Gillian Rose and the promise of speculative sociology

Abstract

While Gillian Rose (1947–95) is acknowledged to be one of the most important social theorists of the late-20th Century, her work continues to exist in a state of relative obscurity. The argument of the present paper is that there are good reasons for returning to Rose’s work, and in particular her vision of a speculative sociology. A defining feature of such a sociology, for Rose, is that ethical life begins with the attempt to think what Hegel terms the ‘absolute’. However, a sociological ethics does not feature prominently in Rose’s later texts, in particular Love’s Work and Mourning Becomes the Law, which centre on questions of death, love, time, and eternity. This article argues, by way of response, that a speculative sociology should be accompanied by an ethics of responsibility for the Other, and that such an ethics can be developed from the writings of Soren Kierkegaard, Max Weber and Zygmunt Bauman.

While Gillian Rose (1947–95) is acknowledged to be one of the most important social theorists of the late-20th Century, Lloyd (2007) rightly observes that she is an author that ‘many have looked at, few have read, and still fewer have read carefully’ (p. 697). In 2017, Irvine (2017), writing in The Guardian, suggested that Rose is ‘beginning to receive her due’, but now, nearly 30 years on from her death, her writings, with the exception of Love’s Work, her final autobiographical reflection, continue to exist in a state of relative obscurity. Maya Krishnan observes, rightly, that it should come as no surprise that Rose has been remembered, above all, for Love’s Work, for ‘if Rose’s time has arrived, it seems that it is Rose the memoirist, not Rose the philosopher, whom the world is ready to meet. That’s a shame, in part because it is an all-too-familiar story for a female philosopher’s reception to foreground her personal life’ (Krishnan, 2024). There are signs, however, that this changing, particularly following the publication of Marxist Modernism (Rose, 2024); a volume of lectures on critical theory that Rose delivered at the University of Sussex in 1979 (see Gane, 2024; Turner, 2024). The argument of the present article is that while Krishnan is right to re-affirm the intellectual status of Rose the ‘philosopher’, it is necessary, alongside this project, to reconsider Rose as a sociologist. Rose’s final position was Professor of Social and Political Thought in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, where her lectures on critical theory, like those at Sussex, read philosophical and literary figures, including Adorno, Benjamin, Lukács, Kafka, Mann and even Nietzsche, through a ‘radically sociological’ lens (2024: 24) to address, among other things, the threat of fascism, the causes of antisemitism and the recurrent failures of the political Left. While attention is now being paid to Rose’s (1981) critical sociology, her work, however, offers something more: a ‘speculative sociology’ that is outlined in Hegel Contra Sociology, but which, to date, has been largely neglected. This article, by way of response, will assess the value of a such a sociology by considering Rose’s later writings, in particular Love’s Work and Mourning Becomes the Law, as final parts of a speculative project that centres on fundamental or ‘absolute’ questions of death, time and love. In returning to these later writings, this article will follow Zygmunt Bauman in seeking to produce an ‘illuminating’ reading of Rose (1993) rather than necessarily ‘a correct one’ (p. 115). This said, however, this reading will be critical in basis as it will argue, against Rose, that a speculative sociology that seeks possibility in life and in death must be accompanied by an ethics of responsibility for the Other.

Speculative sociology

At the outset of her early work Hegel Contra Sociology, Gillian Rose argues that an alternative form of sociology can be developed by retrieving ‘Hegelian speculative experience for social theory’ (1981: 1). Rose defines ‘speculative experience’ as follows:

a formal statement of Aufhebung, the term which is usually translated into English as ‘sublation’, and said to contain the three meanings of ‘preserve’, ‘abolish’, and ‘transcend’. Aufhebung is usually understood to refer to a consecutive and higher stage in a developmental sequence. But Aufhebung is another term for speculative experience, for the experience of difference or negation, of relative identity, of a contradiction between consciousness’ definition of itself and its real existence which is miscognized and recognized at the same time (1981: 111).

This statement implies that speculative sociology is to be critical in method, for it confronts what Rose terms ‘the domination of abstraction’ by recognising ‘the difference between concept and reality’ (1981: 223), and, beyond this, calls us to ‘transform ethical life by re-cognising the law of its determination’ (1981: 199). Rose illustrates the value of such sociology through reference to the work of Karl Marx. She writes: ‘The theory of commodity fetishism is the most speculative moment in Marx’s exposition of capital. It comes nearest to demonstrating in the historically-specific case of commodity producing society how substance is (mis)-represented as subject, how necessary illusion arises out of productive activity’ (1981: 232). In this reading of Marx, a critique of capitalist society and culture thus must proceed by understanding and revealing the means through which commodity fetishism conceals social relations through processes of abstraction that, in turn, create representations or illusions that then become dominant.

The value of speculative sociology, for Rose, is that it attempts to think precisely those forms and abstractions that appear unthinkable, and in so doing confronts what Hegel calls the ‘absolute’. The absolute is the central but most difficult concept addressed by Hegel in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Simply put, it is a response to Kant’s idea of the noumenon, or the ‘thing in itself’ that is said to lie beyond the limits of human sensibility and, because of this, is inaccessible to reason. For Hegel, the absolute, while ‘not susceptible to empirical investigation’ (Inwood, 2018: xii), is often ‘felt and intuited’ rather than ‘comprehended’ (Hegel, 2018: 7), but must, nonetheless, be thought, and this, for Rose, is the precisely the challenge of a speculative sociology.

Howard Caygill argues that in returning to Hegel’s idea of the absolute, Rose moves away from the philosophy of Theodor Adorno, which centres on a ‘dialectical opposition of subject and object’, and instead seeks to retrieve ‘Hegel’s concept of experience’ to address ‘the speculative identity of religion and state’ (Caygill, 1998: 22). In this sense, Rose’s reading of Hegel addresses sociological concerns that are likely to be familiar: identity, power, law, religion, violence and the state. But what distinguishes Rose’s sociology is an attempt to think the absolute, even if such a task is destined to failure. One way to simplify Rose’s position is to distinguish between a sociology, on one hand, that fails because it refuses to address realities that from the outset are deemed unknowable, a sociology that might be termed nihilistic (see below), and, on the other, a speculative sociology that, even if it fails, is valuable because of the possibilities it creates in the process of confronting the absolute. It is for this reason, Rose argues, that the absolute should never be ‘banished or suppressed’ (Rose, 1981:45) for it has ‘generative power’ (Inwood, 2018: xii), as the attempt to think it can create, to use the words of Gorman (2001), a ‘space of formative possibility’ (p. 33). More than this, failure in the process of thinking the absolute poses, implicitly, the question of what ‘ought’ to be done, and it is here, for Rose, that ethical and perhaps even social life begins, for ‘we can think the absolute by acknowledging the element of Sollen [ought] in such a thinking, by acknowledging the subjective element, the limits on our thinking . . . ’ (1981: 218). This is a key point that will be considered in detail below through analysis of Rose’s later writings on love and death, for the question this poses is what type of ethical commitment, or ought, should accompany a speculative sociology that seeks to find possibility in the absolute?

The arguments of Hegel Contra Sociology have been largely neglected but, nonetheless, have still been divisive. On one hand, the Canadian artist, Wall (2007), draws from Rose’s speculative sociology’ (see 2007: 228) to consider the relation of representation to critique and, beyond this, to question the power of ‘volatile negativity’ through the exercise of a ‘dialectical method’ (2007: 122). On the other, Toth (1983), writing in the American Journal of Sociology, dismisses Hegel Contra Sociology as ‘extraordinarily difficult’ and ‘elliptic’ work that leaves one in doubt whether ‘the absolute can be thought’ (p. 830). That Rose’s work is difficult is indisputable and, arguably, this is why it has been neglected within the discipline of sociology. But Toth, inadvertently, offers a way of simplifying the task of reading her early work on Hegel and also later writings on love and death: how to think the absolute, or that which presents itself as being unthinkable and thus without possibility?

Rose’s later work responds to this challenge by drawing on the writings of Soren Kierkegaard, Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud to her expand her early vision of speculative sociology. It is notable that in Rose’s final writings, the philosophy of Hegel features less prominently, even though death is a central point of concern in the Phenomenology of Spirit, which addresses the relation between ‘the departed inner spirit’ and ‘State-power’ (2018: 202), and questions whether death can be the ‘sole work and deed of universal freedom’ (2018: 236). Instead, Rose turns to Kierkegaard (1998), who refuses to see himself as a ‘speculative intellect’ (1998: 40), but in whose work, nonetheless, Rose finds philosophical and theological resources for thinking the absolute, notably in the form of death (for further consideration of Rose’s reading of Kierkegaard in relation to Hegel, see Caygill, 1998). Indeed, Rose describes The Broken Middle, arguably her magnum opus, as ‘a book on Kierkegaard’ (1999:17), and Love’s Work, published shortly before her death in 1995, is a play on the title of Kierkegaard’s Works of Love [1847]. This book by Kierkegaard, alongside his Concept of Anxiety [1844], is central, for Rose, as it addresses, among other things, the anxiety of beginning, love and death, and the speculative possibility of transcending time and the limits of lived physical existence through a belief in ‘eternity’.

Love and death

A key question for Kierkegaard (2014) and Rose ( see 1992), and, arguably, for modern Western sociology and philosophy more generally, is where to begin. Given the centrality of his work for Rose’s later speculative sociology, one starting place is Kierkegaard’s writings on love and death. Zygmunt Bauman is one of the few sociologists aside from Rose to engage with Kierkegaard’s work (Maeve Cooke is another notable exception, see Cooke, 2021). In his brilliant but neglected book Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies, Bauman observes that modern societies make a ‘spatial separation between life and death through the exclusion of the dead – making the dead “cease to exist”’ (1992: 24). Kierkegaard anticipates this observation, and, by way of response, implores us ‘go out to the dead in order there to get a look at life’, for ‘no thinker has power over life as does death’ (1964: 317). Kierkegaard insists, however, that any relation to the dead, and, to death as a form of the absolute, must proceed on a strictly ethical basis, for the dead are never able to return our love, and, because of this, we have ‘duties’ towards them (1964: 319). Kierkegaard instructs us to care for the dead: we should love them for the ‘MOST UNSELFISH’ reasons (1964: 320, emphasis original). To do so, we should remain in their debt, and the work they leave behind should be used with care and responsibility. For this reason, our relation to the dead should never be founded on a principle of ‘self-love’ (1964: 322), but rather proceed through a ‘sacrificial disinterestedness’ (1964: 336) that is guided by a selfless ethics of love for the Other.

Such an ethics is of sociological significance, and potentially a companion to a speculative sociology that seeks to find possibility in seemingly an impossible task or relation, because it can orientate this-worldly conduct in three ways. First, to ‘rightly understand life’, Kierkegaard argues, we must care for the dead because it is our duty to love those ‘we do not see’ as well as ‘those we do see’ (1964: 329). Second, in loving the dead we can develop an ethical understanding ourselves, and, potentially, can discover values to guide conduct between self and Other in the present. For Kierkegaard, death reveals our ourselves to ourselves as it is ‘the occasion which continually reveals what resides in the one living who relates himself’ (1964: 319). More than this, death can reveal possibilities that can be found in the Other: ‘in loving them [the dead] I shall also meet with the dearest among the living’ (1964: 333). Third, Kierkegaard reminds us that, we in due course, will also die, and asks how we want to be remembered once the immediate experiential memories of us ‘crumble’ away (1964: 324) - presumably on an ethical basis with love from others?

While Rose dismisses Kierkegaard’s ethics of love, a point that will be addressed in further detail below, in Love’s Work and Mourning Becomes the Law, published posthumously in 1996, she develops a speculative sociological position that draws from his work in order to reject the existential philosophies of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas. For Rose, these thinkers are resigned in the face of the absolute because they understand death as nothingness, as that which brings the end of all possibility. In line with the argument of Hegel Contra Sociology, Rose terms such thinking ‘existential nihilism’, for while it understands death as a nothingness that gives value to life, it treats death as finality that is marked by the loss of all power when, instead, it should be seen as more than an ending; as ‘civilisation, achievement, the risk of the day’ (1996: 111). Rose explains: ‘For Heidegger, the nothingness of death founds human freedom, for Levinas, it devastates human freedom, by making us “no longer able to be able”’ (1996: 134). Or, to frame this statement differently: ‘Both strive to present the fate of finitude. The definition of death as the “possibility of nothing”, or as the “impossibility of nothing”, presupposes a being with no inner relation to the meaning of death, a being whose finitude is in no determinate relation to transcendence’ (1996: 134). The possibility of impossibility or impossibility of possibility, then, in Rose’s terms, amount to the same thing: a failure to think the absolute, and with this a resignation of reason in the face of precisely that which needs to be thought: death. In line with her earlier outline and call for a speculative sociology, Rose implores us, instead, not to be resigned to nothingness, and to find the possibility of possibility, even in death, and with this its obverse: the impossibility of impossibility. Put simply, Rose seeks to find life, and with this possibility, in the face of that which presents itself as being impossible.

This speculative search for possibility is developed from the writings of Kierkegaard, who, in his idea of the strength of the absurd, asserts that it is still possible to be young even in the face of death, regardless of age, and to dare to find possibility in despair. The Greek myth of Orpheus is instructive here. Whereas, for Blanchot (1989), Orpheus enters Hades not to save Eurydice but to witness or see death first hand, Kierkegaard stives for the impossible: to save Eurydice from death even though her fate, seemingly, has been sealed by Orpheus’ gaze. Kierkegaard (1992) declares: ‘Show me her, show me a possibility that looks like an impossibility; show me her in the shadows of the underworld, I shall fetch her up’ (p. 269). This spirit returns in The Broken Middle, in which Rose argues that possibility in life and death cannot be realised without risk. She writes: ‘life must be risked in order to be gained; that only by discovering the limit of life - death - is “life” itself discovered, and recalcitrant otherness opens its potentialities and possibilities’ (1992: 16).

Rose finds poetic expression of these potentialities and possibilities, above all, in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus [1923]. Rose positions her reading of Rilke’s Sonnets against that of Blanchot, for whom, she argues, death is not possibility but the end of possibility and the beginning of impossibility. Blanchot’s view is that ‘Orpheus does not signify the eternity and the immutability of the poetic sphere, but, on the contrary, links the “poetic” to an immeasurable demand that we disappear’ (1989: 156). Blanchot terms this an ‘extreme’ form of dying, or rather an ‘impure transcendence, that which we never meet, which we cannot grasp: the ungraspable; absolute indeterminacy’ (1989: 154). This reading of Rilke finds an earlier expression in Virgil’s (2006: 92) extraordinary conclusion to Orpheus in Georgics:

So she spoke, and suddenly like wisps of smoke, she vanished in thin air. She watched him for the final time, while he, with so much still to say, attempted to cling onto shadows.

For in vanishing into thin air, Eurydice, ‘like wisps of smoke’, is gone for ever, into nothing.

Rose staunchly opposes this reading of Orpheus and argues that the ‘nihilism’ of figures such as Blanchot discredits and disregards ‘eternity’ and leads philosophy ‘to damage if not to destroy itself’ (1996: 1), as death understood as nothingness resigns us to mourning while, at the same time, denies the philosophical resources necessary to overcome loss. Whereas Blanchot develops his position from a sonnet that centres on vanishing and disappearance, Rose chooses another of Rilke’s sonnets that offers hope. She renders this sonnet in English as follows:

Be ever dead in Eurydice – arise singing with greater praise, rise again to the pure relation.

Here among the fleeting, be, in the realm of declination

be a resonant glass that shatters while it is ringing (Rilke in Rose, 1996: 145).

For Rose, these lines call for an ‘active affirmation’ of life in death (to ‘arise singing’) rather than the endless and repetitive lamentation of that which is lost. Such affirmation can be achieved, she argues, by finding the ‘eternal’ in moments that appear to us as ‘fleeting’. This position hinges, again, on a reading of Rilke, for rather than see finality and nothingness in the ‘glass that shatters’, instead this moment of the absolute contains the promise of ‘endurance’ and ‘eternity’ (1996: 146).

However, to develop this reading of Rilke against Blanchot, Rose amends C.F. MacIntyre’s translation of this sonnet, and in so doing changes its emphasis. In a newer translation of the Sonnets, Martyn Crucefix renders the final two lines cited above, more accurately, as

Here among fading things in a realm of decline,

be a ringing glass shattered by its own sound (2012: 93).

This difference in translation is subtle but important. For whereas Rose translates Schwindenden as ‘fleeting’, fading is more accurate and implies that death is accompanied by loss and ‘decline’ (rather than ‘declination’ in Rose), or Reiche der Neige; literally, a time and a place in which life’s riches are diminishing or running out, down to their last remnants. And in place of Rose’s ‘resonant glass that shatters while it is ringing’ (1996: 146), death becomes ‘a ringing glass shattered by its own sound’ (2012: 93) [‘ein klingendes Glas, das sich im Klang schon zerschlug’]. This is important, for whereas Rose reads these lines as offering the possibility of resonance, endurance and eternity in death, in Crucefix’s translation the glass shatters itself in its final moment of brilliance and, once broken, the glass can no longer ring. What is left from death, rather than endurance and eternity, are, rather, fragments of life that, at best, offer hope in the face of ‘fading things in a realm of decline’.

Rose’s translation, of Schwindenden as fleeting rather than fading is tendentious but, at the same time, serendipitous, as, implicitly, it questions whether it is possible for the empirical or experiential richness of human life to be kept alive or somehow remain intact even after death? Is it possible to stop what Bauman (2023) calls ‘life fragments’ being lost in time, or, in the words of Rose (1996: 145), can we ‘magnify the eternal in the fleeting’? Rilke’s Sonnets address precisely this question as they narrate what is lost in death; those fleeting and transitory moments of human life that are born out of a relation to an Other and which seem destined to be lost in time. In a sonnet preceding the one cited by Rose, Rilke writes:

What did we once glimpse with our eyes

Staring at the hearth, its slow burning-coal?

Visions of life – forever lost to us (2012: 71).

This appears to lead to a vision of death as an ‘infinite winter’ (endlos Winter; Rilke, 2012: 93) or in Blanchot’s reading to an infinite void of nothingness in which everything is ‘forever lost’. But in the face of loss and of human decline (Reich der Neige), there is, for Rilke, still the possibility of self-affirmation:

And if all that is earthly knows you no more,

Declare this to the still world: I flow

And say this to the hurrying waters: I am (Rilke, 2012: 125).

In Rilke, then, there is good reason to fear what is lost forever in death – the shattered glass that can no longer ring – but there is also something precious both in what remains and in the human defiance of the absolute.

Rose takes the latter from Rilke, the idea of continued life in death or ‘I flow’, and refuses to be resigned to that which is ‘forever lost to us’. In the face of her own ill health, she continues to assert life in the form of Rilke’s ‘I am’ and declares, defiantly, that ‘This death is not nothing’ (1996: 146). Rose, however, is not alone in turning to the poetry of Rilke to understand the meaning of her own death. Jean-Paul Sartre, in a key section of Being and Nothingness entitled ‘My Death’, analyses the same sonnet by Rilke and explains that the reason that death, to use Rose’s words, is ‘not nothing’ is because, when we die, ‘it becomes mine’ (2020: 691): it is ‘internalised’ and ‘individualised’ and, as a consequence, ‘is no longer the great unknowable by which a human is limited, but the phenomenon of my personal life which makes this life into a unique life’ (2020: 691). For Sartre, it is precisely this movement that is anticipated by Rilke, for whom life is ‘finite but unlimited’, and for whom also ‘death becomes the meaning of life, just as the resolution chord is the meaning of the melody’ (2020: 691). Hence, there is no shattered glass that continues to ring, but rather the anticipation of silence as the resolution to the music of life. Indeed, it is precisely this finitude that makes life life. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre reflects that

one side of a melody’s final chord turns, in its entirety, towards silence, i.e. towards the nothingness of sound that will follow the melody; in one sense it is made out of silence, since the silence that will follow is already present in the resolution chord as its meaning. But, by another side entirely, it adheres to that plenum of being in which the melody in question consists: without it, this melody would remain in mid-air, and this final indecision would reach back upstream, note by note, to confer on each one of them an unfinished character. Rightly or wrongly – as we are not yet able to determine – death has always been regarded as the final term of human life (2020: 690).

Sartre warns, anticipating the later position of Rose, that we should not be seduced by seeking freedom or possibility in death. Instead, death should be understood as that which gives form and meaning to life; it is that which reveals ourselves to ourselves, and, potentially, ourselves to others. For this reason, he declares that ‘any temptation to regard it as a resolution chord at the end of a melody must be strictly pushed away’ (2020: 692). Life, he argues, is not resolved by death but, rather, death should animate life just as the anticipation of silence brings life to the melody that precedes it. We should also be aware that death can come at any moment, and for this reason we ought ‘to compare ourselves to someone sentenced to death who is bravely preparing himself for his execution’ (2020: 692). We should, then, never postpone thinking about our death, but use death to animate our this-worldly conduct on an ethical basis, guided by the thought that it might be our last living act.

Rose does not engage with Sartre but advances her own account of what he calls ‘my death’; one that asserts the importance of risk in the face of fate. She draws her concept of risk from the second part of Freud’s 1915 essay ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’. In this text, Freud (1957) observes that, in modern culture, there is a ‘tendency to put death on one side, to eliminate it from life’ (p. 289), and, following the death of an Other, for ‘our hope, our desires and our pleasures’ to ‘lie in the grave’ with them (1957: 290). This, Freud argues, results in a conservative attitude towards death, one that ‘exerts a powerful effect upon our lives’, as ‘Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked’ (1957: 290). Rose draws from Freud the idea that there are two relations to death: one passive, which involves the reduction of chance, and with this, the endless repetition of the same, and the other ‘active’, ‘positive’ and perhaps speculative that comes from ‘risking one’s life’, ‘daring death’ (1992: 104) and ‘death beyond the person’ (1992: 109). It is not exactly clear what Rose means by ‘death beyond the person’, but Freud provides one answer, as he observes that the ‘doctrine of the soul’, ‘the belief in immortality’ and ‘the earliest ethical commandments’ came into existence ‘beside the dead body of the loved one’ (1957: 295). Rose responds by asserting that risk in the face of death also includes authorship, including sociological authorship, which is a means for self-assertion, the discovery of possibility in the face of the absolute, and, potentially, becoming more than oneself beyond the limits of physical life. Through authorship, it is possible to die what Rose calls a ‘proud death’ by looking ‘death in the face’ (1996: 112), not to see death to affirm the limitations and powers of the self, as in Blanchot’s reading of Orpheus, but rather to renew ‘virtue in life and death’ and to ‘know the violence at the heart of the human spirit’ so that we can give ‘death back its determination and its eternity’ (1996: 140–141).

In making this declaration, Rose works in the spirit not just of Kierkegaard, in seeking to find the possible in what is seemingly impossible, and Freud through the assertion of risk, but also of Nietzsche. Rose’s reading of Nietzsche, however, is complex. On one hand, it is consistent with the position she develops through Kierkegaard and Freud: that Zarathustra’s instruction to value the will to power rather than simply life itself is an answer to the ‘tired’ existential position that the precondition of ‘life’s possibility’ is the ‘nothingness of death’ (1996: 139). But, on the other hand, it advances a voluntaristic reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy of death as it calls for ‘the affirmation of the will in the idea of the voluntary’ (1996: 140). This is problematic as it reduces Zarathustra’s call to ‘Die at the right time’ (1969: 97) to an understanding of death that is framed in terms of free will and individual choice. This emphasis on the voluntary comes from R. J. Hollingdale’s mistranslation of the title of this section of Zarathustra - Vom freien Tode – as ‘Of Voluntary Death’ instead ‘Of Free Death’ (see 1969: 97–99), which, as a consequence, elevates the idea of the voluntary over Nietzsche’s (1969) theory of fate, expressed most famously in his idea of amor fati, or love of fate. Rose neglects two passages that, even in Hollingdale’s translation, deal with precisely this point. One is consistent with Rose’s commitment to affirmation through the voluntarism of will: ‘I want to die myself, that you friends may love the earth more for my sake; and I want to become earth again, that I may have peace in her that bore me (p. 99). The other, however, is harder to reconcile with this position as it refuses to think of death outside of fate, and, more than this, considers amor fati as central to the affirmation of both life and death. In this reading, death is not voluntary for freedom is seen, instead, to come from the recognition that there is a right, although not necessarily just, time to die. Zarathustra declares: ‘Free for death and free in death, one who solemnly says No when there is no longer a time for Yes: thus he understands life and death’ (1969: 99).

For thinkers who push this Nietzschean logic further, such as Jean Baudrillard, the idea that voluntaristic freedom can ever escape fate is purely an illusion, as narrated, famously, in Death in Samarra; a myth that can be traced to the Babylonian Talmud. Rose, however, advances a different position: that we should not be resigned to fate but risk ourselves in the face of death, even if not under conditions of our own choosing. Rose here turns to Max Weber, who in his lecture ‘Politics as a Vocation’, calls for the political leader to attempt what is seemingly impossible: to subordinate an ethics of conviction to an ethics of responsibility in the making of political choices that, because they are underpinned by the means of violence, may still have diabolical consequences (see Gane, 1997). It is in the face of such a challenge, Weber argues, that the leader who can still say ‘“In spite of all!” has the calling for politics’ (1948: 128). This political ethic should not be confined to the vocation of the political leader but guide an active mediation of human fate more generally. In a passage that could come from Rose’s early work on speculative sociology and later writings on death and possibility, Weber declares: ‘Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible . . . And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes’ (1948: 128). As in Rose, the task is to seek possibility in the face of that which is seemingly impossible, and with this find hope, even when, in Weber words, ‘Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness . . . ’ (1948: 128).

Eternity, ethics and political theology

In her final interview in 1995 (see Lloyd, 2008), Rose returns to this question of fate by asserting the importance of a belief in eternity, which, as stated above, is drawn from a reading of Rilke, and which frames her critique of the ‘existential nihilism’ of figures such as Blanchot and Heidegger (see Rose, 1996:14). In this interview, she declares:

It’s the only thing I believe in [laughter]. If there is eternity, then it’s now, and it’s at all time. So it’s the only thing you can believe in, because, after all, time is devastation. You can’t believe in time. Time is going to destroy you. You can’t believe in time, you have to believe in eternity (2008: 217).

Rose’s laughter indicates playfulness and suggests that eternity it is not, in fact, the only thing she believes in. But, nonetheless, this appeal to eternity as that which is timeless or exists outside of time, from the Latin aeternitas, from aeternus ‘without beginning or end’, is underpinned by a serious philosophical position. Indeed, Rose is not alone in asserting the importance of a belief in eternity. Levinas, in an essay on ‘Judaism and the Present’, observes that ‘Eternity is necessary to a person, and even in our own day it has been sought by the most lucid thinkers’ (1990: 212); a position he develops elsewhere through an engagement with the work of Franz Rosenzweig (see 1990: 194–201). Rose rejects the work of Levinas on the grounds that it is fundamentally ‘apolitical’ (see below), and, again, turns to Rilke’s Sonnets for inspiration. In so doing, she also opposes Blanchot, whose reading of Rilke centres on Orpheus’ death, which is both finite and infinite because it crosses the limit of human experience and perception; ‘he’s where you cannot follow him . . . ’ (Rilke, 2012: 23; Blanchot, 1989: 156). Rose’s position, instead, seeks to find possibility in death, in that glass that continues to ring and in a resolution chord, the beauty of which we continue to hear. Whereas in Rilke there is defiance in the face of nothingness (the infinite winter), in Rose there is defiance in the face both of the absolute and in a philosophy of nothingness; defiance that sees possibility or ‘resonance’ in eternity. Here, Rose (1995) renews her commitment to speculative sociology and insists that you are ‘always more powerful than yourself’ (p. 55), not simply through the possibility of religious transcendence but also through this-worldly forms of authorship that transcend physical life through the creation of works that continue to resound. In Paradiso, a fragment published posthumously, Rose (1999: 44) expresses this possibility that comes from thinking the absolute by citing Teresa of Avila’s Nada te Turbe [Let Nothing Disturb You]: ‘Que muero porque no muero’ [‘I die because I do not die’].

While not considered by Rose, such commitment to a belief in eternity can be used to develop a this-worldly ethics, and, again, the work of Kierkegaard is a key resource for this purpose. In his 1844 book, The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard writes that time is an ‘infinite succession’, and that life bounded by time has ‘no present’ and is ultimately meaningless as it is effaced by the movement from past to future, or what he calls the ‘infinitely vanishing’ (2014: 105). It is for this reason, for Rose that ‘You can’t believe in time. Time is going to destroy you’ and, instead, ‘you have to believe in eternity’ (2008: 217). For, as Kierkegaard explains, eternity is ‘the annulled succession’; that which binds each moment of lived experience to a possible future. It is the future, in the form of eternity, of that which is timeless, then, that gives the present content and meaning. In Kierkegaard’s words: ‘the instant is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity’, and more than this: ‘Only in the instant does history begin’ (2014: 108). Kierkegaard presents four alternatives that lead to different conceptualisations of the eternal (see 2014: 183–186). First, one can deny the possibility of the eternal in ‘man’; a position that will result in endless anxiety about both the future and the present. Second, one can construe the eternal ‘abstractly’, meaning that the eternal becomes the ‘boundary of the temporal’; a boundary that those who continue to live in time can never reach, let alone transcend. Third, eternity can be ‘bent into time for the imagination’ through art as ‘an anticipation of eternal life’; an act, Kierkegaard observes, that can produce ‘an enchanting effect’ (2014: 184). And fourth, eternity can be ‘constructed metaphysically’ through the repetition of an Ich–Ich [I–I] in pursuit of a ‘pure I’ or ‘the eternal self-consciousness’ of the individual ego.

Kierkegaard’s later Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846) and The Moment (1855) reconsider the relation of time to eternity and develop an ethical position that is quite different to anything found in the work of Rose, but which nonetheless can be used to compliment and expand the vision of ethical life advanced at the outset of her speculative sociology. Whereas Kierkegaard concludes The Concept of Anxiety by asserting the necessity of faith for an individual ‘to be formed . . . absolutely and infinitely by possibility’ (2014: 189), and thus to escape time through a belief in eternity, these later texts tie this possibility to an individual’s this-worldly moral conduct. In The Moment, Kierkegaard declares that there is ‘an eternity for repenting’ (1998: 285), and we should remember not only that ‘one lives only once’ but also that there are some forms of loss that are ‘eternally irreparable’, and, for this reason, contra Rose, eternity is not just about possibility but instead the ‘eternal recollection of what is lost’ (1998: 295). Kierkegaard argues that eternity is tied to an ‘accounting’ or balance sheet of rights and wrongs within ‘which nothing is forgotten’ (1998: 274), and, because of this, the very idea of eternity should be ‘continually introduced counteractingly’ (1998: 549) to discipline self-conduct. This is a key point as, framed in this way, the question is no longer how to find possibility in the eternity of the self, but rather how to find possibility, in life and death, for the benefit of the Other. This returns us to the question of ethics that, for Rose, emerges through the speculative attempt to think the absolute. Kierkegaard’s answer is that it is the future that gives the present and the past meaning, and, for this reason, each moment or instant of human conduct should be lived ethically, as the consequences of our actions can, potentially, live forever and become timeless. This is perhaps recognised by Rose in stating that ‘If there is eternity, then it’s now and it’s at all time’ (2008: 217). Kierkegaard insists, however, anticipating Rose’s later position, that the future is that which is possible (2014: 111) but, importantly, also the eternity of a past that cannot be changed and for which one is and should be responsible. It is for precisely this reason that Weber insists in ‘Politics as a Vocation’ that the political leader should temper personal conviction with responsibility by weighing up the consequences of their actions. Similarly, for Kierkegaard, the ‘moment’, or our actions in the present, may well become eternal or timeless, not simply in individual or ‘subjective’ life, but, potentially, on a ‘world-historical’ scale (2014: 159). Because of this, Kierkegaard advances a stark warning that we should not be consumed with our own possibility in the form of a ‘fantastical’ (2014: 193) or ‘deluded’ (2014: 201) ‘I-I’. Instead, he argues that our actions should be guided by love for the other, or what he calls a relation of ‘infinite interestedness’ (1992: 326). This is in keeping with the ethical position outlined by Kierkegaard in Works of Love, which calls for ‘a reciprocal relationship’ between self and other that is ‘infinite on both sides’ (2014: 176). This ethics heeds Sartre’s warning that we should not be preoccupied with possibility in the physical death of the self. Instead, it calls for the transcendence of the individual ego by, in Kierkegaard’s words, developing an ethic based on the duty of love whereby ‘the distinction between mine and yours disappears’ (2014: 248–249), as love ‘seeks not its own’ because ‘the true lover does not love his own individuality’ (2014: 251).

While it might appear possible to develop such an ethics by reading between Rose’s work on death and possibility and Kierkegaard’s writings on love and anxiety, in her final interview, Rose declares the following:

There’s this awful divorce between philosophy, which thinks it’s interested in ethics, and social and political thought, which is more sociological. They’ve got to be brought together somehow . . . I think that, in the wake of the perceived demise of Marxism and of Heidegger’s Nazism, everybody’s looking for an ethics. But in fact they should be looking for a political theology. We need to think about God and the polis and not about this anodyne ‘love ethic’ (Rose in Lloyd, 2008: 210).

This statement rules out an appeal to an ethics based on Kierkegaard’s conception of love for the Other, but it is not clear exactly why. Why is a ‘love ethic’, developed from Kierkegaard or any other thinker, necessarily ‘anodyne’? Why is an appeal to a ‘political theology’ preferable? And why is it necessarily the case that such a theology is incompatible with an ethics based upon the principle of love for the Other?

Rose’s call for a political theology, on first sight, might be read as an allusion to the work of Carl Schmitt, whose book Political Theology opens with the famous declaration that the ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’ (2005: 5). But this is not the case as Rose herself advances a ‘new political theology’ in the final chapter of The Broken Middle (see 1992: 247–307). In this text and in Judaism and Modernity, she opposes emergent forms of communitarian and neoliberal politics that split apart or ‘dirempt’ ethics from law, as well as ‘new’ ethical alternatives that reproduce this position by asserting the pure alterity of ‘the Other’ and, in so doing, refuse ‘any relation to law’ (2003: 10). In Mourning Becomes the Law, Rose stands against what she calls ‘the purity of politics’ and insists, instead, that it is vital to recognise ‘the violence at the heart of the human spirit’ (1996: 141). Here, Rose follows Max Weber, who defines the modern state as ‘a community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ (Weber, 1948: 78), and, more than this, argues that politics is a value-sphere that ‘operates with very special means, namely, power backed up by violence’ (Weber, 1948: 119). For Rose, no human relations exist outside of power, and, hence, there is no possibility, to use the concept of Giddens (1992), of a ‘pure relationship’, even in love. It would be naïve to think otherwise, and thus naïve, too, to assume that there can be an ethics founded upon such a relationship; one that seeks love in abstraction from power.

Rose is right: it is essential to identify and analyse power and violence not just in the operation of the modern nation-state, but in all human relationships, and to place law, and with this, sovereignty, under continued sociological scrutiny. For this reason, a speculative sociology should never be divorced from a critical theory and analysis of the historical conditions of power and possibility. The appeal of political theology, as Newman (2019) observes, is that it can be used to question ‘new forms of governmental, economic and technological power that emerge with the modern state’, and, with this, the ‘form of transcendence’ that takes place in ‘modern societies’ through which ‘Rather than religion becoming power, power becomes religion’ (p. 19). However, contrary to Rose’s position, a political theology that centres on structural questions of power, sovereignty, law, and violence need not be incompatible with a sociological ethics based upon a principle of love. In Mourning Becomes the Law, Rose opposes the ‘intensified’ individualism of post-modernity (see 1996: 76), and of libertarian and neoliberal politics. But such opposition need not exclude, and can potentially even benefit from, an accompanying altruistic ethics for the other, or what might also be called an ethics of love; one neither formulated in abstraction from the consideration of power and violence, nor necessarily apolitical, passive or nihilistic in basis. The work of Kierkegaard is a valuable resource for such an undertaking, as is that of Levinas, from which Bauman (1989), in Modernity and the Holocaust, develops an argument for a normative sociological morality.

First, from Kierkegaard, it is possible to develop an ethics based upon love for the Other, both in life and death, that moves beyond a self-absorbed preoccupation with what he calls the ‘I-I’ of the individual ego. For Kierkegaard, love is never a theoretical or conceptual abstraction but rather than an ‘ethical actuality’ that takes the form of an ‘act’ (1964: 182), or what he calls a ‘knowing’ and a ‘doing’ (1992: 161). Love is an altruistic relation that can fill the ‘broken middle’ between state and individual by guiding this-worldly forms of conduct on the basis of our foundational debts to others. Such an ethics need not be ‘anodyne’, as argued by Rose, for, as Kierkegaard observes, love is always accompanied by the anxiety of death, both death as the limit of the ego and death of the love of the Other that gives individual life meaning and value. Kierkegaard reminds us that any act towards an Other can potentially be timeless, ‘eternal’ and can have ‘world-historical’ consequences. For this reason, Weber insists in ‘Politics as a Vocation’, that our power in relation to others should always be tempered by responsibility for their fate, and, because of this, the power of the individual self should be guided by an accompanying ethics. This point is also addressed by Sartre, whose major contribution in Being and Nothingness is to develop a concept of being-for-the-Other. This work, implicitly, contains a response to Rose’s later declaration in Love’s Work, that ‘you are always more powerful than yourself’ (1995: 55), for you can be more powerful than yourself only through a relation with an Other. The danger of Rose’s declaration, read through Sartre, is that, ultimately, a speculative attempt to think the absolute risks reproducing the Heideggerian position that it seeks to oppose, namely that ‘To be . . . is to be one’s own possibilities, to make oneself be’ (Sartre, 2020: 338). A speculative sociological alternative, guided by the ethics of love advanced by Kierkegaard, is that our power to think the absolute makes possible ethical and social relations beyond a ‘fantastical’ or ‘deluded’ reduction of Being to the I-I of selfhood. Indeed, the power of selfhood must be tempered by love; by ‘a reciprocal relationship’ that is ‘infinite on both sides’ (Kierkegaard, 1964: 176).

Second, it is possible for speculative sociology that moves beyond the repetitive I-I of libertarian and neoliberal subjectivity to be guided by an ethics developed from the philosophy of Levinas. Rose dismisses Levinas’ work on for attempting to develop ‘ethics as the ego-less substitution of one for “the other”’ (1996: 13–14). This, she argues, results in ‘passivity beyond passivity’ (1996: 13–14) and not only ‘a complete disinterest in political virtue’ (Rose, 1996:135), but, more than this, a retreat from politics, which is ‘the risk of action arising out of negotiation of the law’ (Rose, 1996: 85). Contrary to Rose, however, Levinas, in works such as Totality and Infinity, moves from being, or ontology, to ethics in a relation to an Other; a relation that is intrinsically political for it ‘puts in question any attempt to add a political dimension to the ethical relation; the latter is already implicated in a political movement’ (Caygill, 2002: 96). The spirit of this intrinsic relation between ethics and politics is formulated beautifully by Levinas in his writings on the Hanukkah, in which he develops a non-instrumental ethics that transcends life beyond the self-interested ego. In his words: ‘It concerns the infinite resources of the spirit that, as a creator, surpasses the prudence of techniques; without calculation, without past, it joyfully pours forth its feelings in space, freely and prodigiously entering into the cause of the Other’ (Levinas, 1990: 230).

Bauman translates this philosophical idea of being-for-the-Other into a sociological ethics that stands in radical opposition to the fundamental principle of libertarianism and neoliberalism: self-interest (see Gane, 2014, 2023). Like Rose, Bauman’s position is framed by a critique of Heidegger, but for a different reason. Bauman does not contest Heidegger’s understanding of death as nothingness, and, indeed, deems ‘the horror and panic of discovery of ... nothingness as the content, the hard core of being’ (Bauman, 1992: 41). Rather, Bauman opposes Heidegger’s concept of Mitsein (being with others), and, in its place, advocates a sociological ethics based on a principle of Being-for-the-Other. Such an ethics is neither ‘anodyne’ nor ‘passive’, to use Rose’s words, because it is based, fundamentally, on ‘readiness for self-sacrifice’ guided by a will to live for the Other. A comparable position can be found in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, which moves beyond Heidegger by placing the idea of ‘Being-for-the-Other’ at the centre of analysis (see 2020: 305–565), and develops the position of Kierkegaard (Sartre, 2020: 330) by asserting that ‘it is in my essential being that I depend on the Other’s essential being, and my being for myself does not need to be opposed to my being for the Other; far from it, being-for-the-Other appears as a necessary condition of my being for myself’ (2020: 328). For Bauman, this idea of being-for-the-Other is, or should be, the guiding principle of a sociological morality founded upon altruism. Against a libertarian and neoliberal politics of self-interest, Bauman asserts the need for a morality that ‘puts the other’s survival above one’s own . . . and stretches as far as the preference to die rather than see the Other dying’ (1992: 202). In so doing, Bauman answers the central question posed by Rose in Love’s Work: how to be more powerful than oneself? His answer is simple: ‘Unless “I am for’, I am not’ (Bauman, 1992: 40).

This maxim provides a response to Weber’s judgement in ‘Science as a Vocation’ that death and hence life have become meaningless in the modern world. For Bauman, meaning is not contained purely within the self, but is born out of an ethical relation with an Other. He writes: ‘My responsibility for the Other is my importance – all the importance I have, I may have and may dream of having’ (1992: 202). Bauman rejects the work of Sartre, who, he argues, ‘suggested that ego is born of self-knowledge, but that this self-knowledge is triggered by the gaze of the Other’, in favour of Levinas, for whom ‘The self may be born only out of union. It is through stretching myself towards the Other that I have become the unique, the only, the irreplaceable self that I am’ (1993: 77). The sociological consequence of this is an ethical one: that it is only by abdicating sovereignty ‘in the face of the Other’ by taking ‘responsibility for the Other’ that we can stop ‘the meaningless, rumbling clamour of the “there is”’ (1992: 41–42). In this view, death is not necessarily meaningless; it is only meaningless if self-interested individualism comes to dominate over being-for-the-Other, and it is only through ‘being for’ by being responsible for the Other that it is possible to restore meaning to death, and with this, life (see 1992: 50), and overcome what Merleau-Ponty (2002) calls ‘the dread of being outstripped’ (p. 424). This position provides an answer to Rose and Kierkegaard’s question of eternity, and to Weber’s analysis of the meaningless of individual life in the face of cultural and scientific ‘progress’. It also provides the grounds for a speculative sociology in which the generative power of the absolute is inseparable from ethical life, a point that fades from view in Rose’s later work.

This returns us to Rose’s speculative sociology and to the critique, in her final writings, of an ‘existential nihilism’ that ‘can itself only confront death as nothing’ (1996: 138) because it presupposes ‘a being with no inner relation to the meaning of death, a being whose finitude is in no determinate relation to transcendence’ (1996: 134). Bauman’s work is important because it returns to the ethical and social relations that, for Rose, are born out of the attempt to think the absolute, and insists that it is only possible to think the absolute by thinking with and for the Other, with no self-interested expectation of anything in return. For this reason, Bauman (1992, 1993) argues, following Levinas, that it is by living for the Other that death can be more than ‘depersonalised nothingness’ as it can be both meaningful and transcendent. Thus, whereas, for Rose, the problem with Levinas’s work is that ‘it devastates human freedom, by making us “no longer able to be able”’ (1996: 134), the reverse is possible: that by seeking justice for the Other we are able to be able. At the same time, however, Bauman reminds us, rightly, of the potential for the ‘gentle touch of love’ to become ‘an iron grip of power’ (1995: 103). Love does not exist in a ‘transcendental register’ (Lloyd, 2009:2), and, for both Rose and Bauman, is never immune from power or criticism. It is precisely for this reason that a speculative sociology should seek, as in Kierkegaard, to transcend the I-I of the individual ego by seeking possibility in and through love for the Other, but only by adhering to an ethics of responsibility that confronts violence in all its forms: in law, in sovereignty, in death, and potentially even in love.