Abstract
To shoot from a pistol: this essay explores the anxiety of beginning through a reading of Hegel and Gillian Rose. Hegel is anxious about philosophical beginnings and the presuppositions which they might take for granted. Yet he is also anxious to begin, to not waste time securing the beginning in advance, which would indefinitely forestall beginning altogether. For Hegel, one must take the risk of beginning, without any guarantees, if only to discover in retrospect the beginning's shortcomings and failings. Gillian Rose takes this up in her reading of the philosophical canon. Past works are not dogma, unquestionable authorities which tell us what to think, but the work of authorships which, if followed, open up a space for self-reflexive and self-corrective thinking. She also takes it up in her conception of identity. She does not write ‘as a woman’ or ‘as a Jew’, for that would presuppose and fix those identities in advance as a beginning without anxiety. Instead, writing is the means of anxiously developing these identities and discovering their plasticity. Furthermore, Rose takes up the anxiety of beginning in her critique of those philosophies which infer from our failure to think the absolute that the absolute itself is a failure. For Rose, the failure to think the absolute must be recognised as a failure determined by its beginning in the middle of bourgeois property law (or capitalism). In this, I mount a Rosean critique of Slavoj Žižek who transforms the determined failure to think the absolute into an undetermined metaphysics which says that the absolute is a failure. Finally, she takes it up in her notion of justice. Unlike Derrida, for whom justice is a messianic promise outside the law, Rose argues that justice may only be realised through the anxiety of beginning, through the risky activity of the assuming and exercising of power for the sake of the universal interest, activity arising from a comprehension of actuality. This essay will recover the essential point that the (broken) middle for Rose is not only a spatial term, but a narratological or temporal term, naming the passage between the beginning and the end, which at once undoes the certainty of any beginning or end. The essay ends with some reflections on the anxiety of beginning in Palestine.
Where to begin? Hegel never stops asking this question. Certainly, one cannot begin with an introduction – that is, with an abstract statement of our principles, aims, identity, method, prior commitments, or else with an anticipation of the argument to come – for such a starting point is presupposed in advance, and therefore sits outside that which is to be thought or argued. A beginning or introduction like this may seem to ground that which follows, or serve as its foundation, but in doing so it necessarily remains unjustified, thus throwing the security of the entire edifice into question. As Hegel writes at the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit, although it is customary to begin a work with ‘an opening talk about aim and other such generalities’, ‘[i]n the case of philosophy, […] this would give rise to the incongruity that along with the employment of such a method its inability to grasp the truth would also be demonstrated’ (1977 [1807]: §1). Appropriately, but nonetheless disconcertingly, the exposition of the method of Hegel's Logic does not appear until its final chapter, just as the preface of Gillian Rose's The Broken Middle comes only at its end.
In the same way that we cannot know how to swim before entering the water, without having first swum, Hegel thinks that we cannot know how to think without having first done a lot of thinking – only then, long after any putative first beginning, does the ‘how’ begin to emerge.1 It seems, then, that we should just begin, and not waste time prevaricating and procrastinating, without checking that all our plans or tools are in order. The very question of what we are doing, how we are doing it or where we are going will only become apparent on the way.
It might seem ironic, then, if not simply contradictory, that Hegel also never stops writing introductions and prefaces – that he never really stops beginning. Indeed, the Phenomenology of Spirit is famously described by Hegel as the ‘ladder’ (1977 [1807]: §26), the necessary introductory course, to the Logic, which is itself described as the necessary introduction to his system: ‘Only the Logic can serve as an introduction to philosophy’ (Hegel quoted in Comay and Ruda, 2018: 31). Each of these works, in turn, struggles to begin – or rather, they struggle to stop beginning. Whereas the Phenomenology has a preface and an introduction before it begins in earnest, the Logic has two prefaces, an introduction and an additional opening essay on the theme of beginning. Like Tristram Shandy, who makes so many explanatory diversions that he does not get round to an account of his own birth (that is, his own beginning) until the third volume of his autobiography, Hegel's Logic takes ‘about eighty pages of throat clearing’, in the words of Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda (2018: 53), before reaching its opening sentence.
That this might not be simply contradictory (or else an instance of self-ironising whimsy) is suggested by what comes after these repeated introductions: yet more beginnings which ultimately reveal themselves to be insufficiently certain. In the case of the Phenomenology, for instance, even once we make it through the necessary preambles (themselves denouncing preambles as unnecessary), each of the succeeding sections may itself be described as a kind of false start. Each of what Hegel calls a ‘shape of spirit’ that we occupy is a point of departure on the way to knowledge that considers itself to be immediate – ‘immediate’ from Latin, immediatus, ‘not in the middle’. (This is the same for the etymology of the German word for ‘immediate’, unmittelbar, which could be crudely transliterated as ‘un-middle-like’.) But in each case, through experience, we discover what this certainty disavows: that this and every following apparently immediate beginning is always mediate, that each beginning has its own presupposition or law to be discovered and is therefore, in the words of Rose, ‘a beginning in the middle’ (1992: 153) – literally ‘in medias res’. Each begins from what it assumes is a sure beginning, but soon discovers how that beginning is in the middle.
Here is the paradox then: on the one hand, the introduction or preface (or the beginning more generally) is the least philosophical moment of a philosophical work. It stands outside the philosophical exposition and therefore outside the conceptual development and in an inessential relation to that which it announces or sets up. But at the same time, insofar as speculative thinking for Hegel represents little more than the repeated experience of false starts, of coming to realise, after the fact, the error of our way, or at least its insufficiency, of coming to realise how our beginnings are in the middle, the inessential, self-erasing preface epitomises the path of philosophical thinking. Every moment in the work of philosophy (be it a moment of a single philosophical work or a moment in the history of philosophy itself) belongs to the exposition of the whole of philosophy. Every moment also, however, contains something (in some cases, a lot of things) that falls short of philosophy, and therefore outside the concept. The irony, however, is that it is the process of discovering that which stands outside philosophy that is philosophy. Like a preface, every moment is ultimately essential insofar as it demonstrates its superfluity.
Hegel describes his Science of Logic at its outset, rather bombastically perhaps, as ‘the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and of a finite spirit’ (2010b [1816/1832]: 29, italics in the original). Not only is the Logic an introduction or preface to philosophy, it is an introduction or preface to the ability for reality and its creation to be thought at all. This statement might seem to align Hegel with a typical conception of metaphysics, or else with a transcendental project of determining in advance the prior conditions for there to be a world and the prior conditions for us to know stuff about it. The problem, however, is that such a reading neglects Hegel's refusal of the idea that we can secure things in advance, that we can establish anything ‘prior’ without first putting it into action. Although Hegel does describe the Logic as the mind of God before creation, he also writes (and this is far less frequently cited): ‘God before the creation of the world is alone. […] God is not the true God if he does not manifest himself outwardly. For God is God only in the act of creating the world’ (quoted in Ruda, 2018: 88). What distinguishes Hegel's Logic from all other metaphysical projects, therefore, is that it demonstrates that the only way to know prior conditions or beginnings, what came before, is to know them after the fact, as they manifest in reality and in their realisation. One cannot secure or know or be confident in the beginning in advance. This is what Kant tried to do with his critique of pure reason, with his attempt to grasp the possibilities and limits of reason before beginning to use it to think about anything else. Comay characterises this Kantian disposition as [the] obsessional need to inspect the apparatus, to check the equipment to make sure everything's in working order, brakes and safety features installed so that you don’t over strain the engine or veer out of control and end up crashing on the rocks of the antinomies. (Comay, 2015: 260)
For Hegel, meanwhile, this interminable prep-work is little more than procrastination, motivated essentially by a fear of messing up. There is no prior truth, prior essence or God prior to creation, but only truth, essence or God in the process of their realisation and manifestation. To invoke essence before appearance, God before creation or reason prior to its exercise is to end the beginning before it has begun. It is to be satisfied with the acorn instead of a tree, or an embryo instead of a human, to use Hegel's (1977 [1807]: §§12, 21) examples. Alternatively, it is to confuse the spark of love at first sight with the quotidian long-term relationship that takes shape over time – what Rose calls ‘love's work’. It is for this reason that Hegel's Logic is a profoundly Christian one: God, for Hegel, is not fully God (just as reason is not fully reason, and love is not fully love) unless manifested or incarnated in history, locally, in a moment of particularity – that is, of course, God is not fully God unless he is also Christ.
To summarise a little: Hegel is both anxious about beginning and anxious to begin. He is anxious about the disavowed implications and unexpected outcomes of beginning, but equally and at the same time anxious to discover those implications and outcomes as the only means of realising or actualising anything that we might call truth. He is anxious that the pretension and hubris to secure a beginning in advance is to forgo beginning altogether, and so he is anxious to just begin. What Rose calls ‘the anxiety of beginning’, then, should be understood as a truly speculative term, as containing simultaneously opposing meanings.
Where to begin, then? One can only begin with the beginning itself, with the decision to begin, a beginning ‘without any further determination’, without guarantees; without worrying too much that things might go terribly wrong or differently to how we expected. Hegel describes this as a kind of ‘resolve, which can also be regarded as arbitrary’, the resolve simply to ‘take up what is there before us’ (2010b [1816/1832]: 47–8, emphasis in original). Incidentally, I think, for those wanting to read Hegel for the first time, this should be taken as some comfort. In order to begin to read Hegel, one need not begin with any of the available ‘introductions to Hegel’ or ‘how to’ guides – in fact, to do so is to invariably take on a load of abstracted presuppositions and preformed ideas, which is to preclude the possibility of beginning at all. Instead, if one wants to begin to read Hegel, all that is really required is a kind of naive resolution to do so, and to keep doing so.
It has been conventional to read Rose's idea of the broken middle, inspired in part by Hegel (and, by implication, the idea of mediation more generally), as merely the fact of the opposition between two implicated terms which cannot be immediately reconciled. Such a reading is not totally wrong. (That is, so long as it does not in turn present the role of the philosopher as a kind of ‘peace negotiator’, hearing both sides with the hope of finding an agreeable solution for all; or relatedly, but worse, so long as it does not identify the ‘middle’ with some kind of political ‘centre’.)2 At one point in The Broken Middle, employing a phrase from Adorno, Rose describes the broken middle as ‘torn halves of an integral freedom to which, however, they do not add up’ (Rose, 1992: 236; Adorno, 2001: 130). The middle is thus ‘the third, tertium quid, implicit in any opposition, qua sundered unity, without positing any substantial pre-existent “unity” ’ (Rose, 1992: 236). It names the oppositions, for example, between ethics and law, love and violence, subjectivity and its determination, inner freedom and outer unfreedom – terms which must be thought together without positing either their abstract identity or else the possibility of their total, mutual disentanglement. What has been overlooked, however – and which I will attempt to elaborate – is that ‘the middle’ for Rose is also always a narratological or temporal term, naming the passage between the beginning and the end, which at once undoes the certainty of any beginning or end.
This neglect of the temporal middle is symptomatic of what Fredric Jameson diagnoses as the postmodern historical shift from a diachronic to synchronic mode of cultural experience whereby our cultural and intellectual tendency is towards spatialisation – for which the middle would be a space of negotiation or conflict between two positions – and away from temporalisation – for which the middle would also be a temporal element between the beginning and the end (Jameson, 1991: 16).3 My argument here is that, for Rose, the middle is irrevocably both.
The Broken Middle begins, like Hegel's Logic, with an essay on beginning and the difficulty of doing so. More particularly, it begins with an essay on the difficulty of beginning and not beginning with Hegel. In the introduction to Mourning Becomes the Law, Rose writes that ‘[f]rom Marx to Heidegger (and before and beyond), it has become de rigueur to charge your predecessor with adherence to “metaphysics”, and to claim your “new method” to be, exclusively and exhaustively, the overcoming of the tradition’ (1996: 1). Likewise, yet more specifically, Rose begins The Broken Middle with the argument that it has become de rigueur for new interventions in philosophy to have overcome Hegel: The tradition of the new, which understands itself to be “modern” and hence without tradition, has contrived an ironic stance towards the System and its philosopher — Hegel, The Philosopher for modernity as Aristotle became The Philosopher to the Middle Ages. As a result of this all-pervasive irony, the most self-proclaimed, unsystematic, fragmentary, contingent, singular, pained and painful beginnings — even Rosenzweig's beginning with death (beginning, that is, with the ending) — in short, the most unscientific beginnings, begin scientifically. (Rose 1992: 3) these gestures or ‘moves’ against the System affirm one, ‘Hegel’, as Master of those who, by their panironic reversals, themselves reinstate the ‘authority’ of the very System. They find a way of saying ‘of it’ by, apparently, saying against it — proclaiming their abandonment loudly to shroud their purloining with silence. (Rose, 1992: 5)
With what does Rose begin, then? ‘One thing is clear’, she states: ‘we cannot now begin with “Hegel”, nor with the “System” (1992: 5, emphasis in original). This might seem strange. We can be pretty sure that Rose is ‘convinced’ by Hegelian philosophy and its importance, so why not? The reason is suggested once again by the scare-quotes. To begin with ‘Hegel’ is to begin with a Hegel hypostasised as a position (just as to begin with anything is to begin with a hypostasised position). When such a beginning with ‘Hegel’ is undertaken, it usually takes one of two forms. Either ‘Hegel’ becomes the absolute authority of correct positions, the master to studiously learn from, and the ‘System’ becomes the textbook of those positions to memorise, regurgitate and apply; or else, just one thing is learned from him – a particularly popular example at the moment is ‘recognition’ – and this thing is abstracted for its utility and elevated to the level of a quasi-transcendental or methodological principle to ground one's argument, producing a kind of ‘Hegel’-synecdoche where a severed part stands in for the truth of the whole.5 In either case, to begin with ‘Hegel’ is to begin without experiencing the essential drama of misrecognition – basically, of getting things wrong – involved in speculative thinking.
Nor, Rose continues, can we begin ‘with “Kierkegaard” ’ (Rose, 1992: 5). ‘Kierkegaard’ is invoked here (scare-quotes again included) perhaps as the common-sense alternative to Hegel, as occupying the position of anti-Hegelian par excellence; but also (scare-quotes removed) as perhaps the only other thinker who is as constantly and as spuriously reduced to a ‘position’ as Hegel, without recognising that he too made the refusal of any such certain position the route of thinking itself. Adorno, for instance, is criticised by Rose for reading Fear and Trembling as authored merely by Kierkegaard and thus for tacitly dismissing the pseudonymous authorship of Johannes de silentio as incidental: Adorno is ‘too quick to gather “Kierkegaard” into his fold on the tinsel ground of the “construction of the aesthetic”, instead of following the whole authorship, pseudonymous and signatured’ (Rose, 1992: 10; cf. Adorno, 1989 [1933]). Rose argues that in overlooking this authorship which will not be reduced to a position, in neglecting the essentiality of ironic indirection to the truth of what is read, Adorno loses the thought itself, and forgoes the possibility of beginning. In her own typically gnomic terms: ‘This celerity prescinds the concept as much as the authorship; it terminates the beginning before it has begun’ (Rose, 1992: 10).
The problem, for Rose, is that ‘the tradition [has] not trusted itself to think without such towering “authorities” and “masters”, without attributing the content and matter of the tradition to writing of genii — instead of learning from it what thinking might be’ (1992: 6). To argue this is not to forgo the philosophical tradition. Rather, it is to argue again that what the tradition offers is not merely positions of what to think, but instead the understanding of what thinking is, and how one might begin to do it. Thus, she continues: To follow Hegel's or Kierkegaard's “authority” consistently’—note the absence of scare-quotes on the names this time—‘would involve not delineating authorities: to follow the counsel from the Preface to the Phenomenology to proceed without “pistols”; from the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to proceed from the relationship to one's “own author” and not from the pseudonymous one. (Rose, 1992: 6)
To delineate authorities (or ‘originators’, to repeat the etymology) is again to delineate beginnings in advance, and thus to ‘terminate the beginning before it has begun’.’
Instead, to follow Hegel or Kierkegaard consistently involves not learning, hypostasising and occupying their philosophies as positions, but following their authorships without authority. To ‘proceed without “pistols” ’ is to avoid that philosophy which begins, as Hegel puts it, with ‘rapturous enthusiasm […], like a shot from a pistol, […] and makes short work of other standpoint by declaring that it takes no notice of them’ (Hegel, 1977: §27).
A different English translation might be ‘jumping the gun’. To ‘proceed from the relationship to one's “own author” ’, meanwhile, is to avoid the illusion of Kierkegaard (or Climacus, or de silentio) as an authority, but to entrust oneself to think, to be one's own author – which, to quote from Love’s Work, entails ‘that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control’ (Rose, 2010 [1995]: 59). In Hegel, this means following the ironic and dramatic play of personae in the Phenomenology, ‘the story of how natural consciousness acquired “personality” — legal, aesthetic, moral — a story itself fitfully comprehended by philosophical consciousness [the reader] which then proceeds unevenly through the stumbling blocks of personified aporia after personified aporia’ (Rose, 1992: 10). It means reading Hegel, not with critical or ironic detachment, but with naive attachment, with what Comay and Ruda call ‘mind-numbing literalism’ (2018: 4), allowing oneself to be led into false certainties which are then rudely, even comically undermined, allowing one’s own philosophical consciousness to be formed and deformed along with the substance of the work being read.
This is the paradox, then: to be a Hegelian, which means to follow Hegel's thinking on his own terms, with mind-numbing literalism, we must go beyond them. Just as Hegel is the first philosopher to inscribe the ongoing creation of God into the definition of God, and so to grasp the mind of God before creation requires us to grasp it in creation; so Hegel is the first philosopher to inscribe the development of his work beyond itself as a condition of it having any truth at all.
To follow Kierkegaard consistently, meanwhile, means reading the pseudonym as a mask of systematic illusion, not as an illusion to be unmasked to the ‘real’ authorship and authority beneath, to what Kierkegaard ‘really thought’, but as an illusion which ironically draws attention to the ‘persistent modern philosophical illusion’ of the very possibility of such a real, pure or immediate authorship, subjectivity or beginning (Rose, 1992: 9).6 In both cases, the anxiety of beginning – the commitment to begin without presuppositions coupled with the self-reflexive awareness that one begins without guarantees of where you will end up – yields an idea of philosophy not as an abstract system of positions, authorities and instrumental methods to be perfected and applied, but instead an idea of philosophy as what Hegel called both a ‘voyage of discovery’ and a ‘path of despair’ fraught with existential pathos and eros.
This might help us account for Rose's turn to autobiographical writing in two of her final books, Love’s Work and the unfinished, posthumous Paradiso. As she puts in the introduction to Judaism and Modernity, she refuses to write ‘as a woman’ or ‘as a Jew’ – that is, to begin with an identity claim. She states instead: If I knew who or what I were, I would not write; I write out of those moments of anguish which are nameless and I am able to write only where the tradition can offer me a discipline, a means, to articulate and explore that anguish. (Rose, 2017 [1993]: v)
Though she is a woman and she is a Jew, she does not write as a woman or a Jew because to do so would be to presuppose and hypostasise the significance of those identities in advance. This is not to dismiss identity, then, but to dismiss identity as a beginning without anxiety (or here, without anguish). These are works that, if they do begin from a sense of identity, from Rose's first-person perspective, they only do so in a provisional and uncertain sense, the writing of which is conceived not as the communication of that which is known in advance, but the process of coming to know that which is being communicated.
The narratological significance of the middle is made clear from the first time it is introduced as a concept at the end of Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-Structuralism and Law, Rose's work immediately preceding The Broken Middle. This work mounts a sustained critique of post-structuralism (as represented especially by Derrida and Foucault), essentially for having failed to acknowledge its beginning in the middle. In particular, she argues that post-structuralism, declaring a radical break with the tradition of metaphysics and therefore declaring a new beginning (what she elsewhere disparagingly calls a ‘New Jerusalem’),7 amounts merely to a nihilism which refuses to engage with hegemonic structures of reason and law. In doing so, she argues, they have not overcome their implication in and configuration by these structures, but occluded them: ‘The “deconstruction” of metaphysics involves a reconstruction of the history of law which blinds us to the very tradition which it disowns and repeats’ (Rose, 1984: 1). Dialectic of Nihilism, then, seeks to trace these disavowed jurisprudential terms and coordinates through the alleged antinomianism of post-structuralism.
It is on the final page of this work that she announces this otherwise latent concept of the middle: not as a spatial concept, but as a temporal or narratological one between the beginning and the end: From the midst of the tradition, embroiled as it is in the antinomy of law, these interlocutors are heard to speak — not, as they would have it, against the naturalized beginnings or utopian end of the Rousseauian, dialectical or structuralist heritage, but against their middle: against the exposition of civil society and civil law which they explicitly or implicitly present. (Rose, 1984: 212, emphases added)
The middle, then, is not the name given to the law or structures which determine consciousness or subjectivity, for instance, to one side of the opposition (which would be to set it up as another unknowable transcendental or a priori). Instead, it is the name given to the dirempted configuration of that particular opposition as it is historically realised, that any thought or action cannot but begin from, however purified the beginning takes itself to be.
This takes up an argument developed initially in Rose’s earlier Hegel Contra Sociology, which demonstrates that Hegel traces the philosophical dichotomies of Kant and Fichte to their disavowed origins in the dichotomies of bourgeois property law and labour relations. For example, she argues that ‘Hegel shows in detail that Kant and Fichte's “formal” notions of freedom, which depend on a relation between reason and its object, presuppose and “fix” specific, bourgeois, property relations’ (Rose, 2009 [1981]: 60–1). A recurrent motif of that work is that ‘Hegel's thought has no social import if the absolute cannot be thought’ (Rose, 2009 [1981]: 45, 98, 218, 223) – where the absolute stands for the overcoming of these Kantian or Fichtean dichotomies ‘between concept and intuition, theoretical and practical reason’ (218). The twist of the argument, however, is that the absolute cannot be presently thought, or at least cannot be thought concretely, precisely because we are still shaped by the property law which shaped Kant and Fichte: ‘It [the absolute] cannot be thought (realized) because these dichotomies and their determination are not transcended’ (Rose, 2009 [1981]: 218). However, Hegel's failure to think the absolute fails to think it ‘quite differently from Kant and Fichte's thinking and failing to think it’ (Rose, 2009 [1981]: 219). And this is because Hegel traces the failure to its beginning in a particular broken middle (to use the vocabulary from Rose’s later work). Thus: ‘Thinking the absolute is the basis for the critique of different property relations and for the critique of different kinds of law, for the social import of this philosophy’ (Rose, 2009 [1981]: 218).
This is what distinguishes Rose's Hegel from some other Hegelians in the tradition of critical theory. For Slavoj Žižek's Hegel, for example, we must move ‘from our negative access to the Absolute to the Absolute itself as negativity’, from our failure to think the absolute to the absolute as failure: ‘our incomplete knowledge of the thing becomes a positive feature of the thing which is in itself incomplete, inconsistent’ (Žižek, 2012: 267). From a Rosean perspective, this transforms the failure to think the absolute into a metaphysics, and thus avoids the crucial Hegelian move of locating that failure in a particular historical configuration. For Hegel as for Rose, meanwhile, the absolute (the overcoming of concept and intuition, theory and practice, of all necessary misrecognition and illusion) may be concretely thought and realised if given a different property relation and law – what Hegel called ‘absolute ethical life’.
Perhaps Rose's most emphatic statement of her critique of antinomianism which refuses reflection on the question of law can be found in her analysis of Derrida, and in particular Derrida's conception of justice. Derrida writes in his essay on ‘Force of Law’ that ‘[j]ustice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible’ (1992 [1990]: 14). Law, on the one hand, is ‘stabilizable and statutory, calculable, a system of regulated and coded prescriptions’; justice, on the other, is ‘infinite, incalculable, rebellious to rule and foreign to symmetry, heterogeneous and heterotropic’ (Derrida, 1992 [1990]: 22). He therefore sorts law and justice into two undialectically opposed camps, where justice, ‘if such a thing exists’ (a typical example of post-structuralist ironical rhetorical distancing), is something which might be realised beyond the law, beyond all constraints, coercion and enforcement.
For Rose, ‘[s]uch claims are declarations; they leave their authority and legitimacy a mystery—and leave it open for a false Messiah to proclaim a tyranny’ (2017 [1993]: 86). In other words, Rose thinks that by positing that justice lies entirely outside the realm of law, the legitimacy and authority of that justice remains indeterminate, unanswerable and therefore essentially mysterious. Not only does Rose think that such a conception of justice is incredibly disabling as it precludes a comprehension of actuality from which the risk of progressive or genuinely revolutionary action might be taken, she also thinks it has the potential to be radically dangerous, even fascistic, for it affirms a kind of anonymous and ultimately unknowable justice outside all possible accountability. Her argument seems to be that, paradoxically, Derrida's employment of messianic Judaism in his conception of justice is paradoxically too Christian, and in particular too Pauline, for which the difficult world of political actuality, of law, is submerged and obscured in the immediacy of Christian caritas, charity or love – a mysterious and anarchic form of justice beyond any accountability and institutionality. As Rose puts it in The Broken Middle, although this ‘would found a sociality of saints’ – a community of beautiful souls, self-secure in their separation from the compromises and violences of actuality – ‘it will not endure the action-passion of the law that is always already begun’ (1992: 236).
It is this which fundamentally differentiates Derrida from a properly dialectical approach represented by Rose and Hegel. For Derrida, the manifest failures of justice to be justice means that the concept of justice can only ever be a promise of justice; the unresolved dialectic of the concept and its actualisation produces an excess, which is the impossible promise of its resolution: which he describes as the messianic ‘to come’. This is totally anathema to Hegel, as it is to Rose. This is because the gap between an ideal essence and its reality which characterises all conceptual determinations (for instance, the broken middle between justice as an ideal and its failed actualisation) is not a failure to reach the truth of the concept which projects a trace of this realised truth as a ‘to-come’ outside or beyond the law and therefore outside comprehension. Instead, this ‘gap between fact and ideal essence’ is the present truth of the concept within the broken middle – within the actual configuration of law and civil society. This truth may well be profound injustice – but it is only through the comprehension of this truth and the middle from which it has begun that we might critique and therefore transgress or transform it. To actually realise justice cannot entail positing it as a messianic to-come outside teleological history. Instead, justice may only be realised through the anxiety of beginning, through the risky activity of the assuming and exercising of power for the sake of the good and the universal interest, activity arising from and coextensive with a comprehension of the middle from which we begin. Derrida's political philosophy, conceiving of justice beyond law, power and coercion, allows us to edify ourselves as loving, innocent and ethical subjects, apart from the violence of the world – as a ‘sociality of saints’ – but this is a philosophy of a ‘beautiful soul’ (as Hegel puts it in his satire) who through attachment to the purity of their principles refuses to muddy their hands in the messiness of reality, or to recognise their own implication and complicity in the law. ‘[W]hat needs investigation’, Rose writes, is the fate of modern law — the diremption and discrepancy between its promises and the social actuality they presuppose and reproduce. Then the violent acting out of the nationalist or racist phantasies engendered by those discrepancies may be comprehended instead of being exalted to a pure originary violence or degraded to the violence of pure formal law as such. This would be to demystify law without compensatory myth and without hallowing history as holocaust. Only if we resist the temptation of the ontology of ‘originary contamination’ can we begin to discern the complicities of our political history. To do that we need to be able to represent, to formalize, to think, to know, to judge — all activities from which Messianic deconstruction would disqualify us. (2017 [1993]: 87, emphases in original)
Rose uses the word ‘holocaust’ here, first, in the etymological and biblical sense, as a holos-kaustos, a sacrifice to an unknowable and unanswerable divine authority which is ‘wholly burned’ or wholly consumed by fire – with kaustos meaning ‘burned’, as in ‘caustic’. To hallow history as ‘holocaust’ would be to consecrate the events of the past as beyond recovery, beyond understanding. Rose is urging us here, by contrast, to take the risk of comprehension, even in the face of that which is apparently incomprehensible – for only then might something like justice be conceivable, realisable and riskable; a kind of justice which might be implicated in the partiality of the law, but for that very reason actual and within the realm of critique.
She is also using the word ‘holocaust’ here, then, to evoke its more obviously historical sense, to describe the genocide of six million Jews by the Nazi regime during the Second World War. For Rose, the prevailing tradition of reflection on the Holocaust is characterised by what she disparagingly calls ‘Holocaust piety’, a view which interprets the Holocaust as a holocaust in this biblical sense: as a breakdown in divine and human history, which delegitimises narratives and even thought as such, and hence all aesthetic or apprehensive representation (Rose, 1996: 43). From this perspective, the Holocaust is simply too much, beyond or at the very least partially beyond the realms of philosophy, art, analysis or any other such address. For Rose, however, this represents an over-anxiety of beginning – or else, an anxiety of failure – without the anxiousness to begin; a fear both of the possibility of misrepresentation and of the uncomfortable conclusions that comprehension might bring us to. As she writes in Mourning Becomes the Law: To argue for silence, prayer, the banishment equally of poetry and knowledge, in short, the witness of ‘ineffability’, that is, non-representability, is to mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too understandable, all too continuous with what we are — human, all too human. (Rose, 1996: 43)
The horror of fascism, for Rose, is not that it is cosmically and inexplicably evil, something which emerges from beyond, something radically other, which cannot be understood – but precisely that it is not these things. The horror of fascism is that it is mundane and that it emerges from the discrepancies of modern law, a law which is still our own.
To take the risk of the anxiety of beginning, which is to repeatedly come to recognise and re-cognise the way in which we begin in the middle, but to stake a position nonetheless, in spite of the risk of our own failure or our own violence, and in spite of the unpredictability of our outcomes, may also allow us, therefore, to begin to think the ending, which would be to begin to adequately mourn that which has come to pass, or is still coming to pass. I wrote at the beginning of this essay that philosophy for Hegel must always begin with a decision to begin, to work forward without any guarantees, which will always, however, turn out to be a beginning in the middle. But Hegel also says that philosophy ‘always comes too late’; that every beginning comes after the end (2003 [1821]: 23). Philosophy, for Hegel, cannot predict, prescribe or proscribe any future, it can only recollect or comprehend that which has already come to pass: ‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk’ (23). This is why, for Rose, all philosophy is an act of mourning.
This mourning should not be confused, however, with the ‘aberrated mourning’ which characterises both popular discourse and, for Rose, postmodern thought – that which forgoes the work of understanding, out of fear that it may be all too understandable. Instead, it is an ‘inaugurated mourning’, which earnestly seeks to comprehend and even come to terms with what has happened, precisely so that the same mistakes might not be repeated.8 To affirm the ineffability of violence and loss is an example of an ‘aberrated mourning’ – it is to affirm that we can never come to terms with what has happened, and so to elevate it into the status of an unsurpassable horizon. For such an aberrated mourning, ‘the violent acting out of the nationalist or racist phantasies’ – genocides historical and present – ‘engendered by those discrepancies’ – the discrepancies between the promises and actualities of modern law – can only be attributed to ‘a pure originary violence or degraded to the violence of pure formal law as such’. For this position, the Nazis (for example) are either simply diabolically evil, or else they are merely ciphers for the inherent violence of law. In either case, the particularity of their violence and its conditions of possibility (historical, aesthetic, moral, psychological) cannot be worked through, and therefore remain both with us and mysterious. This position is encapsulated once again by Derrida as he ironically reformulates Descartes: ‘I mourn, therefore I am’ (Derrida, 1995: 321). For Derrida, interminable mourning is the condition of possibility. I am insofar as I am at a loss.
Aberrations of mourning abounded in the aftermath of the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023 and the initiation of Israel's genocide on Gaza. From politicians and commentators everywhere, it was frequently implied that in order to express or even possess moral feeling in relation to the violence, one could not affirm that it is a possibly comprehensible situation. To cite even the facts and the history (the land seizures, routine bombing, assassinations, false imprisonment, torture, massacres of unarmed protestors, and so on) was seen to dilute the more immediate response which is demanded of us – again, with ‘immediate’ referring to the pretensions of that which takes itself to be ‘not-in-the-middle’. In spite of any history, it was repeatedly asserted that, whatever it was that was happening, it began immediately on 7 October with Hamas' offensive. To take the risk of comprehending the situation and its history as a whole was seen to contextualise and therefore relativise it. Instead, what was demanded was an affirmation of the abstract and therefore easy ideals of love, peace, community and non-violence, instead of the concrete and difficult work of reason, truth, struggle or liberation. Alternatively, the genocide was simply justified as collateral damage for the self-defence of Israel.
The former Archbishop Justin Welby, for instance, when interviewed on Channel 4 News about Israel–Palestine, argued that there is a distinction to be made between mourning and protest. Now, he argued, is the time for mourning: ‘In the Psalms, there is the difference between lament and protest. You lament first and then you protest. […] Let's not run to judgement and blame straight away. Let's lament and mourn with them’ (Channel 4, 2023). For Welby, this was no time to be ‘pointing fingers’ – hastening to add, however, that ‘I am pointing fingers at Hamas.’ He argued that condemnation of Israel, meanwhile, would ‘make everything worse’. When pressed about Palestinian casualties, Welby claimed ‘[y]ou don’t have to say someone is evil but that this is an eruption of evil in our world’, as if the Palestinian deaths were the result of uncontrollable natural forces – an act of God, perhaps – and not the result of relentless aerial bombardment, tanks and bullets, and a siege, representing the culmination of a 76-year-long nakba. Once again, a criticism in the spirit of Rose would regard this as a deliberate occlusion of political actuality by the edifying false immediacy of a Pauline-Christian love – which, of course, is not really love at all, but sentimental moral feeling, equivalent to those in the book of Jeremiah who say ‘ “Peace, peace,” […] when there is no peace’ (Jeremiah 6.14). For Rose, an engagement with political actuality, with the middle, is the only way to begin or inaugurate mourning.
(As an aside, the psalm of lament and protest to which Welby appears to be referring is Psalm 44, an anguished outcry of suffering: ‘Awake, Lord! Why do you sleep? Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever. Why do you hide your face and forget our misery and oppression?’ (44.23–4). And although containing both mourning and protest, it is not clear at all that the psalm affirms them as separate activities. Regardless, as Gaza is mercilessly destroyed and its people lie dead or alive beneath the rubble, the pertinence of its imagery cannot be underestimated: ‘We are brought down to the dust; our bodies cling to the ground’ (Psalm 44.25).
The inescapable truth is that Israel–Palestine is a broken middle. This, of course, does not mean that it is a middle that is broken symmetrically, nor that we should position ourselves between each side, mediating the differences. Instead, it is a middle insofar as none of the present events can be posited as pure beginnings, as if there were no history or enduring actuality, as if it did not represent a fate of modern law, our law, which needs investigation. Andreas Malm writes, with reference to the climate crisis, that ‘[w]e can never been in the heat of the moment, only in the heat of this ongoing past’ (Malm, 2020: 7). The same should be said of all history, and particularly of Israel–Palestine. It is a middle, too, insofar as any appeal to historical or mythical beginnings as a source of ultimate destiny and justification – the most obvious one being the literal book of Genesis – can only serve to obscure actuality, to sacralise the state and its violence beyond accountability and therefore beyond reprehension. For some on the far right of the Israeli government, perhaps most notoriously the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and minister for national security Itamar Ben-Gvir, what is going on now is literally the apocalyptic fulfilment of biblical prophecy – a pure beginning coming to its final, brutal end.
That it is a middle, however, does not mean that one cannot begin. What Rose calls for is an inaugurated mourning; a mourning which has already begun, and which might ultimately ‘become the law’ – to use her phrase – a mourning which begins from the middle to work towards transforming and even revolutionising existing systems that regulate and organise human activity for better ones: a new polity, a new law.9 It is a process which, unlike Welby's aberrated mourning, is not separate from but coextensive with the work of thinking and judging, with critique, which in turn enables and empowers political practice, be it diplomatic, legislative, activist or militant. Even in the face of seemingly irreconcilable conflict and total injustice, in spite of all preceding failed beginnings and the lack of guarantees that future beginnings will succeed, in spite of it seeming as though the end might already have happened, as though it could not get any worse, that it is too late, this is a mourning which assumes the anxiety of beginning, which risks once again the difficult work of both comprehending the situation, and struggling to transform it.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This essay was written in fits and starts between September 2023 and May 2024. Material from and adjacent to it was presented in various forms at the Theory, Criticism, and Culture seminar at the University of Cambridge (thanks to Ross Wilson and Louis Klee); the Social and Political Thought Critical Theory Reading Group at the University of Sussex (thanks to Marina Lademacher and Adriano Lotito); the Modern and Contemporary Research Seminar at the University of East Anglia (thanks to Joe Williams); and the Summer University at the Performing Arts Forum (PAF) (thanks to Will Spendlove). I am grateful for the questions and comments I received at each of these seminars and workshops, which went on to shape the essay in important ways. All prematurely mended holy middles are my own.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.