Love's Work: Gillian Rose's fiercely forthright life force

The philosopher’s laconic, lyrical memoir displays an unsettling yet wholly inspirational vigour in the face of life-threatening disease

The founding act of defiance for the philosopher Gillian Rose seems, by her own account, to have been against dyslexia. The discovery early on “that the desert of stony words could be made to bloom, that I could channel what I could not overcome” enabled her to embark on a life of intellectual adventure that combined forbidding academic rigour with a passionate, personal engagement in moral and ethical questions.

Her intense and beautiful memoir, Love’s Work, records an experience of learning philosophy at Oxford so sterile she nearly abandoned the subject. Rose recalls being admonished to “remember … all the philosophers you will read are much more intelligent than you are”, but through a left turn into sociology she was able to relaunch her singular journey through speculative European thought. The books that followed included The Melancholy Science, an “introduction” to the work of Theodor Adorno that’s best read only after you know it; and The Broken Middle, a forbidding account of the impossible, unavoidable negotiation between the ideal and the singular, which manages to reveal a Kierkegaardian face to Hegel, and vice versa. This rewarding but rather terrifying work won her fans including Rowan Williams.

These intellectual struggles are all – rather miraculously – alive in this laconic, lyrical autobiography. It describes a troubled childhood in a turbulent Jewish family where the trauma of divorce was loaded on to the emotional weight of history; it recounts romantic loves that are sometimes desperate, sometimes euphoric and offers vivid, tender and occasionally shocking portraits of her many friends.

Throughout a career that ranged across thinkers rarely considered together, the work of Hegel was a constant: the knotty thinker who explored how every concept depends on its opposite; how truth is a moving target in an unceasing dialectic. And this defiantly difficult line of thinking, or something very much like it, seems to have informed her personal life.

In philosophy and in private life, Rose takes as inspiration Hegel’s not obviously hilarious definition of comedy: “The comical as such implies an infinite lightheartedness and confidence felt by someone raised altogether above his own inner contradiction and not bitter or miserable in it at all.” (Rose adds a nuance: “No human being possesses sureness of self: this can only mean being bounded and unbounded, selved and unselved, sure only of this untiring exercise.”)

This style of thinking, which defiantly refuses any easy certainty, is the key with which she unpicked a generation of contemporary philosophers, including Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, to find their claims to have overcome western metaphysics actually recapitulate older forms of law. It also shows in her frustration with uncomplicated feminism, which she argues “fails to address the power of women as well as their powerlessness, and the response of both men and women to that power”.

In spiritual questions, too, Rose insists on complication. Modern debates about faith neglect a protestantism shared by both sides, she argues – a protestantism that was the foundation of modernity. After all, it was to defend Christianity that Immanuel Kant constructed the Critique of Pure Reason – a foundational text of the Enlightenment.

The book is also defiant in its treatment of the life crisis that set her writing: the discovery of advanced ovarian cancer. Her defiance here is not in any romantic “battle” with the disease, any embrace of alternative medicine or credulous faith in conventional doctoring, but in continuing to live, open-eyed, with remarkable vigour – a vigour she says left her friends distinctly unsettled.

Love’s Work is no polemic, but there is a fierceness here that defies both conventional wisdom and readers’ self-reassurances. And also herself: Rose levels a flinty eye at her own exorbitant thinking, and remains ready to “tarry with the negative” in her seeking after the truth. “You are always stronger than yourself” is a refrain in these reflections.

If there were a prize for the most challenging epigraph, Love’s Work would be a strong contender. Rose takes it from Staretz (in some accounts Saint) Silouan: “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.” This is of course impossible wisdom, but Rose bore it with her, writing and thinking to the end. The cancer killed her, aged just 48 in 1995. But the defiant invitation to live and think and feel more deeply remains as urgent as ever.

Her friend Geoffrey Hill wrote his poem Paideia in memory of a thinker who is only beginning to receive her due. It includes these lines:

There are achievements
that carry failure on their back, blindness
not as in Brueghel, but unfathomably
far-seeing.

But Hill offers no easy consolation, concluding: “I find love’s work a bleak ontology / to have to contemplate; it may be all we have.”

• Love’s Work by Gillian Rose is published by NYRB Classics, priced £7.99.

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