Gillian Rose
Gillian Rosemary Rose (née Stone; 20 September 1947 – 9 December 1995) was a British philosopher and writer. Rose held the chair of social and political thought at the University of Warwick until 1995. Rose began her teaching career at the University of Sussex. She worked in the fields of philosophy and sociology. Her writings include The Melancholy Science, Hegel Contra Sociology, Dialectic of Nihilism, Mourning Becomes the Law, and Paradiso, amongst others. Notable facets of her work include criticism of neo-Kantianism, post-modernism, and political theology along with what has been described as "a forceful defence of Hegel's speculative thought." Early life and education Gillian Rose was born in London into a non-practising Jewish family. Shortly after her parents divorced, when Rose was still quite young, her mother married another man, her stepfather, with whom Rose became close as she drifted from her biological father. These aspects of her family life figured in her late memoir Love's Work (1995). Also in her memoir, she writes that her "passion for philosophy" was bred at age 17 when she read Pascal's Pensées and Plato's Republic. Rose attended Ealing Grammar School and went on to St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she read PPE. Taught philosophy by Jean Austin, widow of the philosopher J. L. Austin, she later described herself as bristling under the constraints of Oxford-style philosophy. She never forgot Austin remarking in class, "Remember, girls, all the philosophers you will read are much more intelligent than you are." In a late interview, Rose commented of philosophers trained at Oxford, "It teaches them to be clever, destructive, supercilious and ignorant. It doesn't teach you what's important. It doesn't feed the soul." Sociologist Jean Floud helped keep Rose's passion for philosophy alive in her final year at Oxford. She graduated with upper second-class honours. Before beginning her Doctor of Philosophy at St. Antony's College, Oxford, she studied at Columbia University as a Ford Foundation Fellow and at the Free University, Berlin. Work Rose's career began with a dissertation on Theodor W. Adorno, supervised by the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, who wryly spoke to her of Adorno as a third-rate thinker. This dissertation eventually became the basis for her first book, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (1978). She became well known partly through her critiques of postmodernism and post-structuralism. In Dialectic of Nihilism (1984), for instance, she leveled criticisms at Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Later, in her essay "Of Derrida's Spirit" in Judaism and Modernity (1993), Rose critiqued Derrida's Of Spirit (1987), arguing that his analysis of Heidegger's relation to Nazism relied in key instances on serious misreadings of Hegel, which allowed both Heidegger and Derrida to evade the importance of political history and modern law. In an extended "Note" to the essay, Rose raised similar objections to Derrida's subsequent readings of Hermann Cohen and Walter Benjamin, singling out his notion of the "mystical foundation of authority" as centrally problematic. In the early 1990s there