The Diremption of Love: Gillian Rose on Agency, Mortality, and Hegelian Feminism

Abstract

Gillian Rose (1947–1995) was an influential though idiosyncratic British philosopher whose work helped introduce the Frankfurt School's critical theory and renew interest in Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Jewish thought in Anglo‐American philosophy. After years of relative oblivion, her life and thought have recently received new attention in philosophy, sociology, and theology. However, her work's critical Hegelian contribution to feminist philosophy still remains unexplored. This article seeks to reassess the place and the meaning of feminism and gender identity in Rose's work by addressing both her philosophical writings and her personal memoir, written in the months preceding her untimely death. It argues that although Rose's overall work was not developed in a feminist context, her philosophy, and in particular her ethical‐political notion of diremption, is valuable for developing a critical feminist philosophy that overcomes the binaries of law and morality, inclusion and exclusion, power and powerlessness—and focuses on the meaning of love as negotiating, rather than mediating, these oppositions.

Navigating the Void: Subjectivity and Contemporary Critical Theory

“…Therefore, we can read a certain degree of spontaneity vis-à-vis "subject-knowers," "objects of knowledge," and relations among "subject-knowers" at the root of Hutchings's reading of Hegel and the "simultaneous identity and non-identity of being and truth" (Hutchings 2003, 109). For Hutchings, via Hegel, we can never know reality because reality, and we as part of reality, are in significance of Rose to contemporary readings of Hegel should be noted, and her limited involvement in my analysis here does not reflect on the importance of her contribution (see Angermann 2019;Schick 2012Schick , 2015.…”