Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice

Makes the case for the rediscovery of British philosopher Gillian Rose’s unique but neglected voice

Kate Schick explains the core themes of Gillian Rose’s work. She engages with the work of Benjamin, Honig, Zizek and Butler and locates Rose’s ideas within central debates in contemporary social theory: trauma and memory, exclusion and difference, tragedy and messianic utopia. She shows how Rose’s speculative perspective brings a different gaze to bear on debates, avoiding well-worn liberal, critical theoretic and post-structural positions.

Gillian Rose draws on idiosyncratic readings of thinkers such as Hegel, Adorno and Kierkegaard to underpin her philosophy, refusing to privilege the particular over the universal. While of the left, she is sharply critical of much left-wing thought, insisting that it shirks the work of coming to know and taking political risk in the hope that we might find a “good enough justice’.