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Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation
Mourning Becomes the Law is the philosophical counterpart to the late Gillian Rose's acclaimed memoir Love's Work. It presents a powerful and eloquent case against postmodernism, and breathes new life into the debates about power and domination, transcendence and eternity. Addressing topics such as architecture, cinema, painting, poetry, the Holocaust and Judaism, Gillian Rose enables us to connect ideas about the individual and society with theories of justice. This is philosophy for the nonphilosopher.
172 pages, Paperback
First published September 12, 1996
About the author
Gillian Rose
33 books59 followersGillian Rose (20 September 1947 – 9 December 1995) was a British scholar who worked in the fields of philosophy and sociology. Notable facets of this social philosopher's work include criticism of neo-Kantianism and post-modernism, along with what has been described as "a forceful defence of Hegel's speculative thought."
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May 9, 2017
This is a posthumous 1996 essay collection by the British philosopher, who died of ovarian cancer in 1995 and is perhaps best known less for her philosophical corpus than for her stunning memoir, Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life (1995), which I mentioned in my personal canon. Of this book, the introduction and first chapter ("Athens and Jerusalem: a tale of three cities") concern me most, as they elaborate both Rose's criticism of contemporary philosophical and political thought and what she would put in its place.
In philosophy, Rose claims, we suffer from "despairing rationalism without reason" (her italics); this is what is popularly known as "post-modernism," or the paradoxically rationalized discrediting of both reason (as a totalitarian and imperial force ruthlessly suppressing all diversity and plurality) and of the reasoning subject (as an effect of language or ideology). Politically, this refusal of reason leads to two divergent ideologies, both of which claim to abjure the power of the state (or, more expansively, the civic considered in Hegelian terms as "ethical life," which can only be lived collectively) in the name of more potent and glamorous agencies: the (economic) individual or the (cultural) community.
For Rose, contemporary politics is a contest between libertarianism and communitarianism; the former is destructive of the civic because it refuses social constraints on individual economic choice, while the latter is destructive of the civic because it holds cultural particularism over collective deliberation. Yet, Rose claims, both ultimately empower the coercive force of the state even as they claim to diminish it, because they require the state to police threats generated by inequality to the libertarian order and those generated by cultural conflict to the communitarian order. Both presuppose modern rationalism—what Rose calls "legitimising domination as authority"—though they pretend to have surpassed it. Against their warring particularisms, she mounts a defense of political universalism:
Rose advocates for a middle between libertarianism and communitarianism, but it is not political centrism, still less some cynical Third Way. Her key phrase is "the broken middle," the space of inevitably imperfect negotiation and contestation where individual moral action and collective ethical practice takes place. Rose is a Hegelian, but not one for whom history is a neat narrative of progressively superior modes of order. Rather, for her, we are always involved in ethical action that mediates between the claims of reason and love. Contradiction is synthesized in action—hence her contempt for the refusals of action that she sees disfiguring postmodern philosophy (with its rejection of speculative reason) and postmodern politics (with its contempt for the civic).
Her brilliant essay on Athens and Jerusalem makes the point through a reading of Poussin's painting, Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion. In the painting, the widow of a man executed by a tyrant surreptitiously gathers his proscribed ashes as the buildings of Athens rise in the distance. Rose paraphrases an interpretation of the painting that she rejects: love, in the form of the wife's piety, is pitted against the imperialism of rationalism signified by the tyranny of the city. Here, rationalism is Athens and love is Jerusalem; the rejection of the former Rose understands as the hallmark of postmodernism. She dismisses this opposition as too facile and proposes in its place a more complex relation wherein we supplement both Athens and Jerusalem, reason and love, with a third city that guides our speculation and wandering:
Rose's own politics, though, go largely unspecified. Most contemporary theorists who work in her Hegelian métier are far more forthrightly and sometimes even orthodoxly Marxist than she appears to be (I am thinking of Slavoj Žižek, Susan Buck-Morss, Timothy Brennan). She does defend Marx, together with Plato, at the beginning of the book; she advocates an "aporetic" reading of both thinkers rather than a "determinist" one. A determinist reading would see in their thought nothing but certain monumental and imperial concepts (the forms for Plato, the law of history for Marx), while a reading attentive to the aporias, or contradictions, in their thought would allow the difficulty and complexity—and thus the continued viability—of their works to stand. One imagines that she also prefers Marxism for its nuanced account of contradiction and conflict, as opposed to the moralism of anarchism. Marxism is the theory that only the master's tools can dismantle the master's house; that is what the dialectic means. When Rose argues so passionately against the abandonment of reason because of its instrumentalization in tyranny and genocide, she must have something like this in mind.
Several of this book's chapters were beyond me, especially the central one on Jewish tradition wherein she argues against the idea of "the Jew as modernity's sublime other" and for an interpretation of midrash as inherently political. A related piece on representations of the Holocaust makes a similar case against turning the Nazi genocide into a pious and sentimental myth rather than an object of self-implicating historical investigation and representation. Her example of bad Holocaust art is, unsurprisingly, Schindler's List, which she sees as facile and sentimental; to it, she counterposes Primo Levi's memoirs and Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, among others, as narratives that force readers into morally disturbing crises of identification rather than leaving us at a complacent distance.
Rose is a fierce but sly polemicist. In one paragraph, she obliterates Richard Rorty without so much as mentioning his name:
Rose's thesis, in short, is that we must replace our passivity and nihilism with an activity oriented toward transcendent ends, with the understanding that there will always be a disparity between theory and practice. These disparities should not be taken as evidence that theory or practice are impossible; instead, they are what allow us to scrutinize and correct our actions in the light of both thought and experience. This is a difficult ethic to maintain, it should be said, though I sympathize with it, more from the point of view of aesthetics—why else would I continue to read and write novels, even after the novel is supposed to have died along with God and the subject?—than politics.
Rose, at the end of her life, converted to Anglican Christianity. It has been called a deathbed conversion, implying, I suppose, that it may not have happened had she not been dying. But I can just as easily think of it in the opposite way: who knows if she would have stopped there had she lived longer? Her unnamed third city of justice, synthesizing love and reason, may have been a rather more traditional sublation of Athens and Jerusalem all along: Rome.
In philosophy, Rose claims, we suffer from "despairing rationalism without reason" (her italics); this is what is popularly known as "post-modernism," or the paradoxically rationalized discrediting of both reason (as a totalitarian and imperial force ruthlessly suppressing all diversity and plurality) and of the reasoning subject (as an effect of language or ideology). Politically, this refusal of reason leads to two divergent ideologies, both of which claim to abjure the power of the state (or, more expansively, the civic considered in Hegelian terms as "ethical life," which can only be lived collectively) in the name of more potent and glamorous agencies: the (economic) individual or the (cultural) community.
For Rose, contemporary politics is a contest between libertarianism and communitarianism; the former is destructive of the civic because it refuses social constraints on individual economic choice, while the latter is destructive of the civic because it holds cultural particularism over collective deliberation. Yet, Rose claims, both ultimately empower the coercive force of the state even as they claim to diminish it, because they require the state to police threats generated by inequality to the libertarian order and those generated by cultural conflict to the communitarian order. Both presuppose modern rationalism—what Rose calls "legitimising domination as authority"—though they pretend to have surpassed it. Against their warring particularisms, she mounts a defense of political universalism:
Politics begins not when you organise to defend an individual or particular or local interest, but when you organise to further the 'general’ interest within which your particular interest may be represented.This was written over twenty years ago; I would update it with a stronger account of how these two tendencies embolden each other in a feedback loop, libertarian economics driving people deeper into communitarian cultural shelters until there is no common ground left (the late stage of which process I referred to as "the age of Trump" some four months before the U.S. election).
Rose advocates for a middle between libertarianism and communitarianism, but it is not political centrism, still less some cynical Third Way. Her key phrase is "the broken middle," the space of inevitably imperfect negotiation and contestation where individual moral action and collective ethical practice takes place. Rose is a Hegelian, but not one for whom history is a neat narrative of progressively superior modes of order. Rather, for her, we are always involved in ethical action that mediates between the claims of reason and love. Contradiction is synthesized in action—hence her contempt for the refusals of action that she sees disfiguring postmodern philosophy (with its rejection of speculative reason) and postmodern politics (with its contempt for the civic).
Her brilliant essay on Athens and Jerusalem makes the point through a reading of Poussin's painting, Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion. In the painting, the widow of a man executed by a tyrant surreptitiously gathers his proscribed ashes as the buildings of Athens rise in the distance. Rose paraphrases an interpretation of the painting that she rejects: love, in the form of the wife's piety, is pitted against the imperialism of rationalism signified by the tyranny of the city. Here, rationalism is Athens and love is Jerusalem; the rejection of the former Rose understands as the hallmark of postmodernism. She dismisses this opposition as too facile and proposes in its place a more complex relation wherein we supplement both Athens and Jerusalem, reason and love, with a third city that guides our speculation and wandering:
The gathering of the ashes is a protest against arbitrary power; it is not a protest against power and law as such. To oppose anarchic, individual love or good to civil or public ill is to deny the third which gives meaning to both—this is the other meaning of the third city—the just city and just act, the just man and the just woman. In Poussin's painting, this transcendent but mournable justice is configured, its absence given presence, in the architectural perspective which frames and focuses the enacted justice of the two women.In other words, justice is the sublation of law and love, while the completion of mourning takes place in action—this latter as opposed (Rose is borrowing from Freud) to the unending, inactive, and isolating melancholia of the postmodernists.
Rose's own politics, though, go largely unspecified. Most contemporary theorists who work in her Hegelian métier are far more forthrightly and sometimes even orthodoxly Marxist than she appears to be (I am thinking of Slavoj Žižek, Susan Buck-Morss, Timothy Brennan). She does defend Marx, together with Plato, at the beginning of the book; she advocates an "aporetic" reading of both thinkers rather than a "determinist" one. A determinist reading would see in their thought nothing but certain monumental and imperial concepts (the forms for Plato, the law of history for Marx), while a reading attentive to the aporias, or contradictions, in their thought would allow the difficulty and complexity—and thus the continued viability—of their works to stand. One imagines that she also prefers Marxism for its nuanced account of contradiction and conflict, as opposed to the moralism of anarchism. Marxism is the theory that only the master's tools can dismantle the master's house; that is what the dialectic means. When Rose argues so passionately against the abandonment of reason because of its instrumentalization in tyranny and genocide, she must have something like this in mind.
Several of this book's chapters were beyond me, especially the central one on Jewish tradition wherein she argues against the idea of "the Jew as modernity's sublime other" and for an interpretation of midrash as inherently political. A related piece on representations of the Holocaust makes a similar case against turning the Nazi genocide into a pious and sentimental myth rather than an object of self-implicating historical investigation and representation. Her example of bad Holocaust art is, unsurprisingly, Schindler's List, which she sees as facile and sentimental; to it, she counterposes Primo Levi's memoirs and Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, among others, as narratives that force readers into morally disturbing crises of identification rather than leaving us at a complacent distance.
Rose is a fierce but sly polemicist. In one paragraph, she obliterates Richard Rorty without so much as mentioning his name:
One recent version of this separation of metaphysics from ethics understands itself as a 'neo-pragmatics'. It deliberately eschews any theory of justice, for all such theories are said to be dependent on the metaphysics of objective truth independent of language. The pernicious holism of truth is attributed to the modern tradition whereby the theory of subjectivity, the theory of the freedom of the individual, is regarded as the basis of the possibility of collective freedom and justice. Cast as generally as this, the indictment of liberal metaphysics also applies to corporatist, and to revolutionary theories, and, in effect, to the overcoming of nihilism. In the place of this metaphysical tradition the 'creation of self' is to be explored independently of any theory of justice, which is thereby restricted to the vaporous ethics of 'cruelty' limitation, learnt from modem literature and not from analysis or philosophy. This separation of the self from any theoretical account of justice is advertised as a 'neo-pragmatics' for it claims to follow the contours of contingency and to avoid all and any structures of prejudged truth. Commitment to the ineluctable contingencies of language, self and community is presented as 'ironism' by contrast with liberal, metaphysical 'rationalism'. 'Ironism', the celebration of the sheer promiscuity of all intellectual endeavour, depends on this opposition to any philosophical position which presupposes an independent reality to which its conceptuality aims to be in some sense adequate.She devotes one whole essay to Derrida, whose tragic ethos she replies with Hegelian comedy, and one to a scorching polemic against Maurice Blanchot. She reads Blanchot as an ideologist of "passivity beyond passivity," a refusal of action and language and a worship of a death whose meaninglessness has made it an inverted transcendence; against Blanchot, she calls for "activity beyond activity," the constant labor of imagination, language, and representation in the broken middle where we reside. (Whether or not this is fair, I am not sure; I have barely read Blanchot and know him mainly from secondary sources, friendly [Gabriel Josipovici] or hostile [Richard Wolin]. As for Rorty and Derrida, I find her criticisms cogent, though there is perhaps more to be said for Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity than she allows.)
Rose's thesis, in short, is that we must replace our passivity and nihilism with an activity oriented toward transcendent ends, with the understanding that there will always be a disparity between theory and practice. These disparities should not be taken as evidence that theory or practice are impossible; instead, they are what allow us to scrutinize and correct our actions in the light of both thought and experience. This is a difficult ethic to maintain, it should be said, though I sympathize with it, more from the point of view of aesthetics—why else would I continue to read and write novels, even after the novel is supposed to have died along with God and the subject?—than politics.
Rose, at the end of her life, converted to Anglican Christianity. It has been called a deathbed conversion, implying, I suppose, that it may not have happened had she not been dying. But I can just as easily think of it in the opposite way: who knows if she would have stopped there had she lived longer? Her unnamed third city of justice, synthesizing love and reason, may have been a rather more traditional sublation of Athens and Jerusalem all along: Rome.
July 14, 2013
i read this in 2011, in a less than ideal way, for an essay i was writing. i will re-read it, one day.
September 25, 2015
What I understood of it was absolutely wonderful.
June 25, 2023
this book.....
[Introduction]
• It is strange to live in a time when philosophy has found so many ways to damage if not to destroy itself. One by one all of the clas- sical preoccupations of philosophy have been discredited and dis· carded: eternity, reason, truth, representation, justice, freedom, beauty and the Good. The dismissal of 'metaphysics' is accompa- nied by the unabated search for a new ethics. Yet no one seems to have considered what philosophical resources remain for an ethics when so much oflhe live tradition is disqualified and dead- ened.
• But wisdom WORKS WITH EQUIVOCATION
• In their abstract and general opposition to the state, power, rationality and truth, libertarianism and communitarianism directly and indirectlyaid and abet authoritarian power ofcontrol. They do so directly, by disowning the coercive immediacy of the type of action legitimated, and indirectly, in the way the stance at stake disowns the political implications of legitimated violence and so re·imposes that burden on agents and agencies of the state
• Any account of'freedom' and 'justice' is deemed to depend on the 'metaphysics' of truth. When 'metaphysics' is separated from ethics in this way, the result will be unanticipated political paradoxes.
• However, there is nothing 'ironic' about this outmoded and dualistic contrast between the embrace of the contingency of language versus commitment to objective reality.
• It is conceptually impossible 10 produce a taxonomy which would sequester concepts of justice and the good from concepts of 'self-creation', for the very forma- tion of 'selfhood' takes place in intemction with the mingled ethical and epistemological positings of the other, the partner in the formation of our contingent and unstable identities OKAY
• by disqualifying universal notions of justice, freedom. and the good, for being inveterately 'metaphysical'. for colon!sing and suppressing their others with the violence consequent on the chimera of corre- spondence. 'post-modernism' has no imagination for its own implied ground in justice, freedom and the good.
• ' Despairing rationalism without reason' is, I claim. the story of post-modernism. It is the story of what happens when 'metaphysics' is barred from ethics. THESIS
• it is always possible to take the claims and conceptuality of philosophical works detemlinistically or aporetically - as fixed, closed conceptual structures, colonising being with the garrison of thought; or according to the difficulty which the conceptuality represents by)eaving gaps and silences in the mode of representation.
o I SAY WORKS AND NOT TEXTS: THE FORMER IMPLYING THE LABOR OF THE CONCEPT INSEPARABLE FROM ITS FORMAL CHARACTERISTICS AS OPPOSED TO THE LATTER WITH ITS CONNOTATIONS OF SIGNIFIERS, THE SYMBOLIC AND SEMIOTICS**********
• Here it takes three to make a relationship between two: the devastation between posited thought and posited being, between power and exclusion from power, implies the universal, the third partner, which allows us to recognise that devastation.
• Together, universal and aporia are irruption and witness to the brokenness in the middle. This ethical witness, universal and aporetic, can only act with some dynamic and corrigible metaphys;C5 of universal and singular, or archetype and type, or concept and intuition. Hmmmmm
• Post-modernism in its renunciation 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, which I express in the phrase describing post--modernism as 'despairing rationalism without reason'.
• the reassessment of reason, gradually rediscovering its own moveable boundaries as it explores the boundaries of the soul, the city and the sacred, can complete its mourning. Completed mourning acknowledges the creative involvement of action in the configurations of power and law: it does not find itself unequivocally in a closed cin::uit which exclusively confers logic and power. THESIS
• [1: Athens and Jerusalem: a tale of three cities]
• What do we hope for from the ideal of the community?
• We hope to solve the political problem; we hope for the New Jerusalem; we hope for a collective life without inner or outer boundaries, without obstacles or occlusions, within and between souls and within and between cities, without the perennial work which constantly legitimates and delegitimates the transformation of power into authority of different kinds.
• Community idealized in comparison to convention
o old Athens is opposed to New Jerusalem.
• The two cities are the 1. Autonomous and ‘natural, individual and particular and 2. Participation in a collectivity
• Athens, the city of rational politics. has been abandoned: she is said to have proven that enlightenment is domination. Her former inhabitants have set off on a pilgrimage to the New Jerusalem, the imaginal}' community, where they seek to dedicate themselves to difference, to otherness, to love - to a new ethics, which overcomes the fusion of knowledge and power in the old Athens. What if the pilgrims, unbeknownst to themselves, carry along in their souls the third city - the city of capitalist private property and modem legal status? The city that separates each individual into ap rivate, autonomous, competitive person, a bounded ego, and a phantasy life of community, a life of unbounded mutuality, a life without separation and its inevitable anxieties? A phantasy life which effectively destroyes the remnant of political life? THIRD CITY
o SUBSITUTE ‘NEW JERUSALEM’ FOR THE MISSING ANALYSIS OF OLD ATHENS
o This substitution puts the idea of the community, of immediate ethical experience, in the place of the risks of critical rationality.
• Analysis of the ashes of Phocion
o Story goes that wife consumed his ashes to give him tomb. (exact parallel almost with ANTIGONE)
o Sister Wendy presented the gesture of the wife bending down to scoop up the ashes as an act of perfect love - as Jerusalem. She contrasted this gesture of love with the unjust nature olthe city of Athens, which she saw represented in the classical architecture of the huildings, rising up in the combined landscape and cityscape behind the two women.
o The women exert, though, POLITICAL RISK. This is not only an act of infinite love but POLITICAL JUSTICE. No neat separation here.
o To see the built Conns themselves as ciphers o{the unjust city has political consequences: it perpetuates endless dying and endless tyranny, and it ruins the possibility of political action.
o Jerusalem vs. Athens, and even Jerusalem on its own isn’t as tidy as we might think. It’s the third city that troubles this.
To clarify the THIRD CITY IS THE ACTUAL IMAGINED JERUSALEM: IT IS AS MUCH REASON AS NOT, AND WE MUST RECONCILE THIS.
• A FOURTH CITY: Auschwitz
o A measure for demonic anti-reason
o 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 caJls for silent witness in the face of absolute horror. But to name the Nazi geno- cide 'the Holocaust' is already to over-unify it and to sacralize it, to see it as providential purpose
o 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 areassessed.11lc Holocaust provides the standard for demonic anti-reason; and the Holocaust founds the call for the new ethics.
o Auschwitz is called a 'post- historical city', and is shown gruesomely to fulfil the five functions of the classic model of the five-square city - Athens. These five functions are said to be veneration of the dead, celebration of the future, government, which concerns the active present, dwelling, which concerns the passive present, and sustenance or trade.
o Working at Auschwitz has, however, convinced me that the apparently unnegotiableand expiatory opposition between reaso n and witness, between knowledge/power and new ethics, or between relativisingexplanation and prayer. protects us from con- fronting something even more painful, which is our persistent and persisting dilemma, and not something we can project onto a onc- dimensional, demonic rationality, which we think we have dis- owned. 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 col- liding cities cover a deeper evasion - fear of a different kind of continuity between the thIrd city and Auschwitz, which itself gives rise to the iII·fated twins of the devastation of reason and the phantasmagoric ethics of the community?
o New Jerusalem relatavises the evil which it explains. And why should it not? The answer would be: because that shows norespect for those who died such terrible deaths, and, that it depends on discredited methods of knowledge
o A deeper fear: that we would be part of that relativity without there being any overarching law determining our participation.
• Back to the boundary wall of Athens, with ANTIGONE and the WIFE OF PHOCION MOURNING
o By insisting on the right and rites of mourning, Antigone and the wife of Phocion carry out that intense work of the soul, that gradual rearrangement of its boundaries, which must occur when a loved one is lost
o To acknowl- edge 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.
o 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 perennial anxiety.
o To oppose new ethics to the old city, Jerusalem to Athens, is to succumb to loss, to refuse to mourn, to cover persisting anxiety with the violence of a New Jerusalem masquerading as love.
• Levinas’ Other
o Knowledge, power and practical reason are attributed to the model of the autonomous, bounded, separ- ated, individual self, the sell within the city, 'the alllance of logic and politics'. The self, according to this new ethics, cannot expe- rience truly transConning loss, but plunders the world for the booty of its self-seeking interest. To become ethical, this self is to be dev- astated, traumatised, unthroned, by the commandment to sub- stitute Ihe olher for itself. Responsibility is defined in this new ethics as 'passivity beyond passivity', which is inconceivable and not representable, because it takes place beyond any city - even though Levinas insists that it is social and not sacred.
This new ethics denies identity to the other as it denies identity to the actor, now passive beyond passivity, more radically passive, that is, than any simple failure to act. But the other, too, is dis- traught and searching for politicaJ community - the other is also bounded and vulnerable, enraged and invested, isolated and inter- related. To command meto sacrifice myself in sublime passivity for the other, with no political expression for any activity, is to command in ressentiment an ethics of waving,
• [2 Beginnings of the day—Fascism and representation]
• Holocaust ethnography vs Holocaust piety
o The former permits the exploration of the representation of Fascism and the fascism of representation to be pursued across the production, dis- tribution and reception of cultural works.
• Fascism and Aesthetic Representation
o Cheyette’s Review of Schindler’s List: 'Schindler's List fails only when it. too (like Kencally's original fictionalisation Schindler's List. becomes a seductive and self-confident narrativc at the cost of any real understanding of the difficulties inherent in representing the ineffable'
o Gross’ response to that review exhibits Holocaust piety by rejecting Cheyette’s review in the name of ‘ineffability’
To argue for silence, prayer, the banishment 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. HMMMM IM NOT SOLD HERE LOL
Sueh plasticity of history, such pragmatics ofgood and evil, such continuity between the banality of Schindler's benevolence and the gratuity of Gaeth's violence, should mean that the reader, and, pari passu, the audience, experience the crisis of identity in their own breasts. Instead, we enjoy vicarious revulsion at the hand- some sadist, Gaeth, who appears invincible in the film, but is imprisoned much earlier on in the book, and we applaud the bon- vivant Schindler in his precarious outwitting of him. Okay im with this
The sentimentality of the ultimate predator. HELL YEAH
Comparing book and movie: If the book is 'glib', it is because the story it tells is glib - the ironic, sustained glibness of the style is its integrity: it leaves the crisis to the reader.
The film depends on the sentimentality of the ultimate predator. It makes the crisis external: on first viewing, one is perpetually braced in fear of obscene excess of voyeuristic witness.
In a nature film, we could be made to identify with the life cycle of the fly as prey of the spider, and we could be made to identify with the life cycle of the spider as prey of the rodent We can be made to identify with the Peking Opera singer who is destroyed by the CUltural Revolution, and we can equally be made to identify with the rickshaw man, for whom the Cultura1 Revolution was 'the beginning of Paradise'. It is only the ultimate predator whose sym- pathies can be so promiscuously enlisted. Only the ultimate preda- tor who can be made to identify exclusively and yet consecfcutively with one link or another in the life cycle, because she can destroy the whole cycle, and, of course, herself. Since she is the ultimate predator, she can be sentimental about the victimhood of other predators while overlooking that victim's own violent predation; and she may embellish her arbitrary selectivity of compassion in rhapsodies and melodramas. JESUS
The limits of representation arc not solely quantitative: how much violence, or even, what kind of violence, can I, and should I, tolerate? More profoundly, the limits of representation are con· figurative: they concern the relation between configuration and meaning.
It is my own violence that I discover in this film.
However, Shoah raises questions of the interestedness of memory and recall on the part of the interviewer and the inter- viewed. DAMN
Tadeun: Borowski's account in the selection published under the title This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1967). Borowski was a Pole but not a Jew, who killed himseU in 1951. His attount of being a prisoner in Auschwitz deals with many things which Levi spares us. Above all, Borowski represents himself, a deputy Kapo, as both executioner and victim, and deprives the dis- tinction 'ofall greatness and pathos'. While Borowski never denies his ethical presupposition - for otherwise not one sentence could have been written - he makes you witness brutality in the most dis- turbing way, for it is not clear - Levi a1wa~ is - from what posi- tion, as whom, you are reading. You emerge shaking in horror at yourself, with yourself In question, not in admiration for the author's Olympian serenity (Levi).
BAD REPRESENTATIONS: PASSIVE SOBRIETY OR SENTIMENTALITY OF WITNESS
GOOD: ACTIVE RECOGNITION IN ONESELF OF THE NIHILISM OF DISOWNED EMOTIONS AND THE PERSONAL AND POLITICAL DEPREDATIONS AT STAKE
WE MUST NOT EMERGE WITH SENTIMETAL TEARS, WITH EMOTIONAL AND POLITICAL INTACTNESS, BUT WITH DRY EYES OF DEEP GRIEF WHICH BELONGS TO THE RECOGNITION OF OUR INELUCTABLE GROUNDING IN THE NORMS OF THE EMOTIONAL AND POLITICAL CULTURE REPRESENTED
• Fascism and Philosophical Representation
o REPRESENTATION OF FASCISM LEAVES THE IDENTITY OF THE VOYEUR INTACT
o FASCISM OF REPRESENTATION beyond the limit of voyeurism, provokes the grief of encountering the violence normally legitim- ised by the individual moral will, with which we defend our own particular interests, and see only the egoism of the other - these may be interests of disinterested service, race, gender, religion, class.
• [3 The comedy of Hegel and Trauerspiel of modern philosophy]
o In the work of mourning and the search for tile new elllies, in which philosophy is currently engaged in the wake of the per- ceived demise of Marxism and, equally, of the disgrace of Heidegger's Nazism, the comedy of Hegel (by which I mean not what Hegel says about comedy but the movement 0/ the Absolute as comedy) is, nevertheless, once again being ignored and maligned by the nco-nihilism and antinomianism which continue - but at increasingly crippling cost - to evade their inner self-per- ficient impulse.2 As a result, mourning cannot work: it remains melancholia;] it remains aberrated not inaugurated;( pathos of the eoncept in the place of its logos. Instead of producing a work, this self-inhibited mourning produces a play, the Dauenpiel, the interminable mourning play and lament, of post-modernity.
o The body of Marxism arrayed in its shroud may finally rest in peace, for its vital spirit, its anima, has been thoroughly ethereal- iscd and floats in a heaven of archi.original Messianic justice. But wait! - the resurrection of the dead ill their flesh was a dogma developed for the Hebrews, who could not conceive in Hebrew of the immortality of the Greek soul - psyche - separated from the Greek body - soma. Language to the Hebrews was physical: the idea oC an eternity without body not bliss but unimaginable torture. Let us therefore tarry with those bleached bones; for as we seek to pay them their last respects, they seem to be rearranging themselves in an articulate and urgent configuration.
o LET US CONTINUE TO CHASE SPIRITS BACK INTO THEIR BODIES, back into the history ortheirdevelopment, in order to comprehend their law and their anarchy and to complete the work of mourning. Re- incarnated, put back into their bodies, as it were, 'spectres' in Marx, 'ghosts' in Heidegger, join up with class conflict in the former and with heterogeneous-originary iterable violence in the latter which deconstruction owns as its primordial and hence undeconstructable justice. THESIS
[Introduction]
• It is strange to live in a time when philosophy has found so many ways to damage if not to destroy itself. One by one all of the clas- sical preoccupations of philosophy have been discredited and dis· carded: eternity, reason, truth, representation, justice, freedom, beauty and the Good. The dismissal of 'metaphysics' is accompa- nied by the unabated search for a new ethics. Yet no one seems to have considered what philosophical resources remain for an ethics when so much oflhe live tradition is disqualified and dead- ened.
• But wisdom WORKS WITH EQUIVOCATION
• In their abstract and general opposition to the state, power, rationality and truth, libertarianism and communitarianism directly and indirectlyaid and abet authoritarian power ofcontrol. They do so directly, by disowning the coercive immediacy of the type of action legitimated, and indirectly, in the way the stance at stake disowns the political implications of legitimated violence and so re·imposes that burden on agents and agencies of the state
• Any account of'freedom' and 'justice' is deemed to depend on the 'metaphysics' of truth. When 'metaphysics' is separated from ethics in this way, the result will be unanticipated political paradoxes.
• However, there is nothing 'ironic' about this outmoded and dualistic contrast between the embrace of the contingency of language versus commitment to objective reality.
• It is conceptually impossible 10 produce a taxonomy which would sequester concepts of justice and the good from concepts of 'self-creation', for the very forma- tion of 'selfhood' takes place in intemction with the mingled ethical and epistemological positings of the other, the partner in the formation of our contingent and unstable identities OKAY
• by disqualifying universal notions of justice, freedom. and the good, for being inveterately 'metaphysical'. for colon!sing and suppressing their others with the violence consequent on the chimera of corre- spondence. 'post-modernism' has no imagination for its own implied ground in justice, freedom and the good.
• ' Despairing rationalism without reason' is, I claim. the story of post-modernism. It is the story of what happens when 'metaphysics' is barred from ethics. THESIS
• it is always possible to take the claims and conceptuality of philosophical works detemlinistically or aporetically - as fixed, closed conceptual structures, colonising being with the garrison of thought; or according to the difficulty which the conceptuality represents by)eaving gaps and silences in the mode of representation.
o I SAY WORKS AND NOT TEXTS: THE FORMER IMPLYING THE LABOR OF THE CONCEPT INSEPARABLE FROM ITS FORMAL CHARACTERISTICS AS OPPOSED TO THE LATTER WITH ITS CONNOTATIONS OF SIGNIFIERS, THE SYMBOLIC AND SEMIOTICS**********
• Here it takes three to make a relationship between two: the devastation between posited thought and posited being, between power and exclusion from power, implies the universal, the third partner, which allows us to recognise that devastation.
• Together, universal and aporia are irruption and witness to the brokenness in the middle. This ethical witness, universal and aporetic, can only act with some dynamic and corrigible metaphys;C5 of universal and singular, or archetype and type, or concept and intuition. Hmmmmm
• Post-modernism in its renunciation 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, which I express in the phrase describing post--modernism as 'despairing rationalism without reason'.
• the reassessment of reason, gradually rediscovering its own moveable boundaries as it explores the boundaries of the soul, the city and the sacred, can complete its mourning. Completed mourning acknowledges the creative involvement of action in the configurations of power and law: it does not find itself unequivocally in a closed cin::uit which exclusively confers logic and power. THESIS
• [1: Athens and Jerusalem: a tale of three cities]
• What do we hope for from the ideal of the community?
• We hope to solve the political problem; we hope for the New Jerusalem; we hope for a collective life without inner or outer boundaries, without obstacles or occlusions, within and between souls and within and between cities, without the perennial work which constantly legitimates and delegitimates the transformation of power into authority of different kinds.
• Community idealized in comparison to convention
o old Athens is opposed to New Jerusalem.
• The two cities are the 1. Autonomous and ‘natural, individual and particular and 2. Participation in a collectivity
• Athens, the city of rational politics. has been abandoned: she is said to have proven that enlightenment is domination. Her former inhabitants have set off on a pilgrimage to the New Jerusalem, the imaginal}' community, where they seek to dedicate themselves to difference, to otherness, to love - to a new ethics, which overcomes the fusion of knowledge and power in the old Athens. What if the pilgrims, unbeknownst to themselves, carry along in their souls the third city - the city of capitalist private property and modem legal status? The city that separates each individual into ap rivate, autonomous, competitive person, a bounded ego, and a phantasy life of community, a life of unbounded mutuality, a life without separation and its inevitable anxieties? A phantasy life which effectively destroyes the remnant of political life? THIRD CITY
o SUBSITUTE ‘NEW JERUSALEM’ FOR THE MISSING ANALYSIS OF OLD ATHENS
o This substitution puts the idea of the community, of immediate ethical experience, in the place of the risks of critical rationality.
• Analysis of the ashes of Phocion
o Story goes that wife consumed his ashes to give him tomb. (exact parallel almost with ANTIGONE)
o Sister Wendy presented the gesture of the wife bending down to scoop up the ashes as an act of perfect love - as Jerusalem. She contrasted this gesture of love with the unjust nature olthe city of Athens, which she saw represented in the classical architecture of the huildings, rising up in the combined landscape and cityscape behind the two women.
o The women exert, though, POLITICAL RISK. This is not only an act of infinite love but POLITICAL JUSTICE. No neat separation here.
o To see the built Conns themselves as ciphers o{the unjust city has political consequences: it perpetuates endless dying and endless tyranny, and it ruins the possibility of political action.
o Jerusalem vs. Athens, and even Jerusalem on its own isn’t as tidy as we might think. It’s the third city that troubles this.
To clarify the THIRD CITY IS THE ACTUAL IMAGINED JERUSALEM: IT IS AS MUCH REASON AS NOT, AND WE MUST RECONCILE THIS.
• A FOURTH CITY: Auschwitz
o A measure for demonic anti-reason
o 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 caJls for silent witness in the face of absolute horror. But to name the Nazi geno- cide 'the Holocaust' is already to over-unify it and to sacralize it, to see it as providential purpose
o 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 areassessed.11lc Holocaust provides the standard for demonic anti-reason; and the Holocaust founds the call for the new ethics.
o Auschwitz is called a 'post- historical city', and is shown gruesomely to fulfil the five functions of the classic model of the five-square city - Athens. These five functions are said to be veneration of the dead, celebration of the future, government, which concerns the active present, dwelling, which concerns the passive present, and sustenance or trade.
o Working at Auschwitz has, however, convinced me that the apparently unnegotiableand expiatory opposition between reaso n and witness, between knowledge/power and new ethics, or between relativisingexplanation and prayer. protects us from con- fronting something even more painful, which is our persistent and persisting dilemma, and not something we can project onto a onc- dimensional, demonic rationality, which we think we have dis- owned. 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 col- liding cities cover a deeper evasion - fear of a different kind of continuity between the thIrd city and Auschwitz, which itself gives rise to the iII·fated twins of the devastation of reason and the phantasmagoric ethics of the community?
o New Jerusalem relatavises the evil which it explains. And why should it not? The answer would be: because that shows norespect for those who died such terrible deaths, and, that it depends on discredited methods of knowledge
o A deeper fear: that we would be part of that relativity without there being any overarching law determining our participation.
• Back to the boundary wall of Athens, with ANTIGONE and the WIFE OF PHOCION MOURNING
o By insisting on the right and rites of mourning, Antigone and the wife of Phocion carry out that intense work of the soul, that gradual rearrangement of its boundaries, which must occur when a loved one is lost
o To acknowl- edge 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.
o 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 perennial anxiety.
o To oppose new ethics to the old city, Jerusalem to Athens, is to succumb to loss, to refuse to mourn, to cover persisting anxiety with the violence of a New Jerusalem masquerading as love.
• Levinas’ Other
o Knowledge, power and practical reason are attributed to the model of the autonomous, bounded, separ- ated, individual self, the sell within the city, 'the alllance of logic and politics'. The self, according to this new ethics, cannot expe- rience truly transConning loss, but plunders the world for the booty of its self-seeking interest. To become ethical, this self is to be dev- astated, traumatised, unthroned, by the commandment to sub- stitute Ihe olher for itself. Responsibility is defined in this new ethics as 'passivity beyond passivity', which is inconceivable and not representable, because it takes place beyond any city - even though Levinas insists that it is social and not sacred.
This new ethics denies identity to the other as it denies identity to the actor, now passive beyond passivity, more radically passive, that is, than any simple failure to act. But the other, too, is dis- traught and searching for politicaJ community - the other is also bounded and vulnerable, enraged and invested, isolated and inter- related. To command meto sacrifice myself in sublime passivity for the other, with no political expression for any activity, is to command in ressentiment an ethics of waving,
• [2 Beginnings of the day—Fascism and representation]
• Holocaust ethnography vs Holocaust piety
o The former permits the exploration of the representation of Fascism and the fascism of representation to be pursued across the production, dis- tribution and reception of cultural works.
• Fascism and Aesthetic Representation
o Cheyette’s Review of Schindler’s List: 'Schindler's List fails only when it. too (like Kencally's original fictionalisation Schindler's List. becomes a seductive and self-confident narrativc at the cost of any real understanding of the difficulties inherent in representing the ineffable'
o Gross’ response to that review exhibits Holocaust piety by rejecting Cheyette’s review in the name of ‘ineffability’
To argue for silence, prayer, the banishment 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. HMMMM IM NOT SOLD HERE LOL
Sueh plasticity of history, such pragmatics ofgood and evil, such continuity between the banality of Schindler's benevolence and the gratuity of Gaeth's violence, should mean that the reader, and, pari passu, the audience, experience the crisis of identity in their own breasts. Instead, we enjoy vicarious revulsion at the hand- some sadist, Gaeth, who appears invincible in the film, but is imprisoned much earlier on in the book, and we applaud the bon- vivant Schindler in his precarious outwitting of him. Okay im with this
The sentimentality of the ultimate predator. HELL YEAH
Comparing book and movie: If the book is 'glib', it is because the story it tells is glib - the ironic, sustained glibness of the style is its integrity: it leaves the crisis to the reader.
The film depends on the sentimentality of the ultimate predator. It makes the crisis external: on first viewing, one is perpetually braced in fear of obscene excess of voyeuristic witness.
In a nature film, we could be made to identify with the life cycle of the fly as prey of the spider, and we could be made to identify with the life cycle of the spider as prey of the rodent We can be made to identify with the Peking Opera singer who is destroyed by the CUltural Revolution, and we can equally be made to identify with the rickshaw man, for whom the Cultura1 Revolution was 'the beginning of Paradise'. It is only the ultimate predator whose sym- pathies can be so promiscuously enlisted. Only the ultimate preda- tor who can be made to identify exclusively and yet consecfcutively with one link or another in the life cycle, because she can destroy the whole cycle, and, of course, herself. Since she is the ultimate predator, she can be sentimental about the victimhood of other predators while overlooking that victim's own violent predation; and she may embellish her arbitrary selectivity of compassion in rhapsodies and melodramas. JESUS
The limits of representation arc not solely quantitative: how much violence, or even, what kind of violence, can I, and should I, tolerate? More profoundly, the limits of representation are con· figurative: they concern the relation between configuration and meaning.
It is my own violence that I discover in this film.
However, Shoah raises questions of the interestedness of memory and recall on the part of the interviewer and the inter- viewed. DAMN
Tadeun: Borowski's account in the selection published under the title This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1967). Borowski was a Pole but not a Jew, who killed himseU in 1951. His attount of being a prisoner in Auschwitz deals with many things which Levi spares us. Above all, Borowski represents himself, a deputy Kapo, as both executioner and victim, and deprives the dis- tinction 'ofall greatness and pathos'. While Borowski never denies his ethical presupposition - for otherwise not one sentence could have been written - he makes you witness brutality in the most dis- turbing way, for it is not clear - Levi a1wa~ is - from what posi- tion, as whom, you are reading. You emerge shaking in horror at yourself, with yourself In question, not in admiration for the author's Olympian serenity (Levi).
BAD REPRESENTATIONS: PASSIVE SOBRIETY OR SENTIMENTALITY OF WITNESS
GOOD: ACTIVE RECOGNITION IN ONESELF OF THE NIHILISM OF DISOWNED EMOTIONS AND THE PERSONAL AND POLITICAL DEPREDATIONS AT STAKE
WE MUST NOT EMERGE WITH SENTIMETAL TEARS, WITH EMOTIONAL AND POLITICAL INTACTNESS, BUT WITH DRY EYES OF DEEP GRIEF WHICH BELONGS TO THE RECOGNITION OF OUR INELUCTABLE GROUNDING IN THE NORMS OF THE EMOTIONAL AND POLITICAL CULTURE REPRESENTED
• Fascism and Philosophical Representation
o REPRESENTATION OF FASCISM LEAVES THE IDENTITY OF THE VOYEUR INTACT
o FASCISM OF REPRESENTATION beyond the limit of voyeurism, provokes the grief of encountering the violence normally legitim- ised by the individual moral will, with which we defend our own particular interests, and see only the egoism of the other - these may be interests of disinterested service, race, gender, religion, class.
• [3 The comedy of Hegel and Trauerspiel of modern philosophy]
o In the work of mourning and the search for tile new elllies, in which philosophy is currently engaged in the wake of the per- ceived demise of Marxism and, equally, of the disgrace of Heidegger's Nazism, the comedy of Hegel (by which I mean not what Hegel says about comedy but the movement 0/ the Absolute as comedy) is, nevertheless, once again being ignored and maligned by the nco-nihilism and antinomianism which continue - but at increasingly crippling cost - to evade their inner self-per- ficient impulse.2 As a result, mourning cannot work: it remains melancholia;] it remains aberrated not inaugurated;( pathos of the eoncept in the place of its logos. Instead of producing a work, this self-inhibited mourning produces a play, the Dauenpiel, the interminable mourning play and lament, of post-modernity.
o The body of Marxism arrayed in its shroud may finally rest in peace, for its vital spirit, its anima, has been thoroughly ethereal- iscd and floats in a heaven of archi.original Messianic justice. But wait! - the resurrection of the dead ill their flesh was a dogma developed for the Hebrews, who could not conceive in Hebrew of the immortality of the Greek soul - psyche - separated from the Greek body - soma. Language to the Hebrews was physical: the idea oC an eternity without body not bliss but unimaginable torture. Let us therefore tarry with those bleached bones; for as we seek to pay them their last respects, they seem to be rearranging themselves in an articulate and urgent configuration.
o LET US CONTINUE TO CHASE SPIRITS BACK INTO THEIR BODIES, back into the history ortheirdevelopment, in order to comprehend their law and their anarchy and to complete the work of mourning. Re- incarnated, put back into their bodies, as it were, 'spectres' in Marx, 'ghosts' in Heidegger, join up with class conflict in the former and with heterogeneous-originary iterable violence in the latter which deconstruction owns as its primordial and hence undeconstructable justice. THESIS
December 7, 2013
An incredibly passionate and powerful read. One of the most beautiful books I have ever read.
June 4, 2022
Since the book covers a hell of a lot of ground, I will for now limit myself to tracking and reconstructing the coherence underlying the disparate topics and styles. Rose is concerned with post-modernism, or, in her pithy formula ‘Despairing rationalism without reason.’ This story emerges “when ‘metaphysics’ is barred from ethics.” The scare quotes are a sign of the change in Rose’s position. Where earlier texts were often truer to Hegel than Hegel himself, breaking out of Kantian chains through speculative metaphysics, here Rose sounds almost like a converso: “Hegel is presented as a ‘comic’ thinker in order to provide a route into his thinking which bypasses the mines of prejudice concerning Hegel as a ‘metaphysical’ thinker.” Comedy, then, is a mass line, sheltering a metaphysical kernel that by now has learned the value of discreetness. The argument hinges on the separation of mourning into ‘aberrated’ and ‘inaugurated’:
“The response encountered so far is tragic in the sense of the baroque mourning play, aberrated mourning; the response to be developed further here will be comic - the comedy of absolute spirit, inaugurated mourning.”
Whether this interpretation will convince the enemies of Hegel is uncertain; either way, it explains one of the most difficult, and crucial, aspects of his thought, namely the link between the aesthetics of comedy and revealed religion. On this account, comedy is not only limited to the end of the Phenomenology, but is essential to spirit and reason as such:
“Let me then shoot from a pistol: first, spirit in the Phenomenology means the drama of misrecognition which ensues at every stage and transition of the work - a ceaseless comedy, according to which our aims and outcomes constantly mismatch each other, and provoke yet another revised aim, action and discordant outcome. Secondly, reason, therefore, is comic, full of surprises, of unanticipated happenings, so that comprehension is always provisional and preliminary. This is the meaning of, Bildung, of formation or education, which is intrinsic to the phenomenological process.”
Emphasizing the comedy of spirit enables Rose to challenge the conflation of Marxism and Messianism:
“far from rescuing some quintessential ‘spirit’, this approach reduces Marxism (in the ordinary sense of diminution, not in the philosophical sense of abstention) to a sub-rational pseudo-Messianism, while disqualifying both critical reflection and political practice. It is a counsel of hopelessness which extols Messianic hope.”
The comic sublation of eschatology, carefully distinguished from its reduction to laughability, makes up the engine of Rose’s controversial polemic on fascism and representation. The problem with fascism is, ultimately, its promise of false hope:
“If Fascism promises beginnings of the day, representation exposes the interests of the middle of the day; then the owl of Minerva, flying at dusk, may reflect on the remains of the day – the ruins of the morning's hope, the actuality of the broken middles.”
Rose argues we suspend the piety towards the Holocaust we have assimilated through osmosis from Hollywood’s industrialization of Jewish suffering, situating ourselves within a ‘Holocaust ethnography’ that
“permits the exploration of the representation of Fascism and the fascism of representation to be pursued across the production, distribution and reception of cultural works.”
Rose accuses Schindler’s List of shielding its viewers from difficult truths:
“Schindler’s List betrays the crisis of ambiguity in characterisation, mythologisation and identification, because of its anxiety that our sentimentality be left intact. It leaves us at the beginning of the day, in a Fascist security of our own unreflected predation, piously joining the survivors putting stones on Schindler's grave in Israel. It should leave us unsafe, but with the remains of the day. To have that experience, we would have to discover and confront our own fascism.”
Rose wants to counter this schmaltz with a film of her own:
“Let us make a film in which the representation of Fascism would engage with the fascism of representation. A film, shall we say, which follows the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos, so that we empathise with him, identify with his hopes and fears, disappointments and rage, so that when it comes to killing, we put our hands on the trigger with him, wanting him to get what he wants.”
In a surprising twist, Rose turns the postmodern fascist contamination argument against representation into an argument for the necessity of representation:
“The demonstration that Fascism and representation are inseparable does not lead to the conclusion, current in post-modern aesthetics, philosophy and political theory, that representation is or should be superseded. On the contrary, the argument for the overcoming of representation, in its aesthetic, philosophical and political versions, converges with the inner tendency of Fascism itself.”
This last claim is crucial – fascism on Rose’s account is at its heart a refusal of modernity’s self-representation. As a result, a key part of the fight against fascism is exposure:
“If fascism is the triumph of civil society, the triumph of enraged particular interests, then the subject of representation does not need to be superseded: the danger of its experience needs to be exposed. And the same danger will be the means of exposition. Otherwise we remain at a beginning of the day.”
Rose's Holocaust ethnography is compelling, but underdetermined. When Rose “permits” us to “explore” fascism, what does this mean, in practice? How is this meaningfully different from the liberal free speech advocacy of JK Rowling and others?
“The response encountered so far is tragic in the sense of the baroque mourning play, aberrated mourning; the response to be developed further here will be comic - the comedy of absolute spirit, inaugurated mourning.”
Whether this interpretation will convince the enemies of Hegel is uncertain; either way, it explains one of the most difficult, and crucial, aspects of his thought, namely the link between the aesthetics of comedy and revealed religion. On this account, comedy is not only limited to the end of the Phenomenology, but is essential to spirit and reason as such:
“Let me then shoot from a pistol: first, spirit in the Phenomenology means the drama of misrecognition which ensues at every stage and transition of the work - a ceaseless comedy, according to which our aims and outcomes constantly mismatch each other, and provoke yet another revised aim, action and discordant outcome. Secondly, reason, therefore, is comic, full of surprises, of unanticipated happenings, so that comprehension is always provisional and preliminary. This is the meaning of, Bildung, of formation or education, which is intrinsic to the phenomenological process.”
Emphasizing the comedy of spirit enables Rose to challenge the conflation of Marxism and Messianism:
“far from rescuing some quintessential ‘spirit’, this approach reduces Marxism (in the ordinary sense of diminution, not in the philosophical sense of abstention) to a sub-rational pseudo-Messianism, while disqualifying both critical reflection and political practice. It is a counsel of hopelessness which extols Messianic hope.”
The comic sublation of eschatology, carefully distinguished from its reduction to laughability, makes up the engine of Rose’s controversial polemic on fascism and representation. The problem with fascism is, ultimately, its promise of false hope:
“If Fascism promises beginnings of the day, representation exposes the interests of the middle of the day; then the owl of Minerva, flying at dusk, may reflect on the remains of the day – the ruins of the morning's hope, the actuality of the broken middles.”
Rose argues we suspend the piety towards the Holocaust we have assimilated through osmosis from Hollywood’s industrialization of Jewish suffering, situating ourselves within a ‘Holocaust ethnography’ that
“permits the exploration of the representation of Fascism and the fascism of representation to be pursued across the production, distribution and reception of cultural works.”
Rose accuses Schindler’s List of shielding its viewers from difficult truths:
“Schindler’s List betrays the crisis of ambiguity in characterisation, mythologisation and identification, because of its anxiety that our sentimentality be left intact. It leaves us at the beginning of the day, in a Fascist security of our own unreflected predation, piously joining the survivors putting stones on Schindler's grave in Israel. It should leave us unsafe, but with the remains of the day. To have that experience, we would have to discover and confront our own fascism.”
Rose wants to counter this schmaltz with a film of her own:
“Let us make a film in which the representation of Fascism would engage with the fascism of representation. A film, shall we say, which follows the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos, so that we empathise with him, identify with his hopes and fears, disappointments and rage, so that when it comes to killing, we put our hands on the trigger with him, wanting him to get what he wants.”
In a surprising twist, Rose turns the postmodern fascist contamination argument against representation into an argument for the necessity of representation:
“The demonstration that Fascism and representation are inseparable does not lead to the conclusion, current in post-modern aesthetics, philosophy and political theory, that representation is or should be superseded. On the contrary, the argument for the overcoming of representation, in its aesthetic, philosophical and political versions, converges with the inner tendency of Fascism itself.”
This last claim is crucial – fascism on Rose’s account is at its heart a refusal of modernity’s self-representation. As a result, a key part of the fight against fascism is exposure:
“If fascism is the triumph of civil society, the triumph of enraged particular interests, then the subject of representation does not need to be superseded: the danger of its experience needs to be exposed. And the same danger will be the means of exposition. Otherwise we remain at a beginning of the day.”
Rose's Holocaust ethnography is compelling, but underdetermined. When Rose “permits” us to “explore” fascism, what does this mean, in practice? How is this meaningfully different from the liberal free speech advocacy of JK Rowling and others?
March 8, 2024
One of the best books of philosophy I've ever encountered. There's a moment where autobiography intervenes in her discourse that is simply jaw dropping, and the final lines gave me chills.
"What time occurs between this 'ever failing' and this 'all but coming'?
My time and yours,
Time to praise all others -
Placeable and unplaceable time"
No period, adopting the play of punctuation of those she most fervently criticized throughout her previous works. It won't mean much here, but it means everything at the end of this remarkable book.
"What time occurs between this 'ever failing' and this 'all but coming'?
My time and yours,
Time to praise all others -
Placeable and unplaceable time"
No period, adopting the play of punctuation of those she most fervently criticized throughout her previous works. It won't mean much here, but it means everything at the end of this remarkable book.
July 10, 2024
absolutely magnificent work, though sadly overshadowed by the fact that these ideas couldn't have been further elaborated upon due to the fragmentary and posthumous nature of these writings. however, due to the sense of incompleteness that hangs over them, they end up functioning as an incredibly fruitful source for further thought on the part of the reader. for all its brevity and open-endedness, i'm still teasing out ideas inspired by this text & suspect i will be for some time yet.
May 6, 2020
الحياة بعد الكتاب دا مختلفة. شكرا روس❤️❤️
August 14, 2023
Although it gets hard to understand a points it is a beautifully constructed presentation of poignant and firmly relevant philosophical thought.
October 19, 2023
"In these delegitimate acts of tending the dead, these acts of justice, against the current will of the city, women reinvent the political life of the community."
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews