Gillian Rose

1. McLuhanism is an approach to the integrative study of the modern human condition via the lens of technology. It takes its inspiration from the writings of Marshall McLuhan, but its ambitions reach beyond them, just as 20th century Western Marxism sought to go beyond the writings of Marx. Like Marxism, McLuhanism tells a story that is distinctively Western in origin, although global in eventual scope. McLuhanism enjoys over Marxism an advantage in the wealth of conceptual distinctiveness inherent in its object. In Marxism the primary object and lens of inquiry is capital, whose chief effect is the erasure of distinctiveness. The purpose of capital is to make all things equivalent, and this liquidation of use-values into the uniform medium of exchange-value is a primary object of Marxist critique. But capital is also the critical lens of Marxism, and this lens is by its very nature unsuited to the recovery of the conceptual distinctiveness of use-value. Thus Western Marxism's chronic failure to conceive of positive, emancipatory change. McLuhanism does not have this problem. Capital erases distinctiveness; technology does not. Capital is universal-indeed, the purpose of capital is to be universal. Technology, on the contrary, is indelibly particular. One may speak in general of "technology," but in truth there are only "technolog ies ." In contrast, one may speak only of "capital," as it is inherent in the concept of capital to be irreducibly singular. There is only one "capital," whose purpose is to erase all distinctions and make all things fungible. But "technology" is a category that comprises a whole cosmos of concepts, each of which is irreducibly distinctive and complex. Just as the project of Marxism is the exposition of the concept of capital, the project of McLuhanism is the exposition of the various interrelated concepts of technology. 2. The founding conceptual move of McLuhanism is the subsumption of the concept of "media" into the concept of "technology." This move places it in opposition to the mainstream of academic media studies, which tends to posit axiomatically a strong distinction between "media" technologies-i.e. technologies of communication or representation-and "non-media" technologies, and then directs its focus exclusively on the former. McLuhanism weakens this distinction. Whereas mainstream media studies draws a distinction between "media" and "non-media" technologies, McLuhanism situates that distinction within the category of technology. It thereby avoids one of the great conceptual pitfalls of mainstream media studies: viz., by positing a strong distinction between technologies of representation and communication and other technologies, and then focusing on the former at the expense of the latter, mainstream media studies puts itself in danger of taking for granted the concepts of representation and communication, of positing them as given when they are, on the contrary,

As an alternative to Utilitarianism, animal ethics turned to the Continental philosophies of Levinas and Derrida that welcome and revere Otherness. While Utilitarianism relies on a ‘closed’ system of ethical calculations, the Levinasian model remains open-ended. This essay argues for a revised approach to animal ethics that combines Levinasian immeasurability, what Matthew Calarco called ‘ethical agnosticism’, with a closed approach that sees ethics as issuing from particular modes of practice. Highlighting some of the problems inherent in the Levinasian ethics of love as well as Agamben’s biopolitical critique of law, I propose a corrective, ‘between love and law’, that avoids predetermining the limits of moral consideration yet insists on the social and normative dimensions of ethical responsiveness. I take the practice of veganism - broadly conceived beyond the strictly dietary - as the heart of animal ethics and consider some of the philosophical and theological dimensions of veganism as neither naïve nor as utopian but on the contrary, as a worldly mode of engagement that acknowledges the realities of violence.

That paper is my first experience in Book Reviewing and it was written within the framework of “Cities & Cultures” Master of Arts (MA) at School of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London, in 2010. The reviewed book was G. Rose’s (1993): ‘Feminism and Geography: the Limits of Geographical Knowledge’.

The essay examines three literary memoirs of illness (Giving up the Ghost (2003), Love’s Work (1995) and Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998)) and their location in the recent development of illness narratives in anglophone culture. I showcase within a phenomenological framework how the three books defamiliarize the critical moment of diagnosis, reject readers’ sympathy and invite readers to broaden their repertoire of what well-being might feel like (including chronic illness).

Theodor W. Adorno's writings comprise an attempted recovery of Marx for a dialectic of 20th century social and cultural forms. Through immanent critique of modern aesthetic, philosophical, political and psychological forms of social subjectivity and its antinomies, contradictions and discontents, including those of ostensible Marxism, the thought figures of Adorno's essays are modeled after and attempt to elaborate Marx's self-reflexive critique of the subjectivity of the commodity form. Adorno's critical theory considers modern aesthetic form as social form. Following Marx, Adorno's critique of modern social forms is concerned with their potential for emancipation as well as domination: the term "culture industry," for instance, is meant to grasp comprehensively the context for the critical social object and form of aesthetic subjectivity in common for practices of both "hermetic" art and "popular" culture, and is meant to characterize the condition and possibility for critical subjectivity itself, including Adorno's own. In Adorno's essays, objects of cultural criticism become "prismatic," illuminating the formation of subjectivity and providing moments for critical reflection and recognition. However, Adorno's works faced and sought to provoke recognition of the possibility and reality of social regression as well as regression in thinking. Coming after the collapse of 2nd International Social Democracy in 1914 and the failure of world revolution 1917-19, and inspired by Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch's thought from this period, Adorno developed a critique of 20th Century society that sustained awareness of the problematic of Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky's Marxism. The coincidence of the later reception of Adorno's works with the emergence of social discontents, oppositions and transformations of the 1960s New Left and its aftermath, however, obscured Adorno's thought during two decades of "postmodernism," whose exhaustion opens possibilities for reconstruction of and development upon the coherence of Adorno's dialectic, as expression of the extended tasks and project of Marxism bequeathed by history to the present. (March 2013)

NB proof only, not for citation.

Rose argues that sociology grounds itself on a problematic mixture of neo-Kantian transcendental logic and Hegelian conceptual logic, but only the latter can provide the epistemology and normativity that social theory needs. Methodological clarity, she urges, could help avoid certain temptations and reductions within social theory. Examining her critique of neo-Kantian sociology and, briefly, Hegelian conceptual logic, substantiates this view.

Rowan Williams' attempt to speak for the common good and rein in the extremes of liberal individualism is at the core of his Hegelian co-ordination of ecclesiology and political theology. His is a managerial approach which co-ordinates his Anglican ecclesiology with a Hegelian political theology. Behind the approach of Rowan Williams lies a common liberal Anglican tradition of absorbing large tracts of Hegel's work to forge a political theology that is wedded to a liberal establishment ideology of managing not only the established Church of England and the global Anglican provinces, but also alternately co-opting and marginalising other more orthodox Christian theologies and churches. This paper aims to show how Williams' political thinking was secular from his first publication on politics, a paper on Welsh devolution based on an address given in 1979. This secular approach is rooted in a theological approach that advocates divine retreat from the world. I then analyse critically Williams' reading of Hegel in the three papers he wrote in the 1990s as he climbed the Anglican episcopal ladder. Reading Hegel enables Williams to theologise his secular post-Kantian political theory. I argue that Williams strives to read Hegel in a non-esoteric style, evading the hints towards Hegel's esoteric and pagan roots found in Gillian Rose and Andrew Shanks, to whom he is indebted for his reading of Hegel. Subsequently I show how all this has been incorporated into a managerial approach to types of theology, with an apophatic method peculiar to Williams being employed to manage more kataphatic and orthodox types. The doctrines of eschatology and creation constitute the outer poles of this method. This was the framework for Williams' discussion of the Islamic community in England and modern Palestine in his 2008 speech 'Islam in English Law'. The twin focus on England and Palestine, and on the definitions of religious community appropriated from J. N. Figgis and Gillian Rose, may account for the ambivalence towards the idea of the use of violence by the community in the speech.

I propose to look at Levinas’ theme of substitution. Levinas’s conceptual constellation: recurrence, obsession, persecution, substitution, and Saying influenced Derrida to problematize the gift in less dark terms, as the promise made before any promise. Now, Levinas defined substitution multiply. At its ground, it is “my pre-originary susceptiveness (susception pré-originaire. That is, an unstable state in which I have received something whose thematization can pull it into the everyday or the ontic, but whose implications for intersubjectivity are other than ontic. Levinas also refers to substitution as “a passivity prior to receptivity.” In this sense, it is a one-way street, starting in a “me” outside the realm of the phenomenological ego, and expressed through the hermeneutic turn that Levinas places on affectivity. This is a decisive departure that Levinas makes from Husserlian phenomenology, “while remaining faithful to it." It is as dependent on Husserl as on Heidegger’s hermeneutic deformalization of Husserlian time. Remember that in Heidegger Befindlichkeit, and Verstehen with its three Vor-strukture (Vorhabe, Vorsicht, and Vorgriff), imply that we are fundamentally open to a pre-thematic Gestimmtheit. I mention Heidegger’s deformalization because the primary characteristic of a gift, in Levinas and Derrida, is to find oneself summoned, or invested, but without the correlative possibility of giving back symmetrically. That, too, would be a Vor-struktur. The hermeneutic extension Heidegger proposed could itself be analyzed in terms of such a gift, and clearly inspired Levinas. Nevertheless, in the 1970s, Levinas returned to Husserl’s discussion of passive synthesis and the relationship between the flow of time and the nature of sensation. The argument here is simply that the hermeneutic deformalization of phenomenology, whether in Heidegger or in Levinas, appears to present a complement to phenomenology even as it reaches under intentionality, the phenomenological ego, and constitution generally. Nevertheless, the claims of hermeneutics are not relative (any more than Dasein would be). In short, the ambition to “venture beyond phenomenology while remaining faithful to it”—however we evaluate this—has clearly been adopted by several “inheritors” of Husserl. This talk thus explores how Levinas moves between hermeneutics and Husserl's phenomenology of intersubjectivity, with frequent reference to Derrida's conception of the gift.

Gillian Rose’s magnum opus was her second book, Hegel Contra Sociology (1981).  Preceding this was The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (1978), a work which charted Rose’s approach to the relation of Marxism to Hegel.  Hegel provided Rose with the standard for critical thinking on social modernity, whose threshold she found nearly all others to fall below, including thinkers she otherwise respected such as Adorno and Marx.  Rose read Marx as an important disciple of Hegel who misapprehended key aspects of Hegel’s thought.  According to Rose, this left Marxism at the mercy of prevailing Kantian preoccupations such as the dichotomy of "theory and practice," etc.  Rose’s misunderstanding of Marxism limits the direction and reach of the rousing call for a "critical Marxism" with which she concluded her book.  Rose failed to note how Lukács and Adorno deeply internalized the Hegelian problematic of Marxism, how Marxism was not the (mis)application but the reconstruction of the Hegelian dialectic under the changed social-historical conditions of capital.  But Rose’s perspective remains that of Hegel -- pre-industrial capital.

This paper aims to expound Rowan Williams’s reading of Augustine and Hegel on the question of selfhood. Through an adoption of the tropes of ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’, the argument will be made that Williams’s interpretation of Augustine’s portrayal of the soul as wandering and homeless does not imply an unremitting vision of loss and fragmentation. For him, the distentio animi is always placed within a more expansive arc of desire in which the self is continually rediscovered in what is ‘other’. This means that my self is most primarily found in the unhanding of restrictive identities that hinder our spiritual growth towards union with God, and also in the discovery of my goods as being bound up with the goods of others. This reading is further expanded by relating Williams’s ‘Augustine’ to Gillian Rose’s ‘Hegel’, thereby showing the way that his reception of this has assisted him in explicating a greater ‘comic’ undercurrent in his retrieval of selfhood.

This article examines the relationship between Marx’s Capital, Georg Lukács and Critical Theory through the prism of value-form theory. Marx’s theorisation of value understands commodities as expressions of the historical form of social relations defined by capital. Products of human labour become values in capitalist production, defined by the abstract quality of undifferentiated quantities of labour-power, exchangeable through the universal character of the market. The social form of this process, Marx identifies as processing a fetish quality, where humans take on the thing-like character of commodities. The impact of this theorisation on Critical Theory has been considerable, beginning with Lukács’ concept of reification. In Part I, I examine the challenge to Lukács’ interpretation of Marx’s Capital made by Gillian Rose. She draws attention to a misidentification of reification in Marx, suggesting a strong conceptual distinction between commodity-fetishism and reification. In their conceptual flattening, Rose contends that Lukács and Critical Theory generalised Marx’s value-form theory, losing its speculative character. I argue that despite Rose’s suggestion remaining unfulfilled, she helps illuminate important tensions between Marx’s value theory and Critical Theory. This comparison allows in Part II for the beginning level of a speculative approach to Marx’s Capital to be advanced.

Scholars in the humanities and social sciences have turned to ethics to theorize politics in what seems to be an increasingly depoliticized age. Yet the move toward ethics has obscured the ongoing value of political responsibility and the vibrant life it represents as an effective response to power.

Sounding the alarm for those who care about robust forms of civic engagement, this book fights for a new conception of political responsibility that meets the challenges of today's democratic practice. Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo forcefully argues against the notion that modern predicaments of power can only be addressed ethically or philosophically through pristine concepts that operate outside of the political realm. By returning to the political, the individual is reintroduced to the binding principles of participatory democracy and the burdens of acting and thinking as a member of a collective. Vázquez-Arroyo historicizes the ethical turn to better understand its ascendence and reworks Adorno's dialectic of responsibility to reassert the political in contemporary thought and theory.

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/political-responsibility/9780231174848

Nel suo celebre Ragione e rivoluzione: Hegel e il sorgere della teoria sociale (1941), Herbert Marcuse, trattando del superamento della filosofia di Hegel da Marx a Schmitt, imputa l'inizio della separazione della sociologia dalla filosofia a uno dei primi sociologi tedeschi, Lorenz von Stein (1814-1890), autore di un pionieristico tentativo di "stabilire il concetto di società come concetto indipendente e di svilupparne il contenuto" [von Stein, in Marcuse 1997 2 , 404]. È curioso che a separare la sociologia dalla filosofia in Germania sia stato quello che Marcuse stesso definisce un erede della filosofia hegeliana, capace di influenzare, con i suoi scritti oggi quasi dimenticati, Marx e Engels, i padri ufficiali della teoria sociale ed economica tedesca. Tutta la seconda parte del lavoro di Marcuse, dedicato appunto alla nascita della teoria sociale contemporanea, può essere letto in questi termini. L'eredità di Hegel e il nucleo profondo del suo pensiero non sono stati colti e raccolti dalla filosofia -che infatti dopo Hegel ha la sua identità comune proprio nell'anti-hegelismo (da Feuerbach e Kierkegaard sino a Heidegger e Foucault) o quanto meno in un deciso agnosticismo nei confronti di Hegel (da Lotze a Wittgenstein) -bensì dalla teoria sociale, la quale è ciò che di autentico e vitale rimane della filosofia dopo la grande (ed estrema) sintesi hegeliana. La teoria sociale, insomma, è il risolversi della dialettica in sociologia. Quanto v'è di riproponibile del pensiero di Hegel sarebbe precisamente l'articolazione dialettica dell'intero, ovvero la comprensione -più sociologica che non metafisica -che il tutto esiste solo nelle parti; e che queste, daccapo, hanno la loro vita solo nell'intero, in quel Kreis von Kreisen che per Hegel è l'unica figura della verità. Un'idea, questa, tipicamente olistica, e che si ritrova in altri autori della Grande Teorizzazione sociologica -si pensi solo a Durkheim.

Ethics is more than difficult; it is an anxious opening onto the realm of judgement and perception. It has to confront desires appearing as principles, be exposed to the unintended consequences of action, and come to terms with the stark and often irreversible brevity of dedsion-making. No wonder, titen, that ethics can dissimulate itself into morality; that it needs the security of ideals and confident codes for behaviour.
Ethics, however, cannot be conflated with morality; it hesitates to lay down laws and frustrates expedient answers. It questions more than it affirms. It is a drama of discrimination. True ethics is a disenchanted etitiics.

This dissertation argues that such a disenchanted ethics—one that embraces rather than rejects hesitancy, difficulty and indecision—can be found, partially exposed, partially buried, in the late novels of Henry James. Though there is no ethics -per se in these novels—^in the sense of a conscious project of formulating a system—^an ethics developed through obliquity and eqivocation is nonetheless inextricable fi-om the reticence of James's late style, the complexity of his social scenes, and above all, from title themes of friendship, love, secrecy, mourning and decision-making that recur again and again in his broken and disillusioned worlds.

An anxious ethics is not new and is not confined to literature (though this may be its genuine home). Thus the thesis also explores other authors who negotiate—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—similar anxieties: Jacques Derrida, Gillian Rose and, to a lesser extent, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot and S0ren Kierkegaard.

Secrecy is a constant motif in the dissertation and is used to couple James's oblique approach to the above themes, especially decision-making, to tiie thought of Derrida and Rose. In the first chapter, secrecy is related to friendship, in the second, mourning. In the penultimate, it is considered essential to decision-making and, in the last, it is associated with love. In James's late novels, the anxious suspensions between intention and effect, speech and silence, innocence and experience, not only preserves the secrecy of the secret—it also inspires other ways of thinking and being. Every chapter deals with the difficulty of decisions as they inflect and inform the themes of love, friendship, mourning and secrecy

In “Beginnings of the Day – Fascism and Representation,” Gillian Rose proposes the creation of a film “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, disappointment 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” (50). At the same time, however, Rose also questions whether such empathy with an SS man is even possible, given that the audience would be aware of the identity of the protagonist from the start, and would therefore (in Robert Eaglestone’s words) be “unable to want what this evil man wants” (13). The solution, for Rose, is to withhold information from the audience regarding the true character of the protagonist, thereby allowing empathy to build for the character until the point when their villainy is revealed (as in Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, after which Rose’s piece is named). This paper proposes a further solution to the question of how to encourage the audience to identify with the perpetrator’s perspective: making the audience complicit in the deeds perpetrated by the protagonist, through the use of interactivity in the videogame medium. I read Yager Development’s Spec Ops: The Line (2012) as a prime example of a videogame that manages to involve the player in the perpetration of atrocities through a slow process of coming to empathise with the character who commits them. Due to the interactivity which makes the game work as a game, the player must put their hands on the trigger with the protagonist, Captain Martin Walker, in order to proceed through the game, a fact which Spec Ops then holds up to the player as an example of their complicity in the game’s violence. Fascinatingly, by doing this the game essentially punishes the player for playing it, yet it remains compelling (indeed, it received near-universal critical acclaim among games journalism outlets) in spite of, or perhaps because of its attitude towards videogame violence. By demonstrating the extent to which a strong empathic link between player and perpetrator is possible, the videogame medium has the potential to radically alter our relationship with controversial memories of perpetration, working against the troubling, albeit understandable, tendency of memory studies to universalise the innocent’s perspective in the wake of violent conflict (Crownshaw).

I would like to thank my parents who have supported me during my many years at University. Their dedication, responsibility, generosity and love has been a constancy. Matthew Holt has provided me with a philosophical dialogue for over a decade. His intelligence, sensitivity and passion for thinking has kept me faithful and vigilant to the work. His many proof-readings assisted in the development and refinement of my ideas. His loving friendship awakened in me a love of philosophy. Matthew Karpin has also been supportive in editing my work. His encotiragement and enthusiasm helped when I needed it most. Mindy Laube is another editor whose generosity, interest and vocabulary assisted in the reparation of my chapters. David Musgrave's edit of the last draft provided a thoughtful and intelligent contribution. His attention to detail and literary sensibilities gave me confidence. Richard Rushton offered a valued perspective, and John Sandow was kind enough to lend me some of his favoiuite books. I would like to thank my sister, Margaret, and brother, Robert, for their values and commitment to thinking. Max Deutscher has also been supportive and only shown me kindness. I'd also like to thank Lindsay Barrett for his help and conversation. My supervisor, Tony Thwaites has been the most through editor of all. His acute attention to detail and dose exemiination of each chapter proved to be both challenging and fruitful. I also recognise John Prow's contribution in the early stages of my research. This thesis is dedicated to my father, Joseph Benedict Gibson, whose gentleness, kindness, loyalty and love were imwavering. Writing a thesis becomes less about thought and more about friendship. If one had to choose the one friend, the one companion to preserve beyond the present, who or what would you choose? This is not about choosing the work, as a thesis above people, rather it is about choosing the friend (or friends) that help in the preservation of one's relationship to the work. For these are the fiiends who give one faith when it all seems hopeless. other texts from his immense oeuvre. I also sometimes criticise Derrida through GilUan Rose's works. The Broken Middle, Mourning Becomes the Law and Judaism and Modernity. Superficially it may appear that Rose-and by extension my own work-offers a moral solution to Derrida's aporetics. I don't think this is the case. Rose's concept of the broken middle will be related to the secret in James. By the broken middle Rose means how the seemingly irresolvable tensions between the singular, the particular and the universal, are worked through (but not fixed, synthesised or mended) by that which arises out of their discord, for example, novels, governmental institutions, charity organisations, discussion groups and so forth. (I do not, however, actually go through all of these possible mediations or responses since this thesis is concerned with reading literary and philosophical objects.) The secret, as a damaged vestige of James's fallen, broken worlds, is not only evidential of his society's limitations and failures, it is also a sign of resistance. I argue that what could arise through opposition, a nianifestation or a response that is both a product of and a resistance to injustice, to the elided other or to the distraught, fragmented self or subject, is a space of negotiation; one that could address, not perpetuate, irreconcilable relationships and differences. Rose argues that postmodernism has chosen a defeatist path by sustaining and basking in the untenability of oppositions. For example, I think Maurice Blanchot perpetuates paradox without hope since he forsakes the possibility of working through problems via a middle ground and too easily equates it with sentimentality and humanism. This is a "despairing rationalism without reason" as Rose says.^ I also think, ironically enough, that this kind ^of response is more sentimental and middle-of-the-road than Rose's approach because by default it glorifies irreconcilable oppositions. In The Space of Literature, for example, Blanchot presents mourning as not only endless but also meaningless, making the "event" of death all the more heroic for its transcendent anonjnnity Blanchot assumes the ^Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation

Gillian Rose’s conception of recognition theory articulates a significant challenge to conventional contemporary strands of recognition. Hyperrationalist accounts of recognition portray recognition as an instrument of emancipation that can be wielded by subjects with little risk to their sense of selves. Primordial accounts of recognition portray recognition as always already present in our fundamental attunement to one another and emphasize recovery. From a Rosean perspective, however, both accounts soften and domesticate Hegel’s radical project of mutual recognition. Recognition theory is too often captured by a fantasy of the independent, invulnerable subject: recognition is perceived as an instrument of emancipation that might be wielded with little risk to our sense of selves.

Rose’s recognition, in contrast, is an agonistic process that insists on the ongoing process of recognition, where cognition is followed by re-cognition, or knowing again. It is profoundly countercultural: it calls us to relinquish attachment to self-certainty and self-advantage and emphasizes instead our inescapable relationality. Rose insists that recognition cannot offer a ‘new security’; it is not a technical tool we can employ to reduce our vulnerability or to address our broken norms and structures. Instead, it calls us on a constant journey towards comprehension that requires us to examine ourselves and those desires and denials that shape our interactions and judgments facilitating the oppression of others as well as ourselves. Recognition highlights both our vulnerability and our radical dependence on one another; it calls us on the difficult journey of working together towards a ‘good enough justice’.

The works of Gillian Rose in philosophy and social theory provide an alternative perspective on the debates around Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which goes beyond the choice between 'radical epistemol-ogy' versus 'radical politics'. This paper outlines some salient elements of her work, in particular the concept of 'diremption'—forced splitting—and 'the broken middle' between law and ethics. The paper builds on this work in arguing that a focus on conduct, defined as both discipline and practices, can remain critical of the contemporary world whilst aware of the problems of representation and explanation addressed within ANT.

religion" might be a bit of a red herring in this storyand that all of the talk of theocracy might be provocative rather than elucidating. If we sober up and widen the lens to include all of the many other cases in which constitutional courts shape the legal spaces in which people live their lives, might we not see that what Hirschl is showing us is simply one more way in which government employs constitutional courts as a space for collective negotiation and adjustment. Religion is not different in this respect from other aspects of a particular country's particularity and multiplicity.

This paper will risk interpreting a “not quite” artwork; that is, an artwork whose unclear status throws the work of interpretation into relief. Manufactured by Eva Hesse at her studio on the Bowery, S-105 (1968) is one of a series of “test pieces” that were posthumously consigned to the estate. In 2010, the test pieces were newly designated “Studiowork” by the art historian Briony Fer, who curated a successful travelling exhibition of the same name. Consequently, this “not quite” artwork found passage to the centre of what Robert Pincus-Witten termed the “industry of Eva Hesse [scholarship]”. S-105 is hemmed in by the conceptual act of naming and subject to readings of mimetic inscription: What if this thing is my model of thought? enquires Fer. Thinking with Fer about how S-105 speaks to us from beyond its muteness, I ask the following: What can we do with the excessive material lure that haunts the questions we ask of the “not quite” artwork? I want to trouble the critical transmission of affect, understood as an unavoidable interpretive recourse from a material thing whose lifeline is, patently, the institution of art history. To this end, I shall conduct a surface reading of S-105 as it is mediated via Yale University Press’ catalogue raisonné (2006). How does the formal intrusion of this medium and its value-form actually manipulate S-105? My reading is indebted to Eugenie Brinkema’s programme in The Forms of the Affects (2014). Finally, and in deference to the Late 60s’ positivist grounds of dematerialisation, my argument is informed by the critique of Gillian Rose: ‘Which concepts does the object have ‘by itself’? It has the reified concepts of non-dialectical sociologies and philosophies by means of which the non-reified concepts can be derived’ (1978).

For St. Augustine, Christian living is constituted by the inseparably
connected theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, where
happiness is found in a precarious and changeable world through
hope in a future secured in eternity. Taking up the Hegelian philosophy
of Gillian Rose, Vincent Lloyd has argued that such an
understanding of hope is melancholic, leading him to reject hope
as a virtue and thus invalidating the theological virtues under an
Augustinian conception. However, in my view Lloyd misreads
Rose by failing to recognize the silent character of hope in her
work. I shall argue that Gillian Rose rescues Augustine’s theological
virtues by recasting hope in an eternal present.

This essay proposes that the interpretations of Hegelian philosophy advanced by Gillian Rose and Robert Pippin may be relevant to the theorisation of genocide. This argument is presented via a discussion of Claudia Card's contention that genocide can be understood as a form of 'social death'. According to Card, genocide damages or eradicates what she calls 'social vitality': inter-generational social relations that animate, articulate and characterise social groups, and which give meaning and context to individual lives. The essay points out limitations in Card's claims and proposes that Pippin and Rose could help to respond to those problems. It argues that Pippin's reading can develop Card's ideas regarding the collective 'life' of groups, and that Rose's interpretation can remedy difficulties posed by Card's conception of evil. The essay suggests that, when taken together, this combination of ideas may point towards a means of thinking about Hegel that serves to foreground the pertinence of past disasters to any critical assessment of the present.

How should we remember the Holocaust? In the next decade or so, many of the last living Holocaust survivors will pass away. It will then fall to us later generations to confront what Hannah Arendt called ‘the abyss that opened up before us’ by telling their stories. In doing so, we aim to guard against the spectre of Holocaust denial. But when we vow to ‘never forget’ the terrible crimes of Nazism, what exactly is it that we seek to remember?

Hardening is a process by which the security of the self and internal is relentlessly pursued. Adorno describes this as an 'ideal' which represses the anxiety of the possibility of pain, and imposes this condition externally. This paper explores the processes of spatial hardening in Israel and Palestine, with reference to conversations that arose in response to an artwork by Francis Alÿs: The Green Line (sometimes doing something poetic can be political and sometimes doing something political can be poetic) (2004), in which the artist trailed a line of green paint along part of the 'green line' in Jerusalem. First, I introduce the notion of idealised invulnerability,and discuss this dynamic in the creation of identity and spatiality of Israel and Palestine. I then introduce Alÿs's work, and the ideas of partition, differentiation, and insecurity that arise during the discussions surrounding his work. I argue that bordering practice in Israel and Palestine follows a pattern of seeking absolute differentiation, and avoiding recognition, thereby reproducing conditions of insecurity and trauma. I then indicate an 'architectural third way' of reconceptualising the border as a 'broken middle' in which a 'good enough' justice may be pursued.

The inauguration of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States raises immediate questions about the current state of democracy and the priorities for political action both within the US and beyond. But it might also cause those of us involved in the academic discourse of critical theory to reflect on our own theoretical frameworks and assumptions, not least because of the apparent inability of contemporary theoretical discourses in the humanities to account for the current predicament. Is there anything to be learned for our own theoretical endeavors from the dynamics of social resentment and political disenchantment which Trump's campaign was able to harness, exploit, and channel to such effect?
Although published a year before the election, I'd suggest that Wendy Brown's recent book Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (Zone, 2015) suggests that there is, even if the nature of the election poses significant challenges to her analysis. But for the purposes of addressing the theoretical lessons of the Trump's election, what is remarkable is the extent of her revision of some of the basic assumptions of contemporary theory, a revision whose implications, it seems to me, have been insufficiently acknowledged or thought through. As Brown makes clear, and as reviewers have noted, the book uses but also criticizes Michel Foucault's account of neoliberalism; but the character and implications of Brown's critique are far beyond what we've seen in orthodox theory for a long time.

Hypothesis:  there is a continual tension or negotiation between a freedom for one and all, a cosmopolitanism, and a wariness about the passions and danger of the common people. This tension destabilises accounts of freedom in Spinoza that either emphasise that it is of one order (the order of nature), across his works, both ethical and political (e.g. Steinberg, also me); or whether we should speak of two orders of freedom, one for freedom-loving individuals like philosophers, and a far more minimal threshold of peace and stability for the state (e.g. Jonathan Israel). Or, a third position that I am interested in, and have recently gravitated to, having previously shifted from two to one, whether the common order of freedom still involves an unbridgeable tension, or fracture, between these two orders. Whether in fact, against the progressive tradition, there is also unbridgeable fracture between Spinoza’s context, and ours.

- This paper is a précis of points given greater expansion in my forthcoming book "Spinoza and the Politics of Freedom"

In this presentation I consider a pedagogical argument regarding the place of ethics in representations of trauma. I will focus on two examples of visual historical archives, the documentaries Shoah (France:1985, Dir. Claude Lanzmann) and States of Fear (Ireland: 1999, Dir. Mary Raftery). Both documentaries received considerable attention upon release and influenced a large amount of public discourse relating to the events the documentaries focused on, namely testimonials by survivors of institutionalized violence, in the case of Shoah the Nazi genocide of European Jews in occupied Europe during the second world war, in States of Fear the physical and sexual abuse of children under the state's care in orphanages and industrial homes in the years following the foundation of the Irish state. I focus on the differences in terms of approaching and presenting survivor testimonials via the methodology of film's respective directors. However, one aspect of the shared legacies of Shoah and States of Fear, in how in their placing of the value of survivor testimonies in order to understand the moral implications of traumatic events, these projects influenced a process of historical evaluation that shaped how institutionalized violence is memorialized in the contemporary world. In the case of Shoah, arguments made on moral grounds on how testimony is the singularly vital way of interpreting the Holocaust have abounded in Holocaust studies since the documentary's release. In the case of States of Fear legal proceedings on behalf of the victims of institutional abuse emerged in the wake of the documentary's screening on Ireland's state broadcaster RTE.

It is easy for Rose’s notion of recognition to seem demanding and austere or ‘joyless and difficult’. In this paper, I argue that while Rose’s oeuvre is both difficult and demanding, it is neither joyless nor austere. The difficult and joyful aspects of Rose’s thought are rooted in her radical Hegelianism and her insistence on a fundamentally different orientation to knowing and acting. Rose’s speculative philosophy unsettles the confident epistemology of moral rationalism and advocates a slower, more difficult journey towards comprehension that starts with ‘what is’. She maintains that we must be willing both to know again and to act again, claiming that knowledge and action are ‘fallible and precarious, but risk-able’. Rose’s deeply relational approach to knowing and acting is unsettling and countercultural; however, life lived relationally and vulnerably opens us not only to uncertainty and the pain of coming to know but also to love, beauty, and grace. The dance of recognition is ‘full of surprises’: it juxtaposes misrecognition and loss with joy and ‘overwhelming plenitude’. Seen and unseen bounties return Rose always to ‘the vocation of the everyday’, which starts with what is and eschews messianic escapism; they accompany and sustain love’s work on its imperfect journey towards a ‘good enough justice’.

Critical border studies is increasingly articulating ethical approaches to borders and bordering practises. In this paper, I heed this impulse, by articulating a notion of the border as a ‘broken middle’ in which the bounds of the absolute are challenged and held answerable for injustices. The ‘broken middle’ is a concept developed by British theorist Gillian Rose, for whom it represents a dialectic conceptual space both between and within apparent binaries. The broken middle requires a reassembly of the bounds of each—a confrontation of self—in the pursuit of an evasive yet hopeful ethics. The application of the broken middle to the border illuminates the ambiguities of its physical space, and the ways in which bordering practises represent the imposition of unjust binaries. I finish by considering how a work by Beit Sahour-based collective, Decolonising Architecture Art Residency (DAAR), begins the difficult, pragmatic, and ever-hopeful work of the broken middle in the border.

The adjective 'indescribable' performs a one-word contradiction. Nevertheless, by the early nineties it had become widely believed in certain post-structuralist philosophical circles that the Holocaust was indescribable and unknowable. Carolin Emcke argues in her latest book, Because it is Sayable: On Witness and Justice, that not only are genocide, atrocities and violent crimes describable, knowable and communicable, but the victims of such crimes often want their stories to be told and heard, and it is a matter of justice for society to hear them. (As Emcke's book has not yet been translated into English all quotations in the following are my own translations). The late Gillian Rose had already taken aim at such post-structuralist views in 1994 in a presentation called 'Beginnings of the day-Fascism and representation'. One of the mistakes of such philosophy, she argued, was conflating pat answers with comprehension. The Holocaust itself is not ineffable, and to claim as much, and then to infer from the claim that 'representation' itself is somehow fatally inadequate and even to blame for what happened, does not help. Indeed, 'the argument for the overcoming of representation, in its aesthetic, philosophical and political versions, converges with the inner tendency of Fascism itself,' wrote Rose, insofar as it makes criticism all the more difficult to carry out. Rose accused these philosophers of a pseudo-religious, misty-eyed failure to think clearly about how best to respond to the horrors of the twentieth century, which she dubbed 'Holocaust piety'. In its stead she urged 'Holocaust ethnography'. Rose had some influence on those who study artistic representations of the Holocaust but she did not carry the day in the field of continental philosophy

Venue: Durham Business School 10.00am-18.45pm £50 (buffet and refreshments included) Cheques should be made payable 'Durham University, Centre for Catholic Studies' Send to Dr Pound, Dept. Theology and Religion, Durham University, Abbey House, Palace Green, Durham DH1 3RS There will be a meal afterwards (not included) To register or to enquire about student concessions contact [email protected]; or Tel: 0191 33 41656 www.centreforcatholicstudies.co.uk Gillian Rose's work spans Adorno, Hegel, sociology, philosophy, jurisprudence, post-structuralism, the Frankfurt School, Marxism, anthropology, literature, Jewish and Christian theology, death, Auschwitz, Feminism, and more. This conference brings together some of the foremost scholars on Rose's work to discuss her continued relevance for social theory, politics, Marxism, theology, Hegel and Žižek, amongst other critical streams, twenty years after her untimely death. CALL FOR PAPERS: If you wish to offer a paper on any aspect of Rose's work please send an abstract to Andrew Brower Latz at [email protected]

This issue marks the fortieth anniversary of College Literature, and also sees the College Literature approximates to the period of disciplinary reconstruction and paradigm change that has come College Literature from other rent position in relationship to the upheavals of this period, rather than either of novelty and 'innovation.'