A Commemoration of Gillian Rose
To mark three decades since the untimely passing of British-Jewish philosopher Gillian Rose, the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy and Thesis Eleven are hosting a public forum on her life, death and philosophical legacy.
When: 6:30pm Friday 14 November
Where: Unit 4/9 Wilson Ave, Brunswick (in-person only)
Registration will be available soon.
Presenters
Robert Lucas Scott
This paper examines Gillian Rose's philosophy of death as a challenge to the modern tendency to think of death as an absence, void, or negation –– as nothing –– arguing that, for Rose, death is instead always and unavoidably a politically, socially, and existentially mediated event within what she calls 'the city.' The paper focuses in particular on what Rose takes to be the dire political consequences of the nothingness of death, exemplified by Weber's notion of a meaningless, bureaucratic death in an age of 'infinite' 'progress', which finds its most catastrophic consequence in the fascist mythologisation of death, as theorised by Benjamin. It concludes by arguing that Rose's death-bed conversion to Anglican Christianity should be understood not as a retreat into religious consolation but as a final, agonising wager on what I will call an 'inaugurated eschatology'. Paradoxically, Rose's death should be understood in light of her reading of Nietzsche's vision of a 'proud' and 'voluntary' death, affirming a life that, even at its end, refuses to abandon 'the middle': the 'placeable and unplaceable time' of the city.
Robert Lucas Scott is an Arts Research Fellow at Jesus College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Reading Hegel: Irony, Recollection, Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2025) and coeditor of Gillian Rose's Marxist Modernism lectures (Verso, 2024). His essays have appeared in Radical Philosophy, Thesis Eleven, Critical Horizons, Angelaki, Textual Practice, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacobin, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a new book on Gillian Rose.
Gregory Marks
This paper examines the role of Arthurian myth as a parable for the antinomies of law-making reason in Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work and Paradiso. By taking up the tale of Arthur’s downfall – caught between his human love for Lancelot and Guinevere and his sovereign duty to punish their adultery – Rose offers a tragic diagnosis of the law, the condition of which is the sacrifice of Arthur the man for Arthur the king. As an extension of Rose’s analysis, this paper looks to the romance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for another, comical answer to the dilemma of Arthur’s court: that its sadness may end, not in bloody death, but the blush of shame.
Dr Gregory Marks is a writer and researcher living on Dja Dja Wurrung country. He completed a PhD in 2020 at La Trobe University on the Gothic narratives of Thomas Pynchon’s novels. His work has appeared in Overland, Gothic Nature Journal, Literary Encyclopedia, and Thesis Eleven.
Lillian Phillips
Gillian Rose’s death is inextricable from the form of her life’s work, as errored totality. Following this, if we take death as that which re-casts human error into narrative, how can we think the ‘living’ of error, with Rose, prior to the sense-making of an end? And, in the terms of experience, what is this error’s relation to Hegelian difference? I would like to now take both these questions, and extend them sideways, towards a claim made in Dialectic of Nihilism — that, in the work of Foucault, ‘The notion of sexuality has been destroyed along with the notion of sex’. There is a notion of sexuality, sex, or sexual difference, which can be read from this critique—and it has a basis in Rose’s thinking of rationality, error, and death. For, as she reflects,
When Philosophy visits Boethius in the imperial prison, when Rousseau brings Sophie along to complete Émile’s personality, when Zarathustra goes to visit her with his whip, it is at the crux of gender that philosophy — love of wisdom — the republic, and the legal fictions of personality explode.
The ostensibly-explosive, antinomic structure of post-structuralism — its rejection and reproduction of totality—appears to leave critique stranded. And yet, it is only in the self-conscious encounter with poststructuralism that a dialectical critique can continue — in this adjudication between death, error, sex, and reason. After all, what else is there?
Lillian Phillips is a writer and researcher based at the University of Melbourne. Her work is mostly an attempt to think historically about the tension between the Hegelian dialectic, Marxism, and avant-gardist transgression in 20th century literature, philosophy, and art.
Daniel Lopez
This paper will offer an interpretation of Rose’s deathbed conversion to the Anglican Church as a philosophical gesture, and, indeed, as the only genuine philosophical gesture of her era. Drawing on Agnes Heller’s theorisation of the gesture, as well as Rose’s autobiographical account of philosophy and her relation to Judaism and Christianity, given in Love’s Work, Paradiso and elsewhere, this paper will argue against conventional readings of her conversion, which have regarded it as either a rejection of Judaism or a simple affirmation of Christian faith and agapeic love. Further — and following from Robert Lucas Scott’s paper — this paper will consider Rose’s conversion in light of her affirmation of a Nietzschean “voluntary death,” while also exploring her late interest in Augustinian philosophy and theology. Finally, drawing in part on newly uncovered archival material, this paper will propose a novel interpretation of Rose’s conversion that affirms its salvific element while refusing to foreclose the ‘broken middle’ between faith and reason.
Daniel Lopez is a Lecturer (casual) in political philosophy at La Trobe University, an Adjunct Research Fellow for the Thesis Eleven Forum for Social and Political Theory and a Commissioning Editor for Jacobin magazine. Daniel’s first book, Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute, was published by Brill in 2018, and he is working on a second PhD in creative writing at Deakin University, concerned with Gillian Rose's poetics and philosophy of love. Daniel’s academic writing has appeared in Historical Materialism, Thesis Eleven, Science & Society, and his non-academic writing has appeared in Arena, Salvage, Cordite, Overland, Jacobin, Aeon and elsewhere. When not lamenting the state of things, Daniel enjoys fishing and the poetry thereof.