Rose's "Frank" Autobiography

Just finished reading (my 1st Father's Day gift) Gillian Rose's autobiography Love's Work, which she wrote knowing that she would die from cancer. One of the benefits of reading this small book was just how frank and open Rose was about the frail ( and often physically sick) people she introduces us to in her narrative (many of the stories are based around tragedies of love).

Her philosophy which is centered in the middle place of the tensions within the world and its social place is where we see her situate herself in her own life. This is one of the reasons that she writes against ideas of transcendence that try to escape or explain the messiness of social relations from the outside (see Lloyd's book on Law and Transcendence where he uses her thought to critique such figures as Marion, Stout, Butler and Milbank among others). Her inspiration for her thought is Hegel who grounds thought in the "we" of thinking with all its failures and promises.

For the art of autobiography, Rose book is a testament to the fighting human spirit. It lays out the will to live and for a will to think (and to love). I love this autobiography because Rose seemed so willing to lay out the tensions in her closest relationships; it is to love through all the failures and betrayals. I think that by reading this more personal work, I will have better insight into the actual philosophy of Rose (which I here is a little tough reading).

So I highly recommend this book!!! By the way, I still hope before the end of summer to read her book on Hegel...

Theology of FAIL

So I finally finished my paper. It was an interesting journey. I started out wanting to investigate the use of the idea of "power" in Barth's thought but ended up doing a Barth/Hegel comparison that took me to see the idea of "failure" in Barth's thought instead. Weird thing that research does to you.

The bottom line for my thought is failure can be sobering. Everyone should experience it from time to time. I think Barth becomes so Christocentric (more like Luther than Calvin) because he is more aware of human fallibility. Now this is often interpreted that he has no place for the church, sacraments or ethics, but that interpretation is just rubbish. My contention is that he emphasized action after the event of the revelation of Christ the Word, but it is action aware of both the triumphs and failures found in everything human. However, Barth makes the claim that is why grace comes first then command because God chooses to act through fallible, imperfect beings.

Where does Hegel fit in? Well, Hegel is all about emphasizing the inconsistency of human thought and action. However, this needs to be experienced by the human agent so he or she can learn through process and struggle. It is to learn in the "broken middle", as Gillian Rose has said, because there is a social aspect to knowledge and a trail of failures.

Where do I go from here? Well, part of the idea of failure is to perhaps link it to the idea of comedy or humor (like Judith Butler does with the Hegelian Spirit); it is a theme I started working on right off the bat of my doctoral program specifically looking at Zizek and Deleuze. It is a mode that is primed to deal with the contradictions and the inconsistencies that life throws at you, struggling through them, without resorting to either cynicism, which avoids conflict at an ironical distance (Zizek's pet peeve), or fascism, which tries to cover over the differences with a totalizing system; both cynicism and fascism cannot deal with failure or humor. In short, emphasizing the gap of human knowledge, about ourselves and other things, tries to prevent the systems of hubris that claim any type of absolute knowledge.

Time for Gillian Rose

The Hegelian, Jewish/Christian philosopher Gillian Rose is one of those interesting thinkers in critical theory in that everyone mentions how important she is as a challenging thinker, yet they also seem to notice how she has been somewhat ignored.

The fact that she had a deathbed conversion to Christianity may be part of the equation. The idea that Christian thinkers like Rowan Williams, Graham Ward, Robert Shanks and John Milbank all try to utilize her thought for their respective causes but ultimately leave something out is another issue. Perhaps her hard to understand writing style probably due to its Hegelian roots is another thing preventing popularizing; unlike Zizek, she does not read her Hegel through Kung Fu Panda.

Still, I think she is important for at least a couple of reasons (which is why I am going to be reading her Hegel book this summer while I fulfill language requirements for my doctoral program):

1. She tried to make Hegel important in opposition to post-structuralists readings before Zizek made this move sexy. I'll post more on how she did this after reading through her Hegel book, but what is important is that we get a glimpse of the non-totalizing Hegel here and also a Hegel who is joined by the hip with Kierkegaard. I remain convinced that modern Christian (and postmodern for that fact) have to struggle along with (not against) the two-headed monster of Hegel/Kierkegaard.

2. She struggles with the world of faith and reason. There is no private place to do philosophy/theology; it is for the public and toward a public Other. It is in the place of the "broken middle" where there is no easy synthesis or unreconciled dualisms. I like this middle because it forces us to insists that all ideals have a social and individual responsibility that does not try to sweep away the real conflicts of the real world away.

If you are interested in her then see Vincent Lloyd's site: http://www2.gsu.edu/~phlvwl/
for his essays on Rose (he is a good guy!).

My Barth's Ethics paper: Ethics of Failure

First, the probably most important discovery of the research of this paper is the work of the Jewish/Christian philosopher Gillian Rose. Planning to read her almost exclusively this summer starting with her Hegel book.

Anyway, below is the outline of my paper-in-progress:

Thesis: I claim there is a certain element of the Hegelian dialectic in Barth's thought as especially seen in his ethics.

First, cover the secondary literature criticizing the Hegelian/Barth method (Hoff essay especially).

Second, cover the work of those who see links between Hegel and Barth (Ward, Shanks)

Third, cover the secondary literature that emphasize Barth's dialectical ethics (Cough, Haddorff, Nimmo vs Biggar)

Fourth, critique Barth's reading of Hegel with the non-totalizing Hegel of Slavoj Zizek and Gillian Rose

Finally, dive into Barth's ethics that emphasize act but always beginning again at the beginning (no synthesis)-so then we have a non-totalizing Barth

Conclusion-Barth is like the new reading of Hegel that emphasize the fallibility of human acts and the failures of the acts forward but the point is the journey is the important part for the movement of truth. Grace institutes action that struggles through the contradictions of "this" world but also keeps itself open to new possibilities without falling into the dual trap of conservatism or relativism. However, ethical agents cannot afford to escape this middle, dialectical area of the ethical decision because one cannot simply rely on law but also cannot rely on solipsism. The event opens up the critical points for faith to challenge the law to make a better, new way for the social-political setting.

So I have really tried to latch on the idea of "failure" in Barth as a way to caution the ethical agent in the reality of following the command of God. I'm thinking this might be a good idea to then eventually look at the same idea in a Hegel, Kierkegaard, Zizek or Rose in the future. I think the idea of "failure" prevents both systematization and relativism.