On Gillian Rose

This essay starts with a Hampstead anecdote. A few years ago my wife and son met a friendly man, a "political philosopher who commuted to Durham' in a local store. My wife noted, with bemusement, that when she mentioned my name as a fellow political philosopher he should meet, he seemed to have a vague sense of familiarity with my name. After some reflection (recall), I said "was it David Held?" yes. As it happens Held and I did encounter each other a few times around the neighborhood, but we never had a conversation.

I encountered the memorial plaque to Gillian Rose by chance in St John-at-Hampstead Churchyard Extension during an organized treasure hunt with my son and a friend of his through Hampstead on a sunny winter day. I was  immediately struck by her early death. I had a vague sense of having seen some of her books, but as the boys had moved on searching for the next clue, I did not pause on it. Later that day I posted the picture on facebook, and some friends commented on her loss. I made a mental note to look for her works this Summer.

A few months ago Verso had a sale, and I bought Jacqueline Rose's The Last Resistance, a collection of essays. In her preface she writes,

[T]wo ways of thought make their mark, as they always have for me, against the darkness of the times. One is psychoanalysis, in its ability to uncover truths that would remain hidden, and to unsettle the most rigid forms of identity as they play themselves out across the stage of political life. The other is literature whose power to subvert the status quo received new urgency when the dominant cliches and deceptions of statehood, whether here and in the US or in Israel, have reached such new and mind-numbing heights.--(xi)

I think literature can do a lot, but I am rather skeptical about literature's power to subvert any political status quo today or in the future. I am also not very hopeful that psychoanalysis can uncover (previously hidden) truths. But I do agree that psychoanalysis can unsettle identities, including those that manifest themselves on political stages. Even so because psychoanalysis does not scale up very well, its political effects are by nature limited. So, I expected to dislike Rose's essays, and put them aside. 

Yesterday, I accidentally grabbed Rose's collection while packing for a trip to Dublin. I started reading her essays in no apparent order. Suddenly the title of the last essay, "On Gillian Rose," caught my attention. While I am on the second page, it becomes apparent they were sisters. Gillian Rose is quoted as "If I knew who or what I were I would not write." I underline the sentence in agreement. I like her, I decide. 

Jacqueline Rose's presents her sister as a critic of postmodernism, which, "against Athens," erects "a New Jerusalem," which uses (and then she quotes Gillian Rose) a "dangerously distorted and idealised presentation of Judaism as the sublime other of modernity." The distorted view radically separates ethics and politics." (225). I don't think this is true of all of postmodernism, but this captures nicely good grounds of unease about postmodernism. By contrast, Gillian Rose is presented as a thinker who thinks we are "never pure" and "always implicated in power." I underline some more.

Sadly, Jacqueline Rose's essay makes nu allusion to the plaque. This disappoints me because I am curious about the story about it. I wondered who decided on the identification 'philosopher' -- did any of the sisters wish to have her remembered as a sister?; given, as Jacqueline Rose makes abundantly clear, the significance of her Judaism to Gillian Rose, I wonder why it was erected in a non-Jewish burial ground. Google links me to a page that suggests she died in Coventry, but is buried in the churchyard with the memorial. I feel myself in the presence of a mystery

I pause. I remember once seeing a video of my late colleague, Jose Benardete, giving a memorial lecture for his brother, Seth. It must be difficult, I think, to do justice to the thought of another whose frailties you have known before they had transformed themselves into a "philosopher." Jacqueline Rose resolutely refuses us a glance at the philosopher in her family.

A closing end note to Jacqueline Rose's essay reveals the piece is connected to a presentation at the "memorial for the tenth anniversary of the death of Gillian Rose....chaired by David Held." I remember seeing David Held died a few weeks ago. We never did talk. 

Comments

[Graham White]

Andrew Shanks' biography of her is worth looking at.

[Howard B]

Dear Professor White, every once in a while, as in the Book of Exodus, there comes a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph. Our current epoch offers such a vexing pivot. To say the least, what it means to be Jewish, whether Israeli or in the Diaspora, is radically altered, as if in obedience to a new Calendar. The Israelis have become a warlike people and have discovered Jewish Jihad. For the life of me I can't fathom how we're the chosen people or have an historical mission, and although different, I can't see how we're unique in any profound way. I think there is only so much we can say because history will have the final word