Gillian Rose

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?) our own power. Yet to fail is not to fall into despair. Failing in love, and in criticism, lets us gain a sense of ethical relations: we perceive the conditionality of our judgments, and embrace our capacity to forgive and to be forgiven. Rose puts this better than I can hope to, in lines I often repeat to friends: “There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy. To be at someone’s mercy is dialectical damage: they may be merciful and they may be merciless. Yet each party, woman, man, the child in each, and their child, is absolute power as well as absolute vulnerability. You may be less powerful than the whole world, but you are always more powerful than yourself.” —Merve Emre ...

“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. The tradition is far kinder in its understanding that to live, to love, is to be failed, to forgive, to have failed, to be forgiven, for ever and ever. Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.” ...