Divine comedy in the work of Gillian Rose

Abstract

This article reconstructs Gillian Rose's idea of ‘divine comedy’, from its first articulation in Hegel Contra Sociology (2009) to the development of the idea in later works; most importantly, Love’s Work (1995). This analysis demonstrates that Rose implicitly shifted away from her earlier, pessimistic, Hegelian account of the end of art and her insistence on the ‘severe style’. Divine comedy, it is argued, may satisfy the requirements that Rose articulates for speculative thought, by traversing the constitutive dichotomies of modern life – for example, between universal and particular, or between law and love – in light of individual experience. By reading Love’s Work as an exemplary modern divine comedy, this article argues for the ongoing viability of the ‘ideal style’, which Rose had previously dismissed. This, in turn, suggests a novel reading of Rose's oeuvre and affirms the possibility of a speculative poetics.

Introduction

[W]hat an infinite host of images, actions, situations, etc. are epitomized in the representation of God, or of love, etc.’ (Hegel, 2010: 15)

[B]ut the main point was that Socrates was trying to prove to them that authors should be able to write both comedy and tragedy: the skilful tragic dramatist should also be a comic poet. (Plato, 1997: 505)

Love’s Work is Gillian Rose's philosophical autobiography, and in it she gestures towards a theory of divine comedy. Although Dante's poem is part of her inspiration, for Rose, divine comedy is a broader genre that reconciles between universal and particular, and between tragedy and comedy. Divine comedy, in Rose's sense, grasps the truth of a finite life universally, by presenting and re-cognizing the infinitising or divine masks with which finite beings encounter themselves and their others.

Rose's notion of divine comedy is cryptic, as is Love’s Work as a whole. Indeed, Howard Caygill recalled in the preface to Rose's posthumously published final work, Paradiso, that ‘Rose relished the irony that it was Love’s Work – her most difficult and esoteric act of indirect communication – that gave her popular success’ (Caygill, 2015: 8). This recollection fits with Rose's own description in Paradiso of Love’s Work:

Love's Work is a profoundly Kierkegaardian work: it allows one to pass unnoticed. It deploys sensual, intellectual and literary eros, companions of pain, passion and plain curiosity, in order to pass beyond the preoccupation with endless loss to the silence of grace. (Rose, 2015: 19)

This article argues that the idea of divine comedy is the key to illuminating the mysteries of Love’s Work. Although intimations of Rose's theory of divine comedy can be found in her earlier works, Love’s Work contains her decisive statement on the idea; one which both develops and is at odds with some of her earlier remarks on art and poetry.

Indeed, I argue that the concept of divine comedy is one of Rose's distinct philosophical and aesthetic innovations, born of her heterodox reading of Hegelian philosophy. After all, when introducing the idea, she draws on Hegel's famous treatment of the antinomy between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ in the Science of Logic (Hegel, 2010: ch. 3). At the same time, it will be argued that she breaks with the ‘severe style’ of her previous work on Hegel, in favour of the ‘ideal style’, which seeks a unity between beauty and truth; poetry and philosophy. In addition, Rose's idea of divine comedy speaks to her lifelong interests in the Jewish and Christian traditions and her exploration of desire and love, erotic and agapeic.

Perhaps most importantly, divine comedy eschews the romantic preoccupation with the individual that Rose suggests is characteristic of art in the modern era. It also rejects the purely universal language of Enlightenment rationalism, which conceals un-thought particularity. Instead, divine comedy attempts a literary reconciliation between the two, in full acknowledgement of their necessary diremption within the actuality of modern life. Thus, as a genre, divine comedy stages the re-cognition of the abstractions of law and social life as finite, human relations while at the same time elevating individual experience to universal truth – not by asserting some new dogmatic certainty or representing social actuality in a beautifying way, but by facing the aporetic and ironic nature of our attempt to know ourselves and the world. This is why, as I will argue, Rosean divine comedy should be understood as a Platonic genre.

Perhaps most importantly, divine comedy proceeds through the tripartite motions of katabasis, nesteia and Kalligeneia, or, the journey down, the period of fasting and the beautiful rebirth, to borrow from the classical Greek tradition, movements that are reproduced in the tripartite structure of Dante's divine comedy, naturally, informed by medieval Christian eschatology. ¹ This is to say, divine comedy faces the void of death, mourns and re-emerges with determinate insight and a new lightness of being.

Rose is aware, of course, of the repetition these conceptual movements in classical, medieval and modern philosophy and poetry. Indeed, it is a central characteristic of her idea of divine comedy that it must traverse historical forms of representation while also unfolding immanently within the linguistic, moral and political configuration of its time. Certainly, this insight into the recurrence of the aesthetic, logical structures across broad historic eras gives us a clue as to the ambitious reach of Rose's idea of divine comedy. Although always expressed from within a historically determinate culture, divine comedy points beyond its finite context, toward a truth that overarches history and culture. Given this, Rose's idea of divine comedy should be understood in light of her concern for philosophical style, a concern she shared with and developed through her engagement with Adorno (Rose, 1978).

Rose's idea of divine comedy also bears a close relation to her account of the ‘speculative proposition’ (2009: 52). The latter attempts to express dialectically contradictory truths absolutely – in light of the simultaneous identity and non-identity of their terms – in the terse logical prose of speculative philosophy. The former also attempts to re-cognize opposed representations in order to express a contradictory absolute truth, but beautifully as well as logically.

At any rate, these suggestions are sufficient to intimate the stakes involved in Rose's idea of divine comedy. This article will first discuss the prefigurations of divine comedy in Rose's earlier work. Then, it will outline her articulation of speculative philosophy in order to elaborate the conceptual criteria required for a divine comedy. Subsequently, the article will discuss the idea of divine comedy in Rose's late work, tracing the development of her idea in light of her growing concern with aesthetics. Finally, in conclusion, I will draw on the idea of divine comedy to propose a novel interpretation of Rose's last three books, Love’s Work (1995), Mourning Becomes the Law (1996) and Paradiso (2015), the last of which remained incomplete at the time of her death on 9 December 1995.

The severe and the ideal style

In Love’s Work, to introduce the idea of divine comedy, Rose refers to a part of the story of King Arthur. In her summary, King Arthur dreamed of becoming a just king to Guinevere, and of creating a ‘knowable and reliable law, which would serve the people and their customs as they were’ (Rose, 1995: 122). This law – the law of the round table – would unite king and knights as equals, producing a universal code demanding unconditional fealty.

Lancelot, by contrast, hoped that the new realm would be perfectly just, a desire which Guinevere and the other knights saw as evidence that Lancelot cared ‘more for ideals than for others’. Nevertheless, Guinevere and Lancelot's comrades became convinced of his humanity – and accepted him among the knights of the round table – when he wept, having slain another knight during a jousting tournament (Rose, 1995: 122).

In highlighting these elements of the story, Rose implicitly refers to the contradiction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, a conceptual antinomy that she thematised extensively in Hegel Contra Sociology (Rose, 2009) and that occupies a central place in Hegel's philosophy, and in the German Idealist tradition generally. Although it is unnecessary to reproduce Hegel's strictly logical conceptual exposition, in sum, the ought (sollen) does not exist as a beyond, severed from what is, as a postulate of faith or transcendental reason. Rather, for Hegel, the ought is constituted by what is, as its limit and purpose. Reciprocally, what ought to be constitutes what is.

Insofar as the ought is represented transcendentally – as in Kantian philosophy – it masks its relation with what is. This risks irrationalism and ultimately violence, insofar as the finite, this-worldly content of the ought is masked or, in Rose's words, misrepresented infinitely. By the same token, as the non-being of what is, the ought is the self-movement of what is beyond its finitude. And this very movement constitutes what is, which is to say, the movement of what is self-negates and self-posits, by way of what it ought to be.

In sum, the is and the ought are mutually constitutive, and this relation can only be thought as a motion. Thus, Hegel stages the alternation between is and ought, forcing us to re-cognize these apparently dichotomous terms as forming a circle. This gives rise to the alternation between finitude and infinity which, known rationally, is re-cognized as the true infinite, which ultimately underpins the standpoint of speculative philosophy (Hegel, 2010: 149–53).

I will return to Rose's rendition of the Arthurian legend shortly. For now, however, the reference to the is-ought antinomy returns us to Hegel Contra Sociology (Rose, 2009). In that book, Rose argues that Hegelian philosophy overcomes dichotomous – namely, Kantian and Fichtean – thinking by way of the speculative proposition, a mode of philosophical presentation that can sustain the truth of a proposition and the truth of its negation simultaneously. As she writes:

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. This reading implies an identity different from the merely formal one of the ordinary proposition. This different kind of identity cannot be pre-judged, that is, it cannot be justified in a transcendental sense, and it cannot be stated in a proposition of the kind to be eschewed. This different kind of identity must be understood as a result to be achieved. (Rose, 2009: 52)

In Hegel Contra Sociology, Rose (2009) criticises the broad sociological tradition and, ultimately, Marxism, which she regards as a culture that had yet to re-cognize itself and its relation to society (ch. 7). And she argues that the solution is speculative philosophy, which knows the absolute by way of traversing these oppositions, and coming to be at home in its negativity.

As is apparent in her discussion of the speculative proposition, Rose is concerned with the question of form and is seeking a form of expression – a style – capable of sustaining identity in difference. In the same work, she proposes that this can only be accomplished in the ‘severe style’, a mode of presentation suggested by Hegel in his Aesthetics. According to Rose, the severe style ‘is concerned to give a true representation of its object and makes little concession to the spectator’; it ‘is designed solely to do justice to the integrity of the object’ (2009: 54–5).

Love’s Work, however, is different. Although exhibiting the same philosophical fidelity to its object, it by no means constricts itself to a logically rigorous, true exposition of its object. The object of Love’s Work – Gillian Rose's life and philosophy – is, after all, one that exceeds logic alone. Rather, it is the philosophical autobiography of someone coming to terms with illness and death. The prose of Love’s Work frequently becomes lyric, as Rose moves seamlessly between autobiography, poetry and philosophy.

Indeed, Love’s Work more closely resembles a different style explicated in Hegel Contra Sociology, namely, the ‘ideal style’ (Rose, 2009: 152). As Rose recounts, the ideal style exhibits ‘a liveliness of all points, forms, turns of phrase, movements, limbs’, with the result that ‘in it there is nothing meaningless or inexpressive; everything is active and effective, and it displays the stir and beating pulse of the free life itself’ (152–3).

Rose argues that the ideal style is no longer a possibility in modernity, in her analysis; it is nevertheless the only style capable of the ‘complete exposition’ of the topic, for the configuration is ‘wholly determinate, distinct, living and actual’. When reading a work composed in the ideal style, the ‘spectator participates fully in this concrete life which he has ‘completely before him’, and ‘becomes a witness’. In this sense, in the ideal style, substance becomes subject and, reciprocally, subject becomes substance (Rose, 2009: 153–4).

The ideal style is thus simultaneously poetic and philosophical. As Rose argues in Hegel Contra Sociology, poetry was once capable of this, prior to the subjectivism and fragmentation of romanticism:

Poetry grasps opposites in their living unity, and hence presents the indwelling reason events which are meaningful. It has an affinity with speculative thinking. In poetry, everything is related to the united whole, concretely and freely in an ‘organic articulation’. But the independent parts may become independent of the totality, and, to this extent, poetry no longer presents a classic unity, but becomes increasingly romantic. (Rose, 2009: 154–5)

In short, with the modern dominance of romanticism – a categorization Rose extends far beyond the poetic and artistic movements commonly associated with the term – art has become ‘pleasing’. Consequently, in distinction with the severe and ideal styles, the pleasing style produces its affect from without. It is formalistic and is focused on configuration of elements only; and, insofar as this is the case, it does not help us re-cognize the social relations, but only draws attention to the contingent characteristics of the author (Rose, 2009: 154).

This resume of Rose's account of style in Hegel Contra Sociology draws attention to an implicit contradiction between her earlier and later writing. Love’s Work is patently not written in the ‘severe style’. But if it is read as an exemplar of the ‘pleasing’, romantic style, then it must be regarded as a failure, and inferior to Rose's philosophy. On the other hand, if, as suggested, we read Love’s Work as composed in the ideal style, then this implies the ongoing possibility for an art that overcomes the dichotomies between subject and substance, concept and intuition and representation and re-cognition. That is, if we read Love’s Work as composed in the ideal style, the necessary conclusion affirms the possibility of a speculative philosophical poetics.

I will return to this problem and its significance for divine comedy shortly, in the context of a discussion of Rose's understanding of revealed religion, Enlightenment and modernity. To do this, however, it is first necessary to clarify what Rose means by speculative philosophy.

The death of art and the birth of speculative philosophy

Was the Science of Logic – a book devoid of poetry if ever there was one – composed in the ideal style? If not, this implies that it was inferior to its self-appointed task. Or if it was written in the ideal style, then how do we account for its lack of poetry? Perhaps poetry is superfluous to ‘the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and of a finite spirit’, to quote Hegel's (2010: 29) description of his work. Or perhaps, as Nietzsche famously suggested, philosophers ‘involuntarily write an autobiography of their own unconscious impulses . . . at the root of what comprises [them as] an individual’ (Nietzsche, 2003: §6). If we accept this hypothesis and apply it to the Science of Logic, it would seem to follow that Hegel's soul was god-like and poetic in inverse proportion.

One could imagine Hegel responding to dourly to such a suggestion. After all, he ruled out any return to a classical unity of beauty and truth, arguing that such a configuration can only occur within what he terms the ‘religion of art’, namely, Greek religion. Now, as he argued, such a unity is only accessible to us as a ‘veiled remembrance of this actuality’, and that our enjoyment of classical art cannot re-ensoul its ‘dead elements’, but only ‘represent them as they were within themselves’ (Hegel, 1998: §. 753). Consequently, for Hegel, following the breakdown of Classical Greek culture – contemporary with the rise of the ‘legal spirit’ of Rome – poetry and art ceased to play their culturally and politically formative role. Rome and Christendom heralded the birth of prosaic culture.

In Hegel Contra Sociology, Rose accepts and defends Hegel's historical reading of culture. As she argues, in contrast with Rome, in the Classical Greek configuration of law and culture, social institutions were not alienated from the citizens that created them (Rose, 2009: 130). Of course, by this, Rose does not mean to imply that Classical Greece was a society of universal justice. Greek freedom was the freedom of some, not all. Nevertheless, the partial yet concrete freedom of the Greek polis obviated any need to represent substantial ethical life – the life of the community – as an image divorced from actuality.

So, unlike art from the Roman age onward, Greek art was not representative. Rather, it presented reality honestly, in its heroic, tragic and comic dimensions. This was also possible because social institutions were immediately aesthetic and religious. As Rose points out, ‘the name “Athena” means immediately both the polis and the God’ (2009: 120–1). Poets, after all, invented the Greek religion. And this is not to imply any cynicism on their part. During the festivals of the mystery religions, as much as in Greek institutions, the gods written by poets appeared.

With Rome and the rise of Christianity, citizenship and law became universal, a configuration unthinkable to Classical Greece. In Rose's account, this was in part because Roman private property law abstracted and demarcated ownership from custom and other social relations, like the family. The formal freedom of private property made possible a new, more universal and more abstract conception of freedom. As Rose writes, quoting Hegel:

The result was not a ‘political religion’ as in Greece, but a ‘religion of the state’, a religion that served the particular end of rulers. The state and religion are identical, but determined differently from Greece. The Roman religion is ‘a sovereignty of the world’, but it embraces the world ‘in an external way’. It does not see the world as divine and the people as substantially free. (2009: 121)

This enabled philosophical breakthroughs. Unlike Aristotle, for example, Augustine was able to posit the natural equality of all souls (Compare Aristotle (1992: ch. I, §§iii–v) and Saint Augustine (2003: 874)). Suffice to say, however, the Roman universalisation of citizenship and law did not alleviate the suffering of slaves, ameliorate the discontent of plebians or compensate for the disempowerment of patricians, during the long disintegration of republican institutions.

Rather, in Hegel's and Rose's account, alienation from ethical life became universal under a cultural and legal configuration predicated on universal property law. The antagonism between harsh particular experience and the universal self-representation of this culture stood in stark contrast to the comparative self-transparency of Greece. As a consequence, in the Roman era, the next world became the bearer of the unfulfilled hopes of this world. As Rose explained, this conditioned Christian culture and religion:

The Christian religion inherits the ‘infinite value’ of personality from the Romans. It is a legal value on the one hand, but, on the other, a principle of ‘inwardness and subjectivity’, ‘soulless personality’, which is given a soul by the aspiration of Christianity. Yet this soul is acquired by a conscious and vigorous rejection of the corrupt institution of Rome. Hence it is even more difficult to realize the aspiration, the unity of God and the world. The unity represented by Christ's life is divorced from both law and custom. As a result both the meaning (representation) of Christ and the real existence of Christianity changed. (2009: 122)

For Rose – again, following Hegel – this necessitated an immediately religious art predicated on the diremption of beauty and truth. A true presentation of the actuality of Roman life could not be beautiful or divine. Instead, the estranged universality of Rome could only be made divine as a beautiful re-presentation.

During the medieval period, Rose (2009: 124–5) argues, the universal divine law of Christian dogma concealed the violent, irrational particularity of the feudal aristocracy. This gave rise to the Enlightenment, with its demand for a straightforward, prosaic and rational law. This both revolutionized feudal Europe and emancipated the individual subject, giving rise to a new configuration between universal and particular, or between the law of the heart and the way of the world, to borrow Hegel's turn of phrase. This was the birth of modernity. As Rose writes:

In the modern period the contingency of finitude (feudal law) has turned into the prosaic organization of life (formal, bourgeois law). Subjectivity rejects the finite in this ‘substantial order and the prose of actuality’, the modern legal state based on private property relations. Art asserts ‘the infinite rights of the heart’ against this world. It represents individuals with purely subjective aims, modern knights of love, a new serious chivalry which rejects family, civil society, law, and the state. This art reproduces the society rejected, the ‘subjectivity’ of individuals excluded by a legal state who are ultimately corrected by the law of a prosaic world. (2009: 154)

As a consequence, in a post-revolutionary bourgeois society, Rose argues, following Hegel, art has, by necessity, ‘fallen into such a contradiction between meaning and configuration, between concept and intuition, that it is no longer art in the second sense of a relation, a partial lack of unity, between them’ (2009: 130). Thus, art degenerated into a ‘pleasing’ and ‘subjective’ imitation of present actuality. As a result, art becomes

[the] sheer outpouring of this empty ego, as the virtuosity of an artistic life. This life is totally irresponsible to others, and takes an ironical attitude towards those who do not realize their power as infinite ego but rest content with the prosaic world. This solipsistic vanity is the correlate of Fichte's yearning for God. Its infinite freedom is illusory for it cannot act in the world and remains locked up in a ‘morbid beautiful soul’. (Rose, 2009: 155)

In short, art is dead, poetry included. Obviously, the claim here is not that no one makes art or writes poetry anymore. Rather, Rose's very orthodox Hegelian claim is that art no longer has a culturally or politically formative role; it neither presents ethical life honestly (as in Greece), nor can it help us re-cognize ourselves universally within a false social, legal and cultural configuration (as in speculative philosophy). As Rose writes, ‘art in bourgeois society, whether it represents love, romantic adventures or divine comedy, denies the present and is an absolute, impotent longing (Sehnsucht) for the past or the future’ (2009: 130).

If this is true, then it follows – as Hegel believed – that absolute ethical life can only be thought, and, for that matter, only in German (Hegel, 2010: 32). If this is true, then divine comedy as Rose understands it in Love’s Work can only be a beautification of a legal and cultural configuration that is violent and irrational. The poets who aspire to the unity of reason and intuition would be better off embracing prosaic socialist realism.

Hegel and Nietzsche: a tale of three speculative philosophers

There is a way out of this bind that abandons neither the speculative standpoint nor the classical aspiration to unite reason and intuition. It can be found in Rose's passing comments on ‘symbolic art’ and in her heterodox articulation of the speculative standpoint.

In Hegel Contra Sociology – where, in keeping with the severe style, Rose's aesthetic theory is austere – she proposes that ‘symbolic art’, which, according to Hegel's designation, includes fable, parable, riddle, allegory and didacticism, may be capable of producing politically and culturally formative art within modernity. She is clear that this excludes the possibility of a return to the classical ideal; rather, Rose proposes that symbolic art involve objective irony, in the severe style:

The case for irony as a severe style is that it is not possible to return to the classical ideal, to harmony between meaning and configuration, in a society with a long history of subjectivity and re-presentation. But it might be possible to make substance, the topic, come back into view again if the assimilation of configuration to prosaic meaning, the pseudo-integrity of pleasing art, could be broken by the issue of a form of art which rests on a divorce, ‘an intended severance’, between meaning and configuration. This severance is not romantic and not pleasing, but severe. It emphasises that nature (prevalent configuration) does not coincide with the absolute and that the prevalent idea of the absolute is itself deficient, that ‘what is taken as content is no longer the absolute itself but only some determinate and restricted meaning’. (2009: 156)

Rose's tight-lipped concession of the viability of a symbolic, non-pleasing, non-romantic, severe form of art indicates a gap in her pessimism, or perhaps an excess that bursts beyond it. This, I argue, presages a shift in her aesthetic theory that would eventually result in The Broken Middle (Rose, 1992) and Love’s Work (Rose, 1995). For the argument at hand, is interesting to note that this marks a place where Rose begins to go beyond Hegel, naturally, on the basis of Hegel himself.

Throughout her career, Rose claimed to philosophise in Hegel's manner, from the speculative standpoint, which attempts to know the absolute. But this raises a further question: what constitutes speculative philosophy, if not the form and content of Hegel's philosophy? In the essay ‘From Speculative to Dialectical Thinking – Hegel and Adorno’, Rose (1993) gives an answer, arguing that Nietzsche must be understood as a speculative philosopher. In making her seemingly outrageous case, Rose both outlines the conceptual determinants of speculative thought, and throws open the doors of speculative philosophy, conceptually and stylistically.

Rose's argument rests on five conceptual commonalities she observes between Nietzsche and Hegel. First, both recognized that what Hegel calls ethical life and what Nietzsche calls the custom of morality – broadly, the totality of society, including its morality, law and self-representation – gives rise to the Kantian categorical imperative. This concedes that the categorical imperative is not an a priori judgement of pure reason, but is rather the result of the determinate historical and linguistic conditions of Enlightenment rationalism. In this manner, Rose historicises the dominant form of representation of bourgeois society, which she elsewhere refers to as the ‘unrevealed religion’ of Enlightenment.

Second, Rose argues that both Hegel and Nietzsche regarded morality as a question of Bildung, which is to say, both ‘expound or “narrate” … the culture of history and the history of culturing’ (1993: 55). Their account of the conceptual genesis of morality allows us to understand the apparently unconditioned oppositions within it – for example, Hegel's ‘law of the heart’ versus ‘the way of the world’, or Nietzsche's opposition between slave and noble morality. This supplies philosophy with a standpoint above morality that does not abolish it, but, rather, renders morality self-reflexive as regards its cultural genesis. As Rose argues in Mourning Becomes the Law, this also allows us to recall the classical insight that violence and power are prior to morality: ‘to know the violence at the heart of the human spirit gives death back its determination and its eternity’ (1996: 141).

Third, both Nietzsche and Hegel, in Rose's account, develop a modality of exposition – phenomenology, for Hegel, genealogy for Nietzsche – which depends on the legal language within which their contemporary discourse and experience were couched. This is to say, both expound philosophy immanently from within the politico-linguistic realities of their present, while also exceeding it. This complements the historicism implied by points one and two by allowing philosophy to grasp the present in a systematically critical fashion, thereby supplying a vantage point beyond what Hegel would call representative thought, and what Nietzsche would call the philosophy of the last men.

Fourth, for Rose, both Nietzsche and Hegel recognize that the legalism of morality is both enabling and constricting: it empowers and renders impotent; it politicises and depoliticises. Thus, both Hegel and Nietzsche establish a vantage point above law that is nevertheless politically committed. Fifth – and most importantly – Rose argues that for both Nietzsche and Hegel, the attempt to know is ironic. For Rose, this may be observed in Nietzsche's ‘conscience of method’ and Hegel's ‘absolute method’. These are both ‘equally cancelling phrases’, as she explains, ‘for an “immoralist” could have no conscience, and no “method” could be absolute’ (Rose, 1993: 55–6). This lends a circularity to the philosophies of both insofar as, for Hegel, absolute method is a result that can only be grasped in the exposition of the whole, and, for Nietzsche, the philosopher walks a tightrope between man and superman, the tightrope of the eternal return. ²

For now, rather, two important points follow from the above. Firstly, by suggesting that the conceptual affinities between Hegel and Nietzsche noted above are constitutive of the speculative standpoint, Rose opens space for speculative philosophy beyond (and, implicitly, before) Hegel. Among other things, this opens a welcome route away from Hegel, whose totalising philosophical aesthetic has often goaded subsequent philosophers into disagreement – against which there is always a Hegelian reply – or seduced them into simply repeating his philosophy over and over, albeit in the academic style of the day. In short, one can think speculatively with or without Hegel.

Secondly, by suggesting that Hegel and Nietzsche both knew (and failed to know) the same object, she directs our attention through their texts beyond the text, and towards that secret, third thing – namely, the absolute – which we can only know partially, and therefore fallibly. What matters most, therefore, is not the specific style or conceptual content of a given philosophy, but whether it ably re-cognizes the misrepresentation of reason, morality, law, culture and history endemic to its time and place, in order to cultivate re-cognition and concretely universal – and therefore aporetic – knowledge of the absolute beyond representation. It is indeed as Dionysius the Areopagite suggested:

all who are wise in Divine matters, and are interpreters of the mystical revelations, set apart in purity in and the Holy of Holies from the uninitiated and unpurified, and prefer incongruous symbols for holy things, so that Divine things may not be easily accessible to the unworthy, nor may those who earnestly contemplate the Divine symbols dwell upon the forms themselves as the final truth. (quoted in Alighieri, 2003: 22)

Pre-speculative divine comedy

As we have seen, Rose outlines five determinants of speculative philosophy: it historicises abstract reason, it regards morality as a matter of historic cultivation, it re-cognizes its present immanently, in light of its own politico-linguistic representations and it establishes a vantage point beyond the present configuration of law without becoming apolitical. And finally, because it knows that its attempt to know must fail, speculative philosophy is ironic. Or, in a more condensed form, having returned from history and estrangement, and traversed the ethical life of its day, speculative knowing resides in the absolute present: it speaks to all times and places, and because it knows that it does so insufficiently, it fosters mourning for the passing of finite being, re-cognition of the infinite masks that finite beings wear, and, ultimately, new life: katabasis, nesteia and kalligeneia; inferno, purgatorio and paradiso; being, essence and concept.

But what has this got to do with Rose's idea of divine comedy? To explain this, we must return to the Arthurian legend. As Rose recounts the tale, Lancelot has an affair with Guinevere, and King Arthur finds out. It is far from an ideal situation. Arthur finds himself confronted with three tragic alternatives, the first two of which Rose presents in Love's Work. ³ Arthur could pretend not to know, and to keep the affair secret. This, however, would be to elevate the particular above the universal, destroying the authority of the round table which brought the knights and king together as equals under one law. Alternately, Arthur could choose to uphold the law, requiring him to banish Lancelot and condemn Guinevere to death.

So, Arthur is confronted with a tragic dilemma: he must choose between human law, which is fallible and particular, and ideal law, which is perfect. And the problem is a genuinely dialectical one. Arthur, for all his humanity, established a law with divine right. Divine right must be followed, and it refuses to make an exception, lest it give way to human capriciousness. Lancelot represents the antinomic pole. For all his idealism, Lancelot falls prey to the most human and least violent of usurpations of law, namely, desire. In short, Arthur establishes ‘ought’ over what ‘is’, whereas Lancelot falls short of the ought, and finds himself within what is. It is a tragic situation.

The dichotomy is between law and love, or, as Rose (1996) rendered these opposites in the first essay of Mourning Becomes the Law, Athens and Jerusalem. Arthur chose Athens. Lancelot responded by saving Guinevere and waging war against Arthur; he chose Jerusalem. Although the latter won this conflict, he lost Lancelot and their shared vision of Camelot. Nothing was as it ought to have been. As Rose explains,

whatever King Arthur chooses, whether to overlook the betrayal or to prosecute the crime, the choice is not the issue. For, one way or the other, the King must now be sad. Betrayed or avenged, sadness is the condition of the King. Whether action is taken in the spirit of the law, or whether its requirements are ignored, the law will rebound against his human weakness so as to disqualify itself. Either its authority will be eroded by the deliberate oversight of the King, or, if executed, it will be overthrown by Lancelot's revenge. (1995: 123)

As Rose continues to explain, ‘this medieval tale contains Merlin's wisdom about the rule of reason’ (1995: 123). When a law is decreed by a sovereign people, without coercion, it transcends the humanity of those who have decreed it. Because their humanity is transcended, it is obliterated. And with the obliteration of the sovereign people who decreed the law, the law is also obliterated. ‘Sadness is the condition of the King’, Rose writes, ‘for he has to experience his power and his vulnerability, his love and his violence, within and without the law’ (1995: 123).

This condition – the sadness of the broken middle – is what gives birth to philosophy, which attempts to find a path between the two ineluctable and equally necessary rights:

If metaphysics is the aporia, the perception of the difficulty of the law, the difficult way, then ethics is the development of it, the diaporia, being at a loss yet exploring various routes, different ways towards the good enough justice, which recognizes the intrinsic and the contingent limitations in its exercise. (Rose, 1995: 124–5)

Divine comedy also exists in this broken middle, and it arises out of the conflict of divine powers – in this case, universal and particular – entailed by human life. ‘Earthly, human sadness is the divine comedy’, Rose writes, ‘the ineluctable discrepancy between our worthy intentions and the ever-surprising outcome of our actions. This comic condition is euphoria: the always missing, yet prodigiously imaginable, easy way’ (2009: 135).

From what has already been said, however, it follows that divine comedy must change in accordance with the divine powers whose failures give rise to it. This is the key to a speculative understanding of divine comedy, modern and pre-modern. To return to Rose's historical account in Hegel Contra Sociology, after the breakdown of Classical Greek culture, there are broadly three forms of this prodigiously imaginable, easy way: revealed religion, Enlightenment rationalism and postmodern relativism.

These exist in aesthetic and philosophical variants; their specific configuration depends on the configuration of the society and era that gives birth to them (Rose, 1995: 135). In medieval society, as Rose explains, the idea of universality – the unity of society – is not an existing reality, but a concept imposed upon reality, whose abstractness subsumes nature and intuition underneath the crude practical reason of power. Here, the universal can only be misrepresented by art, and it can have no presence in the community or work of existing people: it must be an infinite beyond. Philosophically, this is Saint Augustine. Aesthetically, it is Dante. In this configuration,

[d]ivine comedy represents an absolute beyond which annihilates individual consciousness, in contrast to the epic which presents a present in which individuals live. Divine comedy represents a humanity which has absolute certainty only in its negation, whose acts are immediately destroyed. The spectator of a divine comedy can only burst into tears. As a witness he is powerless, because the human character is represented as eternally past and unchangeable. (Rose, 1995: 80)

In the final canto of Paradiso, Dante's vision and language necessarily fail him. Worse, he must endure the loss of Beatrice again, as she returns to the divine essence while Saint Bernard takes her place as Dante's guide (Alighieri, 1964: Canto XXXIII).

Bourgeois society, however, transforms the configuration of ethical life, in part by freeing the abstract subject from the domination of superstition. Thus, it gives rise to Enlightenment rationalism, which ‘is presented as the autonomous adversary of “revealed religion,” and which insists ultimately on the free exercise of individual reason. ‘If Enlightenment is grounded in the free use of reason’, Rose writes, ‘then reason is grounded in enlightened self-interest: in what a people may without coercion decree for itself’ (1995: 135).

However, this also results in a conflict between divine law (now represented as reason) and humanity, as particularities are once again subsumed under the abstractly universal social, legal and cultural configuration of modernity. As Rose describes it,

grounded in an overweening claim to absolute and universal authority, without awareness of history, language or locality, enlightened reason sweeps all particularity and peculiarity from its path. The original plea in Kant for submission of conflicting views for public adjudication has been turned into the univocal imposition of a standard, whose very formal impartiality masks its origin in a partial interest. (1995: 137)

With modernity, there is, however, a difference. By positing the possibility of reconciliation between universal and particular, modernity makes it possible to think what Rose calls, after Hegel, absolute ethical life. This is because Enlightenment rationalism becomes, in contrast to revealed religion, the unrevealed religion of modernity.

The unrevealed religion, as she argues, ‘troubles us more than any revealed religion’ because, without a ritual, dogma, or credo, it nevertheless compels us to protest against religion, a protest based in the groundless self-certainty of abstract reason (1995: 137). ‘This self-resilience leaves us at the mercy of our own mercilessness’, she writes, and ‘keeps us infinitely sentimental about ourselves, but methodically ruthless towards others; it breeds sureness of self, not ready to be unsure, with an unconscious conviction of eternal but untried election’ (1995: 137). The unrevealed religion of Enlightenment rationalism is

the baroque excrescence of the Protestant ethic: hedonist, not ascetic, voluptuous, not austere, embellished, not plain, it devotes us to our own inner-worldly authority, but with the loss of the inner as well as the outer mediator. This is an ethic without ethics, a religion without salvation. (Rose, 1995: 137)

The outcome is postmodern scepticism, which, despairing of the deficiencies of both revealed religion and Enlightenment rationalism, makes a virtue out of its limitation. Yet, as Rose (1996) argues in ‘Athens and Jerusalem: A Tale of Two Cities’, the postmodern equation of reason and universalism with totalitarianism and colonialism leads back, by a circuitous route, to the dogmatic certainty of particularism. In place of the divine law that applies to all abstractly, postmodern relativism sacralises the law of the community; the law of the heart, and the capriciousness of particular sentiment. ‘Postmodern relativism is the new baroque stage of the protestant revival’, Rose writes. ‘Reason is apparently being forced to abdicate at the combined protests of its unsatisfied petitioners’ (Rose, 1995: 139–40).

Far from addressing the sadness of the king – the simultaneous necessity of law and its brokenness – ‘postmodern philosophers say that philosophy is founded on the totalitarian ideal of Camelot’. By contrast, ‘philosophy is born out of the sadness of the King, to whom it offers the consolation of reflection’ (Rose, 1995: 126).

Speculative divine comedy

‘Religion is not the concept or thought of the absolute’, Rose writes in Hegel Contra Sociology, ‘but some form of its misrepresentation. As long as the absolute is represented as “God”, it is inconceivable as the absolute’ (2009: 80). Thus, Rose refuses the false dichotomy between revealed religion and the ‘unrevealed’ religion of reason, in both its Enlightened and postmodern form. Her alternative is therefore at question.

Instead of the euphoria of the easy way, Rose insists that we must face the deathliness of the broken middle, even if it deepens our sadness, and she credits Plato's Republic and Pascal's Pensées as the two texts that first cultivated her in this direction. They are, she explains, anagogic texts, ‘and invitations to undertake singular journeys, which deepened and did not seek to placate the burgeoning sadness of the teenage soul’ (Rose, 1995: 128).

Philosophically and politically, facing and thinking the brokenness of our condition means insisting on the groundlessness of reason and law, but without reifying groundlessness itself as an alternative law. ‘There is no rationality without uncertain grounds’, Rose writes, ‘without relativism of authority. Relativism of authority does not establish the authority of relativism: it opens reason to new claimants’ (1995: 138–9). Simply put, when a universal law fails, it results in arbitrariness and violence, and reveals itself as the result of human particularity and fallibility. But abandoning universality is no solution; rather, we must develop a better law. This requires a culture that can know itself; a speculative culture, or absolute ethical life.

Shy of the liberation of such a culture, Rose argues that divine comedy helps us cultivate ourselves towards absolute ethical life by reconciling between tragedy and comedy. In tragedy, divine powers oppose each other as pathos. The contradiction between the human and divine is absolute and humans are left powerless, bereft and desolate. In comedy, the divine powers are shown to be human, finite and capricious, and we are left with cynicism and self-interest; we are still bereft, but in a more subjectively ironic manner (Rose, 1996: 64).

In divine comedy, however, the divine is the community; ‘the substance and aim of human individuality, brought into existence as something concrete, summoned into action and put in movement’ (Rose, 1996: 64). Thus, individual pathos is re-cognized in light of its universal dimension. This lightens it. Individually, we are face down in the mud; together, we are mixed of both earth and starry sky. In our re-cognition of each other, we are incompletely divine.

In speculative or modern divine comedy, the individual sustains themselves in the groundlessness of the universal. As Rose writes, quoting Hegel's idea of comedy, this stands in contrast with Dante's insofar as it provides

a humbler definition of comedy, which eludes the hubris of the medieval poet: ‘The comical as such implies an infinite light-heartedness and confidence felt by someone raised altogether above his own inner contradiction and not bitter or miserable in it at all; this is the bliss and ease of a man who, being sure of himself, can bear the frustrations of his aims and achievements.’ (1995: 134–5)

‘This is Hegel's version of the divine comedy’, Rose continues, because no ‘human being possesses sureness of self: this can only mean being bounded and unbounded, selved and unselved, ‘sure’ only of this untiring exercise’ (1995: 135). The laughter of divine comedy is not jaded; it is the first smile following tears of grief; it is the wry sureness of one who, amongst sophists and dogmatists, knows that they do not know, and, for all their scepticism, incomprehension or irony, maintains that virtue can only come with self-reflection.

As Rose explains in Mourning Becomes the Law, this style of philosophy embraces the work of mourning, a prerequisite for both new love and renewed civic life:

Mourning draws on transcendent but representable justice, which makes the suffering of immediate experience visible and speakable. When completed, mourning returns the soul to the city, renewed and reinvigorated for participation, ready to take on the difficulties and injustices of the existing city. The mourner returns to negotiate the challenge and challenging inner and outer boundaries of the soul of the city; she returns to perennial anxiety. (1996: 135–6)

Divine comedy is therefore a Platonic genre. At the end of the Symposium, Plato presents as Socrates lively and fresh after two days of drinking and a night of speeches honouring Eros. He is arguing to Agathon and Aristophanes, who are barely conscious. Just as Socrates is about to clinch his argument – that ‘the skilful tragic dramatist should also be a comic poet’ – his interlocutors pass out, which Socrates takes as his queue to go home, wash, and get ready for the day's teaching (Plato, 1997: 505).

Gillian Rose's divine comedy

From what has been said, five conclusions may be drawn about Rose's theory of divine comedy.

Firstly, divine comedy must be composed in the ideal style, which combines philosophy and poetry, and which reconciles the aporia between particular and universal by facing the pathos of tragedy, and re-cognizing it as a human comedy, without abandoning reason. Secondly, divine comedy is historicist, insofar as it traces the genesis of the extant configuration of law and morality. Thirdly, it is absolutely present, insofar as it acknowledges its own contemporaneity, and establishes a philosophical vantage point above law and morality that is neither apolitical nor amoral. Fourthly, the vantage point of divine comedy is that of absolute knowing which, as we have seen, re-cognizes the divine forms in which we represent ourselves, while retaining an awareness of the irony of knowing. Fifthly, this cultivates us to know ourselves and our pathos in light of the community, and, in so doing, to rise above the vanity of postmodern subjectivism and the hubris of Enlightenment rationalism. Thus, divine comedy is personal, but without descending into romanticism. And it is universal, but without demanding that the particular submit to an abstract representation. Divine comedy is a self-aware genre that makes free use of the masks given to the author by culture. And by exploring their limits, divine comedy cultivates in us the ability to remove those masks. In short, divine comedy is a genre that faces death, guides us through mourning and cultivates us towards the renewal of life.

With these points in mind, we may now return to the questions posed at the beginning of this article, about the relation between Rose's early and late works, her changing account of aesthetics, and about the possibility of a speculative poetics. According to Hegel Contra Sociology, speculative thought can only be articulated in the severe style. This claim, however, is contradicted by Love’s Work, which is not only an exemplar of the ideal style, but which – as should be evident by now – forms the major part of Rose's own divine comedy.

Inasmuch as this is the case, Love’s Work disputes the pessimistic Hegelian attitude towards art that Rose had previously endorsed. Which is to say, Love’s Work stands as a work not only of speculative philosophy, but of speculative poetics. And if this is true, two points follow. Firstly, Rose has weakened the Hegelian monopoly over speculative philosophy by articulating a path towards absolute knowing that vindicates Hegel by going beyond him. This she accomplishes not only by broadening the speculative church, so to speak, to include Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and others, but by reaffirming an aesthetic dimension to speculative experience. And by achieving this with her philosophical autobiography, Rose affirms that truth cannot flourish indifferent to beauty. Amidst the systematic misrepresentations of modernity and the personal tragedies they bear, Rose demonstrated that the work of mourning and aporetic knowing may cultivate ourselves towards a true, infinite life that exists within a wrong, finite one.