When British philosopher Gillian Rose died in 1995, at the age of 48, succumbing to an aggressive and terminal form of ovarian cancer, her life and thought at once received new attention—not only from colleagues who knew her personally or were influenced by her work, but also from new readers and followers. Although she had by then published several philosophical works and was considered one of the leading neo‐Hegelians of her time, it was rather Rose's personal memoir, Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life (Reference RoseRose 2001), that established her reputation as a notable author and drew interest to her complex philosophical thought. Written in the months preceding her death, the memoir contains philosophical, historical, social, and personal reflections on life and death, love and desire, sexuality, illness, and disability. It alludes to the work of philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Adorno, and others, drawing the implications of theoretical questions to the most concrete aspects of human life: identity, agency, and love, in the face of mortality and finitude. In recent years, interest in Rose's work has been somewhat renewed, though to a limited extent. A conference commemorating the twentieth anniversary of her death produced a special issue of Telos with various essays re‐examining her work, and three of her important works—The Melancholy Science, Judaism and Modernity, and Love's Work—have been republished in new editions (Reference RoseRose 1978/2014; Reference RoseRose 1993/2017; Reference RoseRose 2001/2012). Yet in both the original and the renewed interest, a central aspect of her thought—the significance of being a woman, of gendered experience, and of sexuality—seems to remain unexplored; however, this is not accidental, as questions of feminism and gender identity have indeed never played a conspicuously central role in Rose's philosophical work. It is therefore not surprising that these aspects remained relatively marginal in the reception of her work. Nevertheless, the memoir Love's Work, Rose's final book published during her lifetime, makes clear that she was deeply concerned with these questions, retrospectively examining her own personal and intellectual life.

Rose's philosophical work examines the impact of modernity on the subject, her identity, cognition, agency, and desires, and seeks to decipher the coercive mechanisms of reason and power and their effect on the subject. In her conceptual discussions of subjective identity, ethics, and society, Rose offers a critical—in fact, Kierkegaardian and Adornian—reading of Hegel, in which she challenges the Hegelian theory of identity and elaborates further the notion of diremption—as a form of negative dialectics, as the impossibility of fully mediating between oppositions, of bridging the gaps between subjectivity and objective reality, and of mending what she calls the “broken middle” (Reference RoseRose 1992). At first glance, these theoretical discussions seem to remain far removed from the concrete questions of desire, sexuality, and personal and gender identity with which Rose is concerned in her memoir. Although the notion of diremption and the philosophical discussions of dialectics and negativity in the philosophical writings provide the basis for the personal reflections, and although the biographical memoir touches on the very philosophical problems that her theoretical work concerns, there seems to be no direct connection between the negative dialectics of diremption and the reflections on love, sexuality, gender, life, and death that Rose expounds so passionately in the personal memoir. Likewise, the reception of Rose's work addresses various dimensions of her thought: the dialectics of reason, social and political theory, theology both Christian and Jewish, memory, identity, and education—but precisely those intimate dimensions of her search for love, both as eros (desire and erotic love) and as agape (love as care and charity), both personally and philosophically, and the implications of this search for love for questions of sexual difference and gender identity, seem to have evaded the attention they merit.Footnote ¹

This article therefore seeks to illuminate the interrelations of love, gendered experience, and sexual difference in Gillian Rose's thought—which I would describe as a critical Hegelian (or, critical‐Hegelian, as implying and employing a critique of Hegel's philosophy) contribution to feminist theory—by connecting the abstract Hegelian arguments from her philosophical work with the concrete reflections and observations on life and death, love and mortality, power and desire in Rose's autobiographical‐philosophical monograph.

In the first part of the article (sections I–III), I will introduce Rose's notion of diremption as a critique of Hegel's dialectics of identity and mediation from the Kierkegaardian perspective of the singular individual and the existential experience of paradox. Drawing on The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society (Reference RoseRose 1992), in which Rose demonstrates the personal, social, and political implications of diremption through critical readings of texts from Kierkegaard and Adorno to Rahel Varnhagen, Rosa Luxemburg, and Hannah Arendt, I will discuss Rose's own, unique critical Hegelianism. In my discussion of the concept, I will argue that although these philosophical discussions by no means provide a distinct feminist theory, they may indeed offer meaningful incentives for reconstructing Rose's critical Hegelianism in order to examine its viable contribution to feminist thought.

In the second part of the article (sections IV–V), I will address these questions from the subjective, personal perspective Rose offers in her philosophical memoir, Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life. Written in the months following the diagnosis of an aggressive ovarian cancer, the book is a “reckoning with life” from the double perspective of, on the one hand, the diremption of life, the broken middle and the gaps that are present but intangible in human life (understood also in the biological, even medical, sense: as health or sickness); and, on the other hand, on the powers and powerlessness of love to face mortality and confront finitude, to negotiate the diremption. In my reading, I will examine the memoir in light of the philosophical work and the notion of diremption, to illuminate its implications for questions of love, mortality, and gender identity in the ethical and political sense. Although Rose never actually considered herself a feminist in the common sense—for reasons to which I will attend in this article—my aim is to illuminate and closely examine the meaning and interrelations of love, mortality, and human agency in the specific context of what may be considered Rose's own contribution to a critical, dialectical, Hegelian view of feminism—a contribution that she was not able to fully develop during her short lifetime, but for which, I argue here, her work provides unmissable incentives to think further and explore.

I. The Notion of Diremption: The Broken Middle within the Subject

The Hegelian notion of diremption is arguably the most important notion in Gillian Rose's thought. In Hegel, diremption means a split into two (Entzweiung), an “inner difference” between two oppositions within one whole, resulting in a violent separation, a tearing apart of a synthetic unity. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, describing human understanding of the absolute, Hegel contends that any absolute unity, as infinity, must be conceived of as an identity of differences: a self‐identical unity that contains elements that differ from one another. He describes the “two distinguished moments,” which “are implicit and are opposites in themselves; i.e. each is the opposite of itself; each has its ‘other’ within it and they are only one unity” (Reference HegelHegel 1977, 99–100). Whereas Hegel seeks (and presupposes) the necessary unity of these oppositions, a mediation as a mending of the violent split, Rose argues against the superficial and coercive character of such mediation. She reconstructs a “nonfoundationalist and radical Hegel” (Reference RoseRose 2001/2012, viii), drawing from Kierkegaard's and Adorno's critiques of Hegel: philosophies of nonidentity that derive from Hegel's philosophy of identity but reject its final stage of unity and identity of subject and object, particular and universal, morality and law. Diremption, as Rose understands it,

Such trauma of separation between two entities, concepts, or experiences that seem to form an integral unity exposes the lack of foundations that is intrinsic to the experience of that unity. In other words, Rose is interested in the inevitable process of breakage, split, separation of the middle, of mediation between oppositions. This is expressed by her notion of diremption, a Hegelian notion she employs rather to critique Hegel's philosophy of mediation. Diremption, for Rose, refuses to sustain the illusion that there can be, or that there has ever been, an integral unity between these oppositions. On the contrary, it recognizes the constitutive absence in its middle. Instead of pointing to a logical contradiction between two oppositions that seem to belong together but defy one another, Rose uses the vocabulary of “torn halves”—which she borrows, in fact, without providing a reference, from Adorno's correspondence with Benjamin on the autonomy of art (Reference Adorno, Benjamin and LonitzAdorno and Benjamin 2001, 130)—to denote breakage and the trauma of separation. Instead of attempting to mediate, to idealistically merge the oppositions into each other, as Hegel proposes, Rose insists on the reality of the breakage, of the split, which necessitates a rational confrontation with complex identity, love and desire, and mortality.

The broken middle, she writes, “investigate[s] the breaks between universal, particular, and singular, in individuals and institutions”; the opposition “between inner morality and outer legality, individual autonomy and general heteronomy, active cognition and imposed norm” (Reference RoseRose 1992, xii).Footnote ² She points to a correlation between, on the one hand, questions of subjectivity and identity: the “inner difference” within the subject; and, on the other hand, questions of morality and law, society and politics: the “inner difference” between the subject's human agency and the social and political structures within which she lives. The diremption applies to both spheres—the subjective‐individual and the objective‐social. “Made anxious by such inscrutable disjunctions,” Rose adds, “we invariably attempt to mend them … with love, forced or fantasized into the state” (xii). Here Rose in fact warns against false, simplistic, or one‐sided solutions; she warns of surrogate mediations: of erroneously projecting subjective erotic experiences and emotions into the context of society and politics. This is crucial for understanding her argument and concept of love—which will become increasingly central to her work. Whereas no absolute, all‐embracing mediation of opposites as mending the split can be possible (it can only be an illusory surrogate solution), it is the work of love to “negotiate the diremption,” as she describes it. Rose is highly critical of what she considers poststructuralist Dialectic of Nihilism (this is the title of her 1984 book, a critique of poststructuralism from the perspective of philosophy of law), which, she argues, abandons reason for the sake of a transcendent “Otherness” (that is, for Rose, “Otherness” that transcends reason). Instead, she insists on the need to rationally comprehend—consciously encounter, face, address, confront—the broken middle within both subjective identity and objective society. “Not that comprehension completes or closes,” she concludes the introduction to The Broken Middle, “but that it returns diremption to where it cannot be overcome in exclusive thought or in partial action—as long as its political history persists. The complementarity of comprehension to diremption involves reflection on what may be ventured—without mending diremption in heaven or on earth” (xv). A rational comprehension of the diremption, of the impossibility of mediating between oppositions, illuminates the necessity of agency, of human action. Warning against succumbing to coercive powers and the illusion of absolute freedom, Rose suggests a thinking of disjunctions—sustaining the diremption, upholding the “broken middle”— between ethics and law: between, on the one hand, the autonomous life of the individual, her power and powerlessness, agency and finitude, and, on the other hand, the heteronomous coercive law, the invincible powers that supersede human agency. “What may be ventured” refers to the comprehension of the equivocations of the middle—the various meanings implied or entailed by and between the oppositions. “What may be ventured” in the broken middle is—rather than mending or mediation, piecing together the one‐sided oppositions—a negotiation, practically and actively negotiating diremption: this is the work of love—to act within the broken middle and between the alternatives of ethics and law, of abstract, individual autonomy and concrete, social‐legal coercive heteronomy.Footnote ³

II. Feminism, State, and Civil Society: The “Beautiful Soul” and the “Sexual Contract”

Whereas Rose develops the logic of diremption and the concept of the broken middle through a critique of Hegel, she examines the practical, concrete social and political equivocations and implications of the broken middle by discussing the writings—in her terminology: the authorship, the “agon of authorship”—of Rahel Varnhagen, Rosa Luxemburg, and Hannah Arendt. In an essay entitled “Love and the State,” included in The Broken Middle, Rose elaborates her critical theory of the broken middle in the context of feminist political theory (Reference RoseRose 1992, 153–245). It is important to note here, however, that Rose never considered herself, and has never been considered, a feminist theorist. “I've never found feminism relevant to me,” she reflected in a radio interview, one month before her death, “but then politics begins when you think about what's relevant to other people” (Reference LloydLloyd 2001, 215). Although I do not intend to reintroduce Rose as a feminist thinker, I do argue here that in her critical dialogue with female thinkers and with ideas from feminist theory, Rose effectively produces a dialectical—in fact, negative‐dialectical, diremptive and agonistic—political theory of gender identity, which pushes feminist theory closer to the philosophy of nonidentity and queer theory.

In her introduction to a 1998 volume of Women: A Cultural Review, dedicated to Rose's life and thought, Laura Marcus attends briefly to what she considers “Rose's feminism,” as “her concern … with the ways in which modern subjectivity—sovereign and subordinated—is explored in the soul of a woman, and her arguments with a feminism which knows what it is looking for before it looks” (Reference MarcusMarcus 1998, 4). In a later article that eloquently extrapolates from Rose's critique of identity politics in the context of feminism to her probable views on the politics of race, Vincent Lloyd explains:

Against the backdrop of these contentions Rose raises toward feminist theory, it is important to note that despite the critique, Rose engaged with feminist theory in a way that, at the same time, critiques and elaborates it from her own unique critical‐Hegelian perspective of diremption.

Drawing on her own personal experience as well as on the personal, intellectual, and political lives of the women authors she discusses in “Love and the State,” Rose attends to the dialectics of power and desire, namely that the lack at the core of desire is at the same time empowering and weakening, strengthening and impairing the individual. Feminist identity politics, for Rose, assumes the risk of establishing identity based on deficiency and powerlessness and thus eventually perpetuating it. Rose's reservations regarding feminism derive from her rejection of identity politics, of any position that assumes and concerns identity as static, fixed, and rigid, overlooking its mobility and volatility, and excluding binary, dialectical identities (Reference LloydLloyd 2001, 210). As Lloyd explains, “Rose is highly suspicious of identity politics. For her, politics should be approached in the same way as philosophy and personal life, exploring difficulties as well as the violence done in the attempt to conceal these difficulties” (Reference LloydLloyd 2015, 112). Although Rose's reservations about feminism are directly implied by her rejection of identity politics, I argue that her own work suggests a way of feminist thought that is not indebted to identity politics, that rather understands—if not feminism, then the female gendered experience—as challenging the very notion of a fixed and rigid identity, which turns out to be so disparaging and dangerous. “Not only does accepting identity categories distort our view of individuals, Rose is arguing here,”—as Lloyd persuasively reconstructs her critique—“but the unexpressed anger caused by those distortions finds expression in fantasy, with affective investment in further abstractions, such as the nation (or a racial community, or a gendered community)” (111). Addressing such questions of feminism, however, in a way that at the same time challenges and transcends identity politics, drawing on Rose's own concept of diremption, may indeed provide a productive incentive for encountering the contemporary challenges faced by feminist theory for these very reasons. This is how I suggest reading her arguments on feminism made, tacitly and explicitly, in The Broken Middle.

Idiosyncratically enough, Rose begins her argument on feminism in The Broken Middle by juxtaposing Goethe's and Hegel's critical notions of the “beautiful soul” with Carole Pateman's argument in The Sexual Contract (Reference PatemanPateman 1988b; Reference RoseRose 1992, 184–86). In Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, the “beautiful soul”—an indirect reference to a figure from Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship—is “lacking an actual existence, entangled in the contradiction between its pure self and the necessity of that self to externalize itself and change itself into an actual existence” (Reference HegelHegel 1977, 406–07). This abstract figure exemplifies a person aspiring to moral perfection on the inside—in the “soul”—while incapable of expressing and implementing it in the objective world. It is therefore conceived as an inflated form of moral subjectivity, detached from the necessities and perils of objective existence. Hegel, of course, argues for the necessity of concrete, dialectical overcoming of the beautiful soul's moral subjectivity in actuality, in state and politics. For him, the persistent disjunction between the subjective, internal, private, and the objective, external, public involves ethical and political deficiency: a lack of agency. Hegel's philosophical project hence seeks a unity of both. He therefore criticizes the social‐contract theory according to which society is based on nothing but contractual agreements between individuals. For Hegel, the social contract between individuals is not the foundation of the state, but the state represents rather the universal, the objective absolute will of all subjects. Hegel “contrasts the universal, public state with the market, classes, and corporations of private, civil society” (Reference Pateman and KeanePateman 1988a, 102; cited in Reference RoseRose 1992, 183). “The meaning of ‘civil society’ … is constituted through the ‘original’ separation and opposition between the modern, public—civil—world and the modern, private, or conjugal and familiar sphere”—Rose quotes Carole Pateman, who adds that “Feminists are concerned with this division” (Reference Pateman and KeanePateman 1988a, 102; cited in Reference RoseRose 1992, 183). Hegel, for Pateman, rejects the social‐contract theory and insists on the fundamental initial difference between the private and the public. Pateman's critique of Hegel contends, however, that he still insists that marriage—that is, as a relation between the sexes—“originates in a contract”; that he still accepts “the sexual contract.” This implies further that Hegel's theory “incorporate[s] women into civil society while excluding them”; his “presupposition” is that “women must be both incorporated into civil society and its major institutional bonds—the contracts of citizenship, employment and marriage—and they must be subordinated. The sexual contract ‘requires’ and achieves this because it takes place in the private sphere separated from ‘civil public life’” (Reference RoseRose 1992, 184).

Rose juxtaposes here, on the one hand, the figure of the “beautiful soul” trapped inside her moral inwardness and lacking agency in objective actuality, with, on the other hand, Pateman's critique of the sexual contract, which points at the contract tacitly at work in the division between the private and the public, and at the subjugation in the private sphere as a condition for incorporation (rather than equality) in the public sphere. This juxtaposition implies that it is precisely the sexual contract that retains the beautiful soul within her internality, barred from external, practical implementation. Rose proceeds, however, to criticize Pateman's own feminist critique of Hegel.Footnote ⁴ Rose by no means intends to justify Hegel's theory or to deny that it subjugates women in the private as much as in the public sphere. Rather, she seeks to move beyond both Hegel and Pateman, beyond the mutually exclusive theories of incorporation and subjugation. Pateman, according to Rose, “misunderstands … that the distinctions between the private and the public, and between civil society and the state, are themselves posited by the legality of the modern state” (Reference RoseRose 1992, 184). In other words, for Rose, Pateman fails to think the equivocations and contradictions—the contradictory equivocations—implied in both the private sphere (external to the sphere of state legality but constituted by it) and the public sphere (formal incorporation and inclusion that interdepends on difference and subjugation in the private). This is, again, the setting point for Rose's formulation of her own critical, Hegelian contribution to feminist thought: a comprehension and negotiation (practical, active, political, erotic) of the diremption, contradictions, and equivocations. It is no coincidence, moreover, that Rose's essay “Love and the State” actually begins with a discussion of the notion of a “suspension of the ethical” in Kierkegaard: the situation in which the ethical—prevalent ethical life, the valid, formal morality as legality—must be suspended, overcome, transcended. For Kierkegaard, in Fear and Trembling, the reason—in fact, the nonrational reason—for a suspension of the ethical is faith: a subjective, internal experience (which is, in a sense, comparable to love) that governs the person's agency from within, and thereby opposes the commands of ethics, law, and society (Reference KierkegaardKierkegaard 1843/1983, 54–67). In suspending the ethical, Rose seeks—equipped with Kierkegaard's own negative dialectics—to transcend the social‐ethical binaries of the private and the public, of subjectivity and objectivity; to comprehend and negotiate the diremption. In “Love and the State,” she operates theoretically, by discussing Varnhagen, Luxemburg, and Arendt; in her memoir Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life, she proceeds in a biographical‐literary mode. I will address both texts as illuminating each other to extract Rose's own negative‐dialectical theory of diremption and nonidentity in relation to feminism and to the dialectics of love, desire, and agency.

III. Varnhagen, Luxemburg, Arendt: Love as the Ethical‐Political Negotiation of Diremption

Rahel Varnhagen, Rosa Luxemburg, and Hannah Arendt are three thinkers Rose views as comprehending the diremption of the “beautiful soul” and the “sexual contract,” of law and ethics, legality and morality. These three women (for Rose, it is certainly no coincidence that all three are German‐Jewish women who live the double disjunction of religious and gender identity), she maintains, think the negative dialectics of particularity and universality, activity and passivity, of omnipotence and impotence, of sovereignty and subjugation. Rose reads them (arguably beyond their own intentions) as illustrating the political dialectics of love and desire, which she emphasizes in her own argument.

Rahel Varnhagen (born Levin; Rose insists on naming her this way, emphasizing her split identity), was in fact well aware of the “lived and literary dilemmas,” and reflected on them in her letters and journal: “on love and the development of the modern ‘nation’‐state. She was able to see the instability arising from the conjunction of freedom and lack of freedom within civil society—contracts and their contradictions—from the extra‐ordinary position of being simultaneously excluded from that civil society yet hostess to the birth of the modern, bureaucratic, ‘nation’‐state” (Reference RoseRose 1992, 187–88). Varnhagen was the hostess of the literary salon in late eighteenth‐century Berlin, in which the romantics—Schlegel, Kleist, Tieck, and also Goethe, who, as noted earlier, introduced the notion of the “beautiful soul”—were regular guests. But according to Rose, drawing on Hannah Arendt's biography of Varnhagen, the latter was “struggling to avoid the temptations of such a beatitude” (189). In Rose's account, Varnhagen lived the political paradox (the double political paradox of being both a woman and a Jew) of inclusion and exclusion: “the double difficulty of either being outside civil society or moving into civil society” (193). The formation of the “nation”‐state, as the legal‐rational frame of civil society—a formation to which many of the intellectuals who inhabited Varnhagen's salon contributed—led directly to her de facto exclusion from participation in it—as a Jewish woman. “Not a beautiful soul [that is, not naïve within her own moral subjectivity], nor an ugly body [that is, nor practically instrumentalizing her social role], but the difficulty of moving with an impediment—when you know that each time you risk a step in order to recognize and alleviate the calamity of others and of all, you intensify your own disability” (195). Such a paradox between universality and particularity, inclusion and exclusion, ethics and law, exemplifies Rose's idea of the broken middle; risk, impediment, and disability are topics she will return to in her memoir.

In Rosa Luxemburg's political struggles, Rose again sees the “equivocation of the ethical—the perduring inversions of law” (199). According to Rose, Luxemburg's politics, particularly in “Reform and Revolution” (Reference Luxemburg and ScottLuxemburg 1900/2008, 41–104), exemplifies the diremption—the neither/nor and the thinking beyond—of “reform” (a gradual slow change of the capitalist system) and “centralism” (“destruction of the actual organization of the world in the name of the organization of the party” [Reference RoseRose 1992, 200]). Luxemburg's idea of “revolution” derives, accordingly, from a comprehension of the diremption between universality (“reform”) and particularity (“centralism” of the party). Luxemburg, according to Rose, lived the “aporia intrinsic to socialist activity between the daily struggle and the goal beyond the limits of that struggle”—but it is precisely this aporia, the comprehension of diremption, that guides her in her agonistic politics. “Agon of authorship here means in argument both to recommend struggle and to struggle daily against this culture [of bourgeois morality], and discursively to comprehend it: to oppose it and to let it be” (207). Luxemburg's politics of a negative‐dialectical thinking beyond oppositions is, first and foremost, a rational comprehension of the paradox of political action: it aims predominantly at a modification of existing categories (reform) of inclusion and incorporation within existing structures. In Rose's reading of Luxemburg, her “agonal and aporetic struggle which is based intellectually on a comprehension” arises out of her own identity and her erotic drives, the eros that is confronted with the paradox of inclusion (influence) and exclusion (rejection). Rose argues for an intrinsic relation between the personal and the political eros in comprehending the diremption, the split between universal law and individual ethics, therefore between state and civil society. Luxemburg's struggle is about the confrontation (not mediation) between the political eros on the side of the single individual (in her Kierkegaardian reading) and the legal rigidity on the side of universal law. Love's work is the work of negotiating—not mediating—the oppositions.

It is, likewise, no coincidence that both Varnhagen and Luxemburg were central figures in Hannah Arendt's writings. Arendt is, for Rose, “witness and commentator of these diremptions, [who] took up the agon of prophesying radical democracy under the far heavier burden of the diremptive ‘and’ of state and civil society” (215). From her dissertation on Saint Augustine's concept of love (Reference Arendt, Vecchiarelli Scott and Chelius StarkArendt 1929/1996) to her latter‐day conflict with Gershom Scholem after the Eichmann trial (accused, by Scholem, of lacking “love of the Jewish people,” Arendt contended, “I have never in my life loved any ‘people’ or collective … the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons” [Arendt Reference Arendt, Kohn and Feldman1963/2007, 466–67]), Arendt employed a specifically political concept of love, whose “work,” according to Rose, aimed at the paradox of agency and the diremption of law and ethics, at going beyond the neither/nor. Building on Arendt's representations of Rahel Varnhagen (in the biography, written in 1938; see Arendt Reference Arendt and Weissberg1959/1997) and Rosa Luxemburg (in Men [sic!] in Dark Times; see Arendt Reference Arendt1966/1988), Rose is particularly interested in the concept of love—erotic and agapic love; in fact, erotic rather than agapic!—in The Origins of Totalitarianism (Reference ArendtArendt 1951/1973). The book, as Arendt stated, was “written against a background of both reckless optimism and reckless despair … both articles of superstition, not of faith” (Reference ArendtArendt 1951/1973, vii; cit. in Reference RoseRose 1992, 217). But also thematically, it seeks to comprehend and transcend the neither/nor of totalitarian fascism and totalitarian communism, to think the “‘equivocalities’ of emancipation, the ‘deepening … split’ or ‘growing tension’ between state and society” (Reference RoseRose 1992, 218), by concentrating on the single individual, the particular human being deprived on both sides: persecuted by the state and excluded from civil society.

In the famous passage from Origins of Totalitarianism on the vulnerability and exposure of the individual who has lost the protection of both state and society, Arendt indeed draws on Augustine's concept of love—however, not primarily as agape (care), but also as eros (desire, sexual desire).

This passage, on the one hand, describes the concrete life of the politically persecuted, victims of totalitarian regimes, political dissidents and refugees; and at the same time, it gives a universal account of the constant and often unnoticed persecution—in daily life—of the vulnerable and exposed: sexual, ethnic, national minorities. Stripped of political powers, participation, and representation, one is forced to “revert” into private life, into the human‐natural qualities (or, to use Agamben's terminology: being neither bio nor zoe, but “bare life.” See Reference AgambenAgamben 1998). Significant here are two elements that begin to connect the points I mentioned earlier. First, this argument recalls Luxemburg's ethos of political struggle, attending to the simultaneity of opposing and letting be: opposing the repressive culture of bourgeois morality and letting it be. “Volo ut sis”: I want you to be. Mere letting be as love. “Letting be” by no means implies acceptance and resignation, but rather an active understanding of the paradox and, most important for Rose's reading, a suspension of the ethical: active suspension of repressive ethics. These are the two modes of action Rose proposes: opposing from within and rejecting, suspending from without. This form of suspension of the ethical is associated, already in Kierkegaard, with faith and love, categories that transcend and suspend the ethical. Second, the necessitated limitation of the capacity to articulate oneself only within the sphere of the private, while being deprived of a “qualification” to participate in the public sphere, recalls Pateman's argument in The Sexual Contract, the subjugation of women in the private sphere as a “precondition” for inclusion in the public sphere, which, in turn, leads to nothing but de facto political exclusion, since it is, after all, the state itself that determines not only public participation, but also the conditions that subjugate women in the private sphere. What is left, for Arendt, is mere existence, “the shapes of our bodies and the talents of our minds”; the only affirmation of being, the only agency left is “the grace of love” as “volo ut sis”: “I want you to be.” I would even add here, drawing on Rose's later philosophical memoir to which I will turn presently and which will provide argumentative evidence: erotic love and desire. Love's—and desire's—work is to affirm the comprehension of the diremption, the necessity and possibility of agency beyond the rejected, flawed oppositions of resignation and subjugation; the work of love is to negotiate, to work through the oppositions of inclusion and exclusion, power and powerlessness.

IV. Diremption of Love: Eros and Agape between Agency and Mortality

“What may be ventured—without mending diremption in heaven or on earth” (Reference RoseRose 1992, xv): This ethical‐political imperative from The Broken Middle soon turned, for Rose, into a personal one. Her critical reading of philosophical texts—Hegel, Kierkegaard, Adorno; Varnhagen, Luxemburg, Arendt; and beyond—were soon followed by a critical, philosophical, ethical‐political reading of her own life. In the year following the publication of The Broken Middle, Rose was diagnosed with an aggressive form of ovarian cancer. “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not”—a saying attributed to the Russian Orthodox poet and monk Staretz Silouan (1866–1938) is the epigraph of Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life, the memoir Rose wrote in the months preceding her death. The book's title also alludes to Kierkegaard's late religious work, Works of Love (Reference KierkegaardKierkegaard 1847/1998). In Love's Work, Rose effectively seeks to negotiate the diremption between life and death, desire and mortality, sovereignty and vulnerability, power and powerlessness. She reflects on her own life, illness, disability, identity, sexuality, and unhappy or unrequited loves, and on those of close friends and acquaintances. In Final Acts: Traversing the Fantasy in the Modern Memoir, Tom Ratekin discusses presentations of mortality and terminal illness in memoirs, mainly from the perspective of the confrontation with AIDS, and dedicates a chapter to Rose's memoir. He likens Rose to Antigone:

Rose's agonistic and aporetic dialectics of love equally applies, in her work, to the political, ethical, and the personal. Facing terminal illness, she employs the negative dialectics of the broken middle to reflect on human—ethical and political—agency. In this short but captivating memoir Rose unfolds a broad spectrum of unique individuals—friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and lovers, and a variety of relationships with and between them. Three of these individuals seem to be most central, both personally, to Rose as an author, and thematically, to the philosophical argument she develops in the book—three, along with Rose herself. Significantly, the accounts Rose gives of their lives and views thematically resonate with her accounts of Varnhagen, Luxemburg, and Arendt.Footnote ⁵

Rose begins the memoir by recalling her arrival—not the first one, but a repeated visit, reminiscent of Kierkegaard's question in Repetition on the possibility of repeating one's own existential experiences when returning to a city one has visited in the past (Reference KierkegaardKierkegaard 1843/1983)—in New York, to meet her friend Edna, picked up at the airport by her friend Jim. It was 1991. Rose's account of Edna and Jim—individuals struggling, in different ways, with illness, mortality, and finitude—is, too, a Hegelian, diremptive account: Rose brings to the fore the broken middle between activity and passivity, agency and weakness, love and desire. Edna is a ninety‐six‐year‐old secretary of a private scholar, and has been combatting cancer since she was sixteen; Jim is a forty‐seven‐year‐old gay philosopher who has lost many of his friends and lovers to AIDS, and would soon succumb to it himself. In Edna's family, Rose notes, no men survived. All died at an early age, whereas the women—even though struggling with illness—lived long lives. At the age of ninety‐three, Edna contracted cancer of the face and had to wear an artificial nose; “She would call out to me,” Rose writes, “to enquire whether I would mind if she were not to put on her nose. By then, not only did I not notice the nose, but, if anything, I found the neat, oblong black hole in her face even more appealing” (Reference RoseRose 1995/2012, 7). The unhesitant acceptance of the hole in the face—a sign of, at the same time, survival and mortality—reflects the gap, the crack under the surface of normality or normativity: to survive, to face mortality, illness, disability, one must confront and transcend repressive normativity, a transcendence that entails a thinking beyond. This was, later, Rose's own experience. After her surgery, Rose writes, she was equipped with a temporary colostomy—an artificial opening in the abdomen that allows excretion to leave the body bypassing the colon—which soon thereafter proved to be irreversible and permanent. The hole in the body; the hole in the face—a living, not abstract, metaphor for the gap, the broken middle? “How can that be—that someone with cancer since she was sixteen exudes well‐being at ninety‐six? Could it be because she has lived sceptically? Sceptical equally of science and of faith, of politics and of love?” (9). Rose's skepticism—a radical faith in the powers of reason, which precludes despair, and at the same time a radical skepticism, disbelief, fierce rational disillusionment. “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not”: Rose understands her friend's life as, above all, a fight against resignation. Faith and love: faith in the powers of reason; and love as invincible desire. “Later, when I found myself alone with Edna, there were certain things which she was determined to make clear: ‘My marriage was not happy. My husband was disappointed with me. Although, when he died,’ she added, without a hint of triumph or rancour, ‘I was the only person permitted to attend him. The nurses in the hospital had to assure him that they were ‘Edna’” (8). Unhappy love—a recurrent theme in Rose's biographical writing—is here juxtaposed with trust, confidence, faith. “I am highly qualified in unhappy love affairs,” Rose attests of herself.Footnote ⁶

Following her account of Edna's struggle with mortality and resignation, Rose portrays her friend Yvette—a woman of sixty‐five, a secretary at the University of Sussex, where Rose was a lecturer in sociology, who taught Rose biblical and modern Hebrew. Rose describes a chance meeting with Yvette, whose daughter, “after years of not being able to conceive … was now, at long last, expecting,” while Yvette herself had just been diagnosed with breast cancer, and was waiting for her own surgery (27). Yvette and her daughter, as Rose quotes the former, “are now two ladies‐in‐waiting” (27). Beneath the painful irony, which Rose often employs in the text to emphasize the dialectics, the inseparability of life and death, lies the idea of the contradiction and impossibility of mediation—the inseparability of skepticism and survival; and the denunciation of despair and resignation. In Rose's terms: rejecting nihilism, even at the edge of the abyss. “Two ladies‐in‐waiting”—an acknowledgment of the similarity between the farthest possible oppositions of natality and mortality. For Rose, they are intrinsically related to desire and agency. Rose portrays Yvette as an indeed diremptive contradictory person: on the one hand, a dedicated grandmother, maintaining the closest and most intimate relationship with her children and grandchildren; on the other hand, Rose writes, “Yvette was completely devoted to pleasure without guilt” (28). Divorced from her husband at the age of sixty‐five, and ending a partnership that was weakened by sustaining “much extra‐marital activity on both sides,” Yvette sustained, concurrently, three love affairs (27). Rose also describes Yvette's collection of pornographic material, almost entirely photographs of women. “Yvette's dowdy and unselfconscious bearing was unable to conceal her visceral vocation as the Lover—not the Beloved: she was predator not prey” (24). Yvette's life signifies for Rose the very interplay of power and powerlessness, agency and mortality, which she elaborates theoretically in her critical reading—discussed above—of Hegel. Neither a mere “beautiful soul,” adhering to internal ethical principles, nor pure externality, mere bodily existence, but a life at the gap between them, refraining from attempts to mend the diremption and hovering beyond the opposition between power and powerlessness. This is the concrete, applied form of philosophy of diremption, as well as her own Hegelian (in fact, Hegelian anti‐Hegelian: a thinking with Hegel against Hegel) contribution to critical feminist theory.

From the perspective of her own battle with cancer, Rose looks back at Jim, her close friend who, as she recalls, introduced her to Adorno's philosophy of nonidentity, the topic of her dissertation and first book, in the 1970s. Rose's account of Jim focuses on two apparent paradoxes, seemingly contradictions. A lecturer in continental philosophy who has never held a permanent position, philosophy was, according to Rose, Jim's tragedy, “He found no way … of bringing his inner emotional turmoil into his philosophy, his discipline, his art. Philosophy remained cleverness, a game, but not a stage on life's way” (111; here Rose alludes once again to Kierkegaard, namely to Stages on Life's Way, Kierkegaard Reference Kierkegaard1845/1988). Rose identified Jim with the passion for philosophy and at the same time she noted the impossibility of his bridging the gap between philosophy and life: to negotiate the diremption between them. Jim remained, accordingly, formal, detached, abstract, in his relation to philosophy. Rose was then surprised to discover the other side of Jim's life: “It was other gay friends of Jim's who told me much later that Jim had been an habitué of the New York Baths. I was shocked, not out of naivety or prudery concerning the culture of the baths, but out of surprise at what this participation implied about Jim's degree of sexual energy” (111). The apparent contradiction between the intellectual life of a philosopher—formal, detached, abstract—and his energetic sexual life demonstrates for Rose the work of love: to negotiate the oppositions of outside and inside, universality and particularity. It seems, then, that Rose's discovery of her friend's sexual life indeed altered her view of his capability to negotiate the diremption of philosophy and life. This negotiation, however, had to take a different turn in the 1980s, when AIDS became a vicious, deadly reality. Power and powerlessness: the intersection and disjunction between these oppositions became reality. Jim's lover, Lance, was diagnosed with AIDS in the early days of the epidemic. Lance lived in Jim's apartment for years, as both a lover and a disciple. In the time when doctors were terrified by AIDS patients and the nursing staff refused to care for them, Jim took care of his dying lover alone—performing the work of love as both eros and agape: bridging, without mediating, between them: between love as care and love as desire. The social reality of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s created such a simultaneous conjunction and disjunction between love as eros and as agape, as desire and as care: a mortal infection associated with relentless desire could only be confronted with mutual, passionate care—for lack of medical and institutional care.

In her accounts of her friends’ struggle with love, life, and mortality, Rose emphasizes the meaning of diremption in both an ethical and a political sense: as a mode of confronting the abyss in personal life, but also as a political approach to a social reality that oppressively insists on mediation, on conditioned inclusion at the cost of difference and agency, a formal inclusion that implies de facto exclusion. As in the theories Rose reconstructed with Varnhagen, Luxemburg, and Arendt, in the accounts of her friends’ lives it is love—precisely in its equivocation as agape and eros—that addresses and negotiates the real‐life diremption between the ethical and political oppositions of agency and vulnerability, of law and morality.

V. Rose's Critical Hegelian Perspective on Feminism: Love, Desire, and the Overcoming of Ethical‐Political Binaries

“Suppose I were now to reveal that I have AIDS, full‐blown AIDS, and have been ill during most of the course of what I have related,” Rose addresses the reader of her memoir in a Kierkegaardian fashion, “I would lose you. I would lose you to a knowledge, to a fear and to metaphor” (Reference RoseRose 1995/2012, 77). Indirectly referring to Susan Sontag's argument in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, Rose reiterates that illness is typically associated with a loss of control, a loss of power, a loss of agency (see Reference SontagSontag 1978/2011). But Rose writes precisely against such a loss, in both erotic and political terms. Sontag distinguished between the metaphor of cancer, which “picks up at the point at which rogue cells inside the body mutate, eventually moving out from an original site or organ to overrun other organs or systems—a domestic subversion [and] the description of AIDS [in which] the enemy is what causes the disease, an infectious agent that comes from the outside … This is the language of a political paranoia” (Reference SontagSontag 1989/2011, 76). Whereas Sontag attends to the social perception of both cancer and AIDS—the internal vs. the external enemy, the personal vs. the political—Rose's distinction relates to the subjective confrontation, the opposition between agency and helplessness. As in her accounts of her friends’ battles with cancer and AIDS, Rose sees a clear connection between love and desire, on the one hand, and a rational defiance, conscious resistance, maintaining agency rather than despair and resignation, on the other. She therefore describes without any euphemism the details of the struggle: the meaning of living with a colostomy, the details of the hospital experience, the meaning of powerful sexual desire and recurrent romantic failures.

The skeptic's fight against irrationalism, against the search for simple solutions, against the undialectical, naïve illusion that only one side of a contradiction may be right—this is the core of the philosophical argument Rose advances in her reading of her friends’ and of her own struggle with mortality. She seeks to think the oppositions, at the same time, together and apart: a critique of reason that does not entail abandonment of reason altogether. In practical terms, the Hegelian logic of the broken middle is speculative dialectics in the sense that it provides space for “thinking the absolute,” for knowledge and experience at the gap between coercive universality of the law and the individual ethics of the particular, between agency and powerlessness in the face of law and mortality. Reason, Rose writes, is “protestant” (Reference RoseRose 1995/2012, 129): it protests authority, superstition, it is a subjective protest against coercive universalism. Such internally motivated protest—motivated by love, passion, desire—constitutes personal identity, and more exactly: personal nonidentity. This is the argumentative point that connects back to Rose's theory of personal identity—which she examined in relation to her Judaism: a protest against the coercive universality of the law, and which she elaborated in relation to feminism, in a Hegelian dialectical mode, in her readings of Varnhagen, Luxemburg, and Arendt.

At the very end of Love's Work, Rose notes: “There is one sense in which I do want to rewrite my history. Even in the earlier version of that history, feminism never offered me any help. For it fails to address the power of women as well as their powerlessness, and the response of both men and women to that power” (Reference RoseRose 1995/2012, 140). Feminism, in Rose's analysis, accounts rather for powerlessness and subjugation of women; it views woman as the “beautiful soul,” locked within her ethical worldview, but barred from real inclusion and effective participation in the social and political sphere. In her critique, Rose intersects the erotic and the political: politically, she argues, feminism predominantly concerns weakness and subjection of women; erotically, it concerns the weakened, passive role of women in relationships. “Feminism does not speak of the woman with the gift and power of Active Intelligence … who gives love and draws it to her, enabling and difficult. Tarrying with the negative,” she refers back to Hegel, “I accounted myself too bounteous and too restricting. And so, with much pain, I broke away, ending, not friendship, but the throes of erotic and ethical love. Now I think I was wrong in this analysis” (141). From the matured perspective of several failed loves, Rose—at the end of the memoir on terminal illness—sees the necessity of reexamining her analysis of feminism. By no means does she revert to a position that underscores the weakness and powerlessness of women; but she does not argue for the empowerment of women either. “Is feminism able to credit that it may be better, sometimes, not to get what you want?” she asks, meaning it both erotically and ethically‐politically: unfulfilled, unsatisfied desire as an ethical impetus. Employing her own version of Hegelian negativity and emphasizing the concept of diremption and the broken middle, Rose seems to me to aim at abolishing the binary opposition between power and powerlessness, between sovereignty and subjugation. The true goal of feminism, if I may speculatively continue Rose's untimely interrupted thread of thought, is not primarily political emancipation as empowerment, but a transcendence of a social structure—of a “sexual contract” that is based on the initial distinction between the “beautiful soul” of the “contractual” feminist and the rigid, predominant legal sphere. She aims at a Kierkegaardian “suspension of the ethical,” both erotically and politically, by the dialectical power of love and desire. It is desire, driven by lack, mortality, even powerlessness, that calls for subjective negotiation of the diremption, that calls for effort and rise, and that, finally, by “tarrying with the negative” constitutes agency, the power of sexual difference.

V. Conclusion: Critical Feminism and Rose's Hegelian Perspective

A unique, idiosyncratic, and often unyielding voice in philosophy and critical theory, Gillian Rose insisted on a concept that seems at once irrelevant and highly applicable for exploring questions of love, life, and mortality. Diremption, for Rose, is not only a Hegelian theoretical concept, but a mode of life, of action, of practice. Drawing on the centrality of this concept in Hegel's thought, Rose elaborated her own understanding of diremption—the diremption of life as the mortality within life, and the diremption of love as the persistent equivocation of agape and eros—in her readings of philosophical texts written by women and of personal life stories of friends and lovers. Although Rose never accepted the premises and the goals of feminism, this article demonstrated that her work provides meaningful points of reference for a critical feminism that challenges—from Rose's critical Hegelian perspective—the simple binaries of power and powerlessness, inclusion and exclusion, agency and dependency, and the quest for defined and definite identity. For Rose, feminism itself is entangled in such a quest for identity, insisting on such binaries, but what she offered—indirectly, almost implicitly, and therefore in need of the further extraction I suggested in this article—may indeed contribute to critical feminist thought that does not seek simple solutions by taking one side of a debate—such as that on political recognition and inclusion in political life, at the cost of subordination and submission to a predominantly male politics. Instead, Rose suggests the concept of diremption—in a practical, political sense—as acknowledgment of the tangible, insurmountable divide, the split between oppositions, that cannot be mediated but only negotiated. Such negotiation, for Rose, is the work of love—acknowledging the diremption of love, in personal and political life, and allowing oneself to be guided by love as both agape and eros, care and desire, and by negotiating the opposition between them.

Rose's critical Hegelian contribution to feminism, which, as I suggest, pushes it closer to philosophy of nonidentity and queer theory, refuses to accept such binaries of identity and agency. Applying the Hegelian concept of diremption in her reading of texts by Rahel Varnhagen, Rosa Luxemburg, and Hannah Arendt, as well as in her reading of her own and her friends’ lives, loves, and deaths, Rose elaborates the concept of diremption as the split between oppositions that cannot be mended, that cannot be brought together, but can be sustained and contained through the work of love. In this sense, Rose's radical, critical Hegelianism means a reading of Hegel against and beyond Hegel. In this article, I argued that applying this approach to Rose's own work on questions of feminism, gender, and sexuality is helpful for extracting the implications of her unique Hegelianism for a critical feminism that seeks to identify and transcend binary structures of identity, power, and domination. The argument on the diremption of love in Rose's philosophy can thus been seen as both her challenge and her critical contribution to contemporary feminist philosophy and theories of sexual difference.