Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
Summary
Gillian Rose is an important, but neglected philosopher. She is neglected partly because she is a difficult thinker, who revels in the difficulty of her philosophy, and partly because she is a creative thinker, who falls outside established and easily defined schools of thought. This book makes a case for the timely intervention of Rose's thought and introduces readers to its central themes, without stripping her work of the crucial element of struggle that is at its core. Rose's writing is not easily accessible; however, it rewards extended engagement and has important things to say to the contemporary Left. While, like many on the Left, Rose is acutely aware of the poverty and hubris of liberalism, she does not allow the dominance of liberal thought to lead her into resignation. She refuses to let frustration with the liberal order push her into the pathways that other thinkers have taken, offering an acute critique of those who advocate a melancholic encircling of trauma, a resigned acceptance of tragedy, an inward-looking celebration of alterity or a messianic interruption of linear historical time. Instead, Rose draws on idiosyncratic readings of thinkers such as Hegel, Adorno and Kierkegaard to underpin a dogged insistence that rather than abandoning law or reason, we should pursue an agonistic negotiation of actuality with Hegelian inaugurated mourning at its core. In short, Rose is of the Left, but also sharply critical of much Left-wing thought, insisting that it shirks the work of coming to know and risking political action, in the hope that we might instantiate a ‘good enough justice’.
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- Gillian RoseA Good Enough Justice, pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2012