Love’s Work - Gillian Rose . Mourning Becomes the Law - Gillian Rose . “From Speculative to Dialectical Thinking — Hegel and Adorno” in Judaism and Modernity - Gillian Rose
This is really just my reading notes.
Gillian Rose’s contributions to philosophy, sociology, jewish thought and radical politics are important for our time. I am taking To Think the Absolute — Gillian Rose’s Speculative Philosophy a lecture series by Daniel Lopez at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy
Love’s Work - Gillian Rose
keep your mind in hell,
and despair not.
Loves Work is a mémoire. There is Death - of loved ones, in Auschwitz, the indomitable. There is Family Trauma, Judaism, Protestantism, Faith, Love, Cancer, The Work, the taste of regret.
Rose formed part of a curated grouping of Jewish intellectuals to advise the Polish Commision on the Future of Auschwitz.
How did rose love? Love is total. There are the two and a third - the work
Ethical Love Sleeping with another, the vulnerability. Dreaming infront of them.
Yvette is like a man.
-> more here, links in with the cities.
“I believe that I did in some sense visit Israel with Yvette, that through knowing her, I somehow reached the soul of that land of blessings and curses.” (34)
How did Yvette ‘love’? She did not seem to do the work. she was looking toward the new jerusalem, but harboured the third city in the way she loved.
Rose was dyslexic. And following an opptomitrist declaring one of her eyes as lazy - to dispell this cruel accusation of moral failure on her part, she dedicted herself fiercly to the most difficult works, difficult in text and method; Rose studied the Torah, of course and is an Theadore W. Adorno scholar.
Having loved Imperfectly is just what it is, but Rose steped away from the third, the work. And this is her regret and lonliness as she faces the shadowlands.
The work undone. Some that she stepped away from, but also work she was denied. The priest whom she loved - shockingly, not only did the father step away from his ill Beloved. Upon reading a manuscript of Love’s Work and learning of Jim, a previous lover of Roses who died, he called to check if possibly, she could have AIDS? Need he be worried?
Rose was deprived of old age by cancer. We meet the specialists who handle her case.
“I asked Mr Wong, “What makes a man become a gynaecologist?” He replied, “Some men love women, and some men hate women”—no admission of unresolved equivocation in that taut response. And what makes a man become a specialist in gynaecological cancer (a field “invented” in the last twenty years)? He will always be breaking the bad news to individual women concerning their female anatomy. And what makes a man a specialist and co-author of the latest, standard textbook on ovarian cancer? Mr Wong answers pragmatically, “I was good with my hands but didn’t want to become an obstetrician like my father.” (82)
opinions on the causes of ovarian cancer are re-shared with us. We judge for ourselves from the varying meaning and quality of thought, they are of descending quality.
“I could compose a divan of divination, an anthology of aetiologies:
Camille Paglia (American author and media personality): “Nature’s revenge on the ambitious, childless woman.”
Braham Murray (theatre director, my first cousin): “Your inspiration poisoned at source”
John Petty (Provost of Coventry Cathedral and faith healer): “Transgenerational haunting and possession.”
Ian Florian (Principal, College of Traditional Acupuncture): “Imbalance of energies necessary for a woman to sustain success in the world.”
Your betrayal twice by family; ancient, unacknowledged and unmourned dead; the philosophy of Hegel and Adorno; recent bereavements; the wrong kinds of relationship with men; too much whiskification; too little red wine and garlic. Hold on, I take garlic in my coffee…Well!” (84)
Rose does not dignify alternative medicine with any undue attention. Good.
How it is to shit with a colostomy.
What’s the current state of thought?
“revealed religion, enlightenment rationalism, and postmodern relativism” (135)
“Athens and Jerusalum: a tale of three cities” in Mourning Becomes the Law - Gillian Rose
We don’t know what power is anymore.
The third city, the reproduction of things we don’t want to reproduce, creeps in to the vision of the second city, the New Jerusalum.
a fourth city? Auschwitz
Auschwitz is the third city too.
Analysis of this kind, as opposed to refusal of analysis implicit 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 the third city - the city in which we all live and with which we are too familiar (34)
holy shit
Dr. Robert Jan van Pelt van Pelt - historian who was allowed to work on the archives of Auschwitz, he worked on the ‘city plans’ no one had worked with before. Even before his work was released (presumably published now) it was opposed.
Bhuddist Judaism
Emannuel Levinas and the other, recognition. rose says -> the loss of actor and the other.
“From Speculative to Dialectical Thinking — Hegel and Adorno” in Judaism and Modernity - Gillian Rose
notes from Daniel’s talk.
very psychoanalytic - the approach will be.
Rose converted to anglicanism on her death bed.
“the particular” - particular as in particular to group and the universal
leszek kolakowski -> ‘the left as culture’ or something
speculative thinking -> she says neitzche is speculative and kierkegaard approaches speculative thinking
Hegel Contra Sociology - Gillian Rose
context notes for myself
transcendental logic is thinking builds upon itself, build deeper and deeper understanding of the object.
The most primary level of reasoning we natively posses, neither observable or quantifiable -> like space or time?
Week Two: Relative ethical life and the antinomies of sociological thought
Hegel Contra Sociology, chapters 1-4
An attempt to retrieve hegelian speculative experience
wtf is that. How can I do that? Can I even do that?
a contradiction
She proposes an aporio.
she says shes' doing social theory not philosophy.
there is a transcendental element to culture
Habbermas' return to hegel is ahistorical and ingenuous.
in hegels philosophy speculative thinking is an act. The speculative thinking Rose proposes is something we don’t know. experience isn’t something the agent does, it is passive.
Rose expresses disdain for the insistance of new thought on murdering it’s predecessor - it’s rejection of it’s progeny in the old thought (in some cases).
NeoKantianism blocks acces to Hegel.
NeoKantianism -> People attempting a new answer to the Kantian question of validity within the framework of validity and values first developed by Lotze.
Weber’s system -> values only source of sociological reasoning that is acceptable. No way of comparing one system of belives and values with another, except with ‘trans valutive somethingarather’. Rose critical of this. like Kant -> unable to qualify a experience that takes place outside the subject.
seperation between logic of validity and the epistemological question of cognition -> only if validity can be established independently of cognition can the proces of cognition itself be assessed 7
Validity for Lotze = propositions validity fo Kant = concepts
Marlburg and Heidelberg are not NeoKantian
Marlburg school -> validity > values. The idea of ‘general logic’ and pure reason is the end of transcendental logic.
Heidelberg school -> values > validity
What does the tranasndental mean here?