Here is a short note on Gillian Rose’s Love’s work from Merve Emre. Love’s work is coextensive with the work of thinking and the work of criticism. Despite what advice columns and self-help books might teach, love, like criticism, is a peculiarly autocratic pursuit. One authorizes one’s own judgments and must live with the consequences. Sometimes—most of the time, some would say—we get it wrong. We err on the side of indulgence or cruelty, blind to (blinded by?...
“I will stay in the fray, in the revel of ideas and risk; learning, failing, wooing, grieving, trusting, working, reposing – in this sin of language and lips.” “We have to follow not the path of self-enlightening doubt, but the path of despair. … This path is self-completing because it is more radical than mere doubt, and because it presents the ‘complete’ forms of ‘untrue consciousness in its untruth’.” “This is the counsel of despair which would keep the mind out of hell....