundation for her engagement with more contemporary debates. The first part of the book, therefore, provides a holistic overview of the intellectual roots of 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 interpretations; instead, it unpacks the central themes that emerge in layers of exposition and critique, in order to apply these to contemporary debates in Part 2. In the second part of the book, I draw out how Rose’s core concerns speak to three central debates in social theory, engaging with thinkers such as Zˇizˇek, Derrida, Butler, Honig and Benjamin on the way. In each debate – trauma and memory, exclusion and difference, tragedy and utopia – a Rosean perspective eschews easy answers, 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 critique of liberalism to the abandonment of reason and demonisation 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

Introduction 3 these strands of thought stands in danger of further marginalising the political, by refusing to engage with the contours of present actuality. By demonising law and reason as reductionist, domineering and totalitarian, critics of liberalism fail to engage in the mundane, everyday struggle towards transformation that is at the heart of the political. They avoid the difficulty of the political – aporia – in favour of the easy way – euporia. Against critics of liberalism that seek to abandon reason, Rose’s speculative approach seeks to rehabilitate it. She outlines a fuller conception of reason, with recognition at its core. The concept of recognition speaks of layers of ‘coming to know’: initial cognition, followed by coming to know again. For Rose, the difficult journey towards recognition underlies reason properly conceived; this journey involves an anxiety-filled pursuit of comprehension of ourselves, our relations with others, the structures of power in which we are embedded and our complicity in creating and sustaining those structures. Without this investigation of concrete social and political relations, critique remains lazy and disconnected from the world we inhabit. Rose’s speculative philosophy insists that we attend to the ways in which Enlightenment promises intersect with everyday experience, arguing that to abandon reason in favour of tragic resignation or messianic promise means we abandon the possibility of transformation. Rose’s critique of postmodern thought was prescient in its foreshadowing of an emergent dissatisfaction with the direction of postMarxist social and political theory. Increasingly, thinkers on the Left argue that post-Marxist thinkers have gone too far in the repudiation of grand narratives and that a focus on identity politics and particular suffering distracts from broader structural concerns.3 Lenin is purported to have illustrated this problem of overcorrection with reference to the metaphor of a walking stick. To straighten a walking stick, one must apply pressure in order to bend the crook in the opposite direction. However, there is always a danger that one might apply too much or too little pressure. Post-Marxist thought has too often applied too much pressure, overcorrecting for abstract universalism by retreating into particularity and difference. Although the concerns of post-Marxism (including exclusion, difference, trauma, vulnerability, embodiment, hope) remain centrally important and reflect social actuality, the one-sidedness of dominant responses hampers critique and transformation. Rose’s writings are exercised by the same concerns as post-Marxist

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Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice

thought, but her response falls decidedly outside the well-worn categories of liberalism and postmodernism. Her thought is underpinned by an idiosyncratic speculative interpretation of Hegel that prompts us on a journey towards recognition. Rose’s Hegel is emphatically against one-sidedness: he urges us to transform ethical life through the speculative exploration of freedom and unfreedom in present actuality. Eschewing tragic resignation and utopian hope, speculative philosophy insists that political theory begin in the broken middle between the well-worn dualisms of universal and particular, law and ethics, potentiality and actuality. For Rose, attending to the space between different visions of political theory must go hand-inhand with attention to social and political actualities: diremption of thought is reflected in diremption of lived experience. Negotiating the broken middle, for Rose, is a process of working through or inaugurated mourning. Hegelian inaugurated mourning comes to know the contours of loss and suffering that emerge under the domination of formal law, but it does not remain frozen in melancholy: it calls for a ‘new prayer to be found’ and a ‘new polity to be founded’. To ‘live again’, despite horrific loss, ‘demands a willingness to participate in power and its legitimate violence for the sake of the good’.4 It emphatically resists melancholy, promulgating instead a vision of mourning that is deeply political and that inspires political re-engagement in pursuit of a ‘good enough justice’. In what follows, I first outline four key themes that permeate Rose’s writings: diremption, speculative dialectics, comprehension and risk. They form the fundamental building blocks of her work, informing her engagement with contemporary debates in social and political thought and her speculative rehabilitation of reason and critique. I subsequently give brief chapter outlines, signalling the structure of the remainder of the book.

Key Themes Rose is a difficult thinker. This is no accident: for Rose, the ethical begins with difficulty,5 and her writings outwork this difficulty in multiple layers – difficulty upon difficulty. Her philosophical muses, from an early age, eschewed easy answers: Perplexed, aporetic, not dogmatic, they indicated the difficulty of the way, and the routes to be essayed. I never discovered in them any euporia, any

Introduction 5 easy way or solution, any monologic, imperialist metaphysics. Philosophy intimated the wager of wisdom – as collective endeavour and solitary predicament.6

The emphasis on difficulty in Rose’s writings is, in part, a reflection of a life permeated with struggle. She is perhaps best known for her philosophical memoir, Love’s Work, which points to her wrestling with life and love, a life that ended before its time in 1995, after a battle with ovarian cancer. The epigraph to her book, which she wrote in the last months of her life, is ‘Keep your mind in hell, and despair not’.7 Love’s Work was not merely the title of her memoir, but her life’s work: ‘. . . love’s work, the work I have been charting, accomplishing, but, above all and necessarily, failing in, all along the way’.8 Rose’s social and political thought unfolds, in large part, through her reading of other thinkers. It is rarely easily accessible; it emerges through layers of reflection and critique. However, careful reading of Rose’s work reveals key themes that run throughout her writings, be they her idiosyncratic exegeses of others’ thought – especially in her earlier books – or her later, more thematic writings. These themes are inextricably intertwined: Rose begins always with diremption, with the brokenness of theory and actuality; she works towards comprehension of this brokenness, resisting rigid dualisms and one-sided analyses, in favour of a speculative negotiation of the broken middle; and she insists that comprehension leads always to the ‘risk of the universal’, to the anxiety-ridden pursuit of a ‘good enough justice’ – a pursuit that is always revised and revisable in the light of its (unintended) consequences.

Diremption Throughout Rose’s writings, the theme of diremption recurs, signalling brokenness between universal and particular, law and ethics, actuality and potentiality. Rose argues that such brokenness is fundamental to modern thought and experience, saying that ‘since Kant, philosophy has nurtured its unease with the modern diremption of law and ethics, arising from the mismatch between the discourse of individual rights and the systematic actualities of power and domination’.9 Rose uses the term ‘diremption’ to refer to a rending in two, but not of something that was perfectly unified in the first place:

6

Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice

‘ ‘‘Diremption’’ draws attention to the trauma of separation of that which was, however, as in marriage, not originally united’.10 The fundamental mismatch between Enlightenment discourse and actuality, for example, illustrates a diremption of something that was never united or complete. Such diremption is a fundamental feature both of modern social and political theory and of actual social and political life: the dualisms pervasive in modern thought reflect the underlying antagonisms of social and political relations. In her later writings, Rose refers to diremptions in theory and practice as the broken middle,11 referencing a brokenness that cannot be mended, but must be negotiated, both at the level of philosophy and at the level of politics. In part, Rose’s notion of the broken middle references the gap between the utopian promises of the Enlightenment project and the concrete realities of life under conditions of modernity. It also refers to the chasm in social and political theory between those thinkers who emphasise universal categories (such as universal human rights) and those who emphasise concrete particulars (such as the ineffability of experience). However, as we shall see, Rose is emphatically against such one-sidedness and insists on a speculative negotiation of these categories.

Speculative dialectics Rose argues that both Enlightenment and postmodern thought fall into neo-Kantian dualisms that reinforce the diremption of modern thought and practice. Mainstream liberal thought is grounded in Enlightenment reason, which offers universal claims to authority or ‘oughts’ based on a disembedded and disembodied understanding of ethics. Such abstraction results in a profound disconnect between discourses of rights and equality on the one hand and actualities of domination and exclusion on the other. Postmodern thought, in contrast, draws attention to concrete particulars and human experience, in order to counter the abstraction and universalism of Enlightenment thought. However, it overemphasises the particular and it, too, can end up abstracting from those structures and historical processes in which the particular is embedded. Against exclusive universality and exclusive particularity, Rose argues for a speculative negotiation of the broken middle between universal and particular, law and ethics, Enlightenment ideals and lived experience. She maintains that political theorists must attend to

Introduction 7 particular experience, but that this cannot be thought in isolation from the socio-political structures and historical processes that facilitate particular experiences. Speculative political theory recognises that it is impossible to think a particular in isolation: even the very process of thinking one thing and not another involves relation to that Other that is not thought.12 At the heart of Rose’s speculative political thought, then, is attention to relationality – to the way in which supposed opposites constitute, and are constituted by, one another. Rose replaces a dualistic Kantian structure with a triune Hegelian structure of recognition,13 whereby attention to the relation between two terms (the ways in which they foster recognition and misrecognition) is the third term. A struggle to comprehend is embedded in the very structure of the word re-cognise, which implies an initial understanding, followed by a deeper evaluation and coming to know.

Comprehension A speculative negotiation of the broken middle works towards comprehension of diremption, towards recognition of actuality. For Rose, the journey of coming to know is fraught with difficulty: a struggle towards comprehension, however incomplete, requires work on the part of those that would think it. This emphasis on comprehension opens Rose up to accusations of promoting a totalising philosophy, of suggesting that there is an absolute truth that can be fully known. On the contrary, however, Rose’s emphasis on comprehension, on taking the risk of coming to know, does not call for complete knowledge or for closure.14 Instead, she maintains that we need to embrace a way of being in the world that is emphatically against ignorance and indifference,15 a way of being that unflinchingly struggles to understand ourselves and the world in which we live. At the core of speculative politics is an insistence that we come to understand our own complicity in creating and upholding harmful social and political structures, engaging in critical reflection that gazes inwards, as well as outwards. Rose is against positive and emphatic notions of progress. However, a fragile and aporetic notion of progress does have a clear place in her thought: she maintains that we should not give up working towards comprehension of the brokenness in which we find ourselves, in the hope that we might learn. This knowledge is not directed towards ‘mending’ the broken middle. Although Rose is against tragic

8

Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice

resignation that does not engage in the struggle to know or understand, she is also against utopian visions of a holy or mended middle. She argues that the middle must always be negotiated – with fear and trembling, in Kierkegaardian language – and that this requires a continual working through. This working through is inaugurated mourning, which struggles both to know and to be known.16

Anxiety and risk Rose writes extensively about the need for a thoroughgoing anxiety in speculative philosophy, advocating the need to stay with the ‘anxiety of the middle’.17 An insistence on the need for anxiety stems, in part, from Rose’s rejection of easy responses to the brokenness of modernity. She is scathing towards those that seek to mend the broken middle, either with blueprints for reform or with messianic utopianism. Both these paths to healing resist the anxiety associated with staying with the middle and interrogating the contours of actuality. Instead of proposing utopian paths that would lead us away from anxiety, Rose calls for a dogged acceptance of uncertainty and equivocation. Such uncertainty is not a radical uncertainty that would lead to political paralysis; she insists always upon the need to ‘stake oneself’,18 to take the risk of political action in pursuit of a ‘good enough justice’. The notion of political risk runs like a thread throughout Rose’s thought. She refuses to take refuge in euporia – the easy way – whether it mandates a possible justice through the bestowal of abstract equal rights or an impossible justice beyond historical time. Instead, Rose embraces an aporetic way that struggles towards a ‘good enough justice’, grounded in analysis of the misrecognition that attends the gaps between Enlightenment promises and actuality. Analysis of the present – of ‘the law and its commotion’19 – is a risk-filled journey towards comprehension of ourselves, our relations with Others and our situatedness in socio-political structures. Rose insists that this journey must go beyond the ‘risk of coming to know’20 – it must reach outside and beyond the present society to ‘act, without guarantees, for the good of all – this is to take the risk of the universal interest’.21 Taking the risk of the universal interest requires listening to particular pain and suffering and reflecting upon what these might mean, more generally, for institutions and law. In this sense, it implies a radical democracy, where groups of people

Introduction 9 challenge settled norms at various levels: sub-state, state and suprastate. It requires giving voice to those who are dispossessed and ignored within current systems of power. It challenges tidy liberal categories and forces re-thinking, rather than blind acceptance of what has gone before. It does not throw out existing laws and institutions; it works both within and without these existing structures to hold them accountable to those ideals they profess to uphold and to advocate change where they marginalise and discriminate.

Book Structure The book is divided into two parts: speculative philosophy and speculative politics. In Part 1, I explore the philosophical roots of the themes I have just introduced: diremption, speculative dialectics, comprehension and risk. In Part 2, I illustrate the ways in which Rose’s thought speaks to three important debates in social and political theory: trauma and memory, exclusion and difference and tragedy and utopia. Chapter 1 sets out the central building blocks of Rose’s philosophical project, tracing the development of her thought through her reception of Adorno and Hegel. Her speculative reading of Hegel in Hegel Contra Sociology underpins all her subsequent work and is the key to understanding her approach. Rose presents a ‘radical Hegel’, whose thought offers a way of resisting the rigid dualisms of Kantian philosophy. For Rose, Hegel’s emphasis on relationality takes political theory away from thinking in terms of abstract universals or radical particularity, attending instead to the ways in which individuals are situated in relation to one another, as well as social and political actualities. Rose’s emphasis on diremption and comprehension stems directly from this interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy.22 Chapter 2 shows how Rose builds on this speculative reading of Hegel, in ways that bring her philosophical position into closer contact with the concrete concerns of social and political thought. Through an exegesis of The Broken Middle, we begin to learn what kinds of diremption are important and what kinds of political and ethical action might be involved in the risk-filled struggle for comprehension. Rose’s notion of the broken middle operates at the level of both theory and practice, and it is this brokenness (between universal and particular, law and ethics, actuality and potentiality) that speculative philosophy is centrally concerned with negotiating.

10 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice Rose’s critique of liberal and postmodern thought is that they privilege one half of these binary oppositions, rather than doing the work of negotiating their diremption. So what might this negotiation look like? In her later work, particularly Mourning Becomes the Law, Rose argues for an aporetic and struggle-filled response: one that works toward comprehension of dirempted thought and actuality, but not in order to affect premature closure or to ‘fix’ what is broken. Instead, Rose advocates a work of inaugurated mourning that sits with the anxiety of the middle, in order to examine the contours of suffering and loss, but that also insists on the need to take the risk of political action in pursuit of a ‘good enough justice’. Part 1, then, provides an overview of central diremptions that cannot be fully resolved, but must be negotiated in an anxiety-filled struggle for comprehension and appropriate action. However, it gives only limited guidance as to what forms these problems and action might take in practice. The three chapters in Part 2 make Rose’s abstract philosophical concerns more concrete by setting out how I think her work speaks to some key debates in contemporary social and political thought. The chapters illustrate the ways in which a Rosean perspective can profoundly disturb predominant approaches to important philosophical and political debates. In the process, the chapters also deepen my exegesis of elements of Rose’s thought, providing more concrete examples of what diremption might mean under modernity, what an anxiety-filled negotiation of this diremption might look like and what it might mean to take the risk of the universal. However, readers should not expect ‘solutions’ or ‘answers’ to emerge. Instead, Rose’s thought advocates an aporetic sensibility that resists the twin temptations of tragic resignation or utopian hope. It insists that we do the difficult work of the middle, persisting in a never-ending struggle for wisdom: a wisdom that, for Rose, begins with equivocation. The first debate I consider, in Part 2, draws on Rose’s thought to speak to the question of how we should think about and respond to historical trauma (one part of the diremption between the potentiality and actuality of modernity). I argue that predominant responses to trauma in theory and practice are melancholic and eschew working through. I examine two sets of dominant responses: mainstream responses that attempt to secure the state by adopting simplistic meaning-making narratives and theoretical responses that focus on the traumatic wound, resisting its assimilation or forgetting. Both sets of responses posit Manichean binaries that shut down the political

Introduction

11

and work against comprehension. Mainstream responses adopt narratives that interpret trauma in simplistic terms – such as good and evil, us and them – shutting down questioning and resisting equivocation in the wake of loss. Traumatic responses emphasise the ineffability of trauma, maintaining that it cannot be known, but that we should continually mark the site of trauma, in order to work against forgetting. I argue that Rose’s much more difficult notion of working through offers a profound critique of these melancholic responses, resisting their one-sidedness in the pursuit of an anxiety-filled journey towards comprehension. Her inaugurated mourning promotes an inherently political response: the struggle to situate traumatic events allows connections to be made between the traumatic interruption and the broader socio-political and historical context in which it took place and points to ways in which the possibility of recurrence might be mitigated in the future. In terms of Rose’s broader philosophical project, the chapter illustrates the temptation towards a one-sided emphasis on aspects of the traumatic experience at the expense of a more difficult work requiring a speculative negotiation of the diremptions that trauma reveals. Chapter 4 is more forward-looking, giving us a better idea of what it might mean to take political risk in the pursuit of a ‘good enough justice’. It turns from consideration of acute trauma to the more mundane, everyday experience of exclusion and difference. I advocate Rose’s aporetic universalism as an alternative approach to thinking about exclusion and the Other. Liberal cosmopolitanism advocates legal equality as a redress for exclusion; however, the focus on equal rights too often obscures difference and fosters further marginalisation. Postmodern thought promotes the celebration of difference to counter suppression of particularity; however, this, too, can work against understanding by reifying identities in rigid classification and failing to examine their relatedness to one another or their location in social and political structures. Aporetic universalism, in contrast, begins in the middle: it attends to the mismatch between liberal cosmopolitan promises and social and political actualities, insisting that we journey towards recognition of ourselves and of others. The journey towards recognition is firmly embedded in an understanding of law, broadly conceived: the web of practices and norms that foster recognition and misrecognition. It is also inherently risk-filled: the process of reflection on structures of misrecognition, and our own complicities in structures of domination, is deeply political.

12 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice Dissatisfaction with the perceived failure of liberal and postmodern responses to trauma and difference has prompted a turn to more radical alternatives: political realism and messianic utopianism, which are the focus of the final chapter. Political realism doggedly accepts the tragic inescapability of self-interest and conflict, promulgating a politics of the possible; messianic utopianism supplements the tragedy of the present with an otherworldly hope, promulgating a politics of the impossible. I maintain that Rose’s speculative philosophy sits between tragedy and utopia. She argues that there is a danger that the work of the political is bypassed in both categories: both in tragic resignation, which eschews transformation and fosters conservative self-preservation or solipsistic withdrawal, and in utopian hope, which bypasses the present in hubris-filled attempts to ‘mend’ the brokenness of modernity. Instead, a speculative perspective asserts that we stay with the anxiety of living in a broken, fragile world, working through the existential and historical traumas this inevitably entails. The chapters on trauma and memory, exclusion and difference, and tragedy and utopia demonstrate the provocative challenge with which Rose’s thought disturbs accepted ways of thinking about the central concerns of the Left. She insists on close attention to the brokenness that attends the mismatch between Enlightenment promises and actuality, whether manifested in traumatic events or in the insidious ongoing marginalisation of those deemed Other. For Rose, attention to diremption is not focused solely on the experience of brokenness; it requires interrogation of the structures of misrecognition that facilitate and sustain trauma, exclusion and injustice. A Rosean approach is emphatically against one-sidedness; it insists on a speculative negotiation of the middle between truncated mourning and endless melancholy, abstract equality and absolute alterity, tragic resignation and messianic utopianism. For Rose, a refusal to attend to the middle is a refusal to come to know. In the debate on trauma and memory, both sets of dominant responses refuse the journey towards comprehension: the first, by positing easy answers that truncate mourning, the second, by emphasising our inability to know or represent trauma. In the debate on exclusion and difference, both liberal and postmodern responses work against recognition: the first, by obscuring difference and relationality through an emphasis on abstract equality, the second, by creating a new essentialism that fixes self- and Other-understanding in

Introduction

13

rigid relation and fails to situate exclusion in institutions and law. Finally, in the debate on tragedy and utopia, disaffection with the bankruptcy of liberal thought has led radical thinkers to adopt opposing stances that neglect the aporetic way: a political realist acceptance of tragedy that leads to resignation or a messianic utopianism that bypasses the present to postulate a coming hope. I argue that in all three debates, a speculative approach offers a profoundly different sensibility that remains grounded in the present and calls for an anxiety-filled journey towards comprehension. For Rose, this journey is one of political risk: it insists on the difficulty of negotiating actuality manifested in everyday experience, as well as institutions and law. She challenges us to risk, fail, learn and risk again, in pursuit of a ‘good enough justice’.

Chapter 1 Speculative Dialectics

Rose finds in Hegel a radical speculative philosophy that informs her whole oeuvre: an approach saturated by critical reflection and recognition. In Rose’s work, everything starts with Hegel and is grounded in her speculative interpretation of his thought. She arrives at this reading through critical engagement with what she sees as Adorno’s provocative, but problematic reading of Hegel. In this chapter, I provide an exegesis of the speculative Hegelian core of Rose’s philosophy by situating her interpretation of Hegel against her interpretation of Adorno. Speculative philosophy takes the political seriously: it does the difficult work of the middle, rather than taking easy, one-sided paths, pervaded by conceptual dualisms. Rose emphatically rejects both Enlightenment and postmodern thought. She argues that exclusive universalism and exclusive particularism choose euporia – the easy way – by refusing to attend to the relation between universal and particular. Instead, she embraces a speculative approach to political theory that attends to the broken middle, referencing a brokenness between law and ethics, universal and particular that is both conceptual and actual. A speculative approach refuses to privilege one category over another and examines the relatedness of supposed opposites. It is a struggle-filled approach, one that emphasises the need to work towards a greater comprehension of socio-political realities, to see how we are implicated in the challenges we face and to take the risk of acting politically. This chapter is divided into two sections. The first section traces Rose’s journey to Hegel, through her reading of Adorno in The Melancholy Science.1 Adorno’s critique of Enlightenment thinking and concern with persistent suffering under modernity shape her own thinking about modernity. Furthermore, although Rose asserts that Adorno remains wedded to a broadly dialectical misreading of

18 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice Hegel,2 his perception of the emancipatory potential of Hegelian dialectics and his adoption of negative dialectics to respond to the failures of modernity is formative for the development of Rose’s own, more thoroughgoing, speculative reading of Hegel. The second section traces Rose’s development of speculative philosophy, through her reading of Hegel in the seminal work Hegel Contra Sociology.3 She portrays a ‘radical Hegel’,4 whose speculative thought can help us to negotiate the brokenness of modernity. Rose finds in Hegel a way of resisting the dualisms of Kantian thought: his emphasis on recognition takes political theory away from thinking in terms of abstract universals, atomised individuals or radical particularity. Speculative Hegelian thought is attuned to the ways in which individuals are situated not only in relation to one another, but also in relation to socio-political structures and historical processes. It is this relationality that comprises the radical kernel of Hegelian thought.

Melancholic Beginnings: Rose and Adorno Rose’s journey towards speculative Hegelianism was heavily influenced by her engagement with Frankfurt School critical theory, first encountered as part of her ventures into the world of social theory at Oxford. Rose’s doctoral studies and first book focused on Adorno, with a sophisticated analysis of his work that was far more than the introduction indicated by its title: The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno.5 She was attracted to Adorno’s writings, in part, because of his insistent interdisciplinarity and his rejection of both liberal thinking and the ‘new philosophy’ of such thinkers as Heidegger and Husserl.6 Like Adorno, Rose found postmodern thought uninspiring and unconvincing and unable to engage with the substantive concerns of traditional philosophy. Indeed, her later works are, in large part, devoted to a critique of postmodern approaches to law and ethics.7 Although his project left her unsatisfied on a number of points, Rose found much of value in Adorno’s writings, including his critique of Enlightenment thinking and his attention to suffering.

Adorno’s negative dialectics Rose’s reception of Adorno is important, in part, because her critique of his work leads her to a deeper engagement with Hegel and to a clarification of her own speculative interpretation of his thought.

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Before I turn to Rose’s reading of Adorno in The Melancholy Science, I briefly outline Adorno’s critique of Enlightenment thinking and his appropriation of Hegelian dialectics to respond to commodification and instrumental rationality under modernity. Like Rose, Adorno perceives a radical kernel in Hegel’s thought. Hegel’s dialectical method, which focuses on the relation between binary opposites (universal and particular, subject and object, theory and praxis), informs Adorno’s insistence on the need to enlighten Enlightenment thinking with attention to concrete particularity, as well as social and political structures. Adorno even finds a radical moment in Hegel’s identity theory, despite his rejection of this aspect of his thought: he maintains that Hegel’s positing of eventual reconciliation entails the utopian promise that ‘we might yet succeed’8 – a promise that is essential if we are to avoid despair in the face of pervasive suffering. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer maintain that the desire for ever-increasing control that springs from the pursuit of Enlightenment knowledge works against the attainment of Enlightenment ideals.9 The Enlightenment has stripped reason of rational ideals and reduced human interaction to power relationships and economic transactions. This assertion draws on Marx’s theory of value, which states that capitalism depends upon exchange value, whereby commodities have no intrinsic value, apart from what they are worth on the market.10 Adorno asserts that under conditions of modernity, human beings are treated as commodities: substitutable entities valued merely for their instrumental uses or ability to command market resources; even where commodification is resisted, the overriding pull of society is toward the status quo and those forms that are valued by society. The mind thus shapes itself into socially acceptable, marketable forms, and freedom becomes an illusion, made all the more dangerous and difficult to resist, because of the appearance of freedom. This is not the fault of Enlightenment ideals as such, but the instrumental use of these ideals in the promotion of a rational, efficient system: ‘The network of the whole is drawn ever tighter, modelled after the act of exchange’.11 The driving force in society, that Adorno and Horkheimer term the ‘culture industry’,12 has numbed individuality and creativity: [the spirit] cannot survive where it is fixed as a cultural commodity and doled out to satisfy consumer needs. The flood of detailed information and candyfloss entertainment simultaneously instructs and stultifies mankind.13

20 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice In such an atmosphere, social criticism becomes extraordinarily difficult; where worth is determined in terms of exchange, categories such as beauty and social worth become null and void and things in themselves, including human beings and the natural world, lose their inherent value. Adorno maintains that the repression of humankind under the Enlightenment can be challenged using Hegelian dialectics.14 In doing so, he is influenced by Marx and Engels’s critique of Hegel and their adoption of Hegel’s dialectical method. Friedrich Engels distinguishes between ‘the whole dogmatic content of the Hegelian system [which] is declared to be absolute truth, in contradiction to his dialectical method, which dissolves all dogmatism’.15 This distinction between Hegel’s system, which is rejected, and his dialectical method, which is adopted, is a left-Hegelian move that is followed, in part, by Adorno. On the one hand, Adorno perceives Hegel as a conservative thinker who provides an ‘apology for the status quo’16 and a defence of the State; on the other, he perceives Hegel as a revolutionary par excellence, whose dialectical method provides a means of challenging the status quo. Adorno points to Hegel’s critique of Kant’s dualisms as revealing the radical nature of his dialectics: The poles that Kant opposed to one another – form and content, nature and spirit, theory and praxis, freedom and necessity, the thing in itself and the phenomenon – are all permeated through and through by reflection in such a way that none of these determinations are left standing as ultimate. In order to be thought, and to exist, each inherently requires the other that Kant opposed to it.17

Instead of posing opposites that must be thought separately, Hegel sees the reflection of one extreme in the other, arguing that it is impossible to think one concept without also thinking of its opposite. He posits the category of mediation between the two concepts, examining the ways in which they constitute one another, without proposing a weak middle way. For Adorno, this is the radical aspect of Hegel’s thought, setting his philosophy apart from traditional metaphysics, with its insistence on an ‘ultimate principle from which everything must be derivable’18 and from new philosophy or ontology, with its melancholy resignation.19 He finds in Hegel’s thought an alternative to Kantian dualism – and its reductionist legacy in modern liberalism – and to poststructural thought, with its overemphasis on

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the previously neglected side of a binary pair. Instead, Adorno emphasises the importance of mediation (Vermittlung), which is an interpretive category that never settles on a middle ground between two poles, but operates ‘in and through the extremes’.20 For Adorno, ‘the content of Hegel’s philosophy is the notion that truth – which in Hegel means the system – cannot be expressed as a fundamental principle . . . but is the dynamic totality of all the propositions that can be generated from each other by virtue of their contradictions’.21 So where poststructural thought focuses on the categories of fragmentation, particularity and alterity and largely ignores notions of totality, universality and collective solidarity, Adorno attends to the relations between the two sets of concepts. He maintains that concrete particulars are shaped by wider social processes and that attention to these particulars enhances our understanding of those processes. Adorno draws on Hegel’s dialectics to attack the notion of a complete separation of subject and object. He maintains that such separation is false and masks the repression of the object by the subject. The repression to which Adorno refers is not merely of the human ‘Other’, though this is of central importance; it also refers to human domination of the natural world.22 However, like other leftHegelian interpretations of Hegel, Adorno firmly rejects Hegel’s identity theory, which posits the underlying unity of subject and object, thought and being and leads to the belief that contradictory ideas and ways of life are part of a total truth.23 He maintains that identity theories lead to reification and a suppression of difference. His oft-quoted remark that ‘all objectification is a forgetting’24 indicates a longing for a space where difference and non-identity might flourish.25 Furthermore, he argues that a concept of total truth denies the possibility of reflection and leads to a withdrawal from human effort. Instead, he proposes a conception of subject and object, thought and being, whereby they cannot be thought without reference to each other and are therefore neither completely separate, nor in complete unity.26 He stresses the ways in which the concepts mediate one another, showing how thought is shaped by societal discourses and institutions, and society is shaped by thought and practice. Although Adorno is strongly influenced by a Marxist interpretation of Hegel, he does not uncritically accept a left-Hegelian reading; indeed, in many ways, the critical theory of the early Frankfurt School can be seen as a return to Hegel from Marx.27 Unlike most Marxists, Adorno posits his method of immanent critique against Hegel’s

22 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice ‘fundamental antinomies’.28 He argues that whilst the Hegelian system silences thought through the reification of philosophical categories, its power can be appropriated in order to criticise itself, by holding the system up against the categories it sets forth.29 Thus, Adorno claims to stay true to Hegel’s philosophy, resisting his concluding moves and finding truth amidst the untruth: ‘Hegelian dialectic finds its ultimate truth, that of its own impossibility, in its unresolved and vulnerable quality, even if, as the theodicy of selfconsciousness, it has no awareness of this’.30 Adorno’s appropriation of Hegel is not only in the separation of his method from his system; Hegel’s speculative philosophy and continual critical self-reflection provided substantive inspiration for the development of his negative dialectics, his focus on socio-historical particulars and his ideas on utopian hope.

Rose contra Adorno Rose finds much of value in Adorno’s appropriation of Hegel’s dialectics to criticise Enlightenment thinking. However, in the end, his turn to Hegel is not wholehearted enough for Rose. Along with other Frankfurt School thinkers, Adorno remains wedded to a leftHegelian interpretation that emphasises appropriation of Hegel’s method, rather than his system. Although Adorno is generally characterised as a Hegelian Marxist, Rose maintains that he is better understood as a neo-Kantian Marxist: he falls into neo-Kantian dualisms and methodologism, despite his critique of Kant.31 Adorno reads Hegel and Marx through neo-Kantian lenses and, following Lukacs, he develops a ‘Marxist sociology of cultural forms’.32 According to Rose, this has three major consequences: it prompts an obsession with method that leads to proceduralism; it leads to a focus on cultural forms insufficiently grounded in social and historical context; and it culminates in a paucity of the political. The first criticism that Rose levels at Adorno is that despite his wellknown critique of methodologism, perhaps most clearly stated in his famous debate with Karl Popper,33 his own thought became increasingly methodological. Adorno’s analysis of Enlightenment forms of thought convinced him that if he was to engage in genuine criticism that would preserve spaces beyond the administered world – the nonidentical – then it was vitally important to resist being captured by that which he was criticising. Adorno believed that the everyday use

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of concepts, such as ‘freedom’, camouflaged social reality. He sought to employ methods that would allow him to unmask this deception, without using those concepts in the usual way. He utilised a variety of stylistic methods to facilitate modes of communication that would not be captured by the status quo. In his later writings, especially, he puts aside the norms of philosophical argument, instead embracing a fragmentary style that sets forth a set of ideas in a technique that he describes as a ‘constellation’ or ‘paratactic’.34 Perhaps the most stylistically successful exemplar of this method is in Minima Moralia,35 which employs a fragmentary style to reflect upon his personal experiences of life in exile. He depends heavily upon the technique of ironic inversion in this work, inverting the meaning of well-known phrases and appearing to take the inversion literally, whilst simultaneously drawing attention to the original meaning of the phrase, in order to prompt its re-evaluation.36 Underlying Adorno’s use of alternative modes of communication is the fundamental method of immanent critique, whereby the ideals that a society or a particular text sets for itself are taken at face value and presented with the (non-) corresponding social reality. Although highlighting the mismatch between ideals and reality is Adorno’s central concern, Rose is unconvinced by this method of enlightening Enlightenment, arguing that ‘even at its most ‘‘immanent’’, this form of critique succeeds at the expense of transforming all philosophy into epistemology, even when such philosophy consists of a radical attempt to renounce epistemology’.37 Adorno’s obsession with method and style stems from his theory of society and his desire to negate dominant concepts, but leads him to methodologism all the same. According to Rose, although he does not go so far as to develop a ‘general logic’ that completely disregards its social or historical context, he becomes preoccupied with his method of philosophical intervention, and this preoccupation leads him to neglect the analysis of actuality.38 The second strand of criticism that Rose levels at Adorno’s work is related to this charge of proceduralism: the contention that he neglects the analysis of underlying social and economic relations. Although Rose welcomes Adorno’s broadening of Marxist thought beyond the economic to the cultural, she argues that his analysis is seriously undermined by its neglect of practical and historical dimensions of society. She maintains that he does not delineate an historical account of capitalism – that he ‘rejects all forms of historicism’39 – and that his

24 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice writings lack an adequate account of the state.40 His emphasis on the individual at the expense of the underlying socio-political context is limited and short-sighted: . . . Adorno’s emphasis on the formation or deformation of the individual [replaces] any further definition of the macro-factor, the form of domination. He might at least have detailed the mechanisms by which power has become diffuse but omnipotent, and how that is related to change in the organisation of production. Ideology, domination, and reification are simply equated with each other, and the individual is not satisfactorily reinserted into the socio-political context.41

By overemphasising the particular, Rose maintains, Adorno forfeits the benefits of adopting a Marxian approach – an approach that might have allowed him to situate individuals in their particular societal and political milieu through an analysis of the means of production and social relations. Instead, she argues, he makes it impossible to do so, failing even to locate a social subject.42 This failure to locate subjects in a broader analysis of society is a failure of the Frankfurt School more generally; its move away from class analysis leads it to ‘[academise] politics’, rather than to ‘[politicise] academia’.43 Rose’s final critique of Adorno’s work is that his failure to locate individuals in their socio-political context fosters a failure to theorise social and political action.44 Rose terms Adorno’s critique of Heidegger’s disconnect between his moral and political philosophy ‘embarrassing’, as Adorno’s own writings evince such a gap.45 Despite his call for societal ‘interventions’,46 these interventions are primarily at the level of thought, not political practice, and his concern is always to intervene in such a way as to provoke different ways of thinking, rather than to set forth concrete political goals.47 He does not develop a theory of political action; indeed, he cannot, because he has not developed an account of corresponding social relations.48 Although his later writings are concerned with broader social analysis and political intervention,49 his praxis is essentially praxis of thought: its overemphasis on cultural forms and corresponding neglect of social forms dulls its emancipatory edge. In this sense, Rose argues, Adorno is not sufficiently Marxian. At the core of Rose’s critique of Adorno is her contention that his refusal to embrace a speculative account of Hegel’s identity theory means that he remains caught in the neo-Kantian dualisms that he is

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trying to escape. Adorno’s negative dialectics were developed in response to the Hegelian dialectic; however, he inherits Marx’s non-speculative misreading of Hegel, interpreting Hegel’s thought as a series of oppositions and characterising him as a ‘dialectical dogmatist’50 whose philosophy perpetuates the status quo.51 Rose perhaps overstates Adorno’s misreading of Hegel. Although Adorno does not make a clear distinction between Hegel’s dialectical and speculative thought, he does discuss its speculative core, and his concept of mediation enables him to hold oppositions together in thought and to examine the ways in which they constitute one another.52 Furthermore, despite his rejection of Hegel’s identity thinking and his doctrine of absolute spirit, he finds in these aspects of Hegel’s thought a ‘wholesome corrective’53 that can be used to counter ungrounded, fragmentary poststructural thought; and in the ideal of eventual reconciliation, Adorno finds an important utopian counter to bleak reality. However, Rose is right to say that Adorno’s reading of Hegel is essentially negative; even his insistence on the idea of utopia is a negative move. Although he gestures towards a more positive, politically engaged way of being in the world, Rose’s writings on mourning and political risk (which we explore in Chapter 2) speak more directly to the problem of coming to terms with the past. In any case, for the purposes of this chapter, what matters is how Rose responds to Adorno and how this response leads her to a particular interpretation of Hegel. In the following section, then, I turn to Rose’s speculative account of Hegel, which is the key to understanding her later, more overtly political interventions in theory and practice.

Speculative Thought: Rose and Hegel Rose’s criticisms of Marxian-influenced interpretations of Hegel’s thought in The Melancholy Science prompted a deeper engagement with Hegel; indeed, this became the focus of her next project, Hegel Contra Sociology.54 In this book, Rose outlines the variety of (mis-)readings that Hegel’s writings have inspired and proffers an alternative account of his thought. Her distinctive re-reading of Hegel portrays him speculatively and comprehensively and is the cornerstone of her intervention in contemporary political theory.55 Rose’s work on Hegel lays the foundation for her subsequent thought; an understanding of her speculative Hegelianism is the

26 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice key to understanding her later work and her powerful intervention in contemporary debates in social and political theory.56 It proffers a challenge to the one-sidedness of much political theory and practice: a charge that Rose lays at the feet of both liberal and poststructural variants of social and political thought. Rose’s reading of Hegel posits a speculative account of his work. Unlike Marxist appropriations of Hegel, she does not separate his method (phenomenology) from his system (the idea of an absolute ethical life); she sees these as inextricable parts of the whole of his thought. Hegel himself referred to his thinking as speculative and distinguished it from dialectical thinking.57 In a letter to Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, dated 23 October 1812, Hegel considers the problem of how to introduce schoolchildren to philosophy.58 He distinguishes three forms of philosophical reasoning: abstract, dialectical and speculative. Abstract thinking, he maintains, takes place primarily in the realm of thought and is ‘the so-called understanding which holds determinations fast and comes to know them in their fixed distinction’.59 Dialectical thought, in contrast, is ‘the movement and confusion of such fixed determinateness; it is negative reason’.60 Hegel maintains that speculative reason, on the other hand, is ‘positive reason, the spiritual, and it alone is really philosophical’.61 He goes on to describe it in more detail: . . . the truly speculative form [is] knowledge of what is opposed in its very oneness, more precisely, the knowledge that the opposites are in truth one. Only this speculative stage is truly philosophical. It is naturally the most difficult; it is the truth . . . [l]aw, self-consciousness, the practical in general already contain in and for themselves the principles or beginnings of the speculative. And of spirit and the spiritual there is, moreover, in truth not even a single nonspeculative word that can be said; for spirit is unity in itself with otherness.62

The speculative form maintains that it is impossible to comprehend concepts in isolation; they must always be thought in relation to their Other: ‘each ‘‘thing’’ is defined by not being another, lives in and only in the absence of another, and so ‘‘passes over’’ from being a discrete object to being a moment in a complex movement’.63 Speculative thought is a continual interplay between irreconcilable opposites – particular and universal, religion and state – that attends to the ways in which they constitute one another (‘are in truth one’). According to Rose, Hegel’s focus on the unity of opposites is accompanied by an

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acknowledgement of their diremption, their brokenness – a brokenness that cannot fully be mended. However, there is always an element of promise in speculative thought: the possibility of transformation that Adorno pointed to in his studies of Hegel,64 which is the promise of eventual reconciliation. Speculation opens up a space beyond the present – a space for political action, which points to the future, without providing a blueprint for what the future might look like. It is in the spirit of speculative reason that Rose reads Hegel’s thought and in which she finds the radical kernel of his thought and its powerful challenge to mainstream liberal and critical social and political theory. Hegel’s writings have provided inspiration to thinkers across the spectrum in sociology. Those influenced by him are generally characterised as falling into one of two camps: right-Hegelian or leftHegelian. A right-Hegelian reading maintains that ‘the real is rational’ and supports a conservative status quo in law and religion.65 It emphasises the world of the mind and ideas, rather than the world of existing concrete reality. During the 1840s and 1850s, this was the semi-official philosophical view in Berlin; Hegel was perceived as having elevated Protestant Christianity and the Prussian state to a position of supremacy in world history.66 In contrast, a left-Hegelian reading maintains that ‘the rational is real’ and believes that philosophy should study the concrete realities of human experience.67 Thinkers such as Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx criticise Hegel for his emphasis on abstract ideas at the expense of the material;68 Marx maintains that for Hegel ‘[t]he real becomes an appearance’.69 However, they also perceive resources in Hegel’s writings, that can be used to oppose existing law and religion, separating his dialectical method from the larger body of his work and, especially, from his metaphysics. According to Rose, however, both left- and right-Hegelian traditions of interpretation have ‘mystified’ Hegel’s thought.70 Both readings fail to understand the speculative nature of Hegel’s thought – which grew out of his critique of the abstract oppositions of finite and infinite, phenomena and noumena – to be found in Kant and Fichte. Both readings also omit Hegel’s notion of the ‘absolute’ and of recognition. In Rose’s words: In their very different ways, both the non-Marxist and the Marxist critiques of Hegel attempt to drop the notion of the ‘absolute’, but, at

28 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice the same time, retain the social import of Hegel’s thought. In the case of non-Marxist sociology, the attempt depends on extracting a social object from Hegel’s philosophy, ‘objective spirit’. In the case of Marxism, the attempt depends on extracting a ‘method’ whose use will reveal social contradictions. But the ‘absolute’ is not an optional extra, as it were. As we shall see, Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the absolute is banished or suppressed, if the absolute cannot be thought.71

Non-Marxist critiques of Hegel detach the notion of objective spirit, which denotes human laws, social arrangements and political institutions, from Hegel’s wider thought and transform it into a general term that denotes ‘culture’ or ‘world view’. However, this transformation ensures that the concept of objective spirit is removed both from socio-historical particulars and from absolute spirit, which denotes ‘the meaning of history as a whole’.72 This abstraction from both the particular and the whole strikes at the heart of Hegel’s notion of spirit, which is ‘the structure of recognition or misrecognition in a society’,73 ensuring that it is divorced from its relation to other realms of the social and to the absolute. Marxist critiques of Hegel distinguish between his ‘radical method’ and his ‘conservative system’,74 detaching his method from his system, in order to criticise society. However, like their non-Marxist counterparts, they, too, displace the central notion of recognition from Hegel’s thought. Rose proffers an alternative reading: one that sees Hegel’s system and method as inextricably linked and does not ignore his concept of the absolute. Her speculative account of his thought attempts to demystify Hegel and sees him as a resource for thinking ethically and politically.75

Hegel contra Kant In order to understand Rose’s speculative account of Hegel, one must have some understanding of Hegel’s critique of Kant and Fichte; his thought developed out of his reaction to the limitations of theirs. At the root of Hegel’s critique of Kant is a profound dissatisfaction with Kantian dualisms. Kant’s dualistic thinking pervades his theory of knowledge, in which he clearly distinguishes between that which we may know (the finite) and that which we may not know (the infinite). It also permeates his normative theory, in which morality is separated from legality, and normative ‘oughts’ are pre-decided and prescribed apart from a consideration of wider socio-historical context. This section traces Rose’s account of Hegel’s critique of Kant, examining

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the ‘trinity of ideas’76 he puts in place of Kant’s transcendental method and the triune structure of recognition that he puts in place of Kantian dualisms. The concept of recognition is particularly important, because it forms the basis for Rose’s intervention in contemporary debates about exclusion and the Other, as we will see in Chapter 4. Underlying Kant’s transcendental method is an attempt to delineate the principles needed for the correct utilisation of faculties of cognition. This focus on form – on how or what we may know – is problematic for Hegel. He maintains that the result of this focus is ‘to withdraw cognition from an interest in its objects and absorption in the study of them, and to direct it back upon itself’.77 Hegel also argues that a study of how we know necessarily involves the use of knowledge faculties – the very object of our study – and that it is ‘absurd’ to suppose that it is possible to examine knowledge objectively. Kant’s writings on cognition encompass the question not only of how we know, but also what we might legitimately know. According to Kant, we can only know the finite; the infinite is unknowable. In so doing, he creates what Rose describes as ‘new areas of ignorance’,78 including God and things in themselves. However, Hegel rejects Kant’s approach to the social world and his strict demarcation of that which is ‘knowable’ and that which is ‘unknowable’. He maintains that we cannot restrict the realm of knowledge to the finite; this limits our understanding of ourselves and our place in the sociohistorical world. In Rose’s words: The unknowability of what Kant calls, among other names, the ‘unconditioned’ or the ‘infinite’ results in the unknowability of ourselves, both as subjects of experience, ‘the transcendental unity of apperception’, and as moral agents capable of freedom. Pari passu, the unknowability of ourselves means that the social, political and historical determinants of all knowledge and all action remain unknown and unknowable . . .79

Kant’s ‘neutral method’ closes off knowledge, rather than facilitating it. It does not allow us to think beyond what is; as such, we lose part of our humanness, our ability to think in the realm of possibility. If we cannot know ourselves and if the infinite is designated ‘unknowable’, then our power to imagine and change those social and political conditions that underpin our existence is limited.

30 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice Kant’s transcendental method attempts to delineate universal principles and laws that apply generally, regardless of particularity. He prescribes abstract guidelines that stipulate how we ought to live; a forward-looking approach that works towards the achievement of an ideal. Hegel rejects this abstraction from actuality and sets forth a phenomenological approach to ethical life that stresses ‘the presence of ethical life, not the task of achieving it’.80 He emphasises the desirability of unifying theory and practice, rejecting Kantian prescription as too far removed from socio-historical realities. Rose identifies a ‘trinity of ideas’ that Hegel puts in the place of Kant’s transcendental method: ‘the idea of a phenomenology, the idea of absolute ethical life (absolute Sittlichkeit), and the idea of a logic’.81 These ideas are at the heart of Rose’s reading of Hegel, and they deserve consideration in turn. The idea of a phenomenology is central to Hegel’s thought and is posited as a different theoretical approach to knowing from that proffered by Kant. Simply put, phenomenology is ‘the immanent exploration of how things are experienced’,82 and the Phenomenology of Spirit83 traces the development of human consciousness and capacity for judgement in the context of the philosophy of science, ethics, European history, art and religion. Perhaps not surprisingly, given its wide-ranging nature, the Phenomenology has been subject to chronic misreading. Right-Hegelians interpret it conservatively, perceiving it as a teleological account of the ‘end of history’84 and using it as a justification for a strong state and religion. Left-Hegelians reject the substance of the Phenomenology, which they perceive as totalitarian, but adopt Hegel’s dialectical method, which they deem revolutionary. However, both of these are non-speculative readings that fail to capture the kernel of Hegel’s thought. Hegel’s phenomenology is a response to Kant’s account of knowing, positing an alternative to Kant’s sharp distinctions between such oppositions as: things as we perceive them (phenomena) and things as they are in themselves (noumena), reason and nature, finite and infinite. Kant’s transcendental method places sharp limits on what we have conscious access to and, therefore, what we can know, but Hegel maintains that this is absurd, since Kant’s criteria cannot be determined outside of consciousness itself. In the place of Kant’s transcendental method, then, Hegel calls for a phenomenological approach – one that acknowledges the impossibility of approaching knowledge from

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the outside, as if the object of knowledge is external to consciousness. According to a phenomenological approach: The only consistent way to criticise Kant’s philosophy of consciousness is to show that the contradiction which a methodological, or any natural, consciousness falls into when it considers the object to be external, can itself provide the occasion for a change in that consciousness and in its definition of its object. The new procedure and the new definition of the object may also be contradictory, in which case they, too, will change, until the two become adequate to each other.85

The Phenomenology has been portrayed as presenting a series of dualisms that are reconciled in favour of one or the other and as presenting a strong teleology towards universalism and the good state. However, according to Rose, this was not Hegel’s intention; he sought knowledge of the ‘whole’ – a speculative knowledge that moved beyond Kantian thinking in terms of binary opposites.86 Hegel’s idea of an absolute ethical life (absolute Sittlichkeit) was intended as an alternative means of thinking Kant’s justification of moral judgements, which always proceeded from, and never exceeded, the finite. Hegel’s reference to the absolute does not refer to a ‘known’ infinite; on the contrary, it refers to an infinite that is always present, but not yet grasped – an infinite that should not be dismissed from the outset as unknowable. The ‘absolute’ thus refers to ‘the unity of the finite and the infinite’, and Sittlichkeit, ‘ethical life’, refers to ‘the unity of the realms of morality and legality’.87 Contra Kant, one cannot pre-judge morality or ethical life: . . . the morality of an action cannot be ‘judged’ apart from the whole context of its possibility. It cannot be judged by separating its morality from its legality, by separating its meaning from the social whole.88

Thinking the absolute, therefore, means thinking in terms of past and present, morality and legality, finite and infinite. It is comprehensive thought, and it is worked towards and achieved, not pre-decided. For Rose, then, Hegel’s idea of absolute ethical life is not closed and totalitarian, but open and revisable. Hegel’s idea of logic refers to his work Science of Logic:89 another phenomenological work in which ‘method’ is not discussed, but demonstrated through the description of a series of experiences.90 Rose asserts that the ‘experiences of logic’ do not illustrate the

32 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice development of a natural consciousness learning from its mistakes; instead, ‘the experience of philosophical consciousness in the Logic is to rediscover the unity of theoretical and moral reason and natural, finite consciousness through the contradictions of the history of philosophy’.91 Rather than conceding a disconnect between theoretical and moral reasoning, as the idea of phenomenology (as an alternative to theoretical reasoning) and the idea of absolute ethical life (as an alternative to practical moral reasoning) might suggest, the idea of a logic presupposes the unification of theoretical and practical reasoning, with a combination of the preceding ideas. Hegel does not posit an alternative; rather, he demonstrates it through narrative, through accounts of consciousness on a journey to wholeness, through the gradual realisation and reconciliation of contradictory experiences of awareness. At the heart of Rose’s speculative account of Hegel, then, is a resistance to the conceptual dualisms of Kant’s critical philosophy. These dualisms, between concept and intuition, consciousness and its objects, theoretical and practical reason, are not merely philosophical; they reflect underlying social relations. Hegel replaces this dualistic structure with a ‘triune structure of recognition’,92 whereby attention to the relation between two terms (their identity and non-identity) is the third element. Hegel’s speculative philosophy expresses itself in the form of speculative propositions93 – propositions that, upon formal reading, seem to express identity between a subject and predicate (for example, ‘religion and the foundation of the State are one and the same’), but that when read speculatively, must also be read to express non-identity between the terms. Non-identity means that the relationship that we have claimed between subject and predicate does not reflect the relationship in actuality.94 Hegel’s notion of recognition encompasses identity and non-identity equally in a triune relation; however, it places a special emphasis on nonidentity. This emphasis is implied by the structure of the word recognition (or re-cognition), which suggests an initial mis-recognition and the need to come to know again. In Rose’s words: ‘[t]he familiar or well-known, the immediate experience (das Bekannte), is a partial experience which has to be re-experienced or known again (anerkannt) in order to be fully known (erkannt)’.95 Hegel’s triune structure of recognition is more than a formal structure; it ‘depends on the analysis of social and historical forms of misrecognition, or lack of identity’.96 Hegel is concerned that the

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relationship between binary oppositions does not result in the suppression of the Other; the structure of recognition is such that each term, each pole of the opposition, is able to ‘see’ or ‘intuit’ each other, to recognise both their sameness and their difference without dominating the Other. This recognition of the Other is only possible in a just society.97 A just society, like recognition, depends on the analysis of the structures of domination that are historically and socially embedded. Foremost amongst such unjust structures are bourgeois property relations, which masquerade under the banners of ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’. According to this conception of property, people are abstract, formal entities that are, to all intents and purposes, identical and, therefore, able to be governed by exchange relations. However, there is a lack of identity at the heart of bourgeois property relations: ‘they make people into competing, isolated, ‘‘moral’’, individuals who can only relate externally to one another’.98 There is no possibility of unity between legal and social spheres in this conception of ethical life; the law that guarantees abstract property rights is based upon a fundamental lack of identity, a fundamental inequality between persons. The equal right to property ownership comes hand-in-hand with the assumption that not all persons own property; when Hegel was writing, the right to ownership also came with the assumption that not all individuals were considered legal persons capable of owning property.99 It is, therefore, an excellent illustration of an unjust institution that has been ‘smuggled in’ under the auspices of freedom and universality. It is also an exemplary illustration of an institution that has been universalised, despite its irrelevance to some societies:100 ‘Hegel argues that to ‘‘universalize’’ property is itself immoral, because it involves taking something conditioned, that is, determined by specific social relations, and transforming it into a spurious absolute’.101 Rose’s reading of Hegel lays the foundation for her speculative philosophy. She refuses to perceive the world in terms of irreconcilable binary opposites, such as universal and particular, law and ethics, finite and infinite. Instead, she holds these ideas together in thought, aware of the ways in which the one mediates our understanding of the other. Part of the function of speculative philosophy is to facilitate a broader and deeper understanding of individuals and their place in the world, a deeper understanding of their humanity. Thus, Rose emphasises the necessity of understanding embedded in historical, social and political context, arguing against fixed and

34 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice abstract guidelines that neglect the particular. Rose’s speculative account of Hegel’s philosophy stands in stark contrast to Kantian philosophy, which proposes universal guidelines that apply regardless of socio-historical context. Hegel’s thought is not centrally concerned with the questions of how we ought to live our lives. Any duties that can be gleaned from his writings are not intended to stand alone as a guide to living; they do not form a coherent system of thought and will inevitably provide conflicting guidelines.102 Making decisions speculatively requires the exercise of judgement in the light of broader social, political and historical processes. Thus, Rose’s speculative philosophy struggles to negotiate particular injustices, whilst always striving towards the (constantly revised and revisable) universal; it learns from and mourns the past, whilst working towards a different future; and it perceives the fragility of moral progress, whilst continuing to take political risks, in the hope of engendering positive outcomes.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have traced the development of Rose’s speculative political thought through her reception of Adorno and Hegel. Rose offers a speculative account of Hegel’s philosophy that differs significantly from that proffered by predominant left- and right-Hegelian readings of his work. Whereas left-Hegelian thinkers (such as Adorno) detach Hegel’s method from his system, emphasising the emancipatory potential of his dialectical method, but the totalitarian dimensions of his system, Rose embraces the whole of Hegel’s thought as radical. Rose also emphatically rejects right-Hegelian readings of Hegel, arguing that Hegel is deeply concerned with a struggle towards understanding embedded in socio-historical context and that his system is anything but conservative.103 At the centre of speculative philosophy are a rejection of Kantian dualisms and an embrace of Hegelian recognition. Rose maintains that Kant’s critical philosophy works against comprehension: it is overly concerned with form, it rules out knowledge of the infinite and it is organised around alienating oppositions. Hegel’s speculative philosophy, on the other hand, is centrally concerned with the journey of coming to know, from mis-(re)cognition to re-cognition. His ‘triune structure of recognition’104 is not merely a formal refutation of Kantian dualisms; it calls for analysis of those socio-political and

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historical structures of misrecognition that suppress the Other – those who fall outside the promises of modernity. So what are the implications of a speculative approach for thinking about and responding to what Rose terms the ‘disasters of modernity’?105 Rose accepts much of Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of Enlightenment thought and the broadly related concerns that later postmodern writers raise about modernity’s objectifying universalism, dehumanising instrumentalism, unrelenting rationalism and suppression of difference. However, she criticises Adorno for evidencing a paucity of the political in response; she abhors his unrelenting negativity. Rose’s radical Hegel, in contrast, promises the ongoing possibility of recognition. The Hegelian conception of recognition underpins speculative philosophy’s compelling intervention in contemporary debates of the kind I discuss in Part 2. The journey towards recognition is at the core of Rose’s conception of inaugurated mourning, which emphasises the struggle to come to know and be known in the wake of trauma (see Chapter 3). The concept of recognition is also at the heart of speculative philosophy’s intervention in debates about exclusion and difference (see Chapter 4). In both cases, Rose points us towards a more agonistic, struggle-filled negotiation of the diremptions of modernity. Rose’s later writings build on this Hegelian foundation to deepen our understanding of the brokenness of modernity and her speculative response. In the next chapter, I extend the exegesis of Rose’s speculative philosophy by exploring her response to what she terms the broken middle. I argue that her insistence on an anxiety-ridden comprehension, mourning and political risk offer a stark contrast to dominant mainstream responses to pervasive suffering under modernity.

Chapter 2 The Broken Middle

This chapter deepens our understanding of speculative philosophy: it applies Rose’s speculative Hegelianism to her conception of the broken middle and explores its outworking, in response to the brokenness of modernity. Whereas in Chapter 1, Hegel Contra Sociology was the focus of exegesis, in this chapter, The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society is the central focus. In this, Rose’s most challenging work, she deepens her critique of old (liberal) and new (postmodern) philosophy: the old, for its prescription and progressivism, and the new, for its rejection of the struggle to know and to judge. Both of these approaches refuse to do the difficult work of the middle: they avoid the anxiety associated with the brokenness of modernity. Drawing on Hegel’s speculative thought, Rose asserts the need for philosophy’s ‘grey in grey’:1 a ‘grey in grey’ that contrasts with the ‘colour on colour’ of postmodernity, with its exuberant rejection of traditional philosophy. She continues: Philosophy’s ‘grey in grey’ was never intended to damage its endeavour: to keep it quiescent, modestly contemplative, servile or resigned. This subtle array, this grey in grey, would turn hubris not into humility but into motile configuration. Grey in grey warns against philosophy’s pride of Sollen, against any proscription or prescription, any imposition of ideals, imaginary communities or ‘progressive narrations’. Instead, the ‘idealizations’ of philosophy would acknowledge and recognize actuality and not force or fantasize it. They act as the third, the middle, their own effectivity at stake between the potentiality and actuality of the world and engaging at the point where the two come into a changed relation: not ex post facto justification, even less a priori rejuvenation, but reconfiguration, oppositional yet vital – something understood.2

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Rose’s subtle philosophical approach does not set forth prescriptions based on the abstract reasoning of an imagined community of people, unlike a Rawlsian or cosmopolitan approach to ethics. She perceives such approaches as inexorably rules-bound and lacking in nuance or recognition of contingency. However, speculative philosophy also sets its face against a sweeping rejection of the insights of ‘Western metaphysics’; it acknowledges the importance of struggling with the contraries of freedom and unfreedom, law and morality.3 Rose’s speculative approach refuses to privilege one concept over its opposite; she argues that both sides of a binary opposition must be continually engaged with, and negotiated in pursuit of, the difficult path towards comprehension and wholeness. The focused exegesis of Rose’s concept of inaugurated mourning in this chapter underpins the broader exploration of trauma, memory and mourning in the chapter that follows. In Chapter 3, I argue that predominant strands of contemporary theory and practice proffer melancholic responses to traumatic events, promoting binary oppositions that prevent the risk-filled journey towards comprehension that is at the heart of speculative philosophy. This chapter also lays the foundation for the exploration of messianic utopianism in Chapter 5, foreshadowing a Rosean critique of messianic reluctance to do the difficult political work of the middle. Speculative philosophy sits between tragedy and utopia: acknowledging the profound brokenness of actuality, whilst refusing to be paralysed by this brokenness. A speculative approach advocates political agency in the face of diremption, spurred by awareness of exclusion and loss and wielded by actors in power and out of power. The chapter is divided into two sections. Part 1 explores Rose’s speculative dialectics, in relation to the concept of the broken middle: the violent separation of law and ethics, universality and particularity, actuality and potentiality. It draws on Rose’s engagement with Kierkegaard and Hegel to emphasise the agonistic nature of her speculative philosophy and the way in which it allows the actuality of social and political conditions to be negotiated, without surrendering to tragic resignation or utopian fantasy. Part 2 examines Rose’s two-fold response to the ‘disasters of modernity’:4 mourning and political risk. It argues that Rose’s concept of inaugurated mourning offers a timely corrective to the most prevalent responses to suffering in political theory: it does not rush quickly to prescribe ‘solutions’ based on universal moral laws or a rational consensus, neither does it

38 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice become trapped in an endless melancholy that awaits a messianic awakening. A Rosean politics of mourning is a deeply political response to pervasive suffering: it calls for a working through of past and present trauma, as well as the need to take the risk of political action.

The Broken Middle The ‘broken middle’ to which Rose refers can be characterised in several ways: a break between the potentiality and actuality of the world, between universal and particular, between freedom and unfreedom, between legality and morality. It is both modern and ancient: Rose maintains that the ‘shape of life’ we are experiencing now ‘has always been already ancient’.5 The Broken Middle is a reaction to an attempt on the part of postmodern thinkers to mend this brokenness; an attempt that Rose deems doomed to failure: [Postmodern thought] would mend the diremption of law and ethics by turning the struggle between universality, particularity and singularity into a general sociology of control. Yet the security of this new spectatorship is undermined by the tension of freedom and unfreedom which it cannot acknowledge for it has disqualified the actuality of any oppositions which might initiate process and pain – any risk of coming to know.6

Rather than negotiating the broken middle, postmodern thought looks towards a (premature) reconciliation or an eventual redemption, as we will see in Chapter 5; in so doing, however, it passes over the struggle of living in a world full of contradiction and suffering. In The Broken Middle, Rose embarks on a deeper exploration of Hegel’s diremption of law and ethics. She does so by engaging with a number of thinkers, including Søren Kierkegaard, whose pseudonymous writings profoundly influenced the ideas of comprehension, struggle and risk that are at the heart of her philosophy. Rose rescues Kierkegaard from the charge that he is fundamentally opposed to law and knowledge, arguing that a search for comprehension is central to his work. His struggle to comprehend is not a struggle towards a complete or total knowledge, under which can be drawn a line denoting ‘the whole truth’, but rather a struggle to comprehend the actuality of modernity, the broken middle, without looking for an easy escape:

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Not that comprehension completes or closes, but that it returns diremption to where it cannot be overcome in exclusive thought or in partial action – as long as its political history persists. The complementarity of comprehension to diremption involves reflection on what may be ventured – without mending diremption in heaven or on earth.7

A speculative negotiation of the dirempted middle does not aim to fix what is broken; that would be euporia – the easy way.8 Instead, it works towards comprehension, however partial, of dirempted thought and actuality under modernity. It also reflects on ‘what [political action] may be ventured’, given this brokenness – knowing that any action will be flawed and result in unintended consequences, but clinging to the hope that something may be learned. Rose is attracted to the struggles apparent in Kierkegaard’s thought and to his willingness to wrestle with the difficult questions of ethics and law, without reaching settled conclusions. Like Hegel, Kierkegaard brings the non-immanent concept of ‘Revelation’ to philosophy, without systematising it or pointing to a realised or realisable redemption. For both thinkers, ‘Revelation serves to leave the ethical open and unresolved’.9 Negotiating life is not easy; it must be undertaken with ‘fear and trembling’.10 Kierkegaard did not write simply as himself; he employed a number of pseudonyms and wrote from their perspectives as well. This has not always been taken into account in the reception and analysis of his writings, and Rose maintains that this has facilitated their misinterpretation. In the guise of Johannes de silentio – one of his pseudonyms – Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling tells the story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah, the Akedah – an account that, if laboured over, will cause fear and trembling.11 Rose retells this story because of its illustration of key themes at the heart of speculative philosophy: struggle, risk and witness. She maintains that de silentio is misunderstood by Adorno, who points to the dialectical nature of Fear and Trembling, characterising it as pitting against each other such oppositions as spirit versus nature and loss versus gain, with the oppositions eventually being mythically reconciled in a ‘paradoxical sacrifice’.12 According to Rose, de silentio’s retelling of the story of Abraham and Isaac is not dialectical, but speculative. He does not present the story in terms of oppositions, instead:

40 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice de silentio pits story against story, crisis against crisis, to educate the reader by bringing out the difference between ‘resignation’, which accepts the opposed dichotomies of loss and gain, infinite and finite, spirit and nature; and ‘faith’, which is repetition or plenitude without possession or presence. These positions are not oppositions – they can be suffered simultaneously. They do not even share the tertium comparationis of being ‘positions’: the former, ‘resignation’, may be a position – a ‘swimming’ position: for or against the tide of infinite pain – but the latter, ‘faith’, is a matter of ‘floating’: for which de silentio admits he is not strong enough.13

Adorno’s reading of Fear and Trembling perceives reconciliations where they do not occur and thus misses the struggle, the anguish and the confessions of failure. However, according to Rose, de silentio presents Abraham’s story in order to illustrate the risk of living: ‘life must be risked in order to be gained . . . only by discovering the limits of life – death – is ‘‘life’’ itself discovered, and recalcitrant otherness opens its potentialities and possibilities’.14 This notion of risk is an important part of Rose’s speculative dialectics: to experience the uncertainty and anxiety of the middle is to take risk – to take the journey towards comprehension, towards knowing, is also to take risk. de silentio himself takes a risk by setting aside ethical questions in his retelling of this story; this ‘suspension of the ethical’ is intended to set aside what we do and do not know about the (well-known and sacred) story; it aims to transform us into ‘contemporaneous witness’, rather than ‘witness at second hand’.15 By putting to one side the ethical – our knowledge of universal law that would condemn sacrifice as murder – and placing us in the position of Abraham, de silentio explores the ‘development of individual faith in its violent encounter with love and law’.16 In reading the story of Abraham on Mount Moriah, we become participatory witnesses to Abraham’s willingness to bind his son as a gift, freely given: we become witnesses to his great faith. Rose argues that: [i]t is this witness alone – this always already knowing yet being willing to stake oneself again – that prevents one from becoming an arbitrary perpetrator or an arbitrary victim; that prevents one, actively or passively, from acting with arbitrary violence.17

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Such witnessing embraces the anxiety and equivocation of the middle – ‘it is . . . the beginning in the middle: the middle in the beginning’18 – it marries comprehension with a readiness to ‘stake oneself’, to take the risk of acting. The idea of struggle is fundamental to Rose’s negotiation of the broken middle, and, for her, this is one of the primary attractions of Kierkegaard’s thought. In an entry on Luther,19 Kierkegaard (writing sans guise, as himself) points out the dangers of Luther’s Protestantism, which turned religion into politics, replacing the authority of the Pope with the authority of the State.20 In Rose’s words: Instead of ‘arousing restlessness’ and making spiritual life ‘more strenuous’, Luther makes it soothing and reassuring. Transfiguration of anguish, which occurred in Luther’s own case after twenty years of fear and trembling and of spiritual and scholarly discipline, is universalized by Protestantism so that it is made available for all – without any ‘one’ undergoing the intensity of Luther’s testing. ‘This extremely powerful resource and reassurance’ becomes the cloak of an inwardness which everyone has the licence to counterfeit.21

Luther was a reformer who sought to right the wrongs he perceived in Christianity under the Pope. However, despite the suffering and struggle of his own spiritual journey, what he proclaimed was a Protestantism that encouraged an inward faith and allowed outward compromise with the established secular authority in the pursuit of selfish individualism. Luther’s emphasis on faith to the detriment of works was just as dangerous as the prior emphasis on works to the detriment of faith. Kierkegaard warns that Christians must be aware of, and sit with, both dangers – the ‘double danger’ that is the mark of ‘proper’ Christianity – in order to avoid falling into the opposite of any spiritual, social or political inversion.22 He argues that faith to the detriment of works – Protestant inwardness – is dangerous, because it neglects charity, replacing responsibility for the poor with an inward and detached spirituality. Furthermore, Luther’s undialectical affirmation of faith over works – his zealous refutation of papal power – delivered religion from one human authority – the Pope – into the hand of another human authority – the Prince. More difficult would have been to choose the ‘anxiety of beginning and equivocation of the middle – restlessness that yet remains with both dangers’.23 Just as Kierkegaard warns against the dangers of one-sided thinking and argues that the mark of wisdom is to sit with both sides of the

42 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice ‘faith versus works’ debate, so Hegel warns against the temptation of falling into inversions. Hegel addresses the ‘double danger’24 of ‘aporetic and agapic danger’.25 Aporetic danger is the danger of legal status, dramatised by Hegel as ‘the spiritual animal kingdom’.26 ‘Spiritual’ refers to universal law – the legally enshrined ‘kingdom of ends’ that serves the good of all – and ‘animal’ to the reality of politics, where one’s own interests are served above those of the Other.27 In modern law, the stated spiritual goal is subject to animal reality: ‘modern law is that of legal status, where those with subjective rights and subjective ends deceive themselves and others that they act for the universal, when they care only for their own interests’.28 Aporetic danger, then, is the danger of self-interest cloaked as moral, law-abiding behaviour, which trumps universal good. The second danger Hegel addresses is that of agapic danger, where a denial of the world, and of politics, accompanies pietism. Goethe’s story of ‘the beautiful soul’ is central to his novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and borrowed by Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit to illustrate this danger.29 It portrays an educated aristocratic woman who rejects the pleasures of worldly life so as to develop her inner religious piety. However, she is unable to translate this piety into useful public life. This picture of ‘the beautiful soul’ represents the asceticism of Protestant inwardness as understood by Goethe and Hegel and, later, Walter Benjamin. In Rose’s words, ‘[h]ypertrophy of the inner life is correlated with atrophy of political participation’.30 The agapic danger explored in the story of ‘the beautiful soul’ is also used by Hegel, Weber and Kierkegaard to illustrate the Pietism of the late eighteenth century – the moment when the Lutheran reform is turned on its head. In Pietism, ‘politics [is] delivered to the heart of religion; it reproduces inner poverty and outer ruthlessness at the collective as well as at the individual level’.31 A withdrawal from political life and responsibility in the name of piety produces a selfish individualism. Rather than fall prey to either danger – aporetic or agapic – one must remain in the equivocation of the middle, negotiating the diremption between law and ethics. The anxiety to which Rose continually refers – the ‘anxiety of beginning which is equally the beginning of anxiety’32 – is experienced in relation to the law and to ethics. The ‘law’ to which Rose refers is the form that emerges from a negotiation of the middle: ‘ ‘‘Law’’ . . . emerges as the predicament which elicits form out of the equivocation of the ethical and the

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anxiety of beginning’.33 A speculative conception of law is not an impoverished conception of the letter of the law, narrowly defined as rules and regulations; instead, it is ‘abundant and abounding’ and is inextricably linked with power, which Rose describes as ‘what there is – as actuality itself’.34 The form of law always already exists: Kierkegaard’s authorship is ethical precisely because of the assumption of an always already-given law.35 Rose maintains that the beginning of anxiety, therefore, is grounded in this already-given, already-existing law. Remaining in the equivocation of the middle entails an anxiety-ridden commitment to negotiate actuality: the web of norms, practices and institutions in which we find ourselves and the ways in which they foster recognition and misrecognition. Rose maintains that in this articulation of law and power as actuality, there is ‘possibility’: ‘for and against oneself, and others’.36 I revisit a speculative conception of law in more depth in Chapter 4, in the context of a discussion of cosmopolitanism and difference. This conception of law is one of the key dimensions of Rose’s aporetic universalism, which I highlight in response to the cosmopolitan dilemma: one aspect of the broken middle. The cosmopolitan dilemma refers to the problem whereby liberal cosmopolitanism attempts to mitigate oppression and exclusion of the Other by emphasising abstract equality, but in the process, risks enforcing homogeneity and, thus, further suppressing the Other. I argue that Rose’s response to this dilemma is to insist on an aporetic negotiation of universal and particular. Alongside close attention to particular experiences of suffering and exclusion, aporetic universalism insists on coming to know the social and institutional forces that underpin and shape those experiences. Inextricably linked with a journey towards recognition, aporetic universalism requires that we work towards recognition of actuality – of law, of what there is – and commit to act in response. Rose’s emphasis on equivocation and a struggle-filled journey towards recognition is not only a counterpoint to the certainties of liberal legal theory. Rose also contrasts Kierkegaard’s struggle to articulate the law with a postmodern one, which, by refusing the system of law, refuses anxiety, paradoxically creating certainty in the name of uncertainty: When attention is focused at the beginning of a work on discrediting the System, its historicism, its closure etc., in the name of existential ‘freedom’ or the released ‘other’, this, in effect, proudly obsoletes ‘freedom’ and

44 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice otherness – political or existential. Such apparent house-clearing amounts to a recollection which is itself a refusal, an unreadiness, for anxiety. It awards itself a certainty while claiming to breed no certainties.37

Passing over the contradictions and challenges of law and ethics in favour of the concept of the moment – such as freedom or identity – ruins ethical initiative, initiative which would think speculatively, engaging in the work of negotiating the broken middle. The Broken Middle poses a political challenge: how might we think differently about politics? How can we negotiate the challenges of living in a broken world? The brokenness to which Rose refers has been discussed in different ways by different thinkers: Hegel’s diremption of law and ethics, Benjamin’s decay of experience and Adorno and Horkheimer’s dialectic of Enlightenment. For some, it is exemplified by the Holocaust, the Shoah, which they perceive as the ultimate expression of the brokenness of modernity. Adorno responded to this brokenness with negative dialectics and the promise that things might yet get better. However, Rose is dissatisfied with mere glimpses of hope in a broken world. Instead, she articulates a two-fold response of mourning and political risk: one that works through the traumas of modernity, mourning losses, whilst also taking the risk of acting politically.

Mourning and Political Risk Rose’s embedded and emphatic approach to ethics and the political emerges from an engagement with the brokenness of law and ethics in modernity. Her speculative political thought is centrally concerned with challenging the dualisms and dichotomies of modern thought – a challenge that operates not only at the level of theory, but also, crucially, at the level of praxis. A speculative approach is important, precisely because the dichotomies it opposes in political thought reflect underlying social relations: the broken middle is both philosophical and actual. Rose responds to the ‘disasters of modernity’38 speculatively, rejecting both liberal and postmodern responses to the challenges of pervasive suffering under modernity. She maintains that mainstream liberal responses are too forward-looking, skimming over past and present atrocities in the search for abstract ‘solutions’ to suffering. Postmodern responses, in contrast, eschew solutions, but can fall into the trap of backwards-looking melancholia.

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Approaches to pervasive suffering under modernity in a liberal framework tend to involve bestowing rights upon individuals; this is intended to provide a safety net against the worst atrocities, but does not assess the ability of those affected to claim those rights, remaining abstract and removed from the political.39 Rose claims that the Enlightenment reason, in which modern law is grounded, is disembedded and disembodied: . . . grounded in an overweening claim to absolute and universal authority, without awareness of history, language or locality, enlightened reason sweeps all particularity and peculiarity from its path.40

Liberal ethics pass over the traumas of modern life, turning too quickly to the codification of rules, in order to create a safer world. While liberal approaches too often forget the suffering that prompted reflection, postmodern approaches too often remain focused on actual and existential losses, without working through those losses and moving forward to social and political (re)engagement. Post-modernism in its renunciation of reason, power, and truth identifies itself as a process of endless mourning, lamenting the loss of securities which, on its own argument, were none such. Yet this everlasting melancholia accurately monitors the refusal to let go . . .41

Approaches to traumatic losses in a postmodern framework tend to advocate the encircling of trauma – an endless mourning that remains in the past, lest the pain be forgotten.42 However, Rose argues that we cannot mourn personal, communal and global suffering, without also taking the risk of acting politically. Rose offers a response to suffering that is neither liberal nor postmodern; it is reflective, but politically engaged. She is critical of instrumental reasoning, but does not turn her face against reason in general. She argues that while ‘exclusive and excluding reason’ is not to be encouraged, neither is ‘exclusive otherness’.43 On the contrary, she advocates a nuanced, self-aware and empathic reason that she maintains is the cornerstone of an ethical and politically engaged life. She describes such reason as ‘relational, responsible, and reconstructive’ and ‘full of surprises’.44 We can never fully know or know with certainty, but we must never give up the attempt to journey towards comprehension. Rose draws on Hegelian speculative thought in her

46 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice attempts to negotiate the broken middle, reaching towards ‘the possibility of an ethics which does not remain naı¨ve and ignorant of its historical and political presuppositions and hence of its likely outcomes’.45 In the remainder of this chapter, I outline Rose’s two-fold response to the disasters of modernity: inaugurated mourning and political risk. This deeply political response is most clearly outlined in her posthumously published Mourning Becomes the Law, where it is framed in opposition to a melancholic response to broken actuality. In doing so, Rose draws explicitly on Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia, following Freud in arguing forcefully for mourning and against melancholy.46 Before turning to Rose’s conception of inaugurated mourning, I first outline that which she is reacting against: aberrated mourning (or melancholy) in the face of brokenness.

Responses to trauma: Benjamin and aberrated mourning In the wake of World Wars I and II, the dominant narratives in response to the pain of those suffering loss, disfigurement and mental torture were those of heroism and sacrifice for the greater good of ruler and country. However, challenges to traditional forms arose both in popular response and in political thought, particularly after the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. Walter Benjamin was ahead of his time in prefiguring this disaffection: he profoundly opposed traditional forms of mourning from his early writings.47 He detested the culture of commemoration that sprung up following the First World War; he believed that monuments that honour the sacrifice of those who died in the war and that pay homage to national unity prematurely restore order and acceptance to traumatised communities. In his writings, Benjamin emphatically rejects responses to suffering that offer false consolation and refuse to tarry with the pain and confusion of the horrors of war. He is against a collective ‘working through’ of grief: he maintains that collective mourning discourages individuals from looking more deeply at their pain – a pain that he believes has deeper sources than war alone. Benjamin argues that the allegedly healthy process of working through pain only forecloses deeper consideration of the catastrophe.48 Benjamin’s reflections on Baudelaire provide a window on to his

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perspective on war and trauma. He is highly critical of Baudelaire’s ‘shock-parrying’: ‘Baudelaire made it his business to parry the shocks [of modern life], no matter where they might come from, with his spiritual and his physical self’.49 He argues that Baudelaire’s shockparrying was tantamount to self-anaesthesia – a refusal to register pain in any depth, in order to impose control upon his world.50 Benjamin suggests instead that we respond to war and the ensuing suffering with a ritualistic melancholy that, in Martin Jay’s words, would ‘keep the wound open in the hope of some later utopian redemption, understanding ritual and repetition as a placeholder for a future happiness’.51 His attraction to the Baroque mourning play, Trauerspiel, is outlined in his work The Origin of German Tragic Drama.52 He advocates an open-ended melancholy – a melancholy that holds fast, until the deeper sources of pain are addressed. Although Benjamin rightly opposes the premature restoration of order and a veneration of war, the mourning that he advocates shuts off the possibility of working through. LaCapra terms it impossible mourning, saying that the politics it engenders is ‘often a blind messianism . . . even at times apocalyptic politics or what I call ‘‘hope in a blank utopia’’ ’.53 Rose terms it aberrated mourning – ‘the mournfulness of desertion’,54 a ‘rigid and petrified’55 mourning that precludes the exercise of political judgement and engagement. She points to the profoundly negative consequences of un-mourned loss, not just for the individuals concerned, but for society as a whole.56 Against Benjamin’s Angelus Novus57 – the angel of history that watches, frozen in horror, as the debris of history piles up before it – Rose posits another of Klee’s angels, Angelus Dubiosus: . . . hybrid of hubris and humility – who makes mistakes, for whom things go wrong, who constantly discovers its own faults and failings, yet who still persists in the pain of staking itself, with the courage to initiate action and the commitment to go on and on, learning from those mistakes and risking new ventures.58

She describes this angel as ‘the humorous witness who must endure’.59 Not for this angel the speechlessness and inaction that characterises Benjamin’s traumatised angel. Angelus Dubiosus gives voice to its suffering and moves forward (and backward) in an attempt to reengage ethically and politically.

48 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice

Responses to trauma: Rose’s mourning and political risk Rose’s criticisms of Benjamin mirror her criticisms of postmodern approaches to ethics, which she maintains ‘[proceed] dualistically and deconstructively’.60 Against these, Rose poses her own response, which she maintains ‘comprehends the dualisms and deconstructions of the first response as the dynamic movement of a political history which can be expounded speculatively out of the broken middle’.61 She describes her response as: ‘comic – the comedy of absolute spirit, inaugurated mourning’.62 By comedy, Rose refers to the provisional and contingent nature of any response, whereby ‘our aims and outcomes constantly mismatch each other, and provoke yet another revised aim, action and discordant outcome’.63 This response is most clearly elucidated in Mourning Becomes the Law. It has two dimensions – mourning and political risk – and draws on Jewish hermeneutical thought to offer an alternative reflective, yet positive way of being and acting in a broken world. I examine these strands of Rose’s response in turn. Inaugurated mourning Rose proposes that our first response to trauma be one of mourning: not an unthinking, passive melancholy, but a self-reflective, active work of mourning – a mourning she terms inaugurated mourning. She argues that ‘inaugurated mourning requires the relation to law that is presented by the comedy of absolute spirit as found in Hegel’s Phenomenology’.64 That is, it requires a constant negotiation and renegotiation of individual and communal actions, in light of (often unintended) consequences, as well as a continual evaluation and reevaluation of laws and institutions, in the light of their effects on local, regional and global politics. Inaugurated mourning is not easy; it involves work. It is ‘the ability to know and be known’.65 Such mourning does not shy away from the horrors of trauma or the challenges of modernity. It gives voice to suffering, creating a space for stories to be told and listened to – a space in which pain is acknowledged. It is not a solitary work: Rose’s speculative Hegelianism leads her always towards contextualisation, towards a consideration of the broad social, political and historical processes that have influenced present circumstances and towards a

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being-in-the-world that is embedded both in local community and in wider social structures. In Howard Caygill’s words, ‘such working through is not the achievement of an isolated ‘‘I’’ but is a communal effort which is expressed, for Rose, in culture and the institutions of state and civil society’.66 Communal working through involves the creation of spaces that encourage a critical remembering of what has gone before and the contestation of settled concepts. Dori Laub, co-founder of the Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, has created one such space. Laub believes that knowing and being known are imperative if survivors are to have a life worth living: The survivors . . . needed to tell their stories in order to survive. There is, in each survivor, an imperative need to tell and thus come to know one’s story, unimpeded by ghosts from the past against which one has to protect oneself. One has to know one’s buried truth in order to be able to live one’s life.67

Telling one’s story enables one to know one’s own story, as well as to communicate it to others. Both dimensions of knowing are integral to inaugurated mourning, and these must take place in community. This work of mourning, be it the failings of modernity in general or historically specific trauma, is an inherently political process in itself and prepares the way for more overt political action. It is to an examination of Rose’s second response to trauma – the risk of engaging in political action – which I now turn. Political risk Traumatised individuals and communities are estranged from one another and from the wider socio-political context. Part of the process of working through is rediscovering agency – the ability to engage in political processes and to influence them in some way. Rose’s critique of Benjamin is that he does not allow for a practical wrestling with the political, placing his hope in an eventual flash of redemption, what LaCapra terms ‘hope in a blank utopia’ – a characteristic of messianic thought that we will explore in more detail in Chapter 5.68 Rose’s inaugurated mourning has a clear political goal, however: to overcome the powerlessness and numbing associated with trauma, thus enabling re-engagement with social and political life.

50 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice Reengaging politically is not easy, nor should it be. The experience of trauma, be it first-hand or through bearing witness to another’s trauma and allowing oneself to become unsettled in the process, highlights the complexity of modern life – the struggle of ethical action in a damaged world. How should we think in such a world? How might we act? Rose speaks of the need to draw upon political and theological resources to negotiate the broken middle. She maintains that there is no easy path: If metaphysics is the aporia, the perception of the difficulty of the law, the difficult way, then ethics is the development of it, the diaporia, being at a loss yet exploring various routes, different ways towards the ‘good enough justice’, which recognises the intrinsic and the contingent limitations in its exercise. Earthly, human sadness is the divine comedy – the ineluctable discrepancy between our worthy intentions and the eversurprising outcome of our actions. This comic condition is euporia: the always missing, yet prodigiously imaginable, easy way.69

The negotiation of the diremption of law and ethics involves a realisation of the difficulty of doing so, alongside a refusal to give up working toward this ‘good enough justice’. Rose draws upon Jewish hermeneutics in her discussion of political risk and, in particular, on the concept of Midrash. Midrash is the traditional method of textual interpretation in Jewish biblical hermeneutics.70 Those who utilise it ‘recognize the fluid boundaries between text and interpretation, rather than the imperious unity of the primary text, and tend to emphasize conversation over objectivity and systematic uniformity in interpretation’.71 The rabbinic community maintains that there is no whole truth wholly available in any text and evinces considerable tolerance for varying interpretations: [T]he continuity of Israel . . . derives from the paradoxical situation of the exegete’s submission to the oldest revelation at Sinai and yet freedom for new interpretation of the Divine Word through the strange midrashic conversation. This intertextual dialogue, conducted for thousands of years by multiple voices who understand one another as contemporaries, must also continually reformulate meanings relevant to the adjudication of current problems in Jewish life.72

The need for a continual reformulation of meaning is at the root of Rose’s insistence that any political action we risk must be reflected

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upon and revisited in the light of the present. It resonates with a Hegelian approach to thinking ethically: our understandings of knowledge and law must continually be renegotiated in the light of changing historical and political conditions.73 Rose does not advocate the delineation of a positive or concrete programme of political action, emphasising the contingency of both theory and praxis: In both the world of politics and in the intellectual world, there seems to be a low tolerance of equivocation. The result of this intolerance and unease is the reproduction of dualistic ways of thinking and of formulating public policy . . . Wisdom, theoretical and practical, develops when the different outcomes of ideas and policies are related to the predictable modifications and to the unpredictable contingencies affecting their meaning and employment. Wisdom works with equivocation.74

Inaugurated mourning and political risk require deepening our understanding of the roles we play in the structures of power, both by our action and inaction. Our decisions (and indecision) will have consequences we do not anticipate; part of the work of mourning is to perceive more clearly our place in the wider community and to revise our actions and reactions in the light of this. Rose argues that we must ‘redraw, again and again’75 the boundaries that define the way we live, acknowledging the impossibility of perfect arrangements in a contingent and changing world, but refusing to give up the attempt to shape and reshape our responses in the communities in which we are embedded.

Conclusion Rose’s reflections on the brokenness of modernity – both philosophical and actual – stem from her speculative Hegelianism. This brokenness requires negotiation. It cannot be fixed by legal remedies (in the spirit of liberalism), nor should it be endlessly mourned (in the spirit of postmodernism): these are easy paths that avoid the anxiety of the middle. Speculative philosophy chooses aporia – the difficult path: it resists the temptation of one-sided thinking, avoiding the dangers that attend the privileging of one side of a binary opposition over another. It is aware of both dangers – aporetic and agapic – and stays with the ‘double danger’ of the middle. It works towards comprehension and reflects on ‘what may be ventured’,76 evincing

52 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice a willingness to take the risk of political action out of a position of equivocation. For Rose, the ‘equivocation of the middle’ is where the political resides. The equivocation of the middle comes about when one stands in the present, with an understanding of the historical processes that have determined the present; when one perceives the specific histories and inversions that have shaped one’s culture; when one negotiates the break between universal and particular, without taking refuge in individualism or communitarianism and, thus, falling into yet another inversion. Rose posits a response of mourning and political risk to the disasters of modernity. The mourning she advocates is inaugurated mourning: an acknowledgment of the suffering and loss that we have experienced as individuals, as communities and as bystanders, and a commitment to work through this loss. Inaugurated mourning involves both knowing and being known: it is communal, as well as deeply personal, and involves a deep awareness of the historical and social processes that have contributed to present pain. Inaugurated mourning leads naturally to political action. Contra liberal prescription, Rose does not prescribe fixed guidelines based on unchanging truths and, contra postmodern despair, she does not overemphasise the particular, assuming that there is no room to apply what is learned in one situation to another. Instead, her Hegelian sensibility encourages comprehensive knowledge and a search for wholeness, thinking past and present, universal and particular, and potential and actuality at the same time. Engaging in political risk involves questioning closely held assumptions about oneself, others and current social and political arrangements and daring to think and act differently in response. It involves a commitment to act, to evaluate the outcomes of these actions and to act again, knowing that perfection can never be reached, but refusing to give up the attempt to reach towards a ‘good enough justice’. Rose’s speculative Hegelianism does not set forth a blueprint for action.77 She posits a way of being in the world that has political effects; her purpose is not to formulate abstract guidelines for living or solutions with which to solve the problems of modernity, but to articulate a way in which we can approach the inevitable brokenness of the world around us. Knowledge of the political present, through an understanding of the historical processes that formed it, enables one to imagine the ‘possibility of the ethical’78 – to see glimpses of the absolute in the present and to stake oneself, placing oneself in the

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middle: trying, failing, learning and trying again. Underlying Rose’s negotiation of the middle is a different way of knowing: one that eschews both fixed truths and absolute contingency, forging a path which holds the pursuit of truth and an awareness of contingency together, negotiating a way of being that avoids the danger of falling into one or other opposition. It is a way of being that involves work and struggle, acknowledging that there is no easy path forward in a broken world. Alongside this, however, is a sense of the joy that can accompany the process of learning about oneself and others in the working through and the richness that accompanies a life embedded in, and supported by, community.

Chapter 3 Trauma, Memory and the Political

Rose’s speculative philosophy insists on the need for a political work of mourning, in response to the trauma that attends the broken middle.1 For Rose, this trauma arises out of a diremption, or brokenness, that is both philosophical and actual: it operates at the level of thought, which is permeated by one-sidedness and neglects the work of the middle, and at the level of lived experience, which is permeated by injustice and continuing ‘disasters of modernity’.2 Rose maintains that philosophical dichotomies reflect underlying social relations and that both should be responded to with a political work of mourning. A work of mourning encompasses inaugurated mourning and political risk and involves an anxiety-filled, uneasy journey towards comprehension, towards knowing and being known. It resists the temptation to avoid the difficulty of working through; instead, it obeys the dictum to ‘keep your mind in hell, and despair not’.3 The Holocaust is often cited as embodying the absolute failure of the project of modernity, and Rose’s engagement with the brokenness of modernity is also centrally concerned with reflections on the Holocaust, both on its own terms and in terms of its implications for thinking philosophically.4 This concern, for Rose, is more than philosophical: as a descendent of Polish Jews, she lost many relatives in the Holocaust.5 She also engaged with practical questions of how to remember the Shoah, acting as a consultant for the Polish Commission for the Future of Auschwitz.6 The concern with trauma, memory and mourning that is central to Rose’s thought has pervaded significant strands of social and political theory over the past century. We saw in the previous chapter that Walter Benjamin abhorred the traditional forms of mourning embraced in the wake of the Great War, advocating, instead, a ritualistic

58 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice melancholy that would prevent the pain of what had taken place from being hastily set aside. Benjamin’s interest in how communities respond to traumatic events did not stand alone: it was an important focus of literary reflection after both world wars;7 it was also of central concern to Theodor W. Adorno and Hannah Arendt, both friends of Benjamin, who refused to be silent in the wake of the Holocaust.8 These thinkers’ reflections on memory and trauma in the mid-twentieth century foreshadowed what has, in recent years, become a dramatic proliferation of scholarship on memory and trauma in the humanities and social sciences. An interest in memory studies began in the 1980s and rapidly gathered momentum to become what Jay Winter terms a ‘memory boom’ in contemporary historical studies.9 Its rise to prominence has been closely linked with the advent of trauma studies, which draws on psychoanalytic insights to trace the influence of traumatic events not only on individuals, but also on larger social groups.10 Much of the focus of the memory and trauma industries is an exploration of how past catastrophes influence the present and how individuals and communities respond to such events. For historians and social theorists, in particular, the Holocaust has been central to reflections on memory and trauma.11 Scholars have embarked on oral history projects that systematically record the memories of Holocaust survivors;12 they have wrestled with questions of representation;13 and they have reflected on the wider implications for modernity itself.14 The interest in trauma studies has gathered additional impetus in the wake of the attacks of 11 September 2001, particularly in international political theory, as scholars seek to understand the ways in which the attacks and the responses they engendered have shaped international affairs.15 One of the key debates that attend reflections on trauma and its aftermath is how to interpret and respond to what has taken place. Rose frames this debate in terms of Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia, following Freud in arguing emphatically for mourning and against melancholia.16 Freud characterises mourning as a healthy form of working through loss – one that gradually comes to terms with loss and reengages in life. Melancholia, in contrast, is characterised as an unhealthy response to loss – one accompanied by self-hatred that effectively precludes the sufferer from re-engaging with the outside world. Although Freud centres his discussion of mourning and melancholia on individual loss, his

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concepts have been adapted by a number of thinkers concerned with social and widespread losses, including Rose.17 This chapter deepens our understanding of Rose’s inaugurated mourning, both on its own terms and in contrast with melancholic approaches. I argue that the predominant responses to trauma, in theory and practice, are melancholic – that they promote aberrated mourning. In Rosean terms, they eschew the difficult work of the middle that would attend to the relatedness between the loss(es) suffered and the underlying social forces. At the heart of this melancholia is a retreat into one-sidedness that truncates a proper work of mourning. I argue that Rose’s inaugurated mourning offers a profound critique of these responses, embracing, instead, a struggle-filled journey of working through. It is worth noting that, for Rose, those who experience trauma are not blank slates upon which horror is inscribed, but socially and historically embedded subjects who interact with, and respond to, their experience(s). A work of mourning is carried out by those who have suffered; it is also carried out by those who have not, but who bear witness to suffering. The chapter is divided into two parts. Part 1 outlines two predominant responses to historical trauma: mainstream responses that aim to secure the state by embracing simplistic meaning-making narratives; and theoretical responses that focus on the traumatic wound, encircling it in all its devastation, in order to preserve its critical moment. These two sets of responses to trauma are profoundly different; indeed, trauma theory serves, in large part, to critique mainstream responses. However, both approaches posit Manichean binaries that hinder the political and are inherently melancholic.18 Mainstream responses to trauma serve to secure the state in the wake of a political shock, embracing maladaptive meaning-making narratives that interpret the traumatic event(s) and its effects in sharp binaries: black and white, good and evil, us and them. Trauma theory abhors the manipulation of traumatic experience in service of the state and offers a profound critique of such responses; however, it, too, promulgates binary oppositions that serve to hinder the political. The emphasis on the event and its inability to be known in trauma theory fails to situate the event in its wider context, both in terms of the interaction with the person(s) who experienced the traumatic event and the social, political and historical antecedents of the event. This, too, promulgates an over-simplified and reduc-

60 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice tionist account of the traumatic experience, one that often emphasises the ineffability of trauma and the impossibility of working through. Part 2 outlines the more difficult response of working through or, in Rosean terms, inaugurated mourning. Such a response refuses the stark binaries and one-sidedness of melancholy; instead, it insists upon a work of mourning with political risk at its core. Inaugurated mourning involves a journey towards comprehension that holds two elements in tension. First, it requires that we ask questions about those historical and social antecedents that facilitate suffering, interrogating our own implication in what has taken place. Second, alongside this quest for understanding, it requires a willingness to embrace equivocation and accept that we cannot, and will not, arrive at absolute knowledge or clarity. This section explores Rose’s inaugurated mourning, in response to two related strands of thought: ‘Holocaust piety’,19 which emphasises the ineffability of the Holocaust; and the one-sidedness in social and political theory, encapsulated in the shorthand ‘Athens and Jerusalem’.20 Against the one-sidedness of modern and postmodern social and political thought, Rose draws our attention to the third city: the city in which we live – a complex city about which simple stories cannot be told.

Melancholic Responses to Trauma Rose borrows Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholy in her corresponding formulation of inaugurated and aberrated mourning.21 According to Freud, mourning is a healthy response to loss, whereby the person who has lost (the subject) is able to gradually, over time, withdraw her libidinal energy from that which she has lost (the object) and redirect it elsewhere, re-engaging in social life once more after a period of painful grieving. In Freud’s initial formulation of this distinction, mourning is finite; that is, it eventually comes to an end, although the love-object is never forgotten.22 However, a later revision acknowledges that loss is never fully worked through; there is always a remnant that remains.23 Melancholy, on the other hand, is an unhealthy response to loss, whereby the grief that follows in its wake is accompanied by self-hatred and lasts for an indefinite – perhaps unending – period of time. The libidinal energy that was invested in the love-object is redirected in a pathological direction, be it inwards (‘acting in’) or outwards (‘acting out’).24 Although Freud’s notion of mourning and melancholy was

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developed primarily to explain individual responses to loss,25 his formulation has been borrowed and adapted by theorists, in relation to collective and social losses and revisited in recent reflections on post-9/11 politics.26 Rose’s adoption of Freud’s concepts of mourning and melancholy is used to reflect on actually occurring historical losses, as well as the theory that attempts to come to terms with these losses. In what follows, I consider two predominant melancholic responses to collective loss in popular practice and in theory: mainstream melancholic meaning-making narratives and trauma theory.

Melancholic meaning-making narratives: popular political and cultural responses One strand of melancholic responses, in the wake of social loss, stems from the adoption of maladaptive ‘meaning-making narratives’27, in order to explain what has happened and to bring comfort. Instead of taking time to mourn and to gradually work through loss, a search for meaning in the wake of loss often invites simplistic narratives that shut down questioning of those social forces that may have facilitated the losses. Such narratives resist equivocation and ambiguity; instead, they paint very simple stories through which the loss can be easily understood. In the wake of widespread devastation, these narratives are often promulgated by the state and mainstream media and have a clear purpose: to secure the state in the wake of the insecurity and vulnerability engendered by the traumatic experience(s). Three common narratives are the traditional heroic-soldier narrative, which allows only a truncated form of mourning that shuts down the questioning of self and Other; the good versus evil narrative, which leads to a demonisation of the Other; and the redemptive violence narrative, which prompts revenge-seeking behaviours. These narratives draw people together in times of crisis; however, they create a ‘corrosive’28 community, marked by a promulgation of stark binary opposites (good and evil, us and them, victim and perpetrator) and an outward-looking orientation that prevents soul-searching and questioning. I examine these briefly, in turn. Heroic soldier People search for meaning in the losses they suffer, in an attempt to attenuate the pain and bring comfort. One narrative often adopted by

62 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice the state in the wake of war is that of sacrifice and redemption.29 This narrative maintains that the devastation of war and the sacrifice of heroic soldiers is the prelude to a glorious rebirth, or reassertion, of statehood. Jay Winter examines the loss that attended World War I and its aftermath and how the vast number of those affected by the war dealt with their grief.30 He notes that traditional forms of mourning dominated – forms that drew upon classical, romantic and sacred sources. These forms allowed a search for meaning among the chaos and wreckage the war left in its wake. State-sponsored mourning encourages this search for meaning, particularly in the wake of war; the state has a vested interest in its citizens accepting and supporting its armed engagements, despite the cost in lives. In his semi-autobiographical novel, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Siegfried Sassoon remarks that during World War I, the media colluded in this portrayal of war as heroic and glorious: ‘somehow the newspaper men always kept the horrifying realities of the War out of their articles, for it was unpatriotic to be bitter, and the dead were assumed to be gloriously happy’.31 However, the mourning that the state encourages is generally a truncated form of working through that prioritises memorialisation. It allows very little room to tell one’s story and does not encourage social re-engagement outside the orthodoxy. Jenny Edkins argues that the medicalisation and normalisation of traumatised individuals from the armed forces results in depoliticisation and the preservation of the status quo.32 They are returned to service as soon as possible or, if they are unable to be reintegrated into the armed forces, they are labelled as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. In both scenarios, individuals are discouraged from engaging politically.33 Edkins maintains: ‘In contemporary culture victimhood offers sympathy and pity in return for the surrender of any political voice’.34 Vanessa Pupavac warns against the depoliticisation of entire populations in the wake of conflict, arguing that labelling whole societies as traumatised can strip them of the right to govern themselves and legitimise ‘indefinite international administration’.35 Good and evil A second narrative that people often employ to make sense of trauma is the narrative of right and wrong, good and evil. Individuals and societies perceive themselves as innocent victims and the perpetrators

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as evil. In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001, President George W. Bush immediately began to employ the rhetoric of good and evil. In the first speech he made in the wake of the attacks, he announced: ‘Today, our nation saw evil’.36 He went on to use the word ‘evil’ four times in that speech, setting the tone for subsequent foreign policy rhetoric.37 The trauma in the wake of September 11th affected not only those individuals who suffered loss of family and friends; it affected whole communities and the wider American public, many of whom perceived the attacks as being perpetrated on American values, such as freedom and democracy. However, the mourning that took place was truncated prematurely: there was no official or media space for questioning or for telling stories that did not mesh with the administration’s chosen response to the attacks. The binary division of the world into good and evil does not allow for self-examination. In his reflections on the events and the aftermath of September 11th, Zˇizˇek points to subtle media censorship in the days that followed: . . . when firefighters’ widows were interviewed on CNN, most of them gave the expected performance: tears, prayers . . . all except one who, without a tear, said that she does not pray for her dead husband, because she knows that prayer will not bring him back. Asked if she dreams of revenge, she calmly said that that would have been a true betrayal of her husband: had he survived, he would have insisted that the worst thing to do is to succumb to the urge to retaliate . . . there is no need to add that this clip was shown only once, then disappeared from the repetitions of the same interviews.38

This unacceptability of expressing alternative viewpoints, such as that expressed by the fire-fighter’s widow, only intensified as the war on terror progressed.39 Judith Butler also discusses the rise of censorship in the United States in the post-September 11th environment.40 She notes that Bush’s bald black-and-white statement – ‘Either you’re with us or with the terrorists’41 – left no room for the rejection of both statements and meant that those who did not support the war were seen by the administration as terror sympathisers.42 Similarly vilifying of those who dared to question the war on terror was the (liberal Left) New York Times’ labelling of those who sought a broader understanding of events as ‘excuseniks’.43 Butler argues that this was ‘tantamount to the suppression of dissent’ and that one can (and

64 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice should) both condemn the violent attacks on September 11th and ask what the historical, social and political antecedents were that facilitated the attack.44 Redemptive violence The silencing of dissenting voices and a refusal to allow questioning truncates the mourning process and can pave the way for narratives of redemptive violence. Caroline Yoder maintains that incomplete mourning at a societal level can lead not only to a feeling of victimhood, but also to aggression: Regardless of the reasons for incomplete mourning, the resulting grief thwarts healing and keeps populations more susceptible to acting out of low-mode brain states. Normal fear can morph into panic and paranoia, pain into despair, anger into rage, humiliation and shame into an obsessive drive for vindication. The quest for measured justice can be confused with retaliation and revenge.45

Such aggression was certainly in evidence in the wake of the September 11th attacks. Bush made it perfectly clear that he would make no distinction between the perpetrators of terror and the nations that support and give refuge to terrorists – a doctrine he elaborated over the next weeks and followed with action when the United States began bombing Afghanistan on 7 October 2001. Peter Singer describes Bush’s actions as: the most aggressive choice among a range of options that had not been adequately explored . . . A peace-loving president would have been more convincing in trying all other options. That would have been emotionally and politically difficult in the days immediately following September 11, but it was what Bush ought to have done.46

Meaning-making narratives are not only deployed in the wake of single traumatic events – such as September 11th – they are also employed in situations of ongoing trauma. In her reflections on grief and grievance in the wake of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, Israeli psychoanalyst Rena Moses-Hrushovski examines the ongoing Israeli-Palestine conflict and the complex trauma that so many suffer as a result.47 In a situation of ongoing trauma, each new loss triggers past losses and old wounds are reopened. In the case of Rabin’s

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assassination in 1995, she argues, the murder of a man working for peace served to reinforce the deeply held belief that Israel could not trust anyone, that justice was unachievable, that the unthinkable had happened once again.48 Moses-Hrushovski uses the term ‘deployment’ to describe the recurring attitudes and patterns of behaviour exhibited by her multiply-traumatised patients and argues that such patterns are also exhibited on a broader social scale in the Arab-Israeli conflict. She summarises the characteristics of deployed individuals and groups as follows: . . . deployment entails a rigid self-organisation into a system of attitudes, roles and behaviours aimed at protecting one’s self-esteem and dignity, at consoling or compensating oneself for what one has experienced in the past as unfair, painful, and humiliating; and, [sic] all this rather than deal with the hardships involved, mourn the losses and disappointments experienced and adopt adaptive and self-realising patterns.49

One of the ‘adaptive patterns’ that those embedded in the IsraeliPalestine conflict employ is that of violence: ‘hatred and accusation’50 were soon substituted for mourning after Rabin’s assassination. In the ensuing months, the people of Israel elected a Likud government that opposed peace and clashes with the Palestinian police soon followed.51 Although there was partial mourning after Rabin’s assassination, it was truncated prematurely. Moses-Hrushovski believes that this was, in part, due to Shimon Peres’ decision to bring the Israeli elections forward and to refrain from capitalising on the assassination in the Labour Party campaign – this ‘cut off the expression of grieving and mourning’.52 Another contribution to the premature end of the mourning process was the defensive reaction by orthodox and Right groups, in response to the hurling of accusations by those nonreligious and Left groups. She explains: Their guilt – and indeed the guilt of Israelis from all parts of the political spectrum – for having contributed to, or having done nothing to prevent the outrageous libels hurled against Yitzhak Rabin caused many Israelis to forget, repress or at least not think enough about the tragic event itself. Hatred and accusation took the place of real mourning, which would have had to involve the examining of the problems surrounding the murder, the admission of direct or indirect responsibility for what had happened and the commitment to deal courageously with lessons learned from the tragedy.53

66 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice The uncomfortable suspicion that they were somehow complicit in Rabin’s assassination was repressed; rather than engage in critical self-reflection, many Israelis took refuge in the less disruptive (to their own sense of self) strategy of finger-pointing and hatred. This, combined with a rapid switch of focus in the build-up to a new election, truncated the process of mourning and working through. One of the dangers of prolonged acting out after traumatic events is that a failure to work though the traumatic experience often perpetuates further violence. Rose warns that if traumas are not worked through, this can have political consequences, as those who have suffered experience ‘resentment, hatred, inability to trust, and then, the doubled burden of fear of those negative emotions’.54 This happens not only in the immediate aftermath of trauma, but also decades, and even generations, later. Vamik Volkan argues that the trans-generational transmission of trauma can play a significant role in violent conflict.55 He notes that a refusal to mourn a fourteenthcentury defeat kept a sense of victimhood alive in the Serbian community that was later mobilised by Slobodan Milosevic in the BosniaHerzegovina conflict: ‘The ‘‘defeat’’ of June 28, 1389, became the shared loss that could not be mourned but that had to be recalled continually . . . The Serbs held on to their victimized identity and glorified victimization in song’.56 Volkan describes such traumas as ‘chosen trauma’: ‘Adopting a chosen trauma can enhance ethnic pride, reinforce a sense of victimization, and even spur a group to avenge its ancestors’ hurts’.57 If we are to arrest such cycles of violence and aggression, we must learn how to work through trauma.

Melancholic trauma theory We have seen that narratives embraced by the state, and by popular culture, in the wake of trauma promulgate Manichean dualisms that allow no room for equivocation or questioning. These narratives are resolutely melancholic: in psychoanalytic terms, they do not allow room for those who have suffered losses to examine or come to terms with their anger. It is this refusal to come to know that is at the heart of a melancholic response to loss. In Seth Moglen’s words: ‘melancholia is precisely a mode of grieving in which a bereaved person is unable to acknowledge consciously the nature and object of the anger that has accompanied the experience of loss’.58 While this can be unavoidable and even adaptive in the immediate aftermath of trauma,

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it is maladaptive as a long-term coping mechanism, as it avoids reengagement with complex social and political actualities. The easy answers provided by melancholic meaning-making narratives replace uncertainty and vulnerability with certainty and a sense of purpose. It is easier to direct anger elsewhere than to examine it in all its complexity; it is easier to embrace narratives that speak of revenge and employ simplistic dualisms – such as good and evil, victim and perpetrator – than to engage in the difficult work of mourning. The melancholic responses virulent in mainstream politics have their correlates in social and political theory. Although trauma theory is unrelentingly critical of popular and state-led responses to trauma for their depoliticisation of those who have suffered, it, too, has a refusal to come to know at its core. This refusal to come to know is found in two strands of theoretical reflection on trauma: it is found in trauma theory’s focus on the traumatic event and its inability to be known; and it is found in those strands of Holocaust theology that emphasise the ineffability of the Holocaust – its location outside the possibility of representation or understanding. In what follows, I consider these in turn. I argue that although the motivation behind these theoretical responses to trauma is diametrically opposed to that which motivates popular and state-led responses to trauma, they, too, shut down the possibility of a work of mourning. They do this not to secure the state, but to draw attention to those traumatic moments in which the dark underside of the state is revealed. However, by refusing to allow a work of mourning, a coming to terms with the past, these responses to trauma refuse to do the difficult work of the political. Trauma theory Trauma theory has become an increasingly influential voice in the humanities since the 1990s, when it emerged in a series of seminal texts by Cathy Caruth, Shoshanna Felman and Dori Laub.59 These texts emphasise the ‘enigmatic core’60 of trauma, encompassing ‘an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena’.61 Caruth points to the paradoxical and unknowable nature of trauma, whereby an event is not assimilated at the time of its occurrence, but returns later to bear delayed and repeated witness

68 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice to the wound.62 Not knowing is an inherent element of trauma: the traumatic event is so overwhelming that it is not fully experienced in the moment, and it is not until later that the enormity of what has happened begins to sink in. There is also a strong emphasis on the traumatic event. This focus on the event contributes towards the creation of an oversimplified narrative about trauma, whereby an event of horrific magnitude is unable to be assimilated into already existing categories of the conscious mind and is buried in a part of the mind inaccessible to the conscious self. The imperfectly recorded and (at least partially) repressed traumatic experience then returns to ‘haunt’ the sufferer as it ‘bears witness’ to the traumatic event in the months and years that follow. The narrative of a bifurcated mind (conscious and accessible, unconscious and inaccessible) makes intuitive sense, given what we know about the experience of post-traumatic stress disorder; however, it is vastly oversimplified and places too much emphasis on the nature of the event itself and too little on either the psychological complexity of the person who experiences the event or the sociopolitico-historical context in which the event takes place. In an incisive critique of this dimension of trauma theory, Susannah Radstone argues that this results in a flattening of psychoanalytic theory, whereby the complexities of an inner world – comprising conscious, subconscious and unconscious – are replaced by a ‘revised, depthless topography of the mind’ – comprising the conscious mind and a dissociated area which cannot be accessed.63 Radstone maintains that this is part of a broader pattern of oversimplification in trauma theory, arguing that it is permeated by a series of binary oppositions that neglect the complexity of the experience of historical trauma. She argues: [trauma theory] offers a theory of the subject which retreats from psychoanalysis’s rejection of a black-and-white vision of psychical life to produce a theory which establishes clear, not to say Manichean binaries of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘trauma’ and ‘normality’, and ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’.64

In a vision of trauma characterised by such clear binaries, there is little room for negotiating the ‘middle’ between those purported opposites, in Rosean terms. Trauma theory, as outlined above, is inherently interdisciplinary; it

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draws on insights from psychoanalysis and deconstruction and spans literary theory, psychology, psychiatry, cultural studies and sociology. Its emergence as an influential and ‘popular’ area of study in the 1990s closely followed a surge of interest in memory in history and related disciplines, known as the ‘memory boom’.65 These strands of thought solidified an interest in the humanities and social sciences in the role of memory after traumatic events – an interest that has increasing resonance in international political theory, as states attempt to come to terms with their traumatic pasts and build anew. The proliferation of truth commissions from the late 1980s, a renewed sense of urgency in remembering and commemorating the Holocaust and the more recent shock of the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 have all prompted political theorists to reflect more closely upon the role of memory and forgetting in coming to terms with the past and in securing the state in the wake of profound insecurity.66 In the previous chapter, we saw that Walter Benjamin was annihilatingly critical of the culture of commemoration that sprung up in the wake of World War I, saying that it prematurely restored order to traumatised communities, in order to preserve the status quo. In his writings on the baroque German mourning play, Trauerspeil, Benjamin advocates, instead, a tarrying with the suffering and dislocation engendered by traumatic events.67 His writings actively embrace the traumatic event and resist the work of mourning for fear of depoliticising it. He argues that we ought not to ‘parry’ the shocks of modernity; instead, we should ritualistically embrace them, sitting with our wounds in the hope of a future redemption.68 In contemporary international political theory, Edkins provides a similarly powerful critique of state-sponsored mourning that serves to shut down the experience of vulnerability in the wake of trauma. Drawing on the works of Slavoj Zˇizˇek and Jacques Derrida, she argues that traumatic events point to the Real behind the secure fac¸ade of contemporary politics, highlighting the violence that created and sustains the international state system and its profound fragility.69 As a result, states have a vested interest in shutting down the voices of those who have experienced trauma. Survivors are silenced in a variety of ways: they are hurriedly reinserted back into the established social order and told to ‘forget trauma’;70 they are designated mentally ill and portrayed as traumatised victims;71 or they are lauded as heroes in service of the state.72 In each case, they are depoliticised.

70 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice Edkins maintains that, in order to counter the depoliticisation of those who have experienced the limits of sovereign power, we must work against a politics of forgetting. She argues that it is helpful to think about traumatic memory as falling into one of two temporal modalities: linear time or trauma time.73 The first modality, linear narrative time, falls under the rubric of ‘politics as usual’: the political dimension of traumatic memories is neutralised as they are subsumed into linear, maladaptive meaning-making narratives, such as heroism, good and evil and revenge. The second modality, trauma time, stands outside linear historical time and refuses to be subsumed into ‘politics as usual’: instead, it preserves the political dimension of traumatic memory by ‘encircl[ing] again and again the site’ of the trauma.74 Edkins argues that it is impossible to isolate one modality from the other: they inevitably intersect, constitute and challenge one another.75 However, she maintains that although one cannot fully occupy trauma time, one can resist its gentrification by a ‘recognition and surrounding of the trauma at the heart of any social and symbolic order’.76 Like Caruth, Edkins emphasises the unknowable dimension of trauma: that which cannot be re-inscribed into settled narratives. She does this in order to preserve its political moment, to resist its burial amongst the banality of ‘politics as usual’. By encircling trauma and refusing to assimilate it into linear historical time, Edkins hopes to preserve the potency of its critique, saying: ‘[m]emories of trauma are, potentially, a mode of resistance to a language that forgets the essential vulnerability of flesh in its reification of state, nation, and ideology’.77 Trauma time refuses closure, certainty and security: it highlights our vulnerability, instead. Edkins is right to protest against the shutting down of human vulnerability, in order to secure the state, and to insist that trauma offers an opportunity to embrace the political. However, by so strongly emphasising the location of trauma outside linear historical time, Edkins shuts down the possibility of working through trauma. She maintains that ‘[w]e cannot remember [trauma] as something that took place in time, because this would neutralise it’.78 But if we cannot locate trauma in time, how can we make links between those social forces that facilitated the traumatic events and the events themselves?79 Edkins also insists that ‘[w]e can never quite know who we are, or who anyone else is: once we try to pin it down, something always escapes us: we are always both more and less than

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what we claim to be’.80 The assertion that we can never fully know who we are is indisputable; however, again, by emphasising the inability to know, the journey towards understanding, however partial, is unlikely to take place. Holocaust theology Trauma theory, in its various guises, has strong resonances with a strand of what might be termed ‘Holocaust theology’. We have seen that trauma theory emphasises the unknowable dimension of trauma, arguing that traumatic events cannot be assimilated into existing categories of the mind or linear conceptions of time, but that traumatic experience is located outside these categories. Holocaust theology has strong affinities with trauma theory, particularly in terms of its emphasis on the inability to know or to understand the Holocaust. However, its focus is not on trauma in general, but the Holocaust in particular: the Holocaust is posited as a novum in history, signalling a break or a rupture with what has gone before. Proponents of Holocaust theology maintain (to varying degrees) that the events of the Shoah are unable to be comprehended or represented and that they signal a serious crisis of modernity, with implications not only for thinking about the Holocaust, but also for thinking about modernity in general. Adorno’s dictum ‘[t]o write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’81 is one of the best known statements of this strand of thought, suggesting that in the face of the horrors of the Holocaust, representation fails.82 Other thinkers, such as Elie Wiesel, emphasise the ineffability of the Holocaust: ‘The Holocaust? The ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted’.83 In his reflections on the historical representation of the Holocaust, Saul Friedlander argues that its representation has swung between two extremes: ‘hasty ideological closure’, such as the assimilation of the Holocaust into a redemptive narrative, and ‘a paralysis of attempts at global interpretation’.84 These two approaches have strong affinities with the approaches to trauma examined in this chapter thus far: premature closure through simplistic meaning-making narratives and a principled resistance to representation and closure in the face of the ‘excess’ created by trauma. Against these extremes, Friedlander calls for an approach to history encapsulated by the Freudian notion of working through. He argues that, for the historian, working through entails the task of working towards a

72 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice ‘stable historical representation’85 of what took place, whilst emphatically resisting closure. Closure, according to Friedlander, is ‘an obvious avoidance of what remains indeterminate, elusive, and opaque’.86 Such a project, then, resides resolutely in the middle, in Rosean terms. It requires: the simultaneous acceptance of two contradictory moves: the search for ever-closer historical linkages and the avoidance of a naı¨ve historical positivism leading to simplistic and self-assured historical narrations and closures.87

Such an account reaches towards a historical narrative, but also includes commentary which disrupts that narrative, introducing alternative voices (such as those of the victims) and interpretations of events and resisting closure by continually interrogating the evidence. Friedlander also points to the role of literature and art in keeping concrete historical particulars alive, in order to prevent forgetting and forestall premature closure.88 Thus, Friedlander’s account of working through is very much a speculative account: drawing on particular voices to shed light upon (as well as disrupt) a broader historical narrative.89 Rose’s response to questions of representation and remembrance after Auschwitz has strong affinities with Friedlander’s account. Against those thinkers who highlight the ineffability of the Holocaust, Rose maintains, instead, the more painful position that the Holocaust is, in fact, all too understandable.90 This more difficult position requires a journey towards understanding that resists closure – one that balances the goal of ‘know[ing] and be[ing] known’91 with a tolerance of equivocation and uncertainty.

Inaugurated Mourning So far, this chapter has examined two very different melancholic responses to trauma. Mainstream responses act to secure the state, truncating a proper work of mourning by diverting attention away from horrific suffering. In contrast, theoretical responses – such as trauma theory – draw attention to suffering, encircling the trauma in an effort to preserve its affront to the given order. Although these responses differ in many respects, they converge in their melancholic refusal to work through trauma. Both responses resist the journey

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towards understanding: mainstream responses resist the challenge to the status quo that might arise from a deeper exploration of the underlying social forces; theoretical responses maintain trauma is beyond understanding and that the pursuit of comprehension risks shutting down the political. In the remainder of the chapter, I examine Rose’s inaugurated mourning, contra melancholy. I argue that a work of mourning does not shut down the political, but is an inherently political process. At the core of Rose’s inaugurated mourning is a resistance to onesidedness – an embrace of the anxiety that comes with staying in the middle – and a determined pursuit of understanding. The journey towards comprehension is a struggle-filled journey that knows it will never be complete92 and is accompanied by political risk-taking: trying, failing and trying – ‘again and again’93 – in the pursuit of a ‘good enough’ justice. In what follows, I explore Rose’s inaugurated mourning through her responses to what she terms ‘Holocaust piety’94 and those strands of political theory often characterised as ‘Athens’ and ‘Jerusalem’.95 As I do so, I revisit key themes that I introduced at the beginning of the book: brokenness, speculative philosophy, comprehension and anxiety-filled risk. Rose draws explicitly on Freud’s description of mourning in her conception of inaugurated mourning. She says that mourning is ‘that intense work of the soul, that gradual rearrangement of its boundaries, which must occur when a loved one is lost – so as to let go, to allow the other fully to depart, and hence fully to be regained beyond sorrow’.96 This description of mourning echoes Freud’s initial formulation of mourning, which portrays mourning as a time- and energy-intensive work, directed towards reallocating libido from the love-object.97

Holocaust piety The Holocaust, perhaps more than any other event, has come to represent the brokenness of modernity – its failure to deliver its Enlightenment promises. Reflection in its wake has wrestled to process the horrors that took place – horrors that sat alongside, and were inextricably intertwined with, the banal in a way that only enhanced its brokenness. In the last section, we discussed Holocaust theology – a tradition that Rose engages with explicitly and renames ‘Holocaust piety’. This tradition emphasises the ineffability of the

74 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice Holocaust: it maintains that the Holocaust signals a profound break in history that renders all prior narratives obsolete and shuts down the possibility of representation.98 In Rose’s words: Much of this work judges that generalising explanations are in themselves a kind of collusion in what should not be explained but should be left as an evil, unique in human and in divine history; and it calls for silent witness in the face of absolute horror.99

Holocaust piety, then, is emphatically against representation and comprehension: it argues not only that attempts to understand are doomed to fail, but also that they, inevitably, domesticate the horrific experiences of millions. Rose maintains that Holocaust piety is resolutely melancholic in its refusal to struggle towards representation and that underlying this refusal is a fear of understanding: To argue for silent prayer, the punishment equally of poetry and knowledge, in short, the witness of ‘ineffability’, that is, non-representability, is to mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too understandable, all too continuous with what we are – human, all too human.100

This refusal to come to know is contiguous with fascism itself, according to Rose, and must be rejected.101 Against Holocaust piety, Rose promotes what she terms ‘Holocaust ethnography’,102 which does not turn its back on the difficult work of representation. Holocaust ethnography acknowledges that representation can never be absolute, that it is always ‘fallible and contestable’, but maintains that it is necessary if we are to explore our own implication in ‘the fascism of our cultural rites and rituals’.103 Such an approach has strong affinities with Saul Friedlander’s call for a Freudian working through. It struggles towards representation, whilst resisting closure – it does the difficult work of the middle. In short, Holocaust ethnography turns its back on melancholy and embraces inaugurated mourning: it is a difficult response that has at its core those themes we touched on in the introduction: speculative thought, comprehension and political risk. The speculative dimension of Rose’s Holocaust ethnography rejects binary oppositions, such as black and white, good and evil, victim and perpetrator. Rose talks about the dangers of ‘becoming fixed in

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counter-identification’, in relation to the Holocaust, and explores this, in relation to defining oneself solely or primarily in terms of one’s identity as survivor.104 She asks ‘. . . are we guilty for surviving when six million died? God forbid! We would be guilty if we remain selfdefined solely as survivors; ‘guilty’ because fixed in a counter-identification’.105 To identify as survivor, first and foremost, risks melancholic ossification in a role that refuses to do the difficult work of mourning. Rose argues that survival ought to be met with inaugurated mourning: inaugurating a journey of coming to know and being known and of taking the risk of political action. She continues: To survive – to live again – demands a new tale: a new prayer to be found, a new polity to be founded. It demands a willingness to participate in power and its legitimate violence for the sake of the good. Not as a sanctified, holy Israel, nor as Israeli, or any other raison d’e´tat, but as the risk of recognition – the risk of coming to discover the self-relation of the other as the challenge of one’s own self-relation.106

The element of political risk-taking runs throughout a work of mourning. Political risk refuses one-sidedness in favour of the speculative: it promotes a resolute inhabitation of the middle, embraces the difficulty of recognition and struggles to understand ourselves and others. We have already seen that a struggle towards understanding is at the centre of Rose’s inaugurated mourning and, conversely, that the avoidance of this journey towards understanding is a primary target of her critique of aberrated mourning. Rose’s insistence on a journey towards understanding has two dimensions: one that looks outwards – examining the social forces that facilitated the trauma – and one that looks inwards – examining our own implication in the losses we are mourning. Rose’s speculative Hegelianism always guides her towards examination of ‘social and historical forms of misrecognition’,107 strongly emphasising the social forces that underpin any event we might be trying to understand. Rose’s emphasis on underlying social and historical conditions has been echoed in recent years by Seth Moglen’s work on mourning collective losses. Moglen returns to Freud’s dyadic account of mourning (whereby the subject mourns the loss of the object) and adds a third dimension: the underlying social forces responsible for social loss. Moglen’s triadic account prompts subjects to work towards understanding those conditions that prompted their

76 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice losses, asking questions such as: ‘Who or what is responsible for my loss? Where should I place blame, and what is the proper object of the anger that accompanies loss?’108 These searching questions help the subjects to work towards increased understanding of the ways in which social, historical and political conditions facilitated their losses, prompting them towards political action, rather than melancholic retreat.109 As well as looking outside ourselves, at the conditions that facilitate social loss, Rose asserts that we must examine the ways in which we are implicated in those losses. We saw earlier that Rose points us to consider the ways in which our own ‘cultural rites and rituals’ are implicated in fascism.110 Rose warns against a self-satisfied scapegoating, where we look outside ourselves for the causes of overwhelming loss. Instead, she advocates a Hegelian journey of recognition, where we look inside ourselves and perceive ‘an initial self-identity which discovers itself to be fluid, not fixed, which encounters the violence towards the other in its initial self-definition, and undergoes transformation of the initial identity’.111 This openness to discovering the violence within ourselves is a central element of a journey towards understanding. Soul-searching is a difficult task – one that is full of risk – however, it is an inescapable part of the work of mourning. Inaugurated mourning, then, is a risk-filled endeavour that works towards knowing and being known in the wake of loss. The emphasis on understanding stands in stark contrast to much trauma theory and Holocaust theology that emphasises the location of trauma outside the categories of understanding. These melancholic responses argue that to work towards the comprehension of trauma is to gentrify it: to strip the traumatic event of its horror and its signification of extreme vulnerability. However, in calling for a work of mourning that works towards understanding, Rose is insisting on an activity that is resolutely human, in response to the inhuman. Hannah Arendt puts this beautifully when she insists on the essential humanity of the activity of understanding.112 Where totalitarianism attempts to stamp out humanity, reducing it to bare life,113 the activity of understanding is a political act of resistance. Understanding is a radical assertion of humanity, where humanity itself is challenged. Drawing on Arendt’s essays on understanding, Robert Fine maintains that ‘[m]aking sense of the senseless remains the essential element in recovering the idea of humanity after the Holocaust’.114

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Athens and Jerusalem: a tale of four cities The tradition of Holocaust piety points to the rupture enacted by the Holocaust – rupture that shuts down the possibility of understanding and representation in its wake. The Holocaust as rupture is echoed in social and political thought by those who argue that modern political thought allowed Auschwitz to take place and who forge a new postmodern ethics in its place. Rose refers to this juxtaposition of modern and postmodern thought as the tale of two cities, whereby Athens represents modern ethics, and Jerusalem represents postmodern, or new, ethics.115 In this tale, Jerusalem (or Judaism) is often pointed to as the ‘sublime other’ of modernity,116 replacing modernity’s problematic emphasis on law and coercion with a more palatable and less damaging emphasis on ethics and community. However, Rose argues that this is a ‘dangerously distorted and idealised’117 characterisation of traditions that have much in common: both are founded on Kantian dualisms and are problematically one-sided, neglecting the difficult work of the middle. The opposition of Jerusalem to Athens is a resolutely melancholic move: to characterise them in this way is to succumb to loss, to refuse to mourn, to cover persisting anxiety with the violence of a New Jerusalem masquerading as love. The possibility of structural analysis and of political action are equally undermined by the evasion of the anxiety and ambivalence inherent in power and knowledge.118

Against the one-sidedness of Athens and Jerusalem, Rose draws our attention to a third city – the city in which we live, about which simple stories cannot be told – and a fourth – Auschwitz, emblematic of rupture and despair. For Rose, the city of Auschwitz plays a catalytic role in the tale of the two cities: Athens and Jerusalem. She points to a common line of reasoning in sociology and philosophy that blames Athens for the horror of Auschwitz, culminating in a call for a new ethics or a New Jerusalem. This line of reasoning finds a relation between the Holocaust and a ‘general feature of modernity’; it judges that this aspect of modernity made the Holocaust possible; and it maintains that the predominance of that feature in a particular discipline (be it sociology, philosophy or architecture) renders that discipline a principle actor in the Holocaust.119 Rose notes:

78 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice [t]he devastation of the respective discipline is declaimed; paradoxically, the sociologist then invokes the new ethics, the philosopher turns to social analysis, and the architectural historian breaks off his book after 500 pages, and relapses into a desperate, dramatised silence.120

Although the respective disciplines use critical rationality to formulate their arguments about what facilitated the Holocaust, reason is thenceforth abandoned for the invocation of the new ethics, social analysis or despairing silence: Reason is revealed by the Holocaust to be contaminated, and the great contaminator, the Holocaust itself, becomes the actuality against which the history, methods and results hitherto of reason are assessed. The Holocaust provides the standard for demonic anti-reason; and the Holocaust founds the call for the new ethics.121

The opposition between Athens and Jerusalem turns, in large part, on the city of Auschwitz. Athens (or modernity) and its ‘demonic rationality’122 facilitated Auschwitz; the failure of modernity (embodied in Auschwitz) facilitated the call for a new ethics – a New Jerusalem. Rose maintains that this opposition (and those oppositions that follow) tells a simple story that prevents attention to a more painful and complex truth: the relation between Auschwitz and the third city – that city in which we reside. In her role as a consultant for the Polish Commission for the Future of Auschwitz, Rose observes: Working at Auschwitz has, however, convinced me that the apparently unnegotiable and expiatory opposition between reason and witness, between knowledge/power and new ethics, or between relativising explanation and prayer, protects us from confronting something even more painful, which is our persistent and persisting dilemma, and not something we can project onto a one-dimensional, demonic rationality, which we think we have disowned. New Jerusalem, the second city, is to arise out of Auschwitz, the fourth city, which is seen as the burning cousin – not the pale – of the first city, Athens. Might not this drama of colliding cities cover a deeper evasion – fear of a different kind of continuity between the third city and Auschwitz, which itself gives rise to the ill-fated twins of the devastation of reason and the phantasmagoric ethics of the community?123

The underlying fear that the Holocaust may, in fact, be ‘all too understandable’ is avoided by glossing over the existence of the third

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city and its relation to Auschwitz and thereby avoiding the difficult pursuit of comprehension at the heart of a work of mourning. Rose seeks to disturb the simple stories that demonise reason, that turn their back on reason, in order to prevent the recurrence of the horrors of the Holocaust. These simple stories prescribe an easy way – one that refuses to do the difficult work of examining the conditions and actualities of power. She maintains: Analysis of this kind, as opposed to the refusal of analysis in the demonising argument, does not see Auschwitz as the end-product and telos of modern rationality. It understands the plans as arising out of, and as falling back into, the ambitions and the tensions, the utopianism and the violence, the reason and the muddle, which is the outcome of the struggle between the politics and the anti-politics of the city. This is the third city – the city in which we all live and with which we are too familiar.124

The third city – not Athens, not Jerusalem, not Auschwitz – is a city about which simple stories cannot be (truthfully) told, a city that demands the speculative negotiation of the middle between oppositions.

Conclusion Reflection on trauma has had a resurgence in international political theory in recent years, prompted, in part, by the proliferation of truth commissions in the wake of state-sponsored violence and recent terror attacks. Debates about how we ought to respond to trauma are part of a longer tradition in social theory that includes Holocaust theology and its reflections on the implications of the organised genocide of many millions and, more broadly, reflection on the failure of modernity to deliver its promises. This chapter argues that that the predominant responses to trauma, in theory and practice, are melancholic: mainstream responses to trauma truncate mourning by adopting meaning-making narratives that preclude questioning; theoretical responses truncate mourning by disallowing the possibility of working through. Both sets of responses refuse to do the difficult work of the political: the mainstream, by rushing too quickly to simplistic answers and actions; the theoretical, by emphasising too strongly the impossibility of coming to know and skirting too closely to a depoliticising despair.

80 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice Rosean inaugurated mourning rejects the melancholic refusal to come to know pervasive in both mainstream and theoretical responses to trauma. It insists on an agonistic journeying towards understanding and representation, acknowledging that such understanding will always be fragile and contested, but maintaining that it is necessary in the pursuit of emancipatory political engagement. Thus, whereas trauma theory and Holocaust theology highlight the impossibility of working through, Rose highlights the possibility. These different emphases have markedly different political implications. The trauma theory emphasis on not knowing, in a desire to resist totalising and gentrifying closure, depoliticises: it is unable to draw links between traumatic events and facilitating social forces. A speculative emphasis on coming to know, in contrast, promulgates political risk-taking that is enhanced and sharpened by wrestling with the contradictions and messiness of political life. Rose does not prescribe what form such political engagement ought to take; instead, she advocates a different way of being in community – one that is self-reflective, critical and politically engaged. She encourages a return to the city and the arena of action after a time of mourning, saying: To acknowledge and to re-experience the justice and the injustice of the partner’s life and death is to accept the law, it is not to transgress it – mourning becomes the law. Mourning draws on transcendent, but representable justice, which makes the suffering of immediate experience visible and speakable. When completed, mourning returns the soul to the city, renewed and reinvigorated for participation, ready to take on the difficulties and injustices of the existing city. The mourner returns to negotiate and challenge the changing inner and outer boundaries of the soul and of the city, she returns to their perpetual anxiety.125

Chapter 4 Cosmopolitanism, Difference and Aporetic Universalism

In the previous chapter, I considered dominant responses to trauma and contrasted Rosean inaugurated mourning with melancholic alternatives. In this chapter, I explore theoretical responses to the mundane, everyday experiences of exclusion and difference. I argue that Rose’s aporetic universalism offers an important alternative to dominant discourses about difference, refusing reification of universality or particularity, in favour of a difficult negotiation of the middle. One of the legacies of the Enlightenment is a cosmopolitan sensibility that sets its face against boundaries that would exclude and suppress the Other. In its liberal incarnation, cosmopolitanism insists that individuals have rights by virtue of being human, rather than by virtue of citizenship of any particular state.1 The liberal rights regime (and associated interventions in the name of rights) is perhaps the strongest expression of this type of cosmopolitanism.2 However, this drive towards (abstract) universality as the remedy for oppression risks homogeneity and further suppression of the Other in the pursuit of equality. In this chapter, I refer to this problem as the cosmopolitan dilemma: the situation whereby the emancipatory impulse towards universal cosmopolitanism values (rights and justice for all) fosters further marginalisation of the Other, as difference is sidelined by equality. Against Enlightenment suppression of particularity, postmodern thinkers foster a celebration of alterity and difference.3 However, the focus on alterity fails to deal adequately with the cosmopolitan dilemma, reifying the particular and promoting an ethics tainted by essentialism not dissimilar to that promoted by abstract universality. This tendency towards one-sidedness – an over-emphasis on universal or particular – is at the centre of debates

82 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice about exclusion and otherness. Despite repeated attempts to wrestle with the cosmopolitan dilemma, political theorists struggle to articulate how we might approach the disasters of modernity, without leaning too far towards the universal (and further marginalising the Other) or the particular (and fostering new forms of misrecognition).4 Rose does not turn away from the cosmopolitan dilemma; however, she starts from a very different place: the middle. Occupying the middle, for Rose, is an acknowledgement that there are no easy answers to be found, that there is no easy way to negotiate the disasters of modernity. There are elements of truth in visions that emphasise the pursuit of the universal and elements of truth in visions that focus on the concrete experience of the here and now. However, for Rose, ‘wisdom works with equivocation’5 – that is, it refuses to adopt rigid dualisms that allow us to ignore that which we find uncomfortable. Instead, Rose insists that both sides stop refusing the opposites that make them uncomfortable, maintaining that sitting with that which makes us uncomfortable – with equivocation – is the beginning of wisdom. We cannot face actuality, unless we are prepared to negotiate the broken middle: to acknowledge the dangers of rigid dualisms and their attendant certainties and, instead, give voice to the anxieties and uncertainties of the middle. Rose’s speculative philosophy offers a language for the negotiation of universal and particular that speaks directly to the dilemma of exclusion and otherness. She sets her face firmly against the extremes of abstract universality and identity politics, which fall into dualistic reification of universal and particular, respectively. Instead, Rose promulgates a vision of aporetic universalism. Aporetic universalism emphasises the need to seek out and acknowledge the misrecognition and devastation that accompany the gap between Enlightenment promises and actuality and to embark on a difficult journey towards recognition. This chapter is divided into three parts. In Part 1, I briefly examine the cosmopolitan dilemma and a postmodern response to the dilemma of difference. I argue that abstract universality and postmodern particularity work against recognition: abstract universality obfuscates social and political actualities, whilst postmodern particularity fixes identities in rigid classification. In Part 2, I outline Rosean aporetic universalism: a wrestling with the actualities of exclusion that emphasises journeying towards recognition, rather than uncovering universal guidelines for living. Such an approach rejects the

Cosmopolitanism, Difference and Aporetic Universalism 83 temptations of abstract universality or identity politics, with their dualistic emphases on one side of the binary opposite over another. Instead, it explores the middle between universal and particular, powerful and powerless, included and excluded. This journey towards recognition is Hegelian inaugurated mourning, marked by awareness of exclusion and loss and a politically active working through. In Part 3, I explore aporetic universalism in relation to the politics of immigration, taking Bonnie Honig’s retelling of the Book of Ruth as a point of departure.6

The Cosmopolitan Dilemma Speculative philosophy resists frozen dualisms. Such resistance takes place not only at the level of thought: philosophical dualisms reflect underlying social relations and modern political life is rife with unjust structures that divide and exclude. Boundaries pervade global politics on multiple levels: between states, within states and within individuals. Rose maintains that ‘[m]odern politics offers no unified focus of domination’:7 instead, domination is writ large in the ‘non-legitimated’ boundaries between states, in the division between state and civil society and in the separation of the rational from the nonrational. These boundaries, according to Rose, penetrate individual souls. Indeed, boundaries between states produce ‘the modern phantasies of exclusive monopolising of the means of violence, which takes the shape of racism, fascism, religious and ethnic exclusivity’.8 The relation between boundaries and domination is one that has exercised political thinkers for centuries: wherever boundaries demarcate inclusion and exclusion, belonging and alienation, domination abounds. In what follows, I briefly outline two dominant responses to the boundary/domination nexus: liberal cosmopolitan and postmodern. Despite their differences, both responses spring from progressive ideals: they seek to reduce suffering in global politics, addressing the marginalisation of the Other, perpetrated by the demarcation of boundaries that exclude.

Abstract universalism: a liberal cosmopolitan response For moral cosmopolitans, the Westphalian state system is problematic on a number of levels: it ignores issues of justice or distribution

84 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice between states; it fails to provide a mechanism for redress beyond state boundaries, where state leaders do not protect (or actively harm) citizens’ basic rights; and it produces a significant number of persons who are stateless and therefore excluded from the rights of state citizenship. In short, cosmopolitan thinkers maintain that the Westphalian system encourages statespersons to address failings of justice solely within the boundaries of their own states, instead of thinking globally, and that this failure to work for justice beyond borders perpetuates suffering in global politics. Cosmopolitan theories address the violence of boundaries between and within states by shifting the referent for justice away from the state and towards the individual.9 This radical reconceptualisation of justice maintains that individual lives are of equal value and that this entails specific rights and duties. One of the foremost expressions of moral cosmopolitanism in global politics is the human rights regime, which enshrines equal rights for individuals, regardless of nationality, race, religion or gender.10 Individual rights were codified in international law in response to the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, when citizens had no legal justification for disobeying state orders that they thought to be morally wrong.11 After the Holocaust, the cry ‘never again’ prompted legal response, in an effort to provide the normative guidelines that the international system lacked and in the hope of preventing future horrors. The impetus for the proliferation of rights discourse, in response to exclusionary and oppressive boundaries, is progressive; however, its execution is less so. The codification of universal human rights is far removed from the actualities of exclusion and oppression: it privileges the rational and the individual and renders invisible the non-rational and the socio-political. Furthermore, the rights regime is underpinned by a robust notion of moral progress that serves to highlight its successes and to distract from its failings: the privileging of abstract universals serves to obscure concrete particulars, to mask social and political actualities. Although it has been wielded as a weapon of change by some, it is a double-edged sword that serves to perpetuate misrecognition and suffering for others.12 Despite its progressive impulse, the promulgation of equality as restitution for exclusion and domination enacts ‘systematic inequality’ for particular social or cultural groups of people.13 Paradoxically, rights discourse fosters inequality by its emphasis on abstract equality before the law – an emphasis that promotes homogeneity and

Cosmopolitanism, Difference and Aporetic Universalism 85 obscures difference and relationality. Rose maintains that abstract equality ‘not only pierces the individual soul but renders invisible the actuality of others, their work, desire and otherness, as well as oneself as other’.14 To return to one of the major themes of this book, abstract equality works against comprehension: it ‘renders invisible’ social and political actualities and the way in which these shape individual and communal lives differently. From a speculative perspective, however, we must take difference seriously. To be political is, in large part, to bear witness to inequality and injustice so that we might work towards a more just world. Ignoring difference and, instead, assuming a levelling or egalitarianism, debases both passion and action, so that the response to distinctions, especially to one’s distinction from oneself as abstraction, is to retreat into ressentiment – resentfulness towards the actuality of the pain of differences, instead of passion to recognize them, and action to aid others to recognize them.15

Without recognition of difference, we adopt a position of ignorance that perpetuates further inequality.

Difference: a postmodern response The abstract legal promotion of equal rights produces misrecognition and blindness to difference and fosters anguish among those marginalised. As a result, strands of postmodern thought have turned to the celebration of alterity as a powerful alternative. The emphasis on difference and particularity is compelling, in part, because it signals a new ethics marked by love and inclusion and, in part, because it dispenses with metaphysics, maintaining that the articulation of settled universals promotes marginalisation and exclusion. The celebration of difference has its most salient political expression in identity politics – a form of collective action that actively affirms marginalised groups and draws attention to particularity as a counter to abstract universality. The political expression of identity politics is underpinned by a philosophical distrust of grand narratives (such as liberalism and Marxism) and an abandonment of metaphysics. This new ethics characterises Enlightenment reason as ‘restricting and restricted’ and promulgates, instead, ‘visibility and voice’ for the excluded: ‘the Other, woman, the body (its materiality, its sexuality),

86 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice dialogue, love, revelation’.16 In moving away from repressive and restrictive Western metaphysics, new ethics embraces freedom, plurality and alterity. The renunciation of Enlightenment reason ushers in a new age of voice and assertion for the previously silenced and subjugated Other. However, new ethics’ emancipatory intent is undermined by the very freedom it pursues, which too often results in an ethics unmediated by its relation to ‘other Others’ and divorced from consideration of law and institutions. Thus, although it purposes to address the epidemic of misrecognition perpetrated by modern ethics, it ends up fostering new forms of misrecognition through the promotion of exclusive, unsituated otherness. One of the main dangers of the politics of difference, promulgated by postmodern ethics, is its propensity to create new fixities in global politics. Benjamin Arditi highlights the underside of difference, saying that: the radicalization of the critique of grand narratives and the relentless vindication of particularism . . . turned the question of difference into something akin to the essentialism of the elements that was as illegitimate as the essentialism of the totality it criticized.17

One of the forms this new essentialism took was the emergence of ‘self-referential reasoning’ in marginalised groups,18 fostering a horizon of multiple groups claiming internal sovereignty and resenting external interference. Arditi illustrates this self-referential reasoning by pointing to the difference between modalities of ‘we’ in the Tupı´ Guaranı´ language found in Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil: the exclusive mode, ore´, and the inclusive mode, n˜ande´.19 He argues that ‘identity politics privileges the ore´ at the expense of the n˜ande´’ and that this ‘transforms the face of collective action into a universe of multiple ore´’.20 The proliferation of particular groups defending their special character and rights acts to fix those groups in rigid relation to themselves and to others. Rose maintains that: [t]heir newly achieved franchise imparts a fixity to them, even if, or precisely when, they are defined as fluid. For if exclusive and excluding reason was in the wrong, then exclusive otherness, unequivocally Other, will be equally so.21

The promulgation of a ‘universe of multiple ore´’ promotes rigidity on two levels: it acts to ‘arrest one’s self-understanding in a classification’

Cosmopolitanism, Difference and Aporetic Universalism 87 and to ‘prevent the development of mutual recognition’.22 This fixing of self- and Other-understanding, in terms of a particular dimension or aspect of the self or Other, makes that understanding rigid and immovable – it works against understanding. It also works against solidarity: the inward-looking and self-referential character of identity politics impedes the development of horizontal links between groups.23 Thus, with the heralding of a new age of difference and respect for the Other comes the abandonment of equivocation – the abandonment of the middle. Rose argues that: [f]ar from bringing to light what is difficult out of darkness and silence, difficulty is brought to certainty. Certainty does not empower, it subjugates – for only thinking which has the ability to tolerate uncertainty is powerful, that is, non-violent.24

A further problem with the new postmodern ethics is that it seeks a ‘purified reason’, unmediated by institutions and law. However, affirmation of alterity does not operate in a vacuum: by taking no account of institutions and law and, instead, seeking pure affirmation of the Other, new ethics fails to engage meaningfully with actuality. The experience of marginalisation is always mediated by law and institutions: any response to exclusion must analyse the ways in which social and political structures shape particular experience and must pay close attention to the unintended consequences of its actions. As Rose puts it, New ethics cares for ‘the Other’; but since it refuses any relation to law, it may be merciful, but, equally, it may be merciless. In either case, having renounced principles and intentions, new ethics displays ‘the best intentions’ – the intention to get things right this time. In its regime of sheer mercy, new ethics will be as implicated in unintended consequences as its principled predecessor.25

The portrayal of the Other as sheer alterity, by certain strands of new ethics, not only ignores the location of the marginalised and suffering subject in socio-political structures, it also impoverishes our understanding of that subject. Rose argues: [i]f new ethics ignores the intermediary institutions which interfere with its intentions to affirm ‘the Other’, then, similarly, it ignores the mediation of the identity of ‘the Other’. For ‘the Other’ is both bounded and vulnerable, enraged and invested, isolated and interrelated.26

88 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice The marginalised are agents: they are located in actually existing social and political structures that shape their experiences of exclusion and isolation. Locating the Other outside these structures fosters misrecognition and further marginalisation.

Aporetic Universalism Rose engages powerfully with questions of inclusion and exclusion in global politics, bringing a new philosophical language to a wellrehearsed debate. At the core of Rose’s intervention is a rejection of the one-sidedness pervasive in cosmopolitan thought and identity politics: the former, assimilating the Other, in the pursuit of equality and justice; the latter, reifying the Other, in the pursuit of the protection of difference. Against liberal and postmodern responses to exclusion under modernity, then, Rose advocates aporetic universalism. Where liberal cosmopolitanism promotes abstract equality and postmodern ethics counters abstraction with community, Rose attends to the space between these positions – the space where actuality resides. Inhabiting the middle requires attention to the devastation that arises from the brokenness of law and ethics, universal and particular, potentiality and actuality. It requires becoming aware of the ways in which social and political structures shape particular experience, as well as the ways in which particular experience informs our understanding of social and political structures. Rose explores the concept of aporetic universalism, in conjunction with her readings of Rahel Varnhagen, Rosa Luxemburg and Hannah Arendt. She notes that the three thinkers were ‘triply excluded’ from abstract universalities: ‘as women, excluded from the fraternity of man – liberal bourgeois and socialist; as Jews, excluded from the community of Christian love; and for both reasons excluded from civil status’.27 They all experienced the ‘violence of civil society’, despite the purported universality of the ‘rights of man’; that is, they experienced first-hand the mismatch between Enlightenment ideals and practice. However, despite their experience of multiple exclusions and concomitant understanding of political universality as ‘demonstrably spurious’,28 they set their faces against the temptation of rejecting universality altogether or creating alternative ethical communities. Instead,

Cosmopolitanism, Difference and Aporetic Universalism 89 [r]emaining within the agon of authorship they cultivate aporetic universalism, restless affirmation and undermining of political form and political action, which never loses sight of the continuing mutual corruption of state and civil society – whether the state is separated from or united with gender, religion, politics.29

So what is this aporetic universalism cultivated by Varnhagen, Luxemburg and Arendt? The cultivation of aporetic universalism is an ongoing process that attends to the ways in which so-called dualisms constitute one another and entails continual interrogation of accepted social and political arrangements, challenging ‘politics as usual’ by embarking on a journey towards recognition. Rose refers to an aporetic approach as ‘unsettled and unsettling’, saying that ‘it is not a ‘‘position’’ because it will not posit anything, and refuses any beginning or end’.30 Instead, it is an approach to thinking the universal that tarries with the middle, attending to the relation between universal and particular, everyone and every ‘one’. Rose’s aporetic universalism offers a dramatic re-reading of utopian and Arcadian universalisms. Utopian universalism would create a ‘utopian end’, manufacturing a more secure universality through the pursuit of a rational consensus; Arcadian universalism would return us to our ‘Arcadian beginning’, placing hope in a messianic rebirth or a community of love: both ‘reconcile and posit the unity of particular and universal’.31 Rose maintains that these narratives should be reinterpreted as ‘facetious forms’ that ‘configure the aporias, the difficulty, of the relation between universal, particular and singular’.32 By reading such narratives speculatively – that is, attending to disunity, as well as unity, non-identity, as well as identity – the difficult journey towards recognition may take place. Thus, aporetic universalism struggles with the contraries of universal, particular and singular: it ‘explores and experiments’ with disunity, with non-identity, with misrecognition.33 It sits resolutely in the middle. Above all, aporetic universalism refuses the temptation of positing a mended middle.34 The refusal of a utopian end or Arcadian beginning is a refusal of the easy way, of the premature reconciliation posited by utopian and Arcadian universalisms. So where does the ‘universal’ of aporetic universalism lie? And what is its function? Rose maintains that in order to recognise the broken middle – ‘the devastation between posited thought and

90 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice posited actuality, between power and exclusion from power’35 – a metaphysical ‘third term’ is required. This third term is the universal. Speculatively understood, the universal has, as its Janus-face, aporia: ‘[t]ogether, universal and aporia are irruption and witness to the brokenness in the middle’.36 For Rose, then, the universal of aporetic universalism is not a colonising, exclusionary force: it is dynamic and political; it acts as ‘ethical witness’ to the actualities of social and political life.37 Without the concept of the universal – the third – there is no recognition: ‘it takes three to make a relationship between two’.38 Without the concept of the universal, there is no political risk, no taking ‘the risk of the universal interest’.39 At the heart of Rose’s aporetic universalism is Hegelian inaugurated mourning: a working through of the brokenness of modernity in all its particularity. We saw in Chapter 2 that inaugurated mourning is a response to the broken middle that ‘does not remain naı¨ve and ignorant of its historical and political presuppositions and hence of its likely outcomes’.40 Rose goes on to say that such a response: requires a comprehensive account . . . of the modern fate of ethical life: of the institutions and individual inversions of meaning in the modern state and society where increase in subjective freedom is accompanied by decrease in objective freedom, where the discourses of individual rights distract from the actualities of power and domination.41

This comprehensive account of modern life, then, perceives the ‘dynamic movement of a political history which can be expounded speculatively out of the broken middle’.42 A speculative response is emphatically against ignorance of actuality; instead, it is closely attuned to the gaps and fissures that attend the mismatch between Enlightenment goals and outcomes, to the hidden realities that accompany discourses of rights and freedom. It refuses the tragic sensibility of aberrated mourning and, instead, embraces the comic sensibility of inaugurated mourning – ‘the movement of the Absolute as comedy’43 – attending to the provisional and contingent nature of any response. In what follows, I revisit inaugurated mourning, in the light of what Rose has to say about exclusion and otherness. To do so, I focus on three dimensions: recognition, law and politics.44

Cosmopolitanism, Difference and Aporetic Universalism 91

Recognition A key dimension of Rose’s aporetic universalism is the centrality of coming to know – a theme we have already spent considerable time discussing, but that is worth revisiting in the context of thinking about exclusion and otherness. For Rose, the process of working towards comprehension is a process of recognition. In Chapter 1, we noted that the concept of recognition has a process of ‘coming to know’ embedded in the very structure of the word: re-cognition. The word presumes an initial cognition, followed by a need to re-cognise: it implies opening misrecognition, followed by a journey towards a more stable (but never settled) cognition.45 Hegel’s triune structure of recognition46 has, at its core, a resistance to the rigid dualisms of Kantian thought, which, for Rose, includes Enlightenment and postmodern thought and their reification of universal and particular, respectively. Where Enlightenment and postmodern approaches to the cosmopolitan dilemma reinforce and ‘fix’ dualisms in rigid opposition, thereby silencing the middle, an aporetic approach emphasises relationality. The third dimension of Hegel’s triune structure of recognition, then, is attention to the relation between dualisms – their identity and non-identity and the ways in which this plays out in actual social and political relations. An aporetic journey towards recognition takes place in the middle, where both self and Other are perceived as agents, and the brokenness that attends misrecognition is acknowledged and worked through. Debates about exclusion and otherness are pervaded by simplistic dualisms, such as imperial agent and oppressed Other, powerful and powerless, dominator and dominated. These characterisations tend to bestow agency on the powerful and relegate the Other to a position of helpless inaction. Such dualisms are particularly prevalent in liberal cosmopolitan discourses: on the one hand, they emphasise the equality of all persons before international law; on the other hand, they maintain that when the rights of the powerless Other are being flagrantly violated, this entails a duty of the powerful to intervene on their behalf. The enactment of interventions by the powerful on the behalf of the powerless leaves little room for the process of recognition: those who intervene do so largely on their own terms, with little or no reference to the underlying structural factors that contributed to the crisis.47 Against the denigration of the Other, perpetrated by liberal cos-

92 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice mopolitanism, Rose argues that that ‘ ‘‘the other’’ is also agent, enraged and invested’.48 To attribute agency solely to the powerful is to fail to recognise the dynamism and fluidity of action wielded by ‘all agents in power and out of it’.49 It is also to fix the powerful and powerless in rigid, immovable relation – it leaves no room for the work of recognition, which takes place in the middle. Rose maintains that a speculative exploration of otherness is also vastly different from the postmodern engagement, saying that it ‘has a motility’ that is absent from postmodern narratives.50 Speculative motility contrasts with postmodern fixity: whereas postmodern narratives ‘fix’ the Other by emphasising difference and domination, speculative narratives explore the relation between self and Other. Rose maintains: We are both equally enraged and invested, and to fix our relation in domination or dependence is unstable and reversible, to fix it as ‘the world’ is to attempt to avoid these reverses. All dualistic relations to ‘the other’, to ‘the world’ are attempts to quieten and deny the broken middle, the third term which arises out of misrecognition of desire, of work, of my and of your self-relation mediated by the self-relation of the other.51

Dualisms, then, are an attempt to silence the broken middle: they prevent us from examining our relatedness to ourselves and to others; they prevent us from recognising the devastation that attends misrecognition; they prevent us from acknowledging the ways in which we are complicit in creating and sustaining misrecognition and violence. In short, dualisms silence the anxiety of the middle. The journey towards recognition, for Rose, is a difficult journey, but a productive one: it involves negotiation, change and growth. The learning that takes place is not the robust moral progress that underpins modern ethics; it is struggle-filled, hard-won and reversible. The struggle towards recognition engages with experience and particularity, but it does not valorise them as Other. It attends to the actuality of experience – learning the difficult ‘pain and lessons of experience’ – rather than emphasising its alterity.52 Rose maintains that to exclude experience from reason is to misunderstand and misrepresent reason. She argues that ‘To present experience, with its unwelcome and welcome surprises and with its structure, is the work of reason itself, its dynamic and its actuality’.53

Cosmopolitanism, Difference and Aporetic Universalism 93

Law A second, related dimension of aporetic universalism is law. Rose’s conception of law is neither the impoverished perception of law as legal status, perpetuated by strands of liberal thought, nor always and inescapably violent, as characterised by strands of postmodern thought. Instead, it is a productive engagement with the middle that works towards recognition: it draws attention to misrecognition, as it is mediated by institutions, and is underpinned by a full and relational conception of reason. In sum, for Rose, following Hegel, the drama of recognition is the essence of law. A speculative conception of law is emphatically not legal status, which works against recognition. The Enlightenment emphasis on legal status is grounded in an impoverished conception of reason that claims for itself ‘absolute and universal authority’ and, in doing so, ‘sweeps all particularity and peculiarity from its path’.54 As we saw earlier in this chapter, the emphasis on equal rights granted by legal status obfuscates the actuality of others.55 It works against critical reflection on social and political actualities, against critical reflection on the mismatch between Enlightenment promises and lived experience. The discourse of individual human rights illustrates the propensity of legal status to obscure and to silence, fostering a robust discourse of moral progress that distracts from underlying structures of power. Although aporetic universalism rejects the conception of law as abstract legal status, it refuses to abandon the system of law altogether, arguing that this, too, works against recognition. Rose points to Benjamin’s philosophy of law as exemplifying the postmodern rejection of law.56 Benjamin (and Derrida, following Benjamin) maintains that human law is inextricably linked with violence;57 however, Rose emphatically disagrees with the portrayal of law as ‘sheer violence’.58 She argues that if human law is demonised and rejected, instead of acknowledged and engaged, then there can be ‘no work, no exploring of the legacy of ambivalence, working through the contradictory emotions aroused by bereavement’.59 In short, the refusal of law amounts to a refusal of working through – a refusal of the activity of mourning, in favour of the passivity of melancholia. The postmodern portrayal of law as inherently violent relies on a particular conception of law as a ‘superior term which suppresses the local and contingent’:60 an understanding of law that is grounded in

94 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice an impoverished conception of reason as domineering and oppressive. However, Rose maintains that reason is only ‘dualistic, dominant and imperialistic’ because we make it so: at its best, reason is ‘relational, responsive and reconstructive’.61 We are responsible for impoverishing reason, by promoting rigid dualisms that work against recognition: ‘[o]nly its restriction by specific institutions renders it exclusive, oppositional and closed – and even then it must precariously maintain itself as such’.62 Aporetic universalism seeks to rehabilitate reason and, by extension, law, which, in their Enlightenment iterations, have too often suppressed particularity and worked against recognition. It refuses the demonisation of reason pervasive in strands of postmodern thought, maintaining that to eschew reason is to eschew the difficult work of recognition that is at the heart of working through the disasters of modernity. Without a robust conception of reason, critical reflection on actuality – on the diremption between law and ethics – cannot take place. A speculative account of law, then, is a motile account that is grounded in a very different conception of reason: a ‘relational, responsive and reconstructive’ understanding of reason that works towards recognition. This fuller, relational understanding of reason does not abstract from particularity; however, neither does it posit a radical particularity, unmediated by institutions or law. A speculative conception of law works towards comprehension of particular experience of exclusion and oppression, but this comprehension is rooted in attention to the way that institutions mediate particular experience. As Rose puts it: all and any experience, however long abused and recently uncovered, will be actual and not simply alter (Other): the discrepant outcome of idea and act will be traceable to meanings which transcend the boundaries of idea and act – to norm, imperative, commandment and inhibition, that is, to the law and its commotion.63

That is, the journey towards comprehension requires attention not only to the mismatch of promise and actuality, but also to the deeper web of meanings in which misrecognition takes place: ‘law and its commotion’. Law, on this account, refers not merely to rules and regulations, but to ‘what there is’:64 to the web of social norms, practices and institutions that shape human experience and that are, in turn, shaped by human experience.

Cosmopolitanism, Difference and Aporetic Universalism 95 From the perspective of aporetic universalism, with its emphasis on the Janus-faced third term of universal and aporia, the law is the ‘falling towards or away from mutual recognition, the triune relationship, the middle, formed or deformed by reciprocal self-relations’.65 Becoming aware of this commotion in the middle is at the heart of an education towards critical self-reflection. Rose argues that the law is ‘inseparable’ from Bildung, which comprises ‘education, cultivation, formation’66 and promotes a journey of coming to learn that we are always already engaged in structures of recognition and misrecognition. Vincent Lloyd, following Rose, argues that the task of philosophy is ‘critical reflection on the ordinary’67 and that this reflection begins with law: with what there is. That is, critical reflection on the ordinary begins with comprehension of actuality: analysing the web of social practices and institutions we inhabit, our own implication in creating and sustaining those norms and the ways in which they foster recognition and misrecognition. The process of critical reflection on the law and its commotion also tells us that such norms are not set in stone: they are inherently contestable and revisable.68 It is in the plasticity of the law that the potential for transformation resides.

Political risk A third dimension of aporetic universalism is political risk. We have seen that political risk-taking is an integral part of inaugurated mourning, of working through the ‘disasters of modernity’.69 The everyday experiences of exclusion and oppression are more hidden than the major traumatic events that are the focus of much writing on modern ‘disasters’; however, these more mundane experiences are insidious and damaging on a wide scale, and they, too, require recognition and working through. Political risk-taking cannot be isolated from other aspects of aporetic universalism; it is inextricably linked with the drama of recognition at the centre of speculative philosophy. Embarking on a journey towards recognition is inevitably risk-filled: it requires setting aside simplistic narratives and their attendant dualisms and working towards a transformed understanding of our selves and others. It is risky to explore the relation between self and Other: meaningful engagement between self and Other inevitably brings us up against our own violence towards the Other, whether or not that violence was intended.70 Such interactions facilitate learning, then, not only of the

96 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice Other, but – perhaps even more importantly – of ourselves and our own implication in facilitating and sustaining violence. We learn that the liberal rationalist vision of ourselves as abstractly universal individuals is pure fantasy: ‘the other is never simply other, but an implicated self-relation’.71 The journey towards recognition is, thus, inherently risk-filled on numerous levels, requiring that we learn about ourselves and others, as well as ask difficult questions about those structures that underpin our lives – economic, social, political – not taking them for granted as inevitable and unavoidable, but asking how they might be different. Robbie Shilliam’s work provides a practical illustration of what it might mean to critically interrogate the relation between self and Other, in the context of Western liberalism.72 He maintains that Western liberalism is built on a foundation of misplaced certainty and forgetting, asserting: [it] must consistently repress the memory of its own illiberalism, displace its culpable relationships to the non-Western/un-liberal worlds, and rationalize a fascististic obsession with the dominance of white, propertied heteromale bodies via an abstract universality that it calls human rights.73

He argues that the liberal West needs therapy to address its white supremacism. Such therapy requires a rejection of liberal certainty and a risk-filled journeying towards comprehension of its own illiberalism. Rather than acting decisively to ‘save’ the oppressed – through, for example, ‘humanitarian intervention’, taking on the mantle of liberator – Western liberalism must come to understand its role in fostering and sustaining oppressive structures of white supremacism. This requires Western liberals to work against ignorance and obfuscation, looking to past, as well as present, oppression of those that are deemed Other. Shilliam points to anti-racism workshops that took place in the 1980s in Aoteoroa New Zealand as exemplifying the sort of therapy that empowers liberal Westerners to challenge their own white supremacism. These pedagogical workshops provided Pakeha New Zealanders74 with an unsettling counterpoint to the dominant historical narrative of civilising colonisation, rendering visible that which had been hidden and encouraging Pakeha to come to know their own history as one of dispossession and oppression. In Rosean terms, these workshops facilitated a journey toward comprehension of self and

Cosmopolitanism, Difference and Aporetic Universalism 97 Other, challenging closely held assumptions that perpetuated continued exclusion and brokenness. They were a risky endeavour for those who took part in them, requiring a deep questioning of participants’ own implication in violence and oppression and what this meant both for themselves and for those deemed Other. They required participants to ‘stake themselves’ – to put aside that which they thought they knew to be true and embark on the difficult path of recognition of self and Other. As well as being inextricably linked with the drama of recognition, engaging politically is also closely linked with a Rosean understanding of law. Rose maintains that the poetics of law – a meta-understanding of law as a social activity working towards recognition – prompts us towards political engagement: it is this poetics of law, where the worlds of recognition are tragic (The Antigone) or comic (the modern hypertrophy of the subjective life), which would permit us to rediscover politics: to work through the mourning required by the disasters of modernity, to acknowledge them as body by returning the spirit of misrecognition to its trinity of full mutual recognition, instead of lamenting those disasters as the universal ‘spirit’ of metaphysics, of the logocentric West.75

To ‘acknowledge [the disasters of modernity] as body’ is to face social and political actualities instead of silencing them, to bring them into focus and to use this as the impetus for political action. The journey towards the ‘trinity of full mutual recognition’, then, begins with an acknowledgement of the misrecognition that pervades modernity. It is a work of mourning – a journey that refuses to abandon metaphysics, but that requires attention to both universal and aporia. Rose maintains that those in power and those out of power both face the temptation of pursuing only their own particular interests in the political realm. The pursuit of rights for oppressed, minority groups is one of the core planks of identity politics; however, Rose maintains that acting solely on the behalf of one’s own interests is not true politics. She argues: For politics 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. Politics in this sense requires representation, the critique of representation, and the critique of the critique of representation.76

98 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice The necessity of the two faces of aporetic universalism – universal and aporia – is highlighted in the quote above. Speculative philosophy has, at its core, the need to take ‘the risk of the universal interest’: to act, as far as possible, for the benefit of all. However, this impetus towards ‘the good of all’ is a dynamic process that works towards the universal good and that does so, in part, by attending to the gaps, fissures and damage experienced by those designated Other – that is, by attention to aporia, alongside the drive to the universal. The two faces of the ‘third term’, then, act as ethical witness to the social and political actualities of the middle. Reaching towards the universal – acting on the behalf of all – they nevertheless attend closely to the social and political actualities that eventuate. Speculative political risk entails multiple layers of representation and critique: it journeys constantly towards a more stable representation of actuality and a better outcome for all, evaluating and re-evaluating outcomes in the pursuit of a ‘good enough justice’.

Aporetic Universalism and the Politics of Immigration So far, this chapter has advocated Rosean aporetic universalism as a counter to the one-sidedness evinced by liberal cosmopolitan and postmodern ethics. In this final section, I seek to deepen the understanding of aporetic universalism by engaging with Bonnie Honig’s re-reading of the biblical Book of Ruth and its implications for the politics of immigration.77 Honig retells the story of Ruth from the middle – subverting conventional interpretations by employing the Freudian categories of mourning and melancholia to inform her analysis of Ruth and Naomi’s crossing from Moab to Bethlehem. The story of Ruth has much to say to debates about immigration politics, which are centrally concerned with questions of inclusion and exclusion. Honig notes that immigration is perceived both as a threat to protect the nation from and as a means of reinvigorating the nation, and that, in both cases, foreigners (the Other) are feared or welcomed for what ‘they will do to us’.78 Once immigrants cross state borders and adopt a new homeland, they face opposing temptations of ‘absorption versus enclavism’: on the one hand, the temptation of assimilating fully into their adopted country (and thus abrogating ties to their homeland); on the other hand, the temptation of retreating into a ‘separatist or nationalist enclave’ (and thus compounding their

Cosmopolitanism, Difference and Aporetic Universalism 99 loss by failing to form new ties in their adopted country).79 In all these instances – in the perception of the immigrant as an Other to be feared or welcomed for what they bring to us and in the decision by the immigrant to assimilate or retreat – misrecognition reigns and a successful transition fails to take place. Honig argues that a proper work of mourning is necessary for successful democratic transition and a productive renewal of a political and engaged cosmopolitanism: a cosmopolitanism that might be termed agonistic democracy. Honig’s retelling of the story of Ruth illustrates the central importance of creating space for a proper work of mourning in immigration politics. The story tells of border crossings, foreignness and transition. Naomi and Elimelech and their two sons had crossed from Bethlehem into Moab to escape a famine some years before the story starts. The move to Moab was not without controversy – in making the journey, the family were not only abandoning their hometown in the face of suffering, but also moving to a country that was an established enemy of the Israelites. The family settled in Moab, and the sons married Moabite women, Ruth and Orpah, despite the prohibition against intermarriage. Many years later, where the story begins, Naomi’s husband and sons have died, and she decides to return to Bethlehem. Her daughters-in-law make the first part of the journey with her, but Naomi soon encourages them to return to their homeland. The three women weep, and Ruth and Orpah declare their love and loyalty for Naomi and their intent to continue with her to Bethlehem. After some persuasion, Orpah decides to return to her people, but Ruth insists on staying with Naomi, saying: Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried. (Ruth 1: 16–17)

Naomi stops urging Ruth, and they travel together to Bethlehem. When they arrive, the women of Bethlehem warmly welcome Naomi. Naomi asks that they change her name to ‘Mara’, as a way of recognising her loss.80 She asks, ‘why then call ye me Naomi, seeing the Lord hath testified against me, and the Almighty hath afflicted me?’ (1: 21b). Naomi and Ruth set up house together, and Ruth works in the field of Boaz, a relative of her father-in-law, to support the household throughout harvest time. Naomi seeks a more

100 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice permanent situation for her daughter-in-law, however, and advises Ruth to seek Boaz’s protection one night on the threshing floor. Ruth does what she is told and eventually marries Boaz, with whom she has a child, Obed. When they hear that Ruth has given birth, the women of Bethlehem rejoice, praising God for giving Naomi a son again. They also praise Ruth, asserting that she has been better to Naomi than seven sons. After Obed’s birth, Naomi takes him and raises him as her own. Obed becomes the father of Jesse, who becomes the father of David, who becomes King. Thus David (and, later, Jesus) are direct descendants of Ruth – the Moabitess – and Boaz. The Book of Ruth has traditionally been interpreted as illustrating a tale of reinvigoration by assimilation, and more recent interpretations continue to portray Ruth as a ‘model immigrant’.81 Cynthia Ozick interprets the story of Ruth as a story of renewal, asserting that Ruth’s virtuousness as convert and loyal daughter-in-law laid the foundation for the inauguration of a monarchy.82 Julia Kristeva reads Ruth as a story of disruption, maintaining that this disruption also renews, as Israel becomes more open to otherness and difference.83 In both cases, Honig argues, Ruth is valued for what she brings to the Israelite order: even as she disrupts it, she affirms its worth through her conversion and assimilation. In this meeting of nation and Other, the Other embarks on a risky journey of recognition, but the nation does not. Honig, in contrast, seeks to retell the book of Ruth as a ‘parable of mourning and membership’,84 drawing on a psychoanalytic account of transitional objects and the Freudian categories of mourning and melancholy. Honig engages with the figure of Ruth on her own terms, not merely in terms of what Ruth does for the nation of Israel. On this reading, Ruth’s story is one of failed transition, of truncated mourning. Eric Santner’s work tells us that successful transitions depend on there being space for ‘mourning, empowerment, and intersubjectivity’.85 In Ruth’s case, these elements were notable for their absence: her loss of Orpah and Moab is traumatic and absolute, but it is not recognised as such, and she is unable to mourn. While Naomi was given space to mourn publicly – taking for herself the name of Mara, which means ‘bitter’, and speaking of her losses to the women of Bethlehem – she failed to introduce, or even mention, her daughter-inlaw. The women later value Ruth for what she does for Naomi, but she is not valued on her own terms, in all her particularity and difference, but for what she brings the community. Ruth’s loss of her homeland is compounded by the loss of Obed to Naomi, at the end of

Cosmopolitanism, Difference and Aporetic Universalism 101 the book – a loss about which she is silent, but which symbolises a further loss: a loss of a meaningful relationship with Naomi, her adopted mother. Thus, while Naomi is able to engage in a proper work of mourning on her return to Bethlehem, Ruth’s mourning is truncated and melancholic. Retelling Ruth as a ‘parable of mourning’ highlights the contexts in which a proper work of mourning can (and cannot) take place. Honig argues that it ‘teaches the importance [of] a meaningful and empowered agency of intersubjective spaces, actions in concert, multiple solidarities, civic powers, and (always contested) connections to the past’.86 There are strong parallels between Honig and Rose’s accounts of proper (inaugurated) mourning as central to a political negotiation of difference: the three dimensions of recognition, law and political risk that we have explored, in relation to Rose’s aporetic universalism, are also key elements of Honig’s account of a productive politics of immigration. Firstly, against the dominant processes of misrecognition at work in immigration politics, Honig advocates a journey towards mutual recognition. Both immigrants and receiving populations need to be willing to be disturbed by one another – to engage with one another and risk transformation as a result. She maintains that: [s]uccessful democratic transitions and expansions depend upon the willingness of both receiving populations and immigrants to risk mutual transformation, to engage and attenuate their home yearning for the sake of each other and their political life together.87

The willingness of both foreigners and nationals to be disturbed by one another, and so to learn about and transform their understanding of themselves and each other, is central to Rose’s conception of recognition. She argues that negotiation of self and Other ‘involves recognizing our mutual implication in the dynamics of the relationship, and it leads to changed self-definition inseparable from the changed mutual definition’.88 Such negotiation requires a rejection of fixed conceptions of both self and Other and a willingness to break and redraw established boundaries, which are ‘ever-vulnerable’.89 Secondly, there need to be appropriate spaces in which recognition and mutual transformation can be pursued. Honig draws on Eric Santner’s psychoanalytic writings on transitions to argue that the success of transitions depends, in large part, on the contexts in which they take place, pointing to the

102 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice significance of ‘institutions, culture, community and politics’.90 Successful transitions do not take place in isolation: they are enacted in community, in safe places that allow space for transitional object play, for working through.91 Honig highlights the role of subnational and transnational associations in creating spaces that facilitate the ‘serious political work and negotiation’92 of working through, pointing to neighbourhood groups and the sister-city movement as important sites of subnational and transnational association, respectively. These institutions become spaces in which nationalist assumptions can be challenged, in which the difficult work of translation between identity groups can be ventured and a journey towards recognition begun. Thirdly, engaging in a proper work of mourning is an empowering process that facilitates political agency and risk-taking, not only for the incoming immigrant, but also for the receiving population. Honig argues that engagement with the Other is the key to an invigorated cosmopolitanism: ‘the renewal of cosmopolitanism, the site and source of its energies, will come from engagements with foreigners who seem to threaten but with whom joint action is nonetheless possible – not easy, perhaps, but possible’.93

Conclusion This chapter argues that Rose’s aporetic universalism offers an alternative approach to thinking about difference, one that takes misrecognition and exclusion seriously and that insists upon a multilayered journey towards recognition. Whereas dominant responses work against comprehension of self and Other – occluding difference in the bestowal of abstract equality or reifying difference in the celebration of alterity – aporetic universalism starts in the middle, wrestling with the actualities of exclusion as they are inscribed in law and institutions, as well as on the bodies and lived experiences of those deemed Other. Aporetic universalism can be characterised as having three key dimensions: recognition, law and political risk. It sets its face against ignorance of social and political actuality: instead, it insists that we work towards comprehension of what is. Recognition takes place on multiple levels: it directs the gaze inwards on a journey of critical selfreflection and outwards on a journey towards comprehension of the stories of others. It attends not only to particular experiences of suffering and misrecognition, but also to the ways in which those

Cosmopolitanism, Difference and Aporetic Universalism 103 experiences are shaped by institutions; furthermore, it insists that we examine our own complicity in creating and sustaining such (institutionalised) misrecognition. Aporetic universalism is a deeply relational approach: it fosters an uneasy negotiation between universal and particular, self and Other – continually drawing attention to their mutual constitution. Aporetic universalism’s notions of law and political risk are inextricably tied to recognition. A speculative conception of law goes beyond rules, attending to the web of social norms, practices and institutions that underpin human experience – ‘the law and its commotion’94 – and interrogating the ways in which they foster recognition and misrecognition. The notion of political risk is embedded in the very concept of recognition: it is inherently risky to bring social and political actualities into focus, instead of silencing them, and to interrogate one’s own implication in violent structures and norms. The difficult path advocated by aporetic universalism entails an uneasy negotiation of the middle – one that works against ignorance and that takes agency seriously. Honig proffers a radical account of democratic agency, with Rosean political risk at its core. Drawing on Freud’s description of Moses as the foreign founder of Israel in Moses and Monotheism, she sketches a model of agency in which democratic subjects are always sceptical of their leaders and institutions. For Honig, radically democratic subjects who engage in political risk are: subjects who do not expect power to be granted to them by nice authorities with their best interests at heart; subjects who know that if they want power they must take it and that such taking is always illegitimate from the perspective of the order in place at the time; subjects who know that their efforts to carve out a just and legitimate polity will always be haunted by the violences of their founding; subjects who experience the law as a horizon of promise but also as an alien and impositional thing.95

These subjects live in an agonistic relationship with their law, institutions and leaders. They see glimpses of promise in the law, but do not expect that it is perfect or complete or that it will be wielded wisely by those who adjudicate it. These subjects are also ready to act – to engage in political risk – knowing that any action will have imperfect results and that no system will ever be complete. These subjects do not expect to ‘[mend] diremption in heaven and on earth’,96 nor do they indulge in an endless melancholy. Instead, they

104 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice ‘nurture some ambivalence regarding their principles, their leaders, and their neighbors and . . . put that ambivalence to good political use’.97 In fine, Rose’s aporetic universalism is all about taking political risk in the pursuit of a ‘good enough justice’. The emphasis on the pursuit of a ‘good enough justice’ is important, because it encourages us to stay in the middle and work through the brokenness we find there as best we can, refusing to be paralysed by the spectres of perfection or failure. Speculative philosophy emphatically rejects the desire to mend the broken middle, either in the pursuit of Enlightenment utopias that would solve global ills or in the hope that coming messianic utopias will enact radical transformation. Such visions of coming perfection distract us from present actualities; they quieten the anxiety of the middle.

Chapter 5 Between Tragedy and Utopia

In the previous chapter, I examined dominant approaches to thinking about exclusion and otherness: liberal abstract universality and postmodern difference. I argued that both approaches obfuscate the self and Other and that by working against recognition, they fail to negotiate the dilemma of difference in any meaningful sense. Although liberal cosmopolitanism and postmodern alterity are two prominent alternatives embraced by the Left in the wake of the fall of Communism, dissatisfaction with the paucity of the political of the former and the new essentialism of the latter has prompted the revival of two (more radical) alternatives: political realism and messianic utopianism. The former, promulgated by such thinkers as Carl Schmitt and Hans J. Morgenthau, has traditionally been seen as a conservative politics of the possible, but its annihilating critique of liberalism and its unflinching engagement with the tragic real have prompted its revival on the Left.1 The latter, promulgated by such thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, promotes a politics of the impossible that interrupts the given order with a messianism that looks to the past (Benjamin) or future (Derrida) in the hope of redemption. This broadly messianic tradition might be characterised as utopian; however, it rejects any sort of ideal theory or blueprint for action in the tradition of grand utopian narratives, instead embracing ‘hope in a blank utopia’.2 This chapter is divided into three parts. Part 1 explores the notion of a bleak or tragic vision of politics as a viable alternative to the liberal democratic order, examining the realist tradition, as exemplified by the works of Carl Schmitt and Hans J. Morgenthau. Part 2 explores the messianic politics of such thinkers as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Zˇizˇek, examining their calls for a radical

106 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice break with the given order. Part 3 argues that while both traditions offer rich critiques of the poverty of liberal democracy, drawing attention to the political underlying everyday politics, they ultimately fail to embrace the political in their own work. A tragic vision of politics, whilst admirable in its unflinching assessment of sociopolitical realities and the inevitability of tragic choices, shies away from a deeper analysis of political horrors and their implications for political theory and practice, taking refuge in tragic resignation. Similarly, messianic utopianism, which counters the bleakness of socio-political realities with a vision of a transformed world, refuses to allow any connection between human action and political transformation, proffering a hope devoid of any real content or promise. Rose’s speculative politics offers a difficult path between tragedy and utopia. She is fully alive to the tragic dimensions of contemporary politics in a broken world and emphasises the necessity of attending to the unforeseen consequences of political action; however, she refuses the resigned melancholia and conservatism of tragic resignation and insists instead upon the need to take political risk. She emphatically rejects the otherworldly messianism of radical Leftist thought; for Rose, hope is not an idealised place, but grounded in daily struggle and in taking the risk of comprehension.

Political Realism The political against liberal thought Profound disillusionment with the abstract universalism of liberal cosmopolitanism has prompted a number of contemporary international political theorists to turn to the tradition of political realism for its annihilating critique of liberal democracy and its articulation of a vision of politics that unflinchingly embraces the political.3 The two most influential thinkers in this tradition are Carl Schmitt and Hans J. Morgenthau, conservative legal theorists whose ‘hidden dialogue’ significantly shaped one another’s thought.4 Schmitt and Morgenthau had vastly different experiences of Germany in the 1930s: Schmitt became an influential Nazi intellectual, whereas Morgenthau, a German Jew, fled Nazi Germany and spent the last four decades of his life as an academic and foreign policy advisor in the United States.5 Nonetheless, they remained animated by a common central concern throughout their lives: the depoliticisation of politics. As we shall see,

Between Tragedy and Utopia 107 both thinkers highlight the pervasiveness of the political and warn of the danger of approaches that attempt to supplant it with moralistic and legalistic universals. In what follows, I outline Schmitt and Morgenthau’s definitions of the political and the way in which this shapes their critique of liberal thought. I then examine the place of tragedy in their work. Schmitt maintains that the political is best understood in terms of the distinction between friend and enemy.6 He argues that in making this claim, he is not concerned with abstract notions or normative ideals, ‘but with inherent reality and the real possibility of such a distinction’.7 For Schmitt, the political is concrete and actual: it is manifest in the antagonisms experienced in everyday politics. These antagonisms are expressed in a variety of more or less violent forms; however, the essence of the political is the ineradicable possibility that enmity might lead to killing – to extinguishing human life. Although war is the extreme consequence of such antagonism and is not always present, it is vitally important that we are aware of the ‘ever present possibility’ of conflict.8 Morgenthau’s notion of power politics draws heavily on Schmitt’s notion of the political. Indeed, Morgenthau’s writings were influential in shaping the revised notion of the political that Schmitt outlined in the second edition of The Concept of the Political (1932), although his contribution was not cited by Schmitt.9 Morgenthau’s dissertation (published in 1929) extends the definition of the political found in Schmitt’s first edition of the Concept (1927). In the early edition, Schmitt confines the notion of the political to a narrow sphere of concern; however, Morgenthau argues instead that the political can be manifest in any sphere of human activity and that it might be determined, rather, by the degree of intensity attending any conflict.10 Schmitt’s second edition of the Concept incorporates Morgenthau’s insight, noting, for example, that ‘[e]conomic antagonisms can become political, and the fact that an economic power position could arise proves that the point of the political may be reached from the economic as well as from any other domain’.11 Morgenthau extends the notion of the political further, by maintaining that its origins are found in human nature and are inescapable: ‘the Political is to be understood as a force that exists within the individual and is necessarily directed towards other people in the form of ‘‘a desire for power’’ ’.12 For both Schmitt and Morgenthau, then, the political is essentially a struggle for power: a struggle that is bypassed by liberal thought.

108 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice At the core of political realism’s critique of liberal thought is an abhorrence of its abstraction from the political in its promotion of liberal visions of international law and morality. Both Schmitt and Morgenthau maintain that the liberal belief that decisions should be made not primarily in the interest of particular states, but in the name of humanity, merely disguises the operation of power. They evince a nostalgic vision of international law, whereby the early modern European system of law is seen as providing the basis for restraint and (relative) civility in war between states. This restraint is abandoned with the ‘remoralization of international relations’ in the twentieth century, attributed largely to the revival of the concept of the ‘just war’ in the guise of American liberalism.13 Morgenthau is profoundly critical of the ‘rationalist’ character of modern liberalism, arguing that its assumption of Enlightenment forms of knowledge has obscured its emergence as a reaction to a particular set of historical conditions and impoverished its understanding of politics.14 This incarnation of liberalism embraces a social scientific view of politics, pointing to the triumph of reason and empirically verifiable truths over tradition and religious myth. Rationalist liberalism has embraced problem-solving theory wholeheartedly, adhering to a belief in ‘the power of science to solve all problems and, more particularly, all political problems which confront man in the modern age’.15 Such an approach has, at its root, a belief that ‘more facts’16 are all that is required to solve social and political dilemmas, attributing political failures to a lack of knowledge, rather than a lack of understanding. However, this vision of politics has no conception of the political: it has developed a ‘hostility against any kind of politics’,17 because of its historical beginnings in opposition to the aristocratic politics of domination and, as a result, it has reduced politics to instrumental and technical knowledge.18 Morgenthau points out that the ostensible rejection of politics in favour of rationality has not done away with the political in liberal societies: domination is alive and well. In the place of the ‘open violence’ of militarism, liberals have instigated a system of ‘indirect domination’, which ‘[hides] the very existence of power relations behind a network of seemingly equalitarian legal rules’.19 But for rationalist liberals, the operation of political power – despite its formative role in the history of liberalism – is not integral to domestic or international spheres and will eventually become obsolete. The only situation in which open violence is tolerated is where it is directed towards extending the

Between Tragedy and Utopia 109 circle of liberalism or defending defenceless others from tyrannical oppression.20 Schmitt also maintains that war cannot escape the logic of the political and argues that the idea that wars can be fought under the banner of humanity is a particularly virulent form of the liberal abstraction from power. Wars fought in the name of humanity have ‘an especially intensive political meaning’: such wars are fought not for humanity’s sake, but in order to ‘usurp a universal concept against its military opponent’.21 So-called ‘just’ or ‘humanitarian’ wars mask self-interest with moral intent: ‘the concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion’.22 According to Schmitt, not only are such wars dishonest, they are particularly brutal. Paradoxically, in order to fight for humanity, the enemy must be stripped of its humanity: an inescapable element of such wars is ‘denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity’.23 Thus, universal categories are wielded on the behalf of some, to the denigration of others. Such wars work against recognition on a number of levels: they work against the recognition of the political by those that wage war by cloaking power politics in such laudable ideals as ‘humanity . . . peace, justice, progress and civilisation’24 – promulgating selfdeception – and they work against the recognition of the Other by dehumanising the enemy.

Tragedy For both Schmitt and Morgenthau, then, liberal visions of moral progress under modernity are fictional: politics has become more brutal, not less, with the advent of liberal regimes of morality and legality. The liberal utopia is a dystopia: its obfuscation of the political fosters increased suffering by directing attention away from tragic reality. The notion of tragedy, perceived by liberal thinkers as beyond rationality and therefore largely irrelevant to the operation of global politics, is central to a political realist understanding of politics.25 For Schmitt and Morgenthau, an inability to face the inherent tragedy of political life is at the root of the disease of liberal thought. Morgenthau expresses this in terms of tragic choices in the international sphere.26 He maintains that even with the best of intentions, political actors remain trapped between an existential desire for the good and the harsh reality of needing to make difficult choices in an imperfect

110 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice world with inevitable negative consequences. In politics, ‘good’ choices are a fiction, and we must exercise wisdom and prudence to make the ‘least evil’ choice.27 Schmitt has an even bleaker and more thoroughgoing vision of tragedy. He asserts that the distinction between friend and enemy is at the base of all political motives and actions and that the possibility of war is ever-present. For Schmitt, this vision of the political is the tragic real and any attempt to avoid its seriousness through romantic or metaphysical displacement of actuality ought to be emphatically discouraged. For both thinkers, to act in pursuit of normative goals is a mistake; it assumes a rationalist vision of politics that does away with the political in favour of progress through Enlightenment thinking. Morgenthau argues that the notion of tragedy is an important counter to the ‘historical optimism’ characteristic of the rationalist liberalism dominating American thought.28 For Morgenthau, the emphatic belief that progress is inevitable, given humankind’s capacity for rational thought and increased scientific knowledge, is at the heart of the ‘disease’ of liberal thought.29 Although we might desire progress in an abstract sense, the realities of power politics render it wishful thinking. The dissonance between our desire for progress towards the good and the reality of life in an imperfect world is a tragedy: [s]uspended between his spiritual destiny which he cannot fulfil and his animal nature in which he cannot remain, [man] is forever condemned to experience the contrast between the longings of his mind, and his actual condition as his personal, eminently human tragedy.30

However, this tragic vision of politics – ‘the awareness of unresolvable discord, contradictions, and conflicts which are inherent in the nature of things and which human reason is powerless to solve’31 – ought to be recognised and faced without flinching. To avoid doing so and, instead, to continue living in a liberal fantasy world in which global problems can and will be solved with effort, is to compound the problems we face. For Morgenthau, then, a tragic vision of politics is deeply agonistic, in which desire for the good battles against the harsh realities of the political. Schmitt’s vision of tragedy is less agonised and tortured than Morgenthau’s: whereas Morgenthau’s vision conveys a strong sense of a desire for morality battling against the harsh realities of political

Between Tragedy and Utopia 111 life, Schmitt’s vision conveys an unflinching acceptance of the political.32 Schmitt’s notion of tragedy is profitably explored in contrast to the notion of Trauerspiel, or Baroque theatre, as outlined by Walter Benjamin in The Origin of German Tragic Drama.33 As noted earlier, Trauerspiel is a repetitive allegorical mourning play, to which Benjamin was attracted in the wake of the horrors of World War I. Benjamin was influenced by Schmitt’s methodological extremism and his theory of sovereignty and, in 1930, sent him a copy of his book with a note expressing his debt to Schmitt.34 Much later, after Benjamin’s death, Schmitt continued his conversation with Benjamin with the publication of Hamlet or Hecuba: The Incursion of Time in Play (1956).35 In this work, Schmitt responds to the distinction Benjamin makes in The Origin of German Tragic Drama between tragedy and Baroque theatre (Trauerspiel). Benjamin maintains that Baroque theatre is concerned with ‘historical life’ and, as such, it differs from tragedy, which is concerned with ‘the past ages of heroes’.36 As for Schmitt, the primary driver of history for Benjamin is the sovereign: ‘The Sovereign represents history. He holds the course of history in his hand like a scepter.37 However, contra Schmitt, although the figure of the sovereign is responsible for proclaiming the state of the exception, in Trauerspiel, he is portrayed as deeply human and ‘reveals, at the first opportunity, that he is almost incapable of making a decision’.38 This very creaturely sovereign is paralysed by melancholy and unable to transcend it. Instead, he remains transfixed in contemplation of the death mask (facies hippocratica). For Benjamin, Hamlet is Trauerspiel. However, it is an exception to traditional Baroque theatre in that the figure of Hamlet is able to attain some degree of transformation through his observance of the play at court (the play within the play), which leads to reflection and ‘enigmatic mourning’. Schmitt maintains that Benjamin’s reflections on Hamlet ‘ennoble play’, imbuing the play with a measure of redemption that Schmitt finds abhorrent and untrue.39 For Schmitt, in contrast, Hamlet is tragedy, where tragedy is marked by an unflinching confrontation of actuality. Schmitt’s argument is based, in part, upon his assertion that Hamlet is not mere fiction, but inextricably entwined with the historical realities of the time: the figure of Hamlet draws on James I of England (or VI of Scotland) and the Earl of Essex, whereas his mother represents Mary Stuart. Hence, the supposition that Hamlet’s mother was implicated in the murder of his father was not mere fiction; instead, ‘through the

112 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice masks and costumes, shimmered a frightening historical reality’.40 Schmitt maintains that tragedy is distinguished from sadness by ‘the objective reality of the tragic happening itself’. He argues that the ‘seriousness’ of this reality ‘cannot be playfully gambled away’.41 Where theatre does not express concrete reality, but instead indulges in romantic or metaphysical pretension, it is ‘lukewarm’ (to borrow the language of John’s Revelation),42 where the lukewarm is ‘that which is unforthcoming and wants to effectuate an erosion of seriousness and emergency’.43 The indecision and romantic melancholy of the Trauerspiel transforms the real into the unreal and leaves no room for the political, for the binary distinction between friend and enemy. Aesthetics, therefore, ought to express tragic reality: ‘The tragic arises out of every horror that is understood as the ‘authentic’ perspective of reality’.44 A ‘self-effacing aesthetic’ – one that shies away from the political, replacing it with the endless technical manipulation of parliamentary democracy – is a creation of liberalism. A tragic aesthetic, in contrast, embraces the political: a move that is clearest in the state of emergency, where ‘[t]he inability to make a decision . . . must be stricken down with authority and the delay must be overcome through action’.45 Thus, Schmitt’s tragic vision insists upon space for decision, by the sovereign, and for action. It sits in marked contrast to a Benjaminian Trauerspiel, which is marked by the absence of decision and ‘the possibility for unending appeal and revision’.46

Utopian Hope Thinkers in the tradition of political realism invoke the notion of tragedy in politics and advocate a conservative politics of the possible in response, challenging the strong belief in moral progress that underlies rationalist liberalism. Thinkers in the tradition of critical theory also invoke the notion of tragedy; however, they respond with a politics of the impossible, supplementing an awareness of ongoing domination and oppression with utopian hope.47 This very different response to pervasive suffering insists upon the necessity of a rupture of the given order that would halt the descent into the abyss (Benjamin), affirm a future-to-come (Derrida) or signal the traumatic Real underlying the social order (Zˇizˇek). These thinkers’ writings offer a sharp challenge to the complacency of liberal democracy, meeting Enlightenment rationality with (secular) theology. Like Schmitt and

Between Tragedy and Utopia 113 Morgenthau, they point to the dangers of an apolitical pursuit of moral progress through law and parliamentary democracy and invoke non-rational concepts (such as tragedy) to counter the disease of liberal rationalism. However, they reject the pedestrian politics of the everyday in favour of a messianic rending of the given social and political order, proposing a radically different notion of time and temporality to that adopted by realist and liberal conceptions of politics. The idea of utopia, coined by Thomas More in 1516, has, at its core, a play on words that signals its inherent ambiguity. Depending on the Greek prefix used (et or ot), it can mean ‘good place’ or ‘nonplace’ – referencing a place of perfection or happiness on the one hand or a place that does not (yet) exist on the other.48 The concept of utopia has been much maligned over the centuries by those who maintain that utopian thought is a delusion, and that utopian dreams are unrealistic and unrealisable and, therefore, should be abandoned. Realist thinkers are wary of utopian precepts, advocating prudence and cautioning against attempts at transformation. Radical thinkers on the Left also reject the idea of utopia as commonly portrayed: as a positive vision of a ‘good place’ that might be attained through moral progress. However, there is another image of utopia that remains compelling for these thinkers: a vision that veers more towards the idea of utopia as the ‘non-place’, as a radical transformation of the status quo. This is the type of utopian vision that animates the thought of thinkers such as Benjamin, Derrida, Adorno and Zˇizˇek: it does not sketch a picture of an ideal place, but instead invokes that which is suppressed by the given order – the memory of an ideal age (Benjamin), the non-identical (Adorno), the ‘future-to-come’ (Derrida) and the Real (Zˇizˇek). This image of utopia is a messianic vision that is perhaps especially present amidst catastrophe – as a marker of ‘a stubborn impulse toward freedom and justice’49 in the presence of persistent suffering, exploitation, inequality and horror. It is the promise of redemption, an orientation towards that which is not now present. This strand of thought, which might be termed messianic, is an increasingly influential alternative to both the optimistic pursuit of progress under modernity and the pessimistic refusal of progress by political realism. Although messianic strands of thought emphatically reject positive Enlightenment notions of progress, they hold fast to the (more negative) concept of promise: to the possibility of redemption as a counter to bleak reality. Contemporary messian-

114 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice ism draws on the messianism of the early twentieth century and, in particular, on the work of Walter Benjamin, who continues to be a significant figure. In what follows, I briefly outline the emergence of Jewish messianism in the twentieth century as a way of situating Benjamin’s thought. I then gesture towards contemporary incarnations of the messianic in the work of Derrida and Zˇizˇek.

Walter Benjamin and Jewish messianism In the years leading up to World War I, a strand of German-Jewish thought emerged that challenged the dominant rationalist Judaism of the twentieth century. Described by Anson Rabinbach as ‘apocalyptic, catastrophic, utopian and pessimistic’,50 this messianism clung to a vision of the world made new – a vision that required the apocalyptic destruction of the old order to make way for a (redeemed) new order. Such thinking was particularly strong in Jewish circles and dominated a cross-section of modern Jewish thought in the first three decades of the twentieth century, although it was also significant in certain strands of Catholic and Protestant thought.51 According to Rabinbach, there are four dimensions that are particularly characteristic of the Jewish messianism of the early twentieth century.52 First, there is an emphasis on the ‘utopian content of the past’53 and the hope that this might be restored in the future. This idealisation of originary aspects of the past and the hope of their restoration rejects all forms of reformism. Instead, there is an emphasis on recovering a secret knowledge from images and texts that embody utopian fragments of an ideal age. Second, there is a strong redemptive element that portrays the coming utopia as bringing unity to a previously fragmented world. Such redemption takes place as a decisive rupture of history, signalling a complete break with all that has gone before. Third, there is a robust apocalyptic strand, which points to the catastrophe that accompanies the destruction of the previous age. This devastation, and its accompanying redemption, takes place outside history and, thus, is not brought about by particular acts or historical processes. Fourth, there is an emphasis on the inability of political activity to bring about any such radical change. The emergence of Jewish messianism in the early twentieth century is inextricably linked with the experience of catastrophe during World War I.54 The war profoundly shaped Benjamin’s oeuvre: his attrac-

Between Tragedy and Utopia 115 tion to Trauerspiel was, in part, born out of his dissatisfaction with traditional symbolic forms of mourning and a search for a more ritualistic form of remembrance that would prevent the premature closure of traumatic wounds. Martin Jay argues that his attraction to Trauerspiel can be traced even more specifically to the desire to keep alive the memory of two close friends – the poet Friedrich Heinle and his lover, Frederika Seligson – whose anti-war suicides were a horrific manifestation of the war, but whose deaths were unable to be remembered in the language of traditional mourning.55 The ritualistic form of remembrance – embodied by the Baroque mourning play – looks to the past, staying with catastrophe, in order to mark its pain and to prevent the premature closure of the wound. Benjamin’s experiences during the war produced work that is closely attuned to the tragedy inherent in social and political life and famously hostile to Enlightenment notions of moral progress, maintaining that ‘there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’.56 In his reflections on Paul Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus, Benjamin depicts progress as ‘one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage’.57 The angel of history is being blown inexorably towards the future, but its face is fixed in horror upon the growing piles of rubble that is the past. These expanding piles of rubble are the effects of progress, the markers of evolution towards a better world for the given order. Benjamin’s emphatic rejection of progress goes hand-in-hand with a rejection of individual or communal power to enact radical political change – a disconnect that is one of the markers of Jewish messianism. The emphasis on catastrophe in Benjamin’s thought – on the ‘shocks’ of modern life – is shot through with those elements of messianic thinking outlined by Rabinbach. It is oriented towards the past not only as a guard against forgetting past horrors, but also as a source of utopian hope; it holds before it a horizon of redemption, the promise of a break with what has gone before; it posits a rupture that is absolute and apocalyptic; and it vigorously opposes a vision of history as human progress. These elements of Benjamin’s thought borrow heavily from Jewish theology; indeed, they depend upon it. The figure of the Messiah is necessary for a vision of history that rejects all forms of reformism or revision, whilst continuing to posit redemption. Benjamin’s thought is, in fact, deeply theological, despite his acknowledgement that theology is a figure ‘which today, as we

116 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight’.58 He does not concern himself with the nature of God or with our relation to Him; he promulgates a secular theology that separates theology from revelation. However, Benjamin is deeply concerned with what Gershom Scholem describes as the essence of theology: ‘man’s innermost and darkest needs’59 – needs that are set aside by Enlightenment forms of knowing that reduce human beings to little more than ‘work machines’.60 Benjamin believes that the modern world is ‘infinitely impoverished’ and that any redemption lies in the metaphysical realm beyond the ordinary rational experience of the senses.61 Returning to Rabinbach’s elements of messianism, we see that Benjamin’s messianism is oriented towards the past: he perceives utopian content as residing in what has gone before, rather than that which is to come. This ‘spark of hope in the past’62 resides both in historical time – in remembrance of what has gone before – and in metaphysical time – in flashes of insight into what the world was before the Fall.63 Messianic time resides at the intersection between the past (Vergangenheit) and the moment (Augenblick): every instant contains messianic potential that might be converted into messianic action, via an image of past oppression: ‘that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger’.64 Benjamin warns that the utopian content of the past is at risk of vanishing under the stultifying forces of modernity and that it is the task of the historian to take hold of such memories and rescue them, keeping them alive as a marker of redemption. For Benjamin, then, redemption does not reside in a utopian future, but in fragments of remembrance. There is an affinity between the present generation and those generations that have gone before, and this affinity is a source of power for the present generation: a ‘weak Messianic power’.65 Thus, the Social Democratic strategy of orienting the working class toward a happy, hope-filled future, as the ‘redeemer of future generations’, is, in effect, a means of cutting them off from their greatest source of strength.66 For Benjamin, the working classes’ ‘greatest strength’ lies far more in the remembrance of their ancestors’ oppression, than in the vision of their descendants’ freedom. Such remembrance entails the collision of messianism and historical materialism, opening up a space for messianic action in the present, prompted by the present generation’s response to the experience of the oppressed. Benjamin’s vision of redemption is twinned with an apocalyptic

Between Tragedy and Utopia 117 vision of transformation. He refuses to posit reformist ‘steps’ that might be taken towards such transformation; for Benjamin, redemption is not an historical possibility that might be worked towards and achieved, but a logical postulate that reveals the actuality of the world.67 On the one hand, then, Benjamin’s messianism is decidedly anti-political: ‘the messianic idea stands outside of and opposed to any immanent historical activism that might bring about its realization’.68 On the other hand, however, some of his later writings gesture towards a relation between political action and apocalyptic transformation: ‘Critique of Violence’, in its affirmation of divine violence;69 ‘Theologico-Political Fragment’, in its assertion that the pursuit of happiness is to be encouraged, because it inevitably ushers in unhappiness and, thus, furthers the ‘task of world politics’;70 and ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in its invocation of a need to ‘bring about a real state of emergency’, in order to further ‘the struggle against fascism’.71 The relation between action and transformation is deeply agonistic, however; Benjamin’s hope for a transformed world is ultimately removed from any agency we might wield on our own behalf. The Jewish messianic tradition has recently experienced a revival, with an explosion of interest in the work of Benjamin, in particular. These contemporary incarnations of messianism are usually twinned with a deep pessimism about politics in the present: in this sense, they have strong affinities to political realism, being similarly alert to the tragedy of the political.72 However, unlike political realists, messianic thinkers look beyond the tragedy of the present and hold fast to a utopian vision that keeps the ethical impulse alive. Particularly influential thinkers in this vein include Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Zˇizˇek.73 Their conceptions of the political differ considerably; however, like Benjamin, they disrupt the liberal belief in progress under modernity, promulgate utopias of the ‘non-place’ variety and pursue a politics of the impossible. Contemporary thinkers in a broadly messianic tradition resolutely dispute modern visions of progress through rationality. Zˇizˇek rejects the liberal rationalist belief that a shift away from ideology and towards a reliance on ‘neutral insight’ is a mark of progress, of ‘the inexorable process of the maturation of humanity’.74 Derrida rejects the liberal belief that history might be ‘understood’ in simplistic, linear terms as working towards a comprehensible, achievable utopia of the ‘good place’ variety. Like Benjamin, Derrida disrupts

118 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice a linear historicist notion of time. However, whereas Benjamin’s messianism is oriented firmly towards the past, Derrida’s messianicity is oriented towards both the past and future.75 Benjamin’s notion of messianic time stands at the intersection between the present and past: history should no longer be viewed as a series of events that are interconnected ‘like the beads of a rosary’,76 but as a constellation of past and present able to be rearranged in a (redemptive) flash. Derrida’s notion of disjointed time allows the messianic event to be thought of as a future-to-come outside teleological history, in a ‘time without certain joining or determinable conjunction’,77 a time wholly Other.78 The content of messianic promise remains opaque for Zˇizˇek and Derrida; however, both thinkers insist that a content-less emancipatory alternative must be affirmed in its very impossibility. Zˇizˇek maintains that utopian imaginaries of the first kind – those that sketch an ‘ideal place’– have failed, be they socialist visions of the Left or faith in market economy propounded by the Right. However, he refuses to embrace the ‘cynical resignation’ of what he terms the ‘Leftist knave’: those ‘figures who preach cynical resignation, that is, the necessary failing of every attempt actually to achieve something in the basic functioning of global capitalism’.79 Instead, like Benjamin, Zˇizˇek advocates a utopian imaginary of the second kind – an imaginary that sketches a ‘non-place’. He insists that ‘[t]oday, in the face of this Leftist knavery, it is more important than ever to hold this utopian place of the global alternative open, even if it remains empty, living on borrowed time, awaiting the content to fill it’.80 He believes that genuine social transformation is impossible, because the existing social order – the symbolic realm of law, culture and society – is so influential and all-encompassing that we cannot perceive alternative ways of being.81 However, for Zˇizˇek, the task of the radical Left is to pursue this impossibility. Derrida also insists that we hold fast to content-less utopia. He maintains that messianic anticipation and critique together comprise the spirit of Marx and that these are ‘open to the absolute future of what is coming, that is to say, a necessarily indeterminate, abstract, desert-like experience that is confided, exposed, given up to its waiting for the other and the event’.82 According to Derrida, any attempt to give content to the promise results in the delineation of law, which is inescapably violent.83 For Derrida, then, justice is always in the future-to-come, never in the here-and-now; it resides

Between Tragedy and Utopia 119 outside our linear conception of history. It is impossible; however, we must affirm it in its very impossibility as an impetus to ethical action: not only must one not renounce the emancipatory desire, it is necessary to insist on it more than ever, it seems, and insist on it, moreover, as the very indeconstructibility of the ‘it is necessary’. This is the condition of a repoliticization, perhaps of another concept of the political.84

Rose: Between Tragedy and Utopia Rose’s thought has many commonalities with the tragic sensibility held by political realism and messianic utopianism. These strands of thought stand in emphatic opposition to rationalist political theory, which would solve the world’s ills through recourse to more, and better, knowledge. Rose, too, sets her face against a robust belief in moral progress through rationality. Like the tragic consciousness of political realism and the messianism of the radical Left, she squarely faces the socio-political realities of contemporary politics. However, although Rose rejects utopianism of the ‘good place’ variety (pursued by reform or revolution),85 she also refuses the alternatives posited by political realism and messianic utopianism. Rose’s project is a progressive project that takes on the political by doing the difficult work of the middle. She refuses to preclude the possibility of progress, holding always before her the potential for transformation. Such transformation does not emerge as a matter of course; instead, it is a struggle-filled pursuit of a ‘good enough justice’. For Rose, the political is located in a difficult work of mourning, of critical selfreflection and of agency: it is located between tragedy and utopia. Rose’s critique of messianic utopianism has three interrelated strands – she asserts that it promotes an impoverished conception of law and reason, it is unable to engage in critique and that it advocates a ‘counsel of hopelessness’86 in the guise of messianic hope. Although messianic thinkers hold fast to a notion of promise to counter the bleakness of tragic actuality and keep the ethical impulse alive, the promise is devoid of content and remains far off. Derrida conceives of a justice-to-come that is wholly Other, and Benjamin juxtaposes melancholia and the divine; neither thinker allows comprehension of the broken middle, the here-and-now, manifested in law, institutions and political engagement.87 At the centre of Rose’s critique of the messianic tradition is a

120 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice rejection of its perception of law. For Derrida and Benjamin, the law is violence and loss and is inimical to justice. Derrida’s conception of deconstructive justice resists assigning it content, conceiving it as an ‘impossible’ justice that resides outside our conception of historical time.88 Ware summarises Derrida’s position succinctly: Whenever we determine the content of justice . . . we obtain law instead. Law is always algebraic, centred on an economy of rules, restitution, divestiture, appropriation, and all the totalizing norms of representation that rest on self-presence. Law seeks to reify the relation to the other in a fixed determination of codes and protocols that strip the other of its singularity and uniqueness. Justice, on the other hand, is impossible, not in a negative sense, but in the sense that it can never have self-presence.89

Derrida’s perception of law, then, is an impoverished notion of law as formal legal status that fixes us in rigid relation to the Other – it is what we achieve when we attempt to determine the content of justice. He points beyond established conceptions of justice and law to a justice that cannot be known or prescribed: ‘Justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible’.90 To assign content to justice would be to formulate abstract rules that shut down the possibility of justice and reify the Other. According to Rose, deconstruction mystifies justice and disqualifies critique by promulgating a ‘universal but general piety’ that fails to explore the ways in which law fosters recognition and misrecognition.91 Derrida’s notion of justice, conceived in opposition to grand utopian narratives of justice, is, in fact, a ‘mirror image’ of what it seeks to discredit. Rose asserts that ‘deconstruction offers violence before the law, where grand narrative is said to have offered peace after law’: neither attends to the specific historical configurations of violence.92 From a speculative perspective, then, a messianic conception of justice works against comprehension and against critique. Contra Derrida, Rose advocates the demystification of justice, grounded in reflection on the ordinary, on law and its commotion. She argues that rather than affirming the impossible or the future-tocome: what needs investigating is the fate of modern law – the diremption and discrepancy between its formal promises and the social actuality they presuppose and reproduce. Then the violent acting out of the nationalist or racist phantasies engendered by these discrepancies may be compre-

Between Tragedy and Utopia 121 hended instead of being exalted to a pure originary violence or degraded to the violence of pure formal law as such. This would be to demystify law without compensatory myth and without hallowing history as holocaust.93

Rose’s insistence that we explore the gap between Enlightenment promises and actuality is a call for attention to lived experiences as they are mediated by institutions, history and law, broadly conceived. It reaches towards comprehension, investigating the ways in which the institutions of the middle foster recognition and misrecognition. Against an impoverished conception of law that would fix the Other in rigid relation, this speculative conception of law has recognition at its core. Rose maintains that the conception of hope promulgated by messianic thinkers is an ephemeral hope devoid of substance: ‘[i]t is a counsel of hopelessness which extols Messianic hope’.94 She portrays Benjamin as a ‘taxonomist of sadness’,95 who traces the unintended consequences of the Protestant ethic (inwardness and the end of politics) and the Baroque ethic (aestheticised politics without redemption).96 However, the melancholy that results from Benjamin’s engagement with tragic actuality is not wrestled with on its own terms; instead, it is met with a messianic interruption of melancholy that sits outside actuality, outside difficulty: his figures of melancholy . . . are not counterposed to recognition, love, forgiveness or faith: and therefore their mourning is not completed; it remains aberrated not inaugurated. The figures of melancholy are counterposed instead to the Divine, which is characterized by pure violence or pure language . . . [and] eschews law or mediation or representation. As a result, subjective, fallen melancholy judgement can only be overthrown by the expiation of bloodless violence of a new, divine immediacy.97

The juxtaposition of melancholy and messianism allows no room for ambiguity or equivocation; it allows no room to struggle towards recognition or to work through the disasters of modernity. Instead, all judgement is perceived as violent, and a messianic interruption of actuality is all that can be posited. Messianic notions of promise disrupt linear historical notions of temporality and progress, counterposing alternative conceptions of time that look to an idealised past (Benjamin) or future (Derrida). Tarik Kochi argues that this interruption of linear time ordinarily

122 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice conceived is a central tenet of messianism.98 It stands opposed to traditional utopias that remain within historical time, purport to understand it and prescribe blueprints for action. Messianic thought disrupts the now – indeed, Derrida ‘spits on the present’99 – not in order to deny the possibility of progress as such, but to deny the possibility of understanding or fore-ordaining temporality.100 Speculative philosophy, in contrast, remains resolutely within the present, situated in historical and socio-political context. It rejects a strong notion of inevitable, linear moral progress; however, it insists upon agonistically engaging actually existing historical time. It does not purport to understand temporality, but it struggles toward comprehension of actuality, despite its gaps and fissures. This agonistic engagement with the present is an acknowledgement that human experience is actual, not Other, and that it is situated in a rich web of social, political and historical context. It is worth revisiting a quote from Judaism and Modernity, the first part of which we saw in the previous chapter: But all and any experience, however long abused and recently uncovered, will be actual and not simply alter (Other): the discrepant outcome of idea and act will be traceable to meanings which transcend the boundaries of idea and act – to norm, imperative, commandment and inhibition, that is, to the law and its commotion. To promise anything else, any new righteousness which will not be subject of and subject to the difficulty of actuality, which will never become unjust, is to disempower.101

Rose insists upon an agonistic engagement with the present, one that remains with the ‘difficulty of actuality’. To bypass this difficulty by pointing to an impossible justice that is alter, that resides outside temporality, is to disempower. The positing of utopias of either kind – ‘good place’ or ‘non-place’ – works against difficulty and against the political.

Rose and the aporetic way Rose’s rejection of utopian thought is thoroughgoing: it refuses utopianism of the ‘good place’, as well as utopianism of the ‘nonplace’. She judges both incarnations as manifestations of euporia – the easy way – and advocates in their place aporia – the difficult way. In the last chapter, we saw the difficult way manifested as aporetic universalism against abstract equality and postmodern difference and

Between Tragedy and Utopia 123 explored its implications in terms of recognition, law and political risk. To conclude the present chapter, I explore aporetic universalism situated against utopian evasions of actuality, drawing on Rose’s characterisation of Rosa Luxemburg as a thinker who embraced an aporetic path, in response to the twin utopian alternatives of reformism and centrism.102 Rose presents Luxemburg as a thinker who refuses to become implicated in the ‘contrary barbarisms’ of reformism and centrism, but who expounds their misrecognitions by ‘attending consistently to the equivocation of the ethical – the perduring inversions of law’.103 On this account, Luxemburg stays with the double dangers of reformism and centrism, judging both lacking, and promotes, instead, an aporetic way. Her essay, ‘Reform or Revolution’, presents reformism as promoting bourgeois morality, in the form of ‘reconciliation with the existing social order and the transfer of the hopes of the proletariat to the limbo of ethical simulacra’.104 Reformism stultifies change by pre-judging it. Eduard Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism (1899) maintains that capitalism will be transformed via the operation of trade unions and parliamentary activity.105 However, this judgement leaves no room for evidence to the contrary: instead, it obfuscates misrecognition through a belief in objective laws of socialisation and the bestowal of formal legal equality, ignoring the gulf between legal status and actuality in an obsession with form over substance and power. In sum, reformism ‘denies the contradictions and undermines comprehension of them by the working class and undermines the potential of the working class for transformative activity’.106 If Bernstein’s reformism promotes bourgeois morality through socialisation, Lenin’s centrism promotes a ‘temptation of pure culture’ through discipline.107 Lenin ‘glorifies the educative influence of the factory’ for its imposition of ‘discipline and organisation’,108 which augments the discipline already being propagated by the military and centralised state and argues that this same discipline can be used to establish an ‘omniscient and omnipotent Central Committee’ that can speak for the proletariat.109 Luxemburg challenges this elision, arguing that imposed discipline fosters repression and leads to depravity: ‘Decree, dictatorial force of the factory overseer, draconian penalties, rule by terror – all these things are but palliatives. The only way to a rebirth is the school of public life itself’.110 Luxemburg judges both reformism and centrism as working

124 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice against transformation, despite their stated intent. They depend too heavily on formal means (be they social democratic or centralist); they ‘hope to fix once and for always, the direction of the revolutionary socialist struggle’.111 In the place of these formalistic and prescriptive pathways, Luxemburg expounds a difficult, or aporetic, way. She develops the notion of the ‘mass strike’, whereby ‘the popular masses themselves, in opposition to the ruling classes, are to impose their will’ and notes that ‘they must effect this outside of the present society, beyond the existing society’.112 Rose emphasises that the ‘outside’ and ‘beyond’, to which Luxemburg refers, are not utopian ‘without a place’, but aporetic ‘without a path’.113 Indeed, Luxemburg’s response embodies ‘the difficult path’: [H]er authorship is the difficult path of the repeated recognition of mediators which prevents any fixing of the outcome of the previous ‘daily struggle’. The ‘daily’ or quotidian is the aporia – the difficult path, ‘outside’ and ‘beyond’, which is, qua difficulty, temporally inside and within, continual but not continuous, intermittent but never-ending as opposed to incessant but coming to a finite end.114

Rose’s interpretation of Luxemburg’s difficult path, then, contrasts it with utopian thought that would prescribe or judge the form of the struggle for transformation. An aporetic way refuses to prescribe form or outcome – it ‘prevents the fixing of the outcome’ – instead, it emphasises the struggle for recognition that happens on a daily basis and the need to constantly revisit and revise the outcome of that struggle. The struggle is grounded in the everyday, but at the same time, reaches ‘outside’ and ‘beyond’ the existing society, taking the risk of the universal alongside the pursuit of justice in the here and now. The centre of Luxemburg’s critique of reformism and centrism, according to Rose, is that ‘[i]n both cases, the refusal to recognize ambiguity amounts to a refusal of the equivocation of the ethical’.115 Returning to one of the key themes of Rose’s thought, then, these utopian methods display insufficient anxiety. Rose argues that Luxemburg’s writings highlight the need for a ‘more thoroughgoing anxiety’116 that would eschew the temptation of prescribing unequivocal method and outcome, but that would instead ‘cultivate the plasticity of aporia’.117 Such plasticity acknowledges and embraces ambiguity and equivocation; it is also willing to struggle and take

Between Tragedy and Utopia 125 risks in pursuit of a ‘good enough justice’. Rose maintains that Luxemburg encourages political engagement that is ‘willing to be ‘‘premature’’, to act on faith with what knowledge it can muster, to fail even, but thereby to gain in self-knowledge and self-consciousness’.118

Conclusion Disaffection with the perceived bankruptcy of liberal thought has prompted a number of thinkers on the Left to turn to political realism or messianic utopianism as alternatives that take the political seriously. Both strands of thought are devastatingly critical of liberal assumptions of progress under modernity. Political realists argue that liberalism abstracts from the inevitable tragedy of living in a world governed by the pursuit of power and that morality too often masks brutality. Messianic thinkers concur, but call for a radical interruption of linear temporality that meets tragedy with a determined affirmation of the impossible, in order to keep utopian hope alive. Rose’s aporetic universalism refuses the temptations of both tragic resignation and messianic utopianism. Although she is similarly critical of the abstract universalism and sanguine morality of liberal cosmopolitan thought, she maintains that to abandon a transformative project (political realism) or to pursue the promise of a messianic ‘new righteousness’119 that resides outside existing historical time (messianism) is to opt out of the difficulty of the political. For Rose, the political resides in the dogged pursuit of justice in the everyday. This pursuit begins by remaining with the ‘difficulty of actuality’,120 working towards recognition of the gap between intention and outcome and of our own violence in perpetuating continued injustice. The struggle is grounded in the present, in all its situatedness; it also reaches ‘outside’ and ‘beyond’ the everyday, taking the risk of the universal in the pursuit of a ‘good enough justice’.

Conclusion

Gillian Rose’s difficult project seeks to rehabilitate reason and critique. For Rose, both the ‘enlightened reason’1 of liberalism and the abandonment of reason by postmodernism refuse to do the difficult work of the middle and, thus, in their different ways, invalidate critique. Critique has, at its foundation, an engagement with embedded actuality – with the broken middle and its institutions – and with our role as agents within ‘the law and its commotion’.2 Rose’s speculative philosophy is emphatically against ignorance. It struggles towards comprehension of the gap between the promises of modern law and the social and political actuality in which they are situated. This pursuit of comprehension is not an objective exercise in immanent critique; it struggles always towards comprehension of our selves, of our own roles in promoting and sustaining injustice. In this sense, Rose’s philosophy is against innocence.3 She insists that it is ‘possible to mean well, to be caring and kind . . . yet to be complicit in the corruption and violence of social institutions’.4 We cannot engage in critique and remain ‘strangers to ourselves as moral agents’;5 we must turn our gaze inwards, to our own complicity, alongside investigation of the diremptions of modern law. A speculative investigation of the ‘fate of modern law’ does not purport to fully comprehend the diremption between law and morality, promise and actuality; it struggles towards comprehension, but acknowledges that any understanding is inevitably partial and fraught with inevitable gaps and fissures. However, the process of working towards understanding is an essential part of working through the ‘disasters of modernity’: it interrogates the silences and masks of abstract liberal equality and it remains with the brokenness of the present, rather than positing a messianic ‘new righteousness’6 that would mend actu-

128 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice ality, but that ‘refuses to know or to criticize’.7 Rose’s speculative philosophy is an anxiety-ridden engagement of actuality that sits with ambiguity and embraces equivocation: it is a difficult project. A speculative rehabilitation of critique is a rehabilitation of reason: without reason, there can be no critique. Although the abstract universality of Enlightenment reason is impoverished and takes no account of the political, this does not spell the death knell for reason as such. Reason is not rigid and impoverished in and of itself: it is what we make of it, a tool to be wielded by political actors. Rose argues that: Reason in modernity cannot be said to have broken the promise of universality – unless we have not kept it; for it is only we who can keep such a promise by working our abstract potentiality into the always difficult but enriched actuality of our relation to others and to ourselves. Whether disturbing or joyful, reason is full of surprises.8

A Rosean vision of aporetic universalism fosters a fuller conception of reason, with recognition at its core. This fuller conception is not abstract and fixed; it is an ongoing and difficult process of struggling towards recognition of others, of ourselves and of our location in social and political institutions. Rose’s conception of reason is an embedded conception that engages with actuality and that is ‘ready for all kinds of surprises’.9 This fuller conception of reason does not purport to ‘understand the course of temporality’,10 but it does not turn away from actually existing time to an idealized past or future-to-come. Instead, it continues to engage with the present, with the here-and-now, seeking increased understanding, whilst also accepting ambiguity. Embarking on a difficult journey towards recognition creates the possibility of comprehension and transformation. Rose argues that the initial presentation of reason as ‘abstract universality’ is just the beginning of this journey and that impoverished reason emerges where there is a reluctance to come to know and to learn: the difficulty with reason, theoretical and practical (ethical), lies not in its initial, abstract universality; the difficulty of reason rests on whether the initial, abstract universal (the meaning or idea) comes to learn: whether something can happen to it; whether . . . one abstractly universal individual enters into substantial interaction with another abstractly universal individual.11

Conclusion 129 Where the initial abstract universality of reason does ‘come to learn’, this facilitates the recognition of violence and misrecognition both within ourselves and in the structures in which we find ourselves. In short, it fosters critique. A speculative conception of reason, with recognition at its core, is inaugurated mourning: ‘the ability to know and be known’.12 Inaugurated mourning involves a dogged belief in the possibility of working through the ‘disasters of modernity’, refusing both the premature truncation of mourning through the ascription of meaning-making narratives and the principled refusal of mourning for fear of totalising closure. Instead, it does the difficult work of the middle: it situates experiences of loss, trauma and exclusion within the context of those social forces that facilitated the suffering, interrogating their relation in a process of critical questioning that gazes outwards (on social forces and structures) and inwards (on our own complicity in creating and sustaining those structures). Inaugurated mourning goes hand-in-hand with political risk. The process of working towards knowing and being known is political risk: it is risky to come up against our own violence and the violence of the structures in which we are embedded. For Rose, the journey towards recognition must lead to anxiety-ridden political action. An agonistic pursuit of justice does not assume that we can take linear steps towards a better future, but it does not retreat from action; instead, it insists that we ‘stake ourselves’, taking the risk of acting politically, whilst knowing that any such action will need to be revisited and revised in the light of its inevitable unintended consequences. A speculative pursuit of justice, then, does not seek a displaced or impossible justice; it seeks a ‘good enough justice’ in the here and now. I conclude by revisiting one of Paul Klee’s angels, Angelus Dubiosus, who acts as muse for Rose and who embodies a speculative conception of reason. This dubious angel stands in stark contrast to the better-known Angelus Novus, who acts as muse for Benjamin and who stands fixated in horror at the growing pile of rubble that is history. Whereas Angelus Novus emphatically rejects moral progress, promulgating aberrated mourning, Angelus Dubiosus tenaciously holds fast to the possibility of transformation. Rose notes that ‘this molelike angel appears unguarded rather than intent, grounded and slack rather than backing up and away in rigid horror’.13 Unlike Benjamin’s traumatised angel, transfixed in melancholic and impotent

130 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice contemplation of manifold horrors-upon-horrors, the dubious angel ‘suggests the humorous witness that must endure’.14 This ‘humorous witness’ embraces a ‘facetious reason’ that learns and grows, struggling towards recognition and taking political risks in the pursuit of a ‘good enough justice’. I leave Rose with the final word: The dubious angel, bathetic angel, suits reason: for the angel continues to try to do good, to run the risk of idealization, of abstract intentions, to stake itself for ideas and for others. Experience will only accrue if the angel discovers the violence in its initial idea, when that idea comes up against the actuality of others and the unanticipated meanings between them. Now angels, of course, are not meant to gain experience – in the angelic hierarchies, idea and act at once define the angel, who is the unique instant of its species, without generation or gender. But here is the dubious angel – hybrid of hubris and humility – who makes mistakes, for whom things go wrong, who constantly discovers its own faults and failings, yet who still persists in the pain of staking itself, with the courage to initiate action and the commitment to go on and on, learning from those mistakes and risking new ventures. The dubious angel constantly changes its selfidentity and its relation to others. Yet it appears commonplace, pedestrian, bulky and grounded – even though, mirabile dictu, there are no grounds and no ground.15

Notes

Introduction 1. Gillian Rose, Love’s Work (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 116. 2. Note that my broad characterisations of poststructural and postmodern thinkers are inevitably partial and function as straw people against which to situate Rose’s thought. 3. See, for example, Benjamin Arditi, Politics on the Edges of Liberalism: Difference, Populism, Revolution, Agitation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 10–41; Chamsy el-Ojeili, ‘After Post-Socialism: Social Theory and Utopia in a Global Age’, in Jay Shaw and Michael Hemmingsen (eds), Human Beings and Freedom: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Punthi Pustak: Kolkata, 2011), pp. 195–218; Kate Schick, ‘Against Overcorrection: Risking the Universal’, in Shaw and Hemmingsen (eds), Human Beings and Freedom (Punthi Pustak: Kolkata, 2011), pp. 219–24. 4. Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 100. 5. Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of our Ancient Society (Blackwell Publishers: Oxford, 1992), p. 60. Rose asks: ‘With what does the ethical begin?’ and answers: ‘With the difficulty that cannot rest with either perfection or repugnance . . .’. 6. Rose, Love’s Work, p. 120. 7. Attributed to Staretz Silouan, 1866–1938, epigraph to Rose, Love’s Work. 8. Rose, Love’s Work, p. 71. 9. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 65. 10. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 236. 11. See, especially, Rose, The Broken Middle. 12. Rowan Williams, ‘Logic and Spirit in Hegel’, in Phillip Blond (ed.),

132 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 116. Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: The Athlone Press, 1981). Rose, The Broken Middle, p. xv. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 261. See, also, Andrew Shanks, Against Innocence: Gillian Rose’s Reception and Gift of Faith (London: SCM Press, 2008). Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 148. See, also, Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 202. Rose, The Broken Middle, pp. 77, 207. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 148. See, also, Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 10. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 5. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. xiii. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 62, emphasis in original. See, also, Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 201. My purpose here is to present Rose’s interpretation of Hegel, in order to illuminate the central concepts in her thought. I do not situate Rose’s idiosyncratic reading of Hegel against other differing interpretations, leaving that task for others.

Chapter 1 1. Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1978). 2. See, for example, Rose, Judaism and Modernity, pp. 53–63. 3. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: The Athlone Press, 1981). 4. Ibid. p. viii. 5. Rose, The Melancholy Science. 6. According to Rose, Adorno believed ‘the new philosophy did not raise substantive and moral issues as profoundly as the classical tradition had done, and this was partly because of the development of individual social sciences which had taken over some of the traditional concerns of philosophy’ (Rose, The Melancholy Science, p. 52). 7. See, for example, Gillian Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984); Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law; Rose, Judaism and Modernity. 8. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Experiential Content of Hegel’s Philosophy’, in Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. S. Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993), p. 68. 9. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, 2nd edn (London: Verso Publishing, 1986).

Notes 133 10. The fullest discussion is contained in Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1, trans. B. Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990). 11. Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1981), p. 21. 12. See Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 120–67; Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 98–106. 13. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. xv. 14. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. See, also, Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973). 15. Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy 1888, C. P. Dutt (ed.) (New York, NY: International Publishers, [1941] 1970), p. 13, cited in Rose, The Melancholy Science, p. 57, emphasis in original. 16. Adorno, Prisms, p. 19. 17. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy’, in Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993), p. 8. 18. Adorno, ‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy’, p. 9. 19. Adorno, ‘The Experiential Content of Hegel’s Philosophy’, p. 68. 20. Adorno, ‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy’, p. 9. 21. Ibid. p. 12. 22. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. 23. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Jeremy J. Shapiro, ‘Introduction’ in Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993), pp. xiv–xv. Although, as we shall see, Rose maintains that Marxian readings of Hegel misinterpret his description of the ‘oneness’ of so-called opposites as entailing the closure of critique, when, in fact, a speculative account of Hegel’s identity theory has a radical relationality at its core. 24. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 230. 25. Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 68. 26. Ibid. pp. 61–4. 27. Nicholsen and Shapiro, ‘Introduction’, p. xxi. 28. Rose, The Melancholy Science, p. 57. 29. Rose, The Melancholy Science, p. 57. See Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 334–8, for a section entitled ‘Dialectics Cut Short by Hegel’, where he criticises Hegel for subsuming the particular to the universal and, thus, cutting short dialectics. See, also, Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, for a critique of this reading of Hegel. 30. Adorno, ‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy’, p. 13.

134 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice 31. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, pp. 27–33. 32. Ibid. p. 27. 33. Theodor W. Adorno, H. Albert, R. Dahrendorf, J. Habermas, H. Pilot, and K. R. Popper, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (London: Heinemann Educational Books, [1969] 1976). 34. Rose, The Melancholy Science, p. 13. 35. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, [1974] 2005). 36. For a discussion of this ironic technique, see Rose, The Melancholy Science, pp. 16–18. 37. Rose, The Melancholy Science, p. 76. 38. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, pp. 32–3. 39. Rose, The Melancholy Science, p. 37. 40. Ibid. p. 4. 41. Ibid. p. 95. 42. Ibid. p. 141. 43. Ibid. p. 2. 44. Ibid. p. 37. 45. Ibid. p. 76. 46. Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005). 47. Rose, The Melancholy Science, p. 148. 48. Ibid. p. 141. Note that Rose, too, resists prescribing concrete political goals. However, she strongly emphasises the need to work towards recognition of social and political actualities, and although she refuses to delineate a blueprint for action, she insists that increased comprehension of the brokenness of actuality should prompt actors to take the risk of political action. 49. Adorno was periodically involved in public education, particularly upon his return to Germany after exile in 1949, and gave a number of radio broadcasts and public lectures in the hope of encouraging wider social critique. See, for example, Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Education After Auschwitz’, in Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, pp. 191–204; Theodor W. Adorno, ‘What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?’, trans. Timothy Bahti and Geoffrey Hartman, in Geoffrey Hartman (ed.), Bitburg: In Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 114– 29. See, also, Lydia Goehr ‘Reviewing Adorno: Public Opinion and Critique’ in Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. xiii–lxi. 50. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 62.

Notes 135 51. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 331. 52. Kate Schick, ‘ ‘‘To lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth’’: Adorno and International Political Thought’, International Political Theory 5: 2 (2009), 138–60. 53. Adorno, ‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy’, p. 42. 54. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology. 55. I do not engage with other interpretations of Hegel’s thought in this chapter, as my purpose in exploring Rose’s account of Hegel is to facilitate a deeper understanding of her thought, not to evaluate her interpretation in the light of others. 56. For a more accessible speculative account of Hegel, see Kimberly Hutchings, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), particularly Chapter 2: ‘Philosophy as the Task of Comprehension’. Hutchings’ interpretation of Hegel is influenced by Rose’s holistic approach (p. 161, fn. 2), and her book demonstrates how Hegel can be used as a resource for moving beyond dualistic thinking, with particular reference to feminist thought. 57. However, he was not consistent in this distinction and, at times, uses speculative and dialectical interchangeably. I am grateful to John Milbank for this observation and also for pushing me to be clearer about the nature of speculative thought (personal communication, 30 January 2008). 58. G. W. Hegel, The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christine Seiler (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 280–2, cited in Rose, Judaism and Modernity, pp. 60–1. See, also, G. W. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 113–22 (paragraphs 79–83ff). 59. Hegel, The Letters, p. 280, cited in Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 60. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Hegel, The Letters, pp. 281–2, cited in Rose, Judaism and Modernity, pp. 60. 63. Williams, ‘Logic and Spirit in Hegel’, p. 118. 64. See, for example, Adorno, ‘The Experiential Content of Hegel’s Philosophy’, pp. 68, 87–8. See also, Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Jeremy J. Shapiro, ‘Introduction’, in Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, p. xvii. 65. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 211. 66. For a modern incarnation of a right-Hegelian thinker, see Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992). 67. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 211. 68. See, for example, Ludvig Feuerbach, ‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s

136 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice

69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

Philosophy’, in The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, trans. Zawar Hanfi (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, [1839] 1972), pp. 53–96; Ludvig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. and introduction by Manfred H. Vogel (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966); Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, ed. Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). In the ‘Editor’s Introduction’ to Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, O’Malley notes that this work ‘developed into the whole program of research and writing which occupied Marx for the remainder of his life’ (p. xiv). Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s ‘‘Philosophy of Right’’ ’, in David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 27. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 41. Ibid. p. 42. Ibid. p. 41. Ibid. Ibid. p. 42. Rose’s use of Hegel as a resource for thinking ethically and politically is clearest in her later works: Mourning Becomes the Law and Judaism and Modernity. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 45. Georg W. Hegel, Die Wissenschaft der Logik, Enzyclopa¨die I: 10, cited in Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 43. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 44. Ibid. p. 45. Ibid. p. 51. Ibid. p. 45. See, also, Hutchings, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy, p. 35. Georg W. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). See, for example, Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, pp. 45–6. Hutchings, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy, pp. 32–44. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 47. Ibid. Georg W. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969). For an alternative interpretation of Hegel’s Logic, see Alison Stone, ‘Adorno and Logic’, in Deborah Cook (ed.), Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), pp. 48–50. Stone characterises Hegel’s logic not as phenomenological, but systematic, saying that the systematic reconstruction of the categories with which we structure

Notes 137

91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102. 103.

experience is only possible at the end of the phenomenological journey. The reason Rose emphasises the phenomenological aspect of the Logic is because of her observation that Hegel only discusses method once it has already ‘appear[ed] in a sequence of experiences’, and, therefore, method cannot be mistaken as a justification of neutral and limited knowledge (Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 47). Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 47. Ibid. p. 60, emphasis mine. Georg W. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. E. B. Speirs and J. Burdon Sanderson (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999), p. 247. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 49. Ibid. p. 71. Ibid. p. 60. Ibid. p. 69. Ibid. p. 56. Ibid. p. 67. Other societies (particularly indigenous societies, such as New Zealand Maori) have very different conceptions of property that do not include the concept of private ownership. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 57. See Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 11–28, 46–52. For more on the non-conservative nature of Hegel’s thought, see Michael Hardimon, Hegel’s Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 24–31; Nigel Tubbs, ‘Hegel and the Philosophy of Education’, Encyclopaedia of Philosophy of Education, available at http://www.ffst.hr/ENCYCLOPAEDIA/doku.php?id=hegel_and_philosophy_of_education_ii (accessed 17 December 2011); Nigel Tubbs, Education in Hegel (London: Continuum, 2008). Hardimon argues that, contrary to popular interpretations of his thought, Hegel does not endorse the status quo. He reinterprets Hegel’s claim in the preface to the Philosophy of Right: ‘What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational’ (Philosophy of Right, p. xix). According to Hardimon, Hegel maintains that things are ‘actual’, only insofar as they ‘realize their ‘‘essence’’, their underlying rational structure’, and that they ought only to be endorsed, insofar as they meet these standards of rationality (that is, they are ‘rationally intelligible and reasonable or good’) (p. 26). Thus, Hegel does not claim that all that exists is rational; on the contrary, much that exists is imperfect and fails to meet the demands of rationality. Tubbs argues that in order to understand Hegel’s thought, he must be understood educationally. Against those who characterise Hegel’s system as ‘dogmatic, totalitarian, closing, oppressive, domesticating’, he maintains

138 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice that ‘[t]he only thing that grows in ‘‘certainty’’ in the system is our own comprehension of the necessity of uncertainty in all that we do, all that we think and all that we learn’ (‘Hegel and the Philosophy of Education’, p. 3). Tubbs’ educational reading of Hegel is a speculative reading: he emphasises the need to struggle towards comprehension of experience, arguing that Hegel’s concept of the absolute refers not only to what is learned, but to the process of learning itself (Education in Hegel, p. 3). As for Rose, the risk-filled process of learning is never complete: in Tubbs’ words, it is the ‘truth of unrest’ (p. 4) that comes to learn, relearn and learn again. 104. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 60. 105. Rose, Love’s Work, p. 120.

Chapter 2 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

Rose, The Broken Middle, p. xi. Ibid. emphasis in original. Ibid. pp. xii–iii. Rose, Love’s Work, (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 120. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. xi. Ibid. p. xiii. Ibid. p. xv. Rose, Love’s Work, pp. 115–16. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 18. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (London: Penguin Books, 1985). Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 11. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 14. Rose, The Broken Middle, pp. 14–15. Ibid. p. 16. Ibid. p. 148. Ibid. p. 151. Ibid. p. 148. Ibid. Søren Kierkegaard, ‘Luther’, in Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 3, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1970), cited in Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 157. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 157. Ibid. pp. 157–8. Kierkegaard, ‘Luther’, p. 80, cited in Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 158,

Notes 139

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

emphasis added by Rose. In his reflections on the Reformation in the Journal and Papers, Kierkegaard facetiously illustrates the ‘double danger’ of an undialectical approach to religion and politics by showing the inversion that the era of 1848 might have fallen into had the individualism of Protestantism been corrected with a communitarian Pietism (Rose, The Broken Middle, pp. 159–62). In the first scenario, the ‘rampant individualism’ of Protestantism posits God relating directly to single individuals. In the second scenario, Kierkegaard imagines an inversion of this individualism that would address the chaos of the first scenario by creating a Pietistic sect. Such a sect posits a community of equal persons ruled by tyrannical authority that imposes a particular way of being upon all. These two dangers – atomised individualism and premature, non-reflective community – both reject the agony of reflection that would attend to ‘the actuality of the pain of differences’ (Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 162). Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 159. Kierkegaard, ‘Luther’, p. 80, cited in Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 158. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 173. Ibid. p. 174. Ibid. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 73. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 383–409. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 180. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 178. Ibid. p. 85. Ibid. p. 84. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 87, emphasis in original. See also Vincent W. Lloyd, Law and Transcendence: On the Unfinished Project of Gillian Rose (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), p. 144. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 87. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 87. For a more extended engagement with the concept of law in Rose’s thought, see Lloyd, Law and Transcendence. See, also, Chapter 4. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 88, emphasis in original. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 76. Kate Schick, ‘Beyond rules: A critique of the liberal human rights regime’, International Relations 20: 3 (2006), 345–51. Rose, Love’s Work, p. 128. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 11. I expand on this notion of ‘encircling trauma’, in order to prevent its domestication and depoliticisation in Chapter 3. See, also, Jenny Edkins, Poststructuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back In (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999),

140 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice

43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

pp. 140–2; Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Martin Jay, Refractions of Violence (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003), pp. 11–24; Slavoj Zˇizˇek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 272–3. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 4. Ibid. pp. 4, 9. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, pp. 70–1. Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in Sigmund Freud, On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin Books, 2005), pp. 201–18. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 64, fn. 3. See, also, the discussion in Chapter 3. Jay, ‘Against Consolation: Walter Benjamin and the Refusal to Mourn’, in Refractions of Violence, pp. 11–24. See, also, Walter Benjamin, ‘Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays War and Warrior’, Ernst Ju¨nger (ed.), New German Critique 17 (1979), 120–8. Jay, ‘Against Consolation’, pp. 14–15. Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Hannah Arendt (ed.), trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, [1955] 1999), p. 160. Jay, ‘Against Consolation’, p. 23. Jay, Refractions of Violence, p. 22. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977). Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 152. This strand of messianism is discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, pp. 186–7. Ibid. p. 195. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 51. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 249. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 10. Ibid. p. 209. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 71. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. p. 72. Ibid. p. 74, emphasis in original. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 202. Howard Caygill, ‘The Broken Hegel: Gillian Rose’s Retrieval of Speculative Philosophy’, Women: A Cultural Review 9: 1 (1998), 23. Dori Laub, ‘Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle’, in

Notes 141

68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73.

74. 75.

76. 77.

Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 63. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, p. 152. Rose, Love’s Work, pp. 115–16. A rabbinic hermeneutical approach, with its respect for difference and advocacy for multivocality, has become an important methodology in contemporary literary theory, profoundly influencing deconstructionists, such as Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman. The re-emergence of Midrash – the discourse that has attracted the most scholarly attention – must be seen, in part, as an assertion of Jewish identity in the wake of the Holocaust or Shoah. Midrash differs markedly from traditional Christian exegetical methods, which do not give as elevated a place to the interpretation of divine revelation. Although Christian scholars, such as Augustine, acknowledge the existence of ambiguities in biblical text, the biblical text is believed to portray a coherent message, and there is little toleration for contradiction. Beth Sharon Ash, ‘Jewish Hermeneutics and Contemporary Theories of Textuality: Hartman, Bloom, and Derrida’, Modern Philology 85: 1 (1987), 67. Ash, ‘Jewish Hermeneutics’, p. 65. Ibid. p. 68. In practice, the meaning of legal guidelines is never fixed, but is open to interpretation. See Jan Klabbers, ‘The Meaning of Rules’, International Relations 20: 3 (2006), 295–301. However, Rose advocates a broader and deeper challenge to the meaning of rules that goes beyond legal wrangling by those authorised to define their meaning. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, pp. 2–3. Ibid. p. 122. The full quote states that the work of mourning involves ‘[coming] to learn that will, action, reflection and passivity have consequences for others and for oneself which may not be anticipated and can never be completely anticipated; which comes to learn its unintended complicity in the use and abuse of power; and hence to redraw, again and again, the measures, the bonding and boundaries between me and me, subject and subjectivity, singular and individual, non-conscious and unconscious. This is activity beyond activity . . . The work of these experiences bears the meaning of meaning – the relinquishing and taking up again of activity which requires the fullest acknowledgement of active complicity’ (emphasis in original). Rose, The Broken Middle, p. xv. Raymond Geuss proffers Hegel as an example of a thinker who breaks with the modern form of ethics and instead puts forward an ‘inherently non-individualistic and inherently speculative, that is, nonpractical, enterprise’ Geuss, Outside Ethics, p. 46. He remarks that, according to Hegel, it does not make sense for the philosopher to speak in terms of

142 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice ‘ought’; ‘if you want to know what to do in some particular situation, consult your local authorities, judge, policeman, rabbi, imam, or priest . . . it is not the philosopher’s job to tell anyone what to do, resolve conflicts or dilemmas, or invent new ways of acting’ (p. 51). 78. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 163.

Chapter 3 1. The trauma arising out of the broken middle can be conceptualised on two levels: actual, historical trauma and a more generalised, existential trauma. Dominick LaCapra distinguishes between historical and structural trauma. He notes that historical trauma is associated with a specific event or loss and that only the particular individuals who experience a historically-specific traumatic event experience historical trauma. Structural trauma, in contrast, is not associated with an event or limited to particular persons; instead, it is linked to the potentiality of historical trauma, and everyone may suffer the anxiety associated with it (Writing History, Writing Trauma, pp. 78–82). Rose’s conception of trauma encompasses both aspects. Rose speaks of the ‘disasters of modernity’, whereby much is promised, but not delivered; the persistence of suffering and trauma is a constant reminder of modernity’s shortcomings (Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 76). 2. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 76. 3. Silouan, cited in Rose, ‘Epigraph’, in Love’s Work (London: Vintage, 1995). 4. Note that although Rose uses the term ‘the Holocaust’ as convenient and widely accepted shorthand for the Nazi genocide, she is uncomfortable with the term, maintaining that ‘to name the Nazi genocide ‘‘the Holocaust’’ is already to over-unify it and to sacralize it . . .’ (Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 27). 5. Rose, Love’s Work, p. 15. See, also, Jacqueline Rose, ‘On Gillian Rose’, The Last Resistance (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 223–9. 6. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 30. 7. See, for example, Siegfried Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (London: Faber and Faber, [1937] 1972); Wilfred Owen, The Complete Poems and Fragments, edited by Jon Stallworthy (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1984); Imre Kerte´sz, Fatelessness, trans. Tim Wilkinson (London: The Harvill Press, [1975] 2005). 8. For a discussion of the silence that attended the Holocaust in most intellectual quarters (Jewish and otherwise), see Saul Friedlander ‘Trauma and Transference’, in Saul Friedlander, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews in Europe (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Uni-

Notes 143

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

versity Press, 1993), pp. 127–30. See, also, Adorno, ‘What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?’, pp. 114–29. Jay Winter, ‘The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the ‘‘Memory Boom’’ in Contemporary Historical Studies’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 27 (2000), 69–92. See, for example, the collection of essays in Cathy Caruth’s edited book – an early seminal work in trauma studies: Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). For more recent reflections on the field, see Seth Moglen, ‘On Mourning Social Injury’, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society 10: 2 (2005), 151–67; and Susannah Radstone, ‘Trauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics’, Paragraph 30: 1 (2007), 9–29. Indeed, according to Pierre Nora – one of the progenitors of the ‘memory boom’ – the category of memory is now inextricably entwined with that of the Holocaust: ‘Whoever says memory, says Shoah’ (cited in Winter, ‘The Generation of Memory’, p. 69). For example, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, founded in 1981. See Dori Laub, ‘Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle’, pp. 61–75. See, for example, Saul Friedlander, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews in Europe (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993); Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma; Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law. See, for example, Robert Fine and Charles Turner (eds), Social Theory after the Holocaust (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000). The 9/11 attacks have prompted scholarly attention, in part, because the shock of these attacks highlighted the vulnerability of the United States to wide-scale loss and trauma, and the US response played out on a world scale. Note that this increased interest in trauma, after 9/11, in the Humanities and International Relations literature, in particular, raises interesting questions about whose trauma counts as being worthy of debate and discussion. For a powerful article about the privileging of white Western suffering, see Paula Abood, ‘The Day the World did not Change’, Signs: Journal of Women and Culture 29: 2 (2002), 576–8. See, also, Radstone, ‘Trauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics’, 24–6. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, pp. 201–18; Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 64, fn. 3. See, also, the discussion in Vincent Lloyd, ‘Interview with Gillian Rose’, Theory, Culture and Society 25: 7–8 (2008), 201–18. See, for example, Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory; LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma; Dominick LaCapra, History in

144 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Moglen, ‘On Mourning Social Injury’; Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law. For a similar argument, from a psychoanalytic perspective, see Radstone, ‘Trauma Theory’. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, pp. 41–3. Ibid. pp. 15–39. Ibid. pp. 64–76. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. Tammy Clewell, ‘Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association 52: 1 (2004), 43–67; Moglen, ‘On Mourning Social Injury’, p. 166, fn. 13; Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 14 (1923), pp. 12–66. For a simple characterisation of ‘acting out’ and ‘acting in’ responses to trauma, see Carolyn Yoder, The Little Book of Trauma Healing: When Violence Strikes and Community Security is Threatened (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2005), p. 33. For a discussion of acting out that encompasses both these maladaptive responses to trauma, see LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, pp. 141–53. Freud also refers to loss of abstract notions, such as ‘fatherland, freedom, an ideal and so on’, which suggests that he believes his analysis of individual grief might also be applicable on a broader social scale (Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholy’, p. 203). See, for example, Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004); Moglen, ‘On Mourning Social Injury’; Seth Moglen, ‘Mourning and Progressive Politics After 9/11’, International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 3: 2 (2006), 118–25. Yoder, Trauma Healing, p. 37. Kai Erikson, ‘Notes on Trauma’, in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 189. Jay Winter, ‘The Generation of Memory’. Jay Winter, Sites of memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, p. 364. Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, pp. 9, 42–52. The phenomenon of ‘labelling’, resulting in loss of agency, is also discussed in Karin Fierke, Critical Security Studies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 125. For a personal account of medicalisation and

Notes 145

34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

depoliticisation during WWI, see Sassoon’s autobiographical novels, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, p. 9. Vanessa Pupavac, ‘Pathologizing Populations and Colonising Minds: International Psychosocial Programs in Kosovo’, Alternatives 27: 4 (2002), 489–511. George Bush, ‘Address to the Nation’, 11 September 2001, Washington, DC. Online at http://www.nationalcenter.org/BushGW91101Address.html Peter Singer, The President of Good and Evil: Taking George W. Bush Seriously (London: Granta Publications, 2004), p. 143. Slavoj Zˇizˇek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 13–14, fn. 8. At this early stage of the war on terror, any questioning took place largely underground. Bush’s assumptions created a clear political agenda that did not allow for official alternatives, but in civil society, individuals and groups did begin to question the US administration’s response. One such organisation is Peaceful Tomorrows, founded by people who lost family members on 11 September 2001 and who advocate non-violent alternatives to the Bush administration’s response. See http://www.peacefultomorrows.org/index.php (webpage, accessed 9 July 2011). See, also, a collation of independent filmmakers’ responses to September 11 2001: Underground Zero, film, directed by Caveh Zahedi and Jay Rosenblatt (USA: World Artists Home Video, 2003). Butler, Precarious Life, pp. 1–18. George Bush, ‘Address to Joint Session of Congress’, 20 September 2001, Washington, DC. Online at http://yc2.net/speech.htm Butler, Precarious Life, p. 2. Ibid. p. 9. Ibid. p. 15. Yoder, Trauma Healing, pp. 36–7. Singer, The President of Good and Evil, pp. 152–3. Rena Moses-Hrushovski, with Rafael Moses, Grief and Grievance: the Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, trans. Tim Wilkinson (London: Minerva Press, 2000). Moses-Hrushovski, Grief and Grievance: the Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, p. 12. Ibid. p. 44. Ibid. p. 115. Ibid. p. 163. Ibid. p. 113. Ibid. p. 115. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 51.

146 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice 55. Vamik Volkan, Blood Lines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 43–80. 56. Ibid. p. 64. 57. Volkan, Blood Lines, p. 78. See, also, his chapter in the same book, entitled, ‘Chosen Trauma: Unresolved Mourning’, pp. 36–49, and Karin Fierke’s analysis of acting out in Germany, post-World War I, and its facilitation of the horrors that ensued in World War II, in K. M. Fierke, ‘Whereof We Can Speak, Thereof We Must Not Be Silent: Trauma, Political Solipsism and War’, Review of International Studies 30: 4 (2004), 471–91. 58. Moglen, ‘On Mourning Social Injury’, p. 159. 59. Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory; Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992). 60. Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, p. 5. 61. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 11. 62. Ibid. p. 5. 63. Radstone, ‘Trauma Theory’, p. 16. 64. Ibid. p. 19. 65. Jay Winter, ‘The Generation of Memory’. 66. See, for example, Duncan Bell (ed.), Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship between Past and Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006); Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics; Fierke, ‘Trauma, Political Solipsism and War’; Pupavac, ‘Pathologizing Populations and Colonising Minds’. 67. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. See, also, Jay, ‘Against Consolation: Walter Benjamin and the Refusal to Mourn’, in Refractions of Violence, pp. 11–24. 68. See Chapter 5 for an exploration of the messianic and redemptive dimension of Benjamin’s work. 69. Jenny Edkins, ‘Remembering Relationality: Trauma Time and Politics’, in Duncan Bell (ed.), Memory, Trauma and World Politics, pp. 103–6. See, also, Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics. 70. Jenny Edkins, ‘Forget Trauma? Responses to September 11’, International Relations 16: 2 (2002), 243–56. 71. Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, pp. 42, 49–50. 72. Edkins, ‘Forget Trauma?’ pp. 250, 252. 73. Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, pp. 15–16. 74. Slavoj Zˇizˇek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), p. 272, cited in Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, p. 15. 75. Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, pp. 15–16.

Notes 147 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82.

83.

84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89.

90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

Ibid. p. 16. Edkins, ‘Trauma Time and Politics’, p. 100. Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, p. 15. Schick, ‘ ‘‘To lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth’’: Adorno and International Political Thought’, 138–60. Jenny Edkins, ‘Biopolitics, communication and global governance’, Review of International Studies 34 (2008), 219. Adorno, Prisms, p. 34. Note that, with this phrase, Adorno has powerfully shaped Holocaust discourse. His pronouncement has been transformed into the sound-bite ‘after Auschwitz’, putting Auschwitz at the centre of public and academic debate. For reflections on the significance of this statement put in the context of Adorno’s wider thought, see Michael Rothberg, ‘After Adorno: Culture in the Wake of Catastrophe’, New German Critique 72 (1997), 45–81. Although, note, that later work by Adorno modifies this dictum, suggesting that we have a duty to remember the Holocaust and to critically reflect on the social and economic forces and psychological conditions that facilitated fascism and its horrors. See, for example, Adorno, ‘What does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?’ and Schick, ‘Adorno and International Political Thought’. Elie Wiesel, ‘Trivializing the Holocaust: Semi-Fact and Semi-Fiction’, New York Times, 16 April 1978, 2: 1, 29, cited in J. Roth and M. Berenbaum, Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications (New York, NY: Paragon House, 1989), p. 2. Saul Friedlander, ‘Trauma and Transference’, pp. 129–30. Saul Friedlander, ‘Trauma and Transference and ‘‘Working Through’’ in Writing the History of the ‘‘Shoah’’ ’, History and Memory, 4: 1 (1992), p. 52. Friedlander, ‘Trauma and Transference’, p. 131. Ibid. Ibid. p. 134. Note the similarities here with the attention to particular suffering in order to enlighten the Enlightenment in Adorno’s writings. For a discussion of the role of the dialectical relationship between universal and particular in Adorno’s thought, see Schick, ‘Adorno and International Political Thought’. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 43. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 202. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 8. Ibid. p. 122, emphasis in original. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, pp. 41–3. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, pp. 1–2; Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, pp. 15–39.

148 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice 96. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, pp. 35–6. 97. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholy’. 98. Recall the quote from Elie Wiesel at the end of the last section: ‘The Holocaust? The ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted’ (‘Trivializing the Holocaust’, cited in Roth and Berenbaum, p. 2). 99. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 27. 100. Ibid. p. 43, emphasis in original. 101. Ibid. p. 41. She maintains that ‘the argument for the overcoming of representation . . . converges with the inner tendency of Fascism itself’ (emphasis in original). 102. Ibid. p. 41. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid. p. 100. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid. 107. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 60. 108. Moglen, ‘On Mourning Social Injury’, p. 158. 109. The need for wider comprehension of the society in which collective trauma takes place can also be seen in Adorno’s essay, ‘What does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?’, which discusses the need to examine the ‘objective social conditions’ that facilitated National Socialism in Germany. See, also, Zygmunt Bauman’s essay, ‘The Holocaust’s Life as a Ghost’, which argues that ‘the most sinister truth’ of the Holocaust is not located in a generalised hatred for the Jews; instead, it is located in the fact that most of those who contributed to the murder of millions, did so with no particular feeling towards the victims or towards their actions and consequences. He maintains that comprehension of the event requires comprehension of the society in which it was allowed, saying ‘[i]t is not in any society that a genocide of the unwanted strangers can take place, and the presence of a quantity of Jew-haters is not the only, not even the necessary, condition of such a genocide’ (Zygmunt Bauman, ‘The Holocaust’s Life as a Ghost’, in Fine and Turner (eds), Social Theory after the Holocaust, pp. 16–17). 110. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 41. 111. Ibid. p. 56. 112. Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding 1930–1954 (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1994), especially ‘Understanding and Politics: The Difficulty of Understanding’, pp. 307–27. See, also, Robert Fine, ‘Hannah Arendt: Politics and Understanding after the Holocaust’, in Robert Fine and Charles Turner (eds), Social Theory after the Holocaust (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), pp. 19–45. 113. Giorgio Agamben, Homer Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.

Notes 149 Daniel Heller Roazan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 114. Fine, ‘Politics and Understanding after the Holocaust’, p. 23. 115. This characterisation of modern and postmodern thought is established shorthand (see, for example, Danielle Celermajer, ‘Introduction: Athens and Jerusalem through a Different Lens’, Thesis Eleven 102: 3 (2010), 3–5 and the rest of the special issue on Athens and Jerusalem in that volume); however, Rose adds two more cities to the nomenclature: a third city – which represents the actuality in which we live – and a fourth city – Auschwitz, the catalyst for Jerusalem’s new ethics. 116. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 26. 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid. p. 36. 119. Ibid. p. 27. 120. Ibid. 121. Ibid. p. 28. 122. Ibid. p. 30. 123. Ibid. emphasis in original. 124. Ibid. p. 34, emphasis in original. 125. Ibid. pp. 35–6.

Chapter 4 1. See, for example, Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1979] 1999). 2. See, for example, Tim Dunne and Nicholas J. Wheeler (eds), Human Rights in Global Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); David P. Forsythe, Human Rights and World Politics, 2nd edn (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, A. Gutman (ed.) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (eds), Human Rights: Concepts, Contests, Contingencies (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Jeremy Waldron, Liberal Rights: collected papers 1981–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 3. See, for example, David Campbell and Michael J. Shapiro, (eds), Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); William E. Connolly, Identity|Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 4. Of course, many political theorists struggle to articulate a position between liberalism and postmodernism, with varied success. For ex-

150 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

ample, the Habermasian critique of liberalism has resulted in the development of a more embedded emancipatory theory: one that widens the conversation beyond elites and addresses broader issues of exclusion, identity and redistribution. However, it has not gone far enough: it continues to be based on a strong assumption of moral progress, it emphasises procedural solutions to the problem of exclusion and difference, and it underestimates the strength of existing power asymmetries and historical wrongs, both of which seriously undermine the potential of a conversation to address human suffering. Sympathetic critics of Habermasian dialogue have attempted to bring enhanced awareness of the concrete Other, power relations and non-rational dimensions of dialogic exchange, articulating a nuanced and agonistic engagement with difference. See, for example, Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992); Iris Marion Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy and Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). See, also, Kimberly Hutchings’ critique of Habermasian dialogue in ‘Speaking and Hearing: Habermasian Discourse Ethics, Feminism and IR’, Review of International Studies 31: 1 (2005), 155–65, and her call for a more profound disorientation of Western and non-Western models of dialogue in ‘Dialogue between Whom? The Role of the West/Non-West Distinction in Promoting Global Dialogue in IR’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39: 3 (2011), 639–47. The point of this chapter is not to argue that Rose’s voice is the only voice that opposes the one-sidedness of liberal and postmodern thought; instead, it maintains that her speculative philosophy offers a particularly compelling approach to the cosmopolitan dilemma that resists the pitfalls of one-sidedness and ought to be heard. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 3. Bonnie Honig, ‘Ruth, the Model E´migre´: Mourning and the Symbolic Politics of Immigration’, in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 192–215. See, also, Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 41–72. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 97. Ibid. pp. 97–8. The state was taken as the primary referent for justice in the work of influential scholars such as John Rawls in his ground-breaking tome, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1971] 1999), which examined justice within states and, in his later work, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999),

Notes 151

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

which examined justice between states. A moral cosmopolitan response was revolutionary, because it dispensed with the notion of the state as the proper referent for justice and instead proposed that the individual be central to our conception of justice. See, for example, Charles Beitz’s extension of Rawls’s conception of justice in Political Theory and International Relations and ‘Social and Cosmopolitan Liberalism’, International Affairs 75: 3 (1999), 515–29. I am not suggesting that the rights regime is the only moral cosmopolitan response to suffering; merely, that it is the discourse that sounds loudest in global politics. The global justice movement is another important strand of cosmopolitan thought: promulgated by thinkers such as Charles Beitz, Peter Singer and Thomas Pogge, this tradition argues that we have negative and positive duties to alleviate poverty on a global scale. See, for example, Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations; Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002); Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization (London: Yale University Press, 2002). Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, pp. 4–5. See, for example, Jay M. Bernstein, ‘Suffering Injustice: Misrecognition as Moral Injury in Critical Theory’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 13: 3 (2005), 303–24; Gurminder K. Bhambra and Robbie Shilliam, Silencing Human Rights: Critical Approaches to a Contested Project (London: Palgrave, 2008); and Schick, ‘Beyond rules: A critique of the human rights regime’. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 98. There are many examples that one might point to, in order to illustrate this point. One might think of indigenous peoples who have been further marginalised, as a result of the bestowal of abstract equality. Western visions of equality are far from neutral and promote particular visions of success against which indigenous peoples are often judged lacking. Furthermore, such visions often leave little room for restitution in the wake of active and systematic suppression and denigration of the Other. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 98. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 162. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 3. Arditi, Politics on the Edges of Liberalism, p. 13. Ibid. p. 14. Ibid. pp. 14–15. Ibid. p. 14. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 4. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 98. Arditi, Politics on the Edges of Liberalism, p. 14. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 4.

152 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

Ibid. p. 6. Ibid. p. 8. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 155. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. emphasis in original. Ibid. p. 164. See Chapter 5 for a discussion of utopia as a way of avoiding the difficult work of the middle and Walter Benjamin’s vision of our Arcadian past as messianic interruption of the present. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 164. Ibid. Ibid. p. xv. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 10. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. p. 62, emphasis in original. Ibid. pp. 70–1. Ibid. p. 71. Ibid. Ibid. p. 64, emphasis in original. Rose points to these dimensions in support of her argument that ‘inaugurated mourning requires the relation to law that is presented by the comedy of absolute spirit as found in Hegel’s Phenomenology’ (Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 74, emphasis in original). Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 71. Ibid. p. 60. See, for example, Vivienne Jabri, ‘Solidarity and Spheres of Culture: The Cosmopolitan and the Postcolonial’, Review of International Studies 33: 4 (2007), 715–28. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 62. Ibid. emphasis in original. Ibid. p. 74. Ibid. pp. 74–5, emphasis in original. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 4 Ibid. Rose, Love’s work, p. 128. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 98. Ibid. p. 69. Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, [1979] 1997), pp. 132–54; Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama; Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The ‘‘Mystical

Notes 153

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83.

Foundation of Authority’’ ’, in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson, Deconstruction and The Possibility of Justice (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3–67. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 70. Ibid. Ibid. p. 75. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 4. Ibid. Ibid. p. 5. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 87, emphasis in original. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 75. Ibid. Lloyd, Law and Transcendence, p. 144. Klabbers, ‘The Meaning of Rules’. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 76. See, also, the discussions in Chapters 2 and 3 on inaugurated mourning and political risk. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, pp. 8–9. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 74. Robbie Shilliam, ‘Who will provide the West with therapy?’ in Amanda Russell Beattie and Kate Schick (eds), The Vulnerable Subject: Beyond Rationalism in International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). Shilliam, ‘Who will provide the West with therapy?’ That is, New Zealanders of European descent. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 76, emphasis in original. Ibid. p. 62, emphasis in original. Note that representation in this quote refers to representation in symbolic terms: literary, aesthetic and historical. See, for example, the discussion on representation of trauma in Chapter 3. Honig, ‘Ruth, the Model E´migre´’. See, also, Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, pp. 41–72. Honig, ‘Ruth, the Model E´migre´’, p. 196. Ibid. p. 209. Naomi means ‘pleasant’, while Mara means ‘bitter’. See Honig’s discussion of Cynthia Ozick and Julia Kristeva’s readings of Ruth in ‘Ruth, the Model E´migre´’, pp. 192–215. See, also, Cynthia Ozick, ‘Ruth’, in Judith A. Kates and Gail Twersky Reimer (eds), Reading Ruth: Contemporary Women Reclaim a Sacred Story (New York, NY: Ballantine, 1994), pp. 211–32; Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1991). Ozick, ‘Ruth’, pp. 211–32. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves.

154 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

Honig, ‘Ruth, the Model E´migre´’, p. 210. Ibid. p. 207. Ibid. p. 210. Ibid. p. 209. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 4. Ibid. Honig, ‘Ruth, the Model E´migre´’, p. 207. Santner argues that ‘mourning without solidarity is the beginning of madness’, in Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 26. Recall, here, Howard Caygill’s assertion that, for Rose, ‘working through is not the achievement of an isolated ‘‘I’’ but is a communal effort which is expressed . . . in culture and the institutions of state and civil society’ (Caygill, ‘The Broken Hegel’, p. 23). Honig, ‘Ruth, the Model E´migre´’, p. 209. Ibid. p. 206. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 5. Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, p. 39. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. xv. Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, p. 118.

Chapter 5 1. This is seen most prominently in the employment of Carl Schmitt’s thought by radical thinkers on the Left, such as Chantal Mouffe and Giorgio Agamben. See, for example, Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993); Chantal Mouffe, ‘Carl Schmitt and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy’, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 10: 1 (1997), 21–33; Chantal Mouffe, ‘Schmitt’s Vision of a Multipolar World Order’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 104: 2 (2005), 245–51. See, also, the revival of classical realism in the thought of critical International Relations theorists. See, for example, the discussion of the critical potential of classical realism in Richard K. Ashley, ‘The Poverty of Neorealism’, International Organization 38: 2 (1984), 225– 86. See, also, William E. Scheuerman, ‘A Theoretical Missed Opportunity? Hans J. Morgenthau as Critical Realist’, in Duncan Bell (ed.), Tragedy, Power, and Justice: Variations on a Realist Theme (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); William E. Scheuerman, ‘Realism and the Left: the case of Hans J. Morgenthau’, Review of International Studies 34 (2008), 29–51; Brent J. Steele, ‘Eavesdropping on Honoured Ghosts: From Classical to Reflexive Realism’, Journal of International

Notes 155

2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

Relations and Development 10: 3 (2007), 272–300; and Michael C. Williams, The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, p. 152. See footnote 1, above. William E. Scheuerman, ‘Carl Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau: Realism and Beyond’, in Michael C. Williams (ed.), Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans J. Morgenthau in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 62. Unsurprisingly, Morgenthau loathed Schmitt’s politics, as they became apparent in the 1930s. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (ed.) (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 26. Ibid. p. 28. Ibid. pp. 32, 34. Schmitt wrote Morgenthau a complimentary letter saying how much he liked Morgenthau’s extension of his ideas in the Concept of the Political, but to Morgenthau’s understandable chagrin, failed to cite him in the 1932 edition. Schmitt’s admiration for Morgenthau’s engagement with his work led to a meeting between the two men in 1929, but it was an utter failure: Morgenthau recalls that Schmitt barely allowed him a chance to speak and maintains that ‘the disappointment was total’ (p. 68). Hans J. Morgenthau, ‘An Intellectual Autobiography’, Society 15 (1978), 63–8. See, also, Hans-Karl Pichler, ‘The Godfathers of ‘‘Truth’’: Max Weber and Carl Schmitt in Morgenthau’s Theory of Power Politics’, Review of International Studies 24: 2 (1998), 185–200; Scheuerman, ‘Carl Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau’. Scheuerman, ‘Carl Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau’, pp. 62–3. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 78. ¨ ber die Herkunft des Politischen, p. 9, quoted in Hans Morgenthau, U Hans-Karl Pichler (his translation), ‘The Godfathers of ‘‘Truth’’ ’, p. 196. Scheuerman, ‘Carl Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau’; Chris Brown, ‘The Twilight of International Morality?’ Hans J. Morgenthau and Carl Schmitt on the end of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, in Williams, Realism Reconsidered, pp. 42–61. Hans Morgenthau, Scientific Man versus Power Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1946). See, also, Williams, The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations, pp. 93–104. Morgenthau, Scientific Man versus Power Politics, p. vi. See, also, Robert W. Cox, ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 10: 2 (1981), 126–55.

156 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice 16. Morgenthau, Scientific Man versus Power Politics, p. 215. 17. Ibid. p. 45. 18. It is interesting to note the closeness between Morgenthau’s analysis of rationalist liberalism and the Frankfurt School’s analysis of Enlightenment thought. Morgenthau’s critique of liberal instrumental rationality has strong affinities with Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. For an engaging discussion of the influence of the Left on the development of Morgenthau’s thought, see Scheuerman, ‘Realism and the Left’. Morgenthau spent his early career in Frankfurt, working closely with the great socialist barrister, Hugo Sinzheimer. During those years, he was influenced both by his work in chambers, working for social reform, and by the Left-wing intellectual milieu of the city. Through his work with Sinzheimer, he became close friends with such thinkers as Franz L. Neumann, a legal theorist in the Frankfurt School, and Ernst Frankel, an important Left-wing political scientist. Scheuerman argues that too little has been made of the common intellectual roots of Morgenthau’s classical realism and the Frankfurt School of critical theory and that recent moves to highlight the critical potential of realism are not as unexpected a shift as they might initially appear. 19. Morgenthau, Scientific Man versus Power Politics, p. 45. 20. Ibid. p. 51. 21. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 54. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Chris Brown argues that cosmopolitan theorists (and other inheritors of the rationalist, liberal tradition), ‘as modern heirs of the Scottish Enlightenment, have no time for such quasi-theological notions [as evil or tragedy]. For them, when people do bad things or behave uncooperatively it is because they are pursuing what they take to be their rational interests in a context which provides no incentive to cooperate or behave well; moreover, there can be no such thing as a tragic dilemma, because, given enough brainpower employed to solve a problem, the right thing will always become clear’ (Chris Brown, ‘The House that Chuck Built: Twenty-five Years of Reading Charles Beitz’, Review of International Studies 31: 2 (2005), 375). 26. The implications of Morgenthau’s tragic sensibility for thinking about world politics have prompted a lively debate among contemporary international political theorists, one that centres principally on the possibility of progress in world politics. See, for example, the debate between James Mayall, Mervyn Frost, Nicholas Rengger, Ned Lebow, Chris Brown, Peter Euben and Richard Beardsworth over the course of

Notes 157

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

five years in International Relations: Mervyn Frost, ‘Tragedy, Ethics and International Relations’, International Relations 17: 4 (2003), 477– 95; James Mayall, ‘Tragedy, Progress and the International Order: A response to Frost’, International Relations 17: 4 (2003), 497–503; Nicholas Rengger, ‘Tragedy or Scepticism: Defending the Anti-Pelagian Mind in World Politics’, International Relations 19: 3 (2005), 321–8; Richard Ned Lebow, ‘Tragedy, Politics and Political Science’, International Relations 19: 3 (2005), 329–35; Chris Brown, ‘Tragedy, ‘‘Tragic Choices’’ and Contemporary International Political Theory’, International Relations 21: 1 (2007), 5–14; Peter Euben, ‘The Tragedy of Tragedy’, International Relations 21: 1 (2007), 15–22; Richard Beardsworth, ‘Tragedy, World Politics and Ethical Community’, International Relations 22: 1 (2008), 127–37. See, also, Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision of World Politics: Ethics, Interests, and Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Toni Erskine and Richard Ned Lebow (eds), Tragedy and International Relations (Palgrave, 2012). Morgenthau, Scientific Man versus Power Politics, p. 202. Christoph Frei, Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), pp. 186–9. Morgenthau, Scientific Man versus Power Politics, p. 6. Ibid. p. 221. Ibid. p. 206. Morgenthau’s portrait of the deeply conflicted leader – inescapably caught up in the political, but desiring good – contrasts with Schmitt’s vision, where there is no room for morality. Unlike Schmitt, Morgenthau was not opposed to a liberal society; indeed, some thinkers go so far as to suggest that Morgenthau’s writings seek to establish a variant of liberal thought that might be termed tragic or agonistic liberalism (Williams, The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations; Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics). However, others warn that an emphasis on the category of tragedy in Morgenthau’s thought underplays its Schmittian core (Scheuerman, ‘Carl Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau’, pp. 78, 91, fn. 63). Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. See, for example, the discussion in Samuel Weber, ‘Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt’, Diacritics 22: 3–4 (1992), 5–18. Carl Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba: Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Speil (Dusseldorf and Cologne: Dugen Diederichs, 1956), cited by Ju¨rgen Fohrmann, ‘Enmity and Culture: The Rhetoric of Political Theology and the Exception in Carl Schmitt’, trans. Dimitris Vardoulaskis, Culture, Theory and Critique 51: 2 (2010), 129–44.

158 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice 36. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 62, quoted in Fohrmann, ‘Enmity and Culture’, p. 132. 37. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 65, quoted in Weber, ‘Taking Exception to Decision’. 38. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 71, quoted in Fohrmann, ‘Enmity and Culture’, p. 133. 39. Fohrmann, ‘Enmity and Culture’, p. 134. 40. Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, quoted in Fohrmann, ‘Enmity and Culture’, p. 131. 41. Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, p. 47, quoted in Fohrmann, p. 132. 42. ‘So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth’ (Revelation 3:16). 43. Fohrmann, ‘Enmity and Culture’, p. 136. 44. Ibid. p. 138. 45. Ibid. p. 142. 46. Weber, ‘Taking Exception to Decision’, p. 18. 47. For more on the politics of the impossible, see Arditi, Politics on the Edges of Liberalism, pp. 88–106. 48. Miguel Abensour, ‘Persistent Utopia’, Constellations 15: 3 (2008), 406–21. 49. Abensour, ‘Persistent Utopia’, p. 407. 50. Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), p. 29. 51. Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe, pp. 30–1. 52. Ibid. pp. 31–4. 53. Ibid. p. 31. 54. Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe; Jay, ‘Against Consolation’. 55. Jay, ‘Against Consolation’. 56. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 248. 57. Ibid. p. 249. 58. Ibid. p. 245. 59. Gershom Scholem, ‘Rosenzweig and The Star of Redemption’, in The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, Paul Mendes-Flohr (ed.) (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1988), p. 26, cited in David Kaufmann, ‘Beyond Use, within Reason: Adorno, Benjamin and the Question of Theology’, New German Critique 83 (2001), 154. 60. Walter Benjamin, ‘Dialog u¨ber religioses Gefuhl unserer Zeit’, cited in Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe, p. 41. 61. Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe, p. 46. 62. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 247. 63. Rabinbach, p. 50. See, also, Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, in Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and

Notes 159

64.

65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

75.

76. 77.

78.

79. 80. 81.

Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, [1979] 1997), pp. 107–23. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 247. See, also, Giacomo Marramao, ‘Messianism without Delay: On the ‘‘Post-religious’’ Political Theology of Walter Benjamin’, Constellations 15: 3 (2008), 397–405. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 246. Ibid. p. 252. Unlike his friend, Gershom Scholem, who believed redemption to be an actual historical possibility. See Kaufmann, ‘Adorno, Benjamin and the Question of Theology’, p. 161. Rabinbach, pp. 60–1. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theologico-Political Fragment’, in Benjamin, One Way Street, pp. 155–6. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, pp. 248–9. This is particularly obvious in the work of Giorgio Agamben, which is directly indebted to Carl Schmitt. See, for example, Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Although, note, that it is particularly difficult to make generalisations about Zˇizˇek’s thought, which is diverse and continually evolving. Zˇizˇek, ‘Holding the Place’, in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zˇizˇek, Contingency, Universality, Hegemony: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 323–4. Owen Ware, ‘Dialectic of the Past/Disjuncture of the Future: Derrida and Benjamin on the Concept of Messianism’, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 5: 2 (2004), 99–114. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 263. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), p. 18. Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings argue that Derrida’s messianism is ‘not about fulfilment, now or in the future’, characterising it rather as ‘a messianism of temporal dislocation, haunting and promise’ (Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings, ‘Remnants and Revenants: Politics and Violence in the Work of Agamben and Derrida’, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 13 (2011), 127–44). Zˇizˇek, ‘Holding the Place’, p. 325. Zˇizˇek, ‘Holding the Place’, p. 325, emphasis in original. Note the similarities with Adorno’s work on the culture industry. See, for example, Adorno, The Culture Industry; Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Culture Industry Reconsidered’, in S. E. Bronner and D. M. Kellner

160 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice

82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

99. 100.

101. 102.

(eds), Critical Theory and Society: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 128–35. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p. 90. Derrida, ‘Force of Law’. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p. 75. Rose, The Broken Middle, pp. 199–215. Rose’s engagement with Rosa Luxemburg (and her critique of reformism and centrism) is discussed later in this chapter. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 70. For a related critique of Derrida’s conception of, and responses to, violence, see Frazer and Hutchings, ‘Remnants and Revenants: Politics and Violence in the Work of Agamben and Derrida’. Frazer and Hutchings argue that Derrida’s overly formal conception of violence does not allow space for interrogation of actually existing social and political arrangements. By neglecting the institutional and psychological forces that shape the ongoing daily experience of violence, Derrida neglects the political and is left with a binary framework in which ‘politics is either all violence, or consists in the fleeting moments of messianic possibility’ (p. 141). Derrida, ‘Force of Law’. Ware, ‘Dialectic of the Past/Disjuncture of the Future’, p. 107. Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, p. 14. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 81. Ibid. Ibid. p. 87, emphasis in original. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 76. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 181. Ibid. pp. 175–210. Ibid. pp. 181–2, emphasis in original. Tarik Kochi, ‘Anticipation, Critique and the Problem of Intervention: Understanding the Messianic: Derrida through Ernst Bloch’, Law and Critique 13 (2002), 35. Kochi, ‘Anticipation, Critique and the Problem of Intervention’, p. 31. Ware, ‘Dialectic of the Past/Disjuncture of the Future’, p. 113. Ware argues that, ‘Derrida never denies the telos of history; like Benjamin, he denies any politico-epistemological agenda that claims to understand the course of temporality. Such an ‘‘understanding’’, by negating the heterogeneity of the future-to-come, most often proposes an image of utopia, secular or religious, which marks the end of history’. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 5. Note that Rose’s interpretation of Luxemburg differs from the more commonly held view (held by Luka´cs, for example) that Luxemburg is a theorist of utopian spontaneity. See Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 201.

Notes 161

103. 104.

105.

106. 107. 108.

109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

See, also, Georg Luka´cs, ‘Critical Observations on Rosa Luxemburg’s ‘‘Critique of the Russian Revolution’’ ’, in Georg Luka´cs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971), pp. 272–94. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 199. Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Reform or Revolution’, in Rosa Luxemburg, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (New York, NY: Pathfinder Press, 1970), p. 122, cited in Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 200. ‘[A]ccording to Bernstein, trade unions and parliamentary activity gradually reduce capitalist exploitation itself. They remove from capitalist society its capitalist character. They realise objectively the desired social change’ (Luxemburg, pp. 84–5, cited in Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 203). Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 203. Ibid. pp. 200, 202, 207. Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Organisational Question of Social Democracy’, in Luxemburg, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, p. 168, cited in Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 207. Luxemburg, ‘Organisational Question of Social Democracy’, p. 181. Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, in Luxemburg, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, pp. 533–4, cited in Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 210. Luxemburg, ‘Organizational Question of Social Democracy’, p. 180, cited in Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 205. Luxemburg, ‘Reform or Revolution’, p. 126, cited in Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 201. Rose, The Broken Middle, p. 201. Ibid. pp. 201–2. Ibid. p. 202. Ibid. p. 207. Ibid. p. 211. Ibid. p. 213. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 5. Ibid.

Conclusion 1. Rose, Love’s Work, p. 128. 2. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 5. 3. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1945] 1957), pp. 32–4. See, also, Shanks, ‘Against Innocence’. 4. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 35. 5. Ibid. p. 36.

162 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Ibid. p. 5. Ibid. p. 47. Ibid. p. 9. Ibid. p. 5. Ware, ‘Dialectic of the Past/Disjuncture of the Future’, p. 113. Rose, Judaism and Modernity, p. 8, emphasis in original. Ibid. p. 202. Ibid. p. 209. Ibid. Ibid. p. 10.

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Index

aberrated mourning, 46–7, 59 Rose’s critique of, 75, 121 Abraham, Kierkegaard’s retelling of, 39–41 Absolute as comedy, 48, 90 Hegel’s notion of, 27–8 abstract equality, 84–5 abstract thinking, 26, 27 abstract universalism, liberal, 3, 30, 105 and cosmopolitan dilemma, 83–5 disillusionment with, 106 and reason, 128–9 and recognition, 82 actuality comprehension of, 95 difficulty of, 125 of experience, 92 Adorno, Theodor W. critique of Enlightenment, 17–18 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 19 and Kant, 22 Minima Moralia, 23 (mis)reading of Hegel, 17–18, 20–2, 25 reading of Kierkegaard, 39–40 response to Holocaust, 44, 58, 71, 147n Rose’s criticism of, 22–5, 35 Rose’s reading of, 18–25, 132n utopianism, 113

‘What does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?’, 148n agapic danger, and pietism, 42 agency democratic, 103 of Other, 91–2 alterity postmodern celebration of, 85–8 see also Other Angelus Dubiousus, 47, 129–30 Angelus Novus, 47, 115, 129 anti-racism workshops, New Zealand, 96–7 anxiety, 12 lacking in utopianism, 124 and law and ethics, 42–3 of the middle, 8, 92 aporetic danger, 42 aporetic universalism, 11, 43, 81, 82, 88–98 and inaugurated mourning, 90 law, 93–5 political risk, 95–8 and politics of immigration, 98– 102 and reason, 128–9 recognition, 91–3 aporia (difficulty of the political), 3, 50, 51 Luxemburg and, 123–5 Arcadian universalism, 89 Arditi, Benjamin, 86

176 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice Arendt, Hannah, 76, 88 response to Holocaust, 58 armed forces, treatment of traumatised individuals, 62 Athens and Jerusalem, 77–9, 149n as modern ethics, 77 Auschwitz facilitated by modernity, 78 as fourth city, 77, 78–9 Polish Commission for the Future of, 57, 78 Baroque theatre, 111 as aetheticised politics, 121 see also Trauerspiel Baudelaire, Charles, Benjamin and, 46–7 Bauman, Zygmunt, 148–9n Benjamin, Walter aberrated mourning, 46–7 Angelus Novus, 47, 129 and First World War, 57–8, 114– 15 and Jewish messianism, 114–19 messianic utopianism, 105, 112 The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 47, 69, 111, 115 philosophy of law, 93 and Schmitt, 111 Bernstein, Eduard, 161n Evolutionary Socialism, 123 Bildung (education, culture), law and, 95 binary oppositions, 37 in trauma theory, 68–9 see also dualism Bloom, Harold, 141 Bosnia-Herzegovina, conflict, 66 boundaries and rights, 84 as violent, 84 broken middle, 6, 36, 38–44 anxiety of, 8, 92 and inaugurated mourning, 4 trauma of, 57, 142n Brown, Chris, 157n

Bush, George W., response to 11 September 2001 attacks, 63, 64 Butler, Judith, 63–4 Caruth, Cathy, 67, 70 catastrophe, Benjamin’s emphasis on, 114–15 Caygill, Howard, 49 centrism, Luxemburg’s rejection of, 123–4 charity, and Protestantism, 41 cities, tale of four, 77–9 closure, trauma and, 71–2 collective loss, 75 implication of individual in, 76 mourning of, 75–6 comedy of absolute spirit (Hegel), 48, 90 commemoration, First World War, 46 communal working through, 49, 154n Communism, fall of, 105 comprehension, 51 and abstract equality, 85 emphasis on, 7–8, 76 essential humanity of, 76 Kierkegaard and, 38–41 and process of recognition, 91, 102 of self and Other, 86–7, 102 towards, 57, 127 context, 24 importance of, 33–4 and response to trauma, 59 contingency, 51 cosmopolitan dilemma, 43, 81–2, 83–8, 151n abstract universalism, 83–5, 106 and difference, 85–8 and dualisms, 91 cosmopolitanism and abstract universalism, 83–5 and engagement with Other, 102 and liberal rights, 81, 105 critique closure of, 133n as engagement with reality, 127 ‘culture industry’, 19

Index 177 deconstruction, and mystification of justice, 120 Derrida, Jacques, 69 justice-to-come, 119, 120 and law as violence, 93, 160n messianic utopianism, 105, 112, 117–19, 121–2, 160n dialectical thought, 26 diaporia (ethical development of difficulty), 50 difference, a postmodern response, 85–8 diremption, 10 defined, 5–6 of law and ethics, 38 and trauma, 57 dissent, suppression of, 63, 64 double danger, 42 dualism Kantian, 18, 20, 27, 28, 32 resistance of speculative philosophy to, 83 Rose’s rejection of, 33–4 Edkins, Jenny, 62, 69, 70–1 Engels, Friedrich, 20 Enlightenment Adorno’s critique of, 19–20 and cosmopolitanism, 81 and law as legal status, 93 reason and liberalism, 6 equality and human rights regime, 84–5 Western view of, 152n equivocation, of the middle, 52, 82, 124–5 ethics, 131n ‘new’, 85–6 euporia (the easy way), 3, 17 utopianism as, 122 exclusion experiences of, 95 and Otherness, 91, 105 experience, actuality of, 92, 121, 122 Felman, Shoshanna, 67 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 27

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 27, 28 Fine, Robert, 76 finite and infinite, Kant, 29 First World War, 46, 57–8 and heroic soldier response, 62 and Jewish messianism, 114–15 Frankfurt School, 18, 21, 22, 24, 156n Freud, Sigmund account of mourning, 73, 75, 144n Moses and Monotheism, 103 mourning and melancholia, 46, 58–9, 60 Friedlander, Saul, 71–2, 74 Geuss, Raymond, 142n global justice movement, 151n Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 42 ‘good enough justice’, 8, 11 pursuit of, 98, 103–4 good and evil, 157n as meaning-making response, 62–4 and suppression of dissent, 63, 64 ‘grey in grey’, philosophy, 36 guilt, as survivor, 75 Habermas, Ju¨rgen, critique of liberalism, 150n Hamlet, as tragedy of historical reality, 111–12 Hartman, Geoffrey, 141 Hegel, G. W. F. and absolute ethical life (Sittlichkeit), 31 Adorno’s (mis)reading of, 17–18, 20–2, 25 critique of Kant, 28–34 diremption of law and ethics, 38 Phenomenology of Spirit, 30–1, 48 and rationality, 137–8n right- and left-readings, 27–8 Rose’s reading of, 25–8, 34–5, 133n Science of Logic, 31–2 speculative philosophy, 17, 25–34 system and dialectical method, 20, 21–2, 26, 137n

178 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice ‘trinity of ideas’, 29, 30, 32 triune structure of recognition, 91 Heidegger, Martin, 18 Heinle, Friedrich, 115 heroic soldier, as meaning-making response, 61–2 historicism, Adorno’s rejection of, 23–4 history, as human progress, 115 Holocaust, 69 as break (rupture) in history, 71, 74, 77 comprehension of, 148–9n as failure of modernity, 57 Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, 49 Holocaust ethnography, 74–5 Holocaust piety, 73–6 as melancholic, 74 Holocaust theology (ineffability), 67, 71–2 Honig, Bonnie and Book of Ruth, 98–101 democratic agency, 103 Horkheimer, Max, 19 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 156n human rights regime, 81 and equality, 84–5 and law, 93 humanity, and wars, 109 Husserl, Edmund, 18 Hutchings, Kimberley, 135n, 160n identity and recognition, 32–3 as survivor, 75 identity politics, 85–6, 97 ignorance, opposition to, 127 immanent critique, Adorno, 23 immigrants absorption or enclavism, 98–9 assimilation, 100 immigration mourning in, 99, 100–1, 102 politics of, 98–102 inaugurated mourning, 4, 37, 48–9, 72–9, 129 and aporetic universalism, 90

need for work, 53, 60, 74–5, 80, 154n and political risk, 49–51, 141–2n and survival, 75 inequality, fostered by rights regime, 84–5 international law, 108 international relations, tragic choices, 109–10 interventions by powerful, 91, 96 societal, 24 ironic inversion, 23 Israel, and response to assassination of Rabin, 64–6 Jay, Martin, 47, 115 Jerusalem and Athens, 77–9, 149n as postmodern ethics, 77 Jewish messianism, 114–19 Judaism hermeneutics of mourning, 48, 50 and Midrash, 50, 141n ‘just wars’, 109 justice deconstruction of, 120 demystification of, 120–1 ‘good enough’, 8, 11, 98, 103–4, 129 individual and, 151n and law, 120 ‘to-come’, 119 Kant, Immanuel dualism, 18, 20, 27, 28, 32 Hegel’s critique of, 28–34 normative theory, 28 theory of knowledge, 28 transcendental method, 29–30 Kierkegaard, Søren and comprehension, 38–41 Fear and Trembling, 39–40 as Johannes de silentio, 39–40 on religion and politics, 139n Klee, Paul Angelus Dubiosus, 47, 129–30 Angelus Novus, 47, 115, 129

Index 179 knowledge Kant’s theory of, 28 of political present, 52–3 refusal of, 66–7 Kochi, Tarik, 121–2 Kristeva, Julia, 100 LaCapra, Dominick, 47, 49 Laub, Dori, 49, 67 law aporetic universalism and, 93–5 and ethics, diremption of, 38, 39 and justice, 120 as legal status, 42, 93 and morality, 127 as negotiation of the middle, 42–3, 103–4 plasticity of, 95 poetics of, 97 postmodern portrayal as violent, 93–4, 120 as social norms and practices, 94 left-Hegelian theory, 20, 21, 27–8, 34 Frankfurt School and, 22 and Phenomenology, 30 legal status, law as, 42, 93 Lenin, V. I., centrism, 123 liberal rights regime, 81, 84–5 liberalism abstract solutions to suffering, 44, 45 Habermasian critique of, 150n as indirect domination, 108 and rationality, 2 and reason, 108, 127 Western, 96 Lloyd, Vincent, 95, 139nn logic, Hegel’s idea of, 31–2 loss collective and social, 61, 75 see also trauma Lukacs, Georg, 22 Luther, Martin, 41 Luxemburg, Rosa, 88, 123–5, 161n ‘Reform or Revolution’, 123 Marx, Karl, 20, 22 and Hegel, 27, 28

theory of value, 19 meaning, reformulation of, 50–1 meaning-making narratives (in response to trauma), 61–6 depoliticisation, 69–70 good and evil, 62–4 heroic soldier, 61–2 maladaptive, 70 redemptive violence, 64–6 mediation, 21 melancholia, 44, 45 and messianism, 121 as unhealthy response to loss, 58–9, 60, 79–80 melancholic trauma theory, 66–72 memorialisation, 46, 69 as truncated mourning, 62 ‘memory boom’, 58, 69 messianic utopianism, 12, 105, 125 as counsel of hopelessness, 119, 121 of the future, 118 impoverished view of law and reason, 119 notions of promise, 121–2 of the past, 114, 116 and radical break with present, 105–6 methodologism, Adorno, 23 middle aporetic universalism and, 89 difficult work of, 119 equivocation of, 52 negotiation of, 8, 12–13, 82 Midrash, Jewish concept of, 50, 141n Milosevic, Slobodan, 66 misrecognition, 91 forms of, 75 modernity brokenness of, 51, 73 and commodification, 19 disasters of, 44, 46, 97, 127 Moglen, Seth, 66 mourning collective losses, 75–6 moral progress liberal visions of, 109 pursuit of, 113 rights regime and, 84

180 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice morality and harsh realities of political life, 110–11 and law, 127 More, Thomas, concept of utopia, 113 Morgenthau, Hans J. analysis of rationalist liberalism, 156n political realism, 105–9 and Schmitt, 155–6n tragedy of political life, 109–11 tragic realism, 158n Moses-Hrushovski, Rena, 64–5 motility, speculative, 92 mourning aberrated, 46–7, 59, 75, 121 of collective loss, 75–6 as healthy response to loss, 58, 60, 73 in immigration politics, 99, 100–1, 102 and political risk, 44–6, 49–51 political work of, 57 truncated, 62 see also Freud, Sigmund; inaugurated mourning negotiation and immigration, 101 in journey towards recognition, 92, 103 New Zealand, workshops for Pakeha New Zealanders, 96–7 Niethammer, Friedrich Immanuel, Hegel’s letter to, 26 noumena, and phenomena, 30 objective spirit, 28 Other as agent, 91–2 celebration of, 85–6 engagement between self and, 95–7 excluded by liberal cosmopolitanism, 43, 81 location in socio-political structures, 87–8 oppression and powerlessness of, 91 recognition of, 33, 35, 101–2

self-referential reasoning of, 86 see also immigration Ozick, Cynthia, 100 particularity, 6 Enlightenment suppression of, 81 Peres, Shimon, 65 phenomena, and noumena, 30 phenomenology, 30–1 pietism, 42, 139n poetics of law, 97 Polish Commission for the Future of Auschwitz, 57 political engagement, 80 political realism, 12, 105, 106–14, 125 the political against liberal thought, 106–9 tragedy, 109–12 and utopian hope, 112–14 political risk, 8–9, 11 aporetic universalism and, 95–8 continued trying, 73 and mourning, 44–6, 49–51 in pursuit of ‘good enough justice’, 103–4, 125, 129 political, the as antagonistic force, 107 depoliticisation of, 106–7 as distinction between friend and enemy, 106, 110 located between tragedy and utopia, 119–22 Popper, Karl, Adorno and, 22 possible, politics of the, 105 post-Marxist theory, 3 postmodernism, 18, 36 and difference, 85–8, 105 and ethics, 48 and melancholia, 44, 45 and ‘purified reason’, 87 and reconciliation of broken middle, 38, 92 and refusal of anxiety, 43–4 rejection of law as inherently violent, 93–4 poststructuralism, particularity and difference, 2, 7

Index 181 power, politics as desire for, 107 powerless, and interventions by powerful, 91, 96 proceduralism, Adorno, 23 progress as catastrophe, 115, 129 notions of, 7, 125 possibility of, 119 through rationality, 117, 119 property ownership, as unjust structure, 33 Protestantism and individualism, 139n as inwardness, 121 Lutheran, 41 Pupavac, Vanessa, 62 Rabin, Yitzhak, Israeli response to assassination, 64–6 Rabinbach, Anson, and Jewish messianism, 114, 115, 116 Radstone, Susannah, 68 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, 151n realism see political realism reality, tragic, 111–12, 119 reason abstract universalism, 128–9 empathetic, 45 impoverished by rigid dualisms, 94 liberalism and, 108 ‘purified’, 87 rehabilitation of, 3, 127–30 recognition and aporetic universalism, 91–3, 102–3 as core of reason, 3 Hegel’s notion of, 27, 29 Hegel’s ‘triune structure’ of, 32–3, 34–5 and immigration, 101 and political risk, 95–6 and self-identity, 76 redemption and apocalyptic transformation, 116–17 in fragments of remembrance, 116 possibility of, 113–14

redemptive violence, as meaningmaking response, 64–6 reformism, Luxemburg’s rejection of, 123–4 relationality, 7 representation, possibility of, 74, 154n revelation, Kierkegaard, 39 right-Hegelian theory, 27–8, 34 and Phenomenology, 30 risk of living, 40 of universal interest, 97–8 see also political risk Rose, Gillian, 57 The Broken Middle, 9, 36, 38–44 Hegel contra Sociology, 9, 18, 25 key themes, 4–9 Love’s Work, 5 The Melancholy Science, 17, 18, 25– 6 Mourning Becomes the Law, 46, 48 and Polish Commission for the Future of Auschwitz, 57, 78 speculative philosophy, 1–2, 4 Ruth, Book of, 98–101 Santner, Eric, 100, 101 Sassoon, Siegfried, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, 62 Schmitt, Carl Hamlet or Hecuba, 111 and Morgenthau, 155–6n political realism, 105–9 The Concept of the Political, 107 tragedy of political life, 109, 110–12 Scholem, Gershom, 116 science, and power to solve problems, 108 Scottish Enlightment, 157n Second World War, 46 self-examination, and response to trauma, 63 Seligson, Frederika, 115 September 11 (2001) attacks, 58, 69, 143–4n alternative responses to, 145n good and evil response, 63–4

182 Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice Shilliam, Robbie, 96 Shoah see Holocaust Singer, Peter, 64 Sinzheimer, Hugo, 156n Sittlichkeit (absolute ethical life), Hegel, 31 social science, and liberal politics, 108 socialism, as reformism, 123 soul-searching, 76 sovereign decision and action, 112 as tragic, 111 speculative philosophy, 6–7, 17–35, 127–8 Rose on Adorno, 17–25 Rose on Hegel, 25–34 state(s) and boundaries, 84 depoliticisation of trauma, 69–70 and meaning-making narratives, 61, 67 Westphalian system, 83–4, 108 struggle, centrality of, 41 subject and object, separation of, 21 suffering, responses to, 44–5 theology, secular, 116 third city (where we live), 77, 78 time, interruption of linear, 118, 121–2 tragedy, political realism, 109–12 tragic resignation, 7–8, 12, 125 transformation action and, 117 failure of reformism and centrism, 123–4 possibility of, 27 Trauerspiel (Baroque mourning play), 47, 69, 111, 115 trauma Benjamin and, 46–7 and closure, 71–2 and diremption, 57 enigmatic core, 67–8 historical, 142n mainstream responses to, 59, 72–3 melancholic responses to, 60–6 and political risk, 49–51 reflection on, 79

responses to, 10–11, 46–51, 58 structural, 142n theoretical responses to, 59, 72–3 trans-generational transmission of, 66 unknowable dimension of, 70–1 trauma event, 68 trauma theory, 67–71 and binary oppositions, 59 and Holocaust theology, 71–2 truth commisssions, proliferation of, 69 Tubbs, Nigel, on Hegel, 137–8n uncertainty, 8 universalism, 6 aporetic, 11, 43 see also abstract universalism; aporetic universalism universality, as remedy for oppression, 81 utopia content-less, 118–19 as ‘good place’, 113, 117, 119 impossibility of, 118–19 More’s concept of, 113 as ‘non-place’, 113, 117, 118 utopian hope, 112–14, 119 utopian universalism, 89 utopianism of the past, 114, 116 Rose’s rejection of, 122 see also Jewish messianism; messianic utopianism Varnhagen, Rahel, 88, 89 victimhood, 62, 64 perpetuated, 66 violence of law, 93–4, 120 liberalism and, 108–9 redemptive, 64–6 Volkan, Vamik, 66 war fought in name of humanity, 109 veneration of, 47 white supremacism, challenges to, 96–7 Wiesel, Elie, 71

Index 183 Winter, Jay, 58, 62 witnessing, 40–1 work, need for, 48–9, 53 working classes, Benjamin’s view of, 116 working through (pain), 46, 74, 127 communal, 49 and inaugurated mourning, 60, 74–5, 80, 154n

Yale University, Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, 49 Yoder, Caroline, 64 Zˇizˇek, Slavoj, 69, 105–6 on US response to 11 September 2001 attacks, 63 utopianism, 112, 117, 118