Sometimes, despite our best intentions, things go terribly wrong. For leftists in particular, this experience is sadly familiar — as the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin observed in 1940, history appears as “one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble.”
By the end of the twentieth century, Benjamin’s note rang especially true, with the catastrophe of the Soviet Union and the perceived final victory of capitalist liberal democracy prompting the political scientist Francis Fukuyama to herald “the end of history.” This sense of failure has only intensified. While the triumph of liberal democracy has been called into question with the global rise of a new authoritarian right, the defeats of the Left have only been reiterated. Particularly with the genocide in Gaza, Benjamin’s metaphor of history as a catastrophe that piles rubble on rubble has become horrifyingly literal.
Our time is one of disappointment and disarray — and this is why Gillian Rose may be the philosopher the Left needs. If her thought could be summed up in a phrase, it might be: concede the difficulty, but not final defeat. Or, in the words of the epigraph to her 1995 memoir Love’s Work: “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.” Whether in politics, philosophy, love, or life itself, when things go wrong or get tough it may be tempting to give up, escape, or else simply deny the problem. For Rose, however, it is only by confronting difficulty and failure head-on and learning from it — by keeping your mind in hell — that moving forward might be possible. In the words of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, her most consistent ally: “The fear of error is the error itself.”
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Auteur: Robert Lucas Scott
