Substance is subject is style: On the speculative poetics of Gillian Rose

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of philosopher Gillian Rose's works as predominated by the question of literary style. In contrast to Rose's professed antipathy for the linguistic and structuralist turns in 20th-century philosophy, this article contends that her thought makes recourse to distinctions of literary form (i.e. poetics) to resolve problems of philosophical expression. The contours of this poetics are traced from Rose's first works on the respectively ‘ironic’ and ‘severe’ styles of Adorno and Hegel, through to her final published work and its experimentations with the formal limitations of philosophical writing. Following Hegel's theorisation of the ‘speculative proposition’ as a statement of formal difference belying a conceptual unity, Rose's poetic thought is designated as a speculative poetics, which seeks a stylistic unity that does not efface the non-identity of its terms.

Introduction to a speculative poetics

The maxim that drives Gillian Rose's project in Hegel Contra Sociology cuts a sharp distinction between her position and that which has predominated in post-Hegelian thought: ‘Hegel's philosophy has no social import if the absolute cannot be thought’ (Rose, 1981: 98). If we are to comprehend ourselves as the subject of absolute knowing – if we are to cease to merely represent it in the form of a divine, inhuman power – we must recognise the absolute as something thinkable. Rose's project of critical Marxism therefore entails the recognition of Marxism not as the science of capital's abstract laws, but as a culture capable of reforming these laws in its revolutionary practice. Such a reconception of Marxism is informed by Hegel's speculative thought, which navigates the contradictions of concept and reality to attempt a statement of the absolute that is no longer abstractly situated ‘in-itself’, set apart from the subjective position for which this ‘in-itself’ appears. Still, Rose maintains a separation between Hegel ‘the philosopher’, accompanied by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and Marx ‘the sociologist’, alongside Durkheim and Weber. Worse still for any prospective Hegelian-Marxism, it is through Marx's sociological outlook that a Fichtean scission of theory and practice is smuggled into any account that does not read him critically (that is, philosophically contra sociologically), which has been made difficult by the uncritical canonisation of Marx's thought as ‘Marxist’ theory. The project of critical Marxism is therefore faced with the unenviable task of wilful blasphemy in its goal of speaking against an orthodoxy without seeking either to leave it behind in apostasy or supplant it with heretical authority (see Osborne, 2015: 65–6). Such a project produces an idiosyncratic basis for social theory, which is refused its recourses to the security of rational schemas or the immediacy of recorded experience. In the place of these abstractions, social life is conceived as totality, but a totality that is viewed from several vantage points, each inadequate to the task if taken as the sole royal road to absolute thought (see Brower-Latz, 2015: 52–3).

Implicit in Rose's declaration that the absolute must be thought is, therefore, a question of what makes this thought communicable in terms that do not fall back into the half-measures and mystifications of the ineffable. Such a question is at the forefront of Rose's early works on both Hegel and Adorno, whose writerly styles are shown as essential to the content of their philosophies. On a more fundamental level, Rose's reconstruction of Hegelian thought brings with it a deep interest in the technical matters of language, from the grammatical conundrum of the speculative proposition, to the circularity of transcendental and hermeneutical modes of exposition, to the refusal of any notion of language as something immaterial or ghostly. Hence, the present article investigates this guiding linguistic thread in Rose's thought, from her first writings on philosophical style to her final poetic works, to discover how the demand to make the absolute thinkable involves a secondary goal of making the ineffable speakable. The recourse to style is not meant to defuse the philosophical or political intent of Rose's works but to explicate what is left implicit at several key moments of her thought, or which serves as a significant but undertheorised component of her interventions in philosophical and political thought.

The discovery of linguistic concerns in Rose's work must confront two obstacles at the outset. The first is Rose's own hostility to the structuralist and post-structuralist ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy, the advent of which is the chief polemical target of Dialectic of Nihilism. In that work, which contains some of Rose's most explicit statements on the philosophy of language, the linguistic is saddled with the baggage of neo-Kantian abstraction, and the structuralist ambition of discovering the synchronic laws of speech is denounced for its one-sidedness. Nevertheless, Rose's scepticism towards the project of general linguistics puts her in good company with other Marxist theorists critical of the structuralist turn, such as Valentin Vološinov and Evald Ilyenkov, while also clearing the field for another, concrete view of language. If Rose's work stands opposed to linguistics as first philosophy, the possibility of a philosophy of language may still be redressed by turning attention away from language as such and to the expressed material of writing. Throughout Rose's work this shaping of language is addressed as style, which is not the form of writing separable from its content but the manifestation of form through its content, and the navigation of the mismatch between the patent content of the work and this implicit content of the form. The philosophy of language for Rose is therefore a philosophical poetics, as against the philosophical linguistics of her contemporaries.

Poetics in this sense is not the study of poetry alone but of literary language in general and the basic divisions by which its formal characteristics may be described. For much of its history, this work of division has been performed either inductively, as in the observations of Aristotle or Longinus that literary works tend to fall into high, low or mixed styles, or schematically, as in the later applications of the high–low style distinction as a rule for composition rather than a description of existing works. Between these inductive and schematic moments, the philosophical rigour of poetics has remained in question, as it alternates between generalisations taken from an arbitrary selection of literary texts and criteria devised without clear justification for their general use. But poetics is not entirely without an ambition towards rational systematicity. As Northrop Frye has observed, the hypothesis of poetics is that its object is not produced in the investigation but presents its own rationality; that ‘criticism cannot be a systematic study unless there is a quality in literature which enables it to be so’, or ‘that just as there is an order of nature behind the natural sciences, so literature is not a piled aggregate of “works,” but an order of words’ (1957: 17). What subtends the work of poetics is the presumed rationality of its object, a unified whole of written works, though as an ‘order of words’ this object seems less reducible to the culturally bounded realm of ‘literature’ than language in general. In other words, as Tzvetan Todorov has claimed, the tendency of poetics towards the interpretation of ‘not only literary texts but all texts’ condemns it to a transitional place between literary criticism as a culturally delimited field of investigation and general linguistics as the study of language as such (1981: 71–2, emphasis in original). The ambition for a systematic poetics thus confronts linguistics at the initial boundary of its investigations, where literary language is defined as a special kind of writing or speech, enclosing poetics as a theoretical fiefdom within the general domain of linguistics.

This priority of the linguistic over the poetic is the second obstacle that must be faced by the exposition of Rose's philosophy of language. The philosophical terrain in which Rose makes her intervention is one for which the thought of the absolute is an unlikely proposition. The linguistic turn has brought with it a ban on the contravention of language's special domain, which stands as a middle between theory and practice, a veil through which the subject peers at substance, at best assuming one or the other of these poles as the source of language's synchronic laws, but never letting them meet united. Even among the Hegelians, the thought of the absolute has been reduced to an ought, to which philosophy tends though its realisation is deferred, as in Robert Pippin's call for a ‘struggle to actualize a free life’, or a rational freedom without correspondence to real ethical life (2008: 281). The decades since the publication of Hegel Contra Sociology have seen a proliferation of Hegelianisms – whether post-structuralist or analytic – that shy away from the absolute, instead seeking models of language capable of representing human rationality in partial forms.

The linguistic misrecognitions of Hegel's absolute thought may not be corrected in abstract – supplanting this one-sided view of the matter with another, no less one-sided theory – but must be addressed through the real problems of thought that these misrecognitions bring into view. For Hegel, the proposition that is capable of showing the conceptual unity of subject and substance even in their non-identity is the speculative proposition; so, for Rose the poetics that can give a stylistic answer to this linguistic problem must be a speculative poetics. Speculation in this sense is not the ‘illegitimate use of correct principles’ outlawed by Kant but the experience of conceptual unity across the formal non-identity of a statement (Rose, 1981: 52–3). This unity is misrecognised as an identity transgressing the formal division of the statement, making the relation of subject and predicate into tautological self-reference. This may be seen in the statements of Hegel such as ‘subject is substance’ or ‘the real is rational’ that seem to collapse their terms into an undifferentiated field of ‘reason’ or ‘spirit’. But it is precisely this panlogism that Hegel's speculative logic is supposed to overcome, as it maintains the formal separation of its terms as the bridge that their concept must traverse. Hence, Hegel's apparent statements of metaphysics become matters of practical reason: ‘subject becomes substantial’ and ‘reason must be realised’.

Naturally, Hegel's speculative logic is not framed as a purely linguistic problem, though the problem of distinguishing speculative from ordinary propositions does lead him to describe them as two modes of ‘philosophical exposition’, the one attaining the ‘goal of plasticity’ in its speculative treatment of its terms and the other mistaking this speculation for a statement of identity or tautology (Hegel, 2018: 40). The correction of this misrecognition of the speculative statement therefore falls back on a stylistic judgement, determining a suitable reading of the proposition based on a poetics of philosophical modes of exposition. For Rose's part, her reconstruction of speculative logic as a poetics of misrecognition would inform the recovery of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous irony and the ‘facetious style’ of Thomas Mann in The Broken Middle, just as they would motivate the reflections on the genre of philosophy in Mourning Becomes the Law and the final creation of the philosophico-poetic essay Love’s Work. Rose's project, for which The Melancholy Science provided the germ and Hegel Contra Sociology gave the programme, can be seen in these terms as an extended meditation on the effect of style on philosophical thought, detailing the many failures to think the absolute and the poetics of making these failures legible.

In what follows, the concept of philosophical style will first be shown at work in Rose's monographs on Adorno and Hegel, then the wider problematics of poetics will be examined as they develop from the anti-Kantian polemics of Hegel Contra Sociology to the anti-structuralist arguments of Dialectic of Nihilism. On this basis, Rose's affinity with the Marxist philosophy of language will be outlined, so as to remount her offensive against linguistic philosophy with the post- and non-Marxist strands of this century's ‘Hegel Renaissance’ in view. Finally, having outlined the goals of Rose's speculative poetics in its opposition to the linguistic rereadings of Hegel, the practice of this poetics will be demonstrated with reference to Love’s Work.

In search of a style

The question of style takes a place of pre-eminence in the opening chapter of Rose's first published book, her monograph on Theodor Adorno titled The Melancholy Science. Before dealing with the content of Adorno's thought, Rose highlights the formal features of his writing and their central place in his philosophy. For Rose, the form of writing is not incidental to its content but an integral part of its expression. In respect of Adorno, this is the case for both historical and methodological reasons. On the one hand, Rose (1978: 10–11) locates in Adorno's experiments with style a modernist impulse towards formal experimentation, whereas on the other hand she recognises his scepticism towards any purely formal solution to the problems of modern thought. Rather, Adorno's approach to philosophical language reflects his convictions that the object of modern philosophy is no longer the true but the false, and that the presentation of the idea of the false must extend even to the falsehood of that presentation itself. ‘Criticism of language (Sprachkritik), like criticism of cultural forms (Kulturkritik), is philosophy and criticism of society for Adorno’ (Rose, 1978: 21). Hence, in the criticism of society there must be no absolute boundary between the style and the substance of criticism:

‘Style’ is not uniform or codified, not elevated over the material which it forms, but stands for continual vigilance to the mode in which theory is presented, thereby recasting the relation between theory and praxis. If Lukács has turned Marxism into method, Adorno has turned it into the search for style. (Rose, 1978: 180)

In this search for style, Rose identifies in Adorno's works elements of the ‘tradition of irony’ as an intentionally cultivated style. Owing much to the elliptical ironies of Nietzsche and the pseudonymous play of Kierkegaard, Adorno deploys a variety of stylistic strategies to make his works say more than they can straightforwardly express. To disturb the subjective position of philosophical thought, Adorno deploys ‘passive constructions’ and ‘dramatic metaphor[s]’ which put a distance between his writerly perspective and that of his object (Rose, 1978: 17). To disrupt the readerly experience of his writing, he refuses the expected elaboration of his material, opting for the reiteration of the argument in aphoristic statements that do not entirely cohere into a whole:

This gives an impression of confusion, but in fact amounts to a set of parallaxes, apparent displacements of an object due to changes of observation point. This is quite consistent with the idea that the object cannot be captured, and that a set of presentations may best approximate it. (Rose, 1978: 17)

The ironic style is in this manner defined by the mismatch of content and form with themselves, as the explicit meaning of the work is made to contradict itself and express additional, implicit messages, while the formal aspect of the work relays these messages according to an esoteric structure that expresses what cannot be stated directly.

The question of style as it applies to Hegel's work is flagged in The Melancholy Science in the discussion of Adorno's treatment of the topic in his Three Studies on Hegel's philosophy. As Rose notes, two of the three essays which make up that work are concerned with the presentational style of Hegel's writing and the hermeneutical position that it demands of its readers (see Adorno, 1993: chs 2 and 3). In particular, Hegel's writing is described by Adorno as implicating the reading subject in the conceptual object under discussion, while denying the subjective position any sovereignty over the composition of that object. The object is conceived by the subject, but only by means of this negative experience of misconception, as the subject pieces together glimpses of a totality that cannot be immediately represented (Rose, 1978: 73).

In Hegel Contra Sociology, this refusal of readerly comfort is what Rose calls Hegel's ‘severe style’, a designation borrowed from Hegel's own Lectures on Fine Art and counterposed to the ‘ideal style’, which coordinates the truth of its object with the pleasures of the spectator, and the ‘agreeable style’ which seeks firstly to please at the expense of an adequate depiction of its object (Hegel, 1975: 616–17; Rose, 1981: 54–5). Like the ironic style of Adorno or Nietzsche, the severe style of Hegel is no writerly whim but a measured response to the challenge of communicating philosophical thought in an epoch without recourse to the classical unity of style and substance or to the religious exercise of traditional hermeneutics. This style is severe not only in its disregard for the aesthetic pleasures of writing, but in its registering of the severance between our modern developments of thought and our comparative paucity of representation (Rose, 1981: 156). For Hegel, there is no longer to be found in the works of art or religion a meaning received by recollection or reminiscence, to borrow the terms of Paul Ricoeur (1970: 33–5) because these works are now conceived as misrecognitions of a unity between concept and experience. The form and the content of writing come apart at the seams, as the practice of writing is subordinated to the presentation of its object as it is for itself in all its uncompromising severity, and as the practice of reading becomes an exercise in extracting implicit meanings from material that can only be misrecognised at first glance.

In this disunity of form and content, concept and experience, thought and its objects, lies the possibility of re-cognition to which the severe and ironic styles gesture. In these styles, the initial misunderstanding of the material is utilised to dispense with the immediate and uncritical reception of the work, which must be followed by a reassessment that unifies in thought a disjunction between concept and experience that may nevertheless remain dirempted in fact (Rose, 1981: 76–7). That is, the severe or ironic work makes no claims to deliver an identity of thought and object, but in its place presents a stylistic unity that takes this lack of identity as the content of its form.

The works of severity and irony are therefore well suited to the thought of diremption which Adorno calls non-identity thinking and Hegel calls speculative thinking. In everyday thought we suppose a rational identity between our concepts and their objects, but it is the experience of modern philosophical thought that the objects of our experience evade the capacity of our concepts to become commensurate with them. This confrontation with the limits of our ability to conceptualise totality does not imply an absolute failure of thought, but instead necessitates a recognition of this failure that makes visible the non-identity between concept and object itself. Such is the intention of Adorno's negative dialectic, which aims to undo the tendency in dialectics to assume this non-identity under the category of contradiction, hence making it legible only in its submission to conceptual thought (see Adorno, 2021: 14–15). The alternative for Adorno is not another way of formulating the concept, but a stylistic strategy of presenting the disjunction between thought and its objects alongside their unfulfilled tendency towards one another:

The concept is not equal to nor congruent with the object which it identifies. But that concept is what the object has ‘by itself,’ that is, the properties it could potentially have. These properties are what it ‘would like to be.’ The personification of the object entailed by ‘like to be’ is a stylistic way of presenting the objective, utopian moment. This would be the condition of rational identity. (Rose, 1978: 57, emphasis in original)

Against the formal demands of the concept, this ‘utopian moment’ of unity is one expressed but not formalised in the stylistic circumnavigation of a disunity that must remain broken.

Although Rose would later characterise Adorno's thought as dialectical rather than speculative (see Rose, 1993: 53–64), in Hegel Contra Sociology she describes speculative thought in much the same terms as non-identity thinking: ‘To read a proposition “speculatively” means that the identity which is affirmed between subject and predicate is seen equally to affirm a lack of identity between subject and predicate’ (Rose, 1981: 52). That is, the copula of the sentence no longer expresses an immediate unity of the subject and its predicate, as though one participates directly in the other, but only states their rational unity even as it affirms their factual non-identity. Hence, in Rose's reading, when Hegel states that ‘the real is the rational’ this is not to declare the rationality of the world as accomplished but to affirm a process of reason that is only partially realised (Rose, 1981: 53). Likewise, Rose takes Hegel's statement that religion and the state are ‘identical in and for themselves’ as neither describing an empirical or a desired state of affairs, nor as a tautological definition whereby one of these things simply is another name for the other (Rose, 1981: 51). Rather, these speculative propositions must be understood in their severity, emptying the exposition of its ordinary meaning such that ‘the subject of the proposition is no longer fixed and abstract with external, contingent accidents, but, initially, an empty name, uncertain and problematic, gradually acquiring meaning as the result of a series of contradictory experiences’ (Rose, 1981: 52). Speculative thought therefore has its own utopian moment in the unity of its style, for it perceives in the disunity of ordinary language – which is riven by the insufficiency of thought to take stock of experience and hastily repaired by the tautologies of identity thinking – an ultimate unity which derives from a process of recognition that does not prejudge its access to its object.

Against the ineffable

The failure to think speculatively does not produce simple identities but irreconcilable divisions in thought. There is no return to the ideal unity of form and content: severance is constitutive of modern subjectivity, which apprehends itself as opposed to its objects, its conditions, and its truth. Since Kant, philosophy has had at its disposal a transcendental method which seeks to justify the proper roles of thought ahead of its use. A separation of cognitive powers is elaborated, granting to the faculties their rightful function in the creation and exercise of thought's fundamental laws. But from the beginning this transcendental project runs into contradiction: it must prejudge the boundaries of thought before their use has commenced, effectively throwing the case before it has entered the courtroom, transforming the legal order of the faculties into a kangaroo court (Rose, 1981: 47). Worse still, in a Kafkaesque contortion, the source of the laws is rendered unknowable, as the transcendental method draws a limit on the rightful capacities of thought that excludes the very conditions that are supposed to justify it:

The demarcation of legitimate theoretical and practical knowledge turns out to be the demarcation of new areas of ignorance: God is unknowable, things-in-themselves are unknowable, the source of the causality of the will is unknowable, and the transcendental unity of apperception is unknowable. In sum, the finite only is knowable, while the infinite transcends the realm of thought. The unknowability of what Kant calls, among other names, the ‘unconditioned’ or the ‘infinite’ results in the unknowability of ourselves, both as subjects of experience, ‘the transcendental unity of apperception,’ and as moral agents capable of freedom. Pari passu, the unknowability of ourselves means that the social, political and historical determinants of all knowledge and all action remain unknown and unknowable. (Rose, 1981: 47)

If the transcendental method begins on the wrong foot, its style of exposition is no less fraught. Because the source of transcendental law is outside the law and therefore unknowable, it remains for the philosopher to deduce the laws only from what has been conditioned by them. For Kant to discover the preconditions of experience and the understanding he must work backwards from their products to posit the necessary categories without which thought would not be possible. But this leaves the conditions of experience as abstractions, which are empty of thought except when attached to the objects that they are supposed to precede. The transcendental condition cannot be thought without what it conditions, leading the search for the necessary beginning of thought in a circuit the goal of which is excluded from thought (Rose, 1981: 9). ¹

This is not only a matter of philosophical argument, but a problem of style and interpretation. Drawing from Hans-Georg Gadamer's comments on the circular nature of hermeneutical thought, Rose (1981: 25) characterises this transcendental circle as an expositional issue for the discourse of value and validity. In hermeneutics the tautology of part and whole leads the search for the rules of interpretation in circles, as the text at hand must be read as belonging to a wider context of sentence, work, lifework or genre, while these contexts must be understood as composed of individual texts that are legible primarily on their own terms (Gadamer, 1975: 303). Likewise, the transcendental circle supposes an implicit identity of condition and the conditioned, though this identity cannot be stated without transgressing the ban imposed on speculative thought, and is instead expressed in the formal circularity into which the transcendental exposition is led. The form of exposition taken by the transcendental method can therefore be understood as a philosophical style that stands alongside the severe and the ironic, although it is not able to recognise itself as such. Like the severe and ironic, the transcendental style expresses a unity of its elements on the level of presentation rather than on the level of content, but it achieves this by binding its oppositions in a tautology that cannot be acknowledged on either level. What the severe and ironic styles make expressible by covert means, the transcendental confirms as simply ineffable.

The interrogation of philosophical style cannot help but implicate those who practise it, and Rose's own deliberations over style are no exception. As Tony Gorman (2001: 30) has observed, ‘it is not [only] Hegel but Rose who writes in the “severe style” ’, and much of what she has to say about her philosophical precursors appears equally as statements of intention for her own work. Indeed, Rose's efforts in The Melancholy Science and Hegel Contra Sociology may be recognised not as straightforward commentaries on the writings of Adorno or Hegel but as critical reconstructions which aim to intensify the peculiarities of their styles against the abstractions to which they often revert. Speculative thought is not given in a statement, but must be drawn out by interpretative practices that do not prejudge the object of the severe style or presuppose a unity of the object given ironically. Such a need for hermeneutical revision is made explicit in Rose's later writings on Adorno and Nietzsche – which identify Adorno's failure to recognise the speculative dynamic of Nietzsche's writing, and his reversions to a merely dialectical method – just as it may be seen in the speculative rereading of Hegel Contra Sociology, in which Hegel's own unsuccessful attempts to state the absolute are counterposed to his proficiency at recognising the speculative content that resides even in these failures (Rose, 1981: 223; 1993: 54–9).

Indeed, throughout Rose's works it is the process of misrecognition that informs her thinking on style and may best serve as the principle for her poetics of philosophical writing. Hegel's writing attests to the history of philosophy as a succession of instructive failures, in which the variety of misrecognitions are reread as testaments to philosophy's perennial refusal to think itself as the absolute about which it desires to speak (Rose, 1981: 218). To make this dilemma thinkable is to make it expressible by the indirect means of philosophical style, to deliver not

an abstract statement about the absolute, but an observation to which we have now attained, by looking at the experiences of a consciousness which knows itself as an antithesis, as negative, and thus ‘participates’ in this antithesis as its own act. (Rose, 1981: 192–3)

Such an observation of the negativity operative within consciousness requires not only a philosophical hermeneutics to draw it into view, but a poetics that can account for its periphrastic expression.

A hermeneutical Hegel?

The turn towards philosophical style is presaged by Hegel, though he wavers on treating it as a poetic matter of expression or a hermeneutic problem of interpretation. On the one hand, Hegel insists that the proper comprehension of speculative thought requires a ‘refusal both to insert one's own views into the immanent rhythm of the concept and to interfere arbitrarily with that rhythm by means of wisdom acquired elsewhere’, or that the philosopher is not truly the subject of their thought but must train themselves in the art of listening, of making sense of a thought that is not their own (Hegel, 2018: 37). On the other hand, this thought does not float in the ether but requires means of expression, for ‘this return into itself on the part of the concept must be shown’ (Hegel, 2018: 40, emphasis in original). The presentation of philosophical thought therefore requires a ‘plasticity’ of style, which is legible first in the register of ordinary propositions and again for its speculative content. This content cannot be directly stated without transgressing the formal divisions of the ordinary proposition and falling into tautology, so it must be presented in an indirect style that invites revision. One typical complaint against philosophical discourse is that ‘so much has to be read over and over again before it can be understood’, but this an intended outcome of its style, which involves a play of double meanings that must be untangled by the philosophically motivated reader (Hegel, 2018: 40).

Still, Hegel's hesitation between placing the speculative meaning in either the proposition itself or in the understanding of its reader risks its falling into the domains of either linguistics or hermeneutics. Taken solely as a problem of expression, speculation is subordinated to linguistics and the formal construction of the proposition. Indeed, it is the idealism of speech that Evald Iyenkov identifies as a weakness in Hegel's account of language, which gives the word, the verbal appearance of thought, a privileged place within the life of Spirit as the exteriorisation of otherwise invisible processes of thought. Such a conception risks identifying thought with its expression, reducing reason to a figment without reality independent from its outer appearance. For Ilyenkov (2018: 20–3), this is a concession on Hegel's part to the formalist view of thinking that stretches from the scholastics to the structuralists, for whom thought can only be understood as discourse bound to the laws of formal logic or synchronic structure. In these terms, the exercise of thought ceases to concern itself with the concept but only with words, signs and the organising principles of signification. The task of the theorist is then to find the correspondences between the thought at hand and the laws of discourse which appear to shape it, allowing the abstract order of language to step in between theoretical reason and its object as a mediating surrogate (see Ilyenkov, 2018: 174). ²

This possibility of a Hegelian philosophy made amenable to a linguistic reading has been seized upon within the continental tradition, from Hans-Georg Gadamer's (1971) presentation of a hermeneutic Hegel to Jean-Luc Nancy's (2001) attempt at a grammatical rendition of Hegel's thought. Perhaps the most compelling of these Hegelian rediscoveries in that of Catherine Malabou (2005: 167), for whom speculative thought is understood primarily as a hermeneutical position in which the thinker as reader is tasked with recovering the speculative proposition from within its ordinary grammatical expression. This interpretation avoids much of the awkwardness of a straightforwardly grammatical reading of Hegel, such as that presented by Nancy, who trades the order of logic for the order of language, making the form of expression of Hegel's philosophy the beginning and the end of its meaning. Rather, Malabou's (2005: 185) reading attempts to map the disjunction between Hegel's expression and his thought, to find where the language available to him falls short of his intellectual task, and where this problem is left to the reader in their own production of the text's speculative meaning. However, despite its nuances, this mapping of a speculative hermeneutic still risks the error of placing the central problematic of Hegel's thought in his language, and in making dialectical contradiction something internal to the system of terms rather than rationality itself. If speculative thought primarily exists as a hermeneutical problem, then the tension in Hegel's philosophy is placed not in thought itself but in the speech that stands outside and apart from it.

In its most extreme form, the hermeneuticised Hegel approaches something like what is described in the Phenomenology of Spirit as an ‘unhappy consciousness’, which knows itself only in its absolute separation from the source of its truth, whether it be divine, transcendental or inhuman. We find the strongest suggestions of this unhappy consciousness in the most significant works of Hegelian reinterpretation in the continental tradition, namely those of Jean Hyppolite and Jacques Derrida. In Hyppolite's (1997: 24) work, Hegel is seen as the discoverer of a logic of sense that surpasses human reason, a sense which is identified with language as a synchronic system pre-existing and determining the range of utterances available to the human faculties of philosophical expression. This logic of sense is explicable only from an absolute standpoint that dissolves the privileges of the human subject, which can at most participate in an absolute self-knowledge that works ‘across’ but not through human thought: ‘Humanity as such is not the supreme end for Hegel. When man is reduced to himself, he is lost […] Hegel indeed speaks of history having a sense, the absolute Idea, but this idea is not man’ (Hyppolite, 1997: 186). This autonomy of sense from human language is intensified in Derrida's magisterial survey of Hegel's philosophy of language, in which Derrida (1982: 106–7) finds the repressed elements of an automatic writing, a machinery of language that works independent of human thought.

Rose among the Hegelians

For the critical Marxist view propounded by Rose, this position appears as nothing less than a lapse into theoretical melancholia: the work of philosophy becomes the production of words, words without substance, which are uttered according to laws that are neither accessible nor explicable for the utterer. Regardless of whether the order of language is available to human understanding, this order stands between the human subject and a wider, inhuman reality that evades the attempts of human language to become commensurate with it (see Ilyenkov, 2018: 103). In Rose's (1996: 71–2) account, this melancholia is, however, an effect of theoretical reason in its separation from practical reason: the gulf that it locates between the substance of sense and the subject of language is a phantasmagorical projection of its own dirempted nature. Standing alone, theoretical reason can think of its own productions in only a formal manner, as the rules of language and conditions of thought that have been given to it as arbitrary and abstract laws (see Rose, 1984: 110–11). Lacking the means to realise its intentions, theoretical reason falls back on an image of the absolute as the source of these laws and conceives of its vocation as the dutiful contemplation of an order that it cannot hope to comprehend. ³

The predominance of theoretical reason in the post-Marxist Hegelian camp might be contrasted with the expanded role of practical reason among the non-Marxists who make up the analytic Hegelian school. Whereas the continental reading of Hegel makes language into a middle that binds the order of thought to the order of words, while also separating the powers of thought from the reality of sense, the recent works of Anglo-American Hegelianism envisage language as a means for the realisation of rationality in the social sphere. In Pippin's (2008) work on Hegel's practical philosophy, language is treated not as the source of a new metaphysics but as the most basic institution of human social life. Through language, the rational subject is both free to act within the social realm and is themselves constituted by the forms of recognition that take place within the society of similarly free subjects. To borrow Terry Pinkard's (1994: 113) phrase, we encounter in the practical philosophy of Hegel the ‘sociality’ of reason, or a rationality that does not follow an order separate from itself but must be conceived in its capacity for collective and communal self-transformation. Still, the turn from theoretical to practical reason presents new difficulties for the realisation of a speculative philosophy. Whereas theoretical reason posits the reality of its thought as something unknowable, practical reason is caught in the pursuit of an actuality that it cannot attain. Pippin's work concludes with a call for the ‘struggle to actualize a free life’ (2008: 281), meaning that freedom is not realised but only acknowledged as an ‘ought’, which practical reason takes as an infinite task (see Rose, 1981: 218). That these impasses cannot be navigated from within the terms of theoretical or practical reason alone does not prevent them from being circumnavigated by the properly speculative reunion of theoretical with practical reason.

To return to Rose's maxim, what is at stake in the predicaments of theoretical and practical reason is the thought of the absolute, which cannot be realised on either side of this division but only acknowledged as something inaccessible for thought: ‘To theoretical reason actuality is “acknowledged” and unknowable, and to practical reason it is “acknowledged” and unattainable’ (1981: 205). In either case, our attempts to think the absolute are not properly our own but are only expressions of a desire for an absolute that lies perpetually outside of thinking as something either theoretically ineffable or practically impossible. The absolute is therefore only represented – or, rather, misrepresented – as something alien to us, which reflects our incapacity to fully think our own conditions of thought. In Hegel's terms, the navigating of these misrepresentations has been the historical task of religion, which has illustrated to us in the figure of the God the implicit idea which we have of ourselves as human agents:

‘The idea which a man has of God corresponds with that which he has of himself, of his freedom.’ If ‘God’ is unknowable, we are unknowable, and hence powerless. If the absolute is misrepresented, we are misrepresenting ourselves, and are correspondingly unfree. But the absolute has always been misrepresented by societies and peoples, for these societies have not been free, and they have re-presented their lack of freedom to themselves in the form of religion. (Rose, 1981: 98)

In our modern times our representations have not lost their religiosity, though they may have lost their call to divinity. The misrepresentation of ourselves persists in the new abstractions of theoretical and practical reason, which confirm our incapacity to recognise ourselves in our social and cultural works.

A viable Marxist-Hegelian philosophy of language cannot remain within the grip of these misrepresentations, but neither can it do entirely without them. There is no immediate access to the absolute, circumventing the misrecognitions of reason, but only a path through these apparent errors, which takes the failures of thinking not as the end but as the beginning of speculative thought. One illustration of this approach can be found in Fredric Jameson's Hegel Variations, which stands across the continental and Anglo-American readings of Hegel and pushes their investments in language beyond the scope of their post- and non-Marxist philosophies. Acknowledging the limits of language, but recognising the speculative unity of theoretical and practical reason that it can nonetheless express, Jameson reminds us that

[w]hile language cannot be trusted to convey any adequate or positive account of the Notion, or of truth and reality—whence the tortured sentences and figures through which Hegel is forced to attempt such accounts—it can much more pertinently be used as an index of error or contradiction. Language, in other words, is more revealing for what it cannot say than it is for what it does manage to say: and this will clearly also mark the kinship of this moment of Hegel, not only with contemporary theory, but also with modernism in literature, where failure is so often more significant than success, and where the limits of language become the paradigm for the limits of representation as such. (2010: 35).

In these terms, Hegel's philosophy may be read literarily rather than linguistically, comprehended as work rather than as text. In accordance with Rose's maxim that the absolute must be thought, the function of language here is not to relay the esoteric laws of the absolute into the partial forms human thought, but to measure the freedom of that thought in its recognition of its own limits and in its collective navigation of the historic misrecognitions that make up its existence. Incidentally, it is in this that Marx's thought is most in agreement with Hegel's speculative project, pace Rose's criticism of Marx for missing the speculative meaning of Hegel's own statements. For Marx, consciousness and language are not separable, though their identity cannot be stated, because they exist within one another in the production of human subjectivity (see Bologh, 1979: 264–5). Turning the hermeneutical Hegel the right way up, we no longer see the limits of our language as the limits of our world, but instead find our freedom in the world reflected in our freedom to restate the social norms, institutions and forms of recognition that make up our collective existence. Language does not stand apart from its speakers, as the pneumatic structure that passes through the living, diachronic utterance, but is embodied in these utterances as the human idea that they make real (see McNally, 2001).

Love languages

At the limits of structural hermeneutics, speculative poetics emerges as a necessary corrective, though it has thus far been shown in theory but not in practice. If the immaterial structure of language is an object of criticism throughout Rose's works, the embodiment of language finally arrives as a preoccupation in Love’s Work and its sister volume Mourning Becomes the Law. In these paired works, the material interest of poetics is made clear, and is offered as a counterpoint to the spectral theories that would separate language from life. The latter work insists upon the materiality of Spirit against its misunderstandings as breath or pneuma, and draws into focus the isomorphism that runs from the dualism of the spiritual and material to the abstract division of linguistic meaning from its matter. ⁴ In her comparison of the Hebrew conception of the embodied soul with the Greek view of psyche separable from soma, Rose slips from the soul to speech, equating the unity of body and soul with that of sign and signification:

The resurrection of the dead in 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 of an eternity without body not bliss but unimaginable torture. (1996: 66, emphasis in original)

For the Spirit of Hegel, this separation from the material has meant a melancholy non-existence, its realisation forever postponed and put outside this world. For the individual spirit, the denial of embodiment, the scission of speech from life, is no less a saddening experience. But just as Mourning Becomes the Law redresses the sad fate of collective Spirit, Love’s Work takes aim at the individual soul in – not within – its physical existence, including the acts of language in which it physically stakes itself in the world. Masquerading as memoir, Love’s Work offers a phenomenology of the writer's life, from her first confrontations with the sociality of selfhood through the relations of intellectual, romantic and spiritual existence as they are worked over in the written practice of recollection.

The earliest chronological sequence in Love’s Work is a reflection on language. Rose recounts her childhood experience of dyslexia as an initiation into the general problems of mediation. The fraught relation to language is developed as a metonym for the uncertainty of other social relations, such as those between the child and her parents, from whom some content is supposed to be passed on, though its form frustrates this inheritance. Dyslexia reveals the unnaturalness of language, that its content is not assured and that its successful transmission must be worked for and worked over. The awareness of mediation between self and others brings with it the stirrings of consciousness concerning the relation one holds with oneself: ‘Reading was never just reading: it became the repository of my inner self-relation: the discovery, simultaneous with the suddenly sculpted and composed words, of distance from and deviousness towards myself as well as others’ (Rose, 1995: 40). To read is not to apprehend some content stored in the text and addressed to the reader, but to navigate the relation between form and content, recognising it as a relation belonging as much to the text as to the reader themselves. We read texts, we read others, we read ourselves: in each case neither the form of the relation nor the access to meaning can be presupposed. Through this experience of the duplicity of words, the metonymic role of language as relation is expanded, turning reading into the representative act of interpretation that unites form and content in the concrete self-knowledge of relation.

As Rose's narrative develops from this first encounter with the relationality of language and progresses into the achieved relations of maturity, a new name is given to this work of reading, of receiving uncertainly from others: love. To love is to successfully read the relations that tie oneself to others not as formal relations that sit apart from their participants, like the marriage pact that denies the life of the couple except in their abstract roles of husband and wife, but as concrete relations that are as malleable, fungible as they are absolute: ‘To grow in love-ability is to accept the boundaries of oneself and others, while remaining vulnerable, woundable, around the bounds. Acknowledgement of conditionality is the only unconditionality of human love’ (Rose, 1995: 105). As the surmounting of relationality in the unified non-identity of its members, this love is a poetic name for the absolute that is described philosophically in Rose's other works. It is an absolute because it overcomes relation, but it is not an absolute presupposed or pregiven. The absolute is not the annihilation of differences in a unified one, but the discovery of oneself in another, and hence the loss of oneself in the unity found but not guaranteed. There is no love except what is expressed in and by the lovers, in all the contingency of their union, which is transformed into necessity for as long as they can successfully navigate the relations to each other and to themselves.

That this love must, in human terms, come to an end is one source of life's tragedy, but it is also essential to the comedic openness of that life. Though written in the shadow of death, Love’s Work gives poetic expression to the work of mourning against the unhappy consciousness that takes the lack of permanence as a mark against the dramas of human life:

No human being possesses sureness of self: this can only mean being bounded and unbounded, selved and unselved, ‘sure’ only of this untiring exercise. Then, this sureness of self, which is ready to be unsure, makes the laughter at the mismatch between aim and achievement comic, not cynical; holy, not demonic. (Rose, 1995: 134–5)

Though the lovers may suffer from the passing on of their other half, the bond of love is not destroyed but perfected in these trials. As a figure of the absolute, Rose's love must be understood speculatively, as expressing the unity of the lovers even as it confronts their non-identity, and without letting life's finitude be abstracted as transience or vanity of vanities. Recalling the terms set out in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, the statement ‘life is finite’, when understood dialectically, means the abstraction of finitude as the essence of life, which overwhelms and abolishes it. Read speculatively, the phrase ‘life is finite’ is an exposition of two concepts, ideally united but held apart in practice (see Hegel, 2018: 37–9). Or, in a variation on Hegel’s (2018: 29) own poetic formula: the absolute is the dance that never ends, though the dancers come and go, in which no one is not lovesick.

The path to Hegel's absolute is one of despair, of the repeated humiliation of natural consciousness in its misapprehension of its self-relation as the relation to an external object. But the labour of overcoming these misconceptions is not entirely painful, as it so often brings about the reunion of Spirit's dirempted being from among the alienated figures that make it up. The reading of oneself and others is no less a work of recognition, expressed in Love’s Work as a poetic labour against the formalisms of the literary text: ‘I say “works” not “texts:” the former implying the labour of the concept inseparable from its formal characteristics as opposed to the latter with its connotations of signifiers, the symbolic and semiotics’ (Rose, 1996: 7–8). This distinction between work and text puts a twist on the terms defined by Roland Barthes in a structuralist frame. A partisan of the text, Barthes (1977: 160–1) identifies in the work a line of filiation, attaching it to a proper name or a paternal authority who begets its meaning – whereas Rose conceives the work as a navigation of possible lines of filiation, a choice of spiritual fathers whose inheritance is not assured. ⁵ For Barthes (1977), ‘the work is a fragment of substance’ (156) denoting some original and immediate fullness of meaning, though this may be read askew for its Hegelian valence: the substance of the work is not motionless pleroma but the divisible and malleable matter that is worked upon, that works upon itself, as subject (see Hegel, 2018: 12–13).

Rose's speculative philosophy of love, and hence of the basic situation of community, locates the work of love in the fragile middle between choosing and being chosen, in the attitude of amor fati that transforms tragic destiny into the unforced but not unwilled errors of comedy. ‘Earthly, human sadness is the divine comedy—the ineluctable discrepancy between our worthy intentions and the ever-surprising outcome of our actions. This comic condition is euporia: the always missing, yet prodigiously imaginable, easy way’ (Rose, 1995: 124–5; see Lloyd, 2008: 61). Rowan Williams has called the love of Rose's final works a kind of grace, ‘a gift and love not ours’ (2015: 36), though this reinstates the separation of ourselves from our fate that marks the tragic, rather than comedic, disposition. Expressed in the terms of an individual life rather than those of social totality, the speculative meaning of Love’s Work is of a piece with the critical Marxist project announced in Hegel Contra Sociology, which states severely what the later work exposits poetically. The work of love is the work of making intelligible our forms of misrecognition and of thereby discovering ourselves and one another united in difference, contingency and conditionality. This work cannot be guaranteed in advance, meaning that its results cannot be given in prejudged forms, so it requires both a speculative poetics to give it expression in a fitting style and a speculative reading that will not mistake this style for empty form. ⁶ The absolute must be thought, which means it must find adequate expression, and this love must be ours, for there is nothing and no one else to which it can belong.