Paradiso E-Book

Gillian Rose

• Herausgeber: HetMoet-Menard Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 73

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Shortly before her death, Gillian Rose began work on a new book her Paradiso thus fulfilling her promise at the end of Love's Work to 'stay in the fray, in the revel of ideas and risk'. Confident even only a week before her death that she could complete the work, all that remains are these fragments. In them, Rose combines the detached insight of one who is taking leave, or who has almost left, with a desire to participate in the joys of life until the last.Exceeding the injunction to 'keep your mind in hell and despair not', Paradiso sketches a movement through the hell and despair of terminal illness to an affirmation of the joys of companionship and memory. Paradiso contains some of Rose's most serene and affirmatory writing, and in that light completes one of the most remarkable philosophical oeuvres of the late twentieth century.

Leseprobe

Paradiso

Text © Howard Caygill, literary executor, on behalf of the estate of the late Gillian Rose, 1999 We are grateful to Professor Raphael Loewe and to Jonathan and Connie Webber for permission to reprint Professor Loewe’s Hebrew poem and the Webbers’ English translation.

Acknowledgment to Czeslaw Milosz for the five lines quoted from a poem. All rights reserved Cover design: Charlotte Hodes Ebook conversion by leeds-ebooks.co.uk Worldwide print distribution (except North America)

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Paradiso

GILLIAN ROSE

MENARD PRESS

Contents

Editor’s Preface

Edna or the Song of Songs

MYSTICAL THEOLOGY

Margarets or Authority

RATIONAL THEOLOGY

Dr Grove or Goodness

HELLENISM

Jonathan or Sephardism

HOLOCAUST ANTHROPOLOGY

Preface

Gillian Rose enjoyed the reputation of being a difficult author. Her first book, The Melancholy Science (1978), masqueraded as an introduction to the thought of T. W. Adorno, but readers looking to be introduced were quickly dismayed. The knotty prose and the involved analyses of style and reification were definitely not for beginners. Rose relished hearing stories from defeated readers of her first work, and would crown them with the information that it began life as a commission to write a cookery book. Her next book, Hegel contra Sociology (1981), combined a close study of the neo-Kantian origins of sociology and a reconstruction of the development of Hegel’s thought in a synthesis that proved formidable even for those readers familiar with the arcana of Hegel scholarship. Her polemic against post-structuralist thought in Dialectic of Nihilism (1984) and her reflections on Kierkegaard in The Broken Middle (1992) in their different ways conformed to a level of philosophical difficulty that deterred many potential readers­.

The recourse to a difficult style did not arise from an incapacity to write clearly – as testified by the limpid essays that make up Judaism and Modernity (1993) and the posthumous Mourning Becomes the Law (1996) – but reflected the working through of the intrinsic difficulty of a ‘trauma within reason itself’. In the preface to the second edition of Hegel contra Sociology, Rose traced the aetiology of the trauma of reason and her difficult negotiation of it to ‘the dilemma of addressing modern ethics and politics without arrogating the authority under question’, a dilemma which provoked the ‘ineluctable difficulty’ which she found played through in ‘Hegel, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard’s engagement with modernity’. The same negotiation of trauma is performed in the deceptively not-difficult Love’s Work (1995), where the existential drama is explored lyrically through the experience of imminent death, couched in sentences whose rhythms esoterically allude to Shakespeare, Burton and Jonson. Rose relished the irony that it was Love’s Work – her most difficult and esoteric act of indirect communication – that gave her popular success.

In the fragments of the unfinished Paradiso, published here for the first time, Rose continued to play through what she called the ‘existential drama’ provoked by the difficulties of modern ethics and politics. The work was conceived as a procession of twenty-one personae and themes, each provoking an affirmation of the difficulty of leading an ethical life under modern conditions. The few chapters that Rose was able to bring to a publishable state show a serenity and beauty that was always present in her work but rarely permitted their full voice. They are here published as her final word.

HOWARD CAYGILL

The flower

Sex, death and beauty

All in one

There is a film from 1937, directed by Irving Thalberg called The Good Earth and based on the novel by Pearl Buck. In this film Chinese peasants, normally eking out a living at subsistence level, are suddenly blessed with a bountiful harvest. Their response to their unexpected good fortune is to find it almost unbearable; they are terrified by its abund-ance. Without deliberate decision, the community pretends to itself that the crop is as bad this year as ever, in order mystically to protect its precarious gift. This is a book about the good earth: it is my Paradiso.

I have decided that I too will be difficult for a few minutes.

It concerns your eloquent analysis of King Arthur’s dream of Camelot with its tragic and inevitable outcome of sadness, no matter what choice he makes. The law that he has sworn to uphold will always rebound against his human weakness, whether or not he fulfils or ignores its requirements. However, as my wife Barbara and I read this, Barbara pointed out to me that there is a third scenario. What Arthur could have done is to pass sentence on Guinevere and Launcelot, but then offer to die in her place. In this way he would fulfil the just requirement of the law, liberate the two he loved and probably save the kingdom.

From a letter to me from

DR TOM AND MRS BARBARA GOODFELLOW

5 February 1995

Edna or the Song of Songs

MYSTICAL THEOLOGY

Rabbi Akiba said: ‘Had the Torah not been given, the Song of Songs would have sufficed to guide the world.’

When I innocently and joyfully conveyed to Sister Edna that I was planning to write about her, the vehemence of her response took me utterly by surprise. She claimed that she would be ruined with her community, a closed community, which would feel that their trust in giving her permission to pursue her work on the Song of Songs had been betrayed. She wrote to me, ‘What we are all committed to is a life of prayer in hiddenness. Against that I count my work on the Song as nothing’. And since then my love of her and my sense of the truth have been in deep travail.

My more or less immediate response was to point out to Edna that she represents to me the St Bernard of my Paradiso. In Dante’s Divine Comedy St Bernard is to be found at a higher terrace in Paradise than St Thomas Aquinas; for, to Dante, St Bernard expresses the love of God, while St Thomas expresses the knowledge of God. St Bernard also wrote a commentary on the Song of Songs in the form of eighty-six sermons. The symbolic analogy with Edna seems precise; while her whole life-story closely parallels and modernises the dilemmas and the goodness of St Augustine. It was the desire to communicate her radiant goodness that gave birth to this whole work in which I am engaged.

Edna replied to my reference to St Bernard with alacrity: ‘If I am your St Bernard that should make this easy. Bernard was really tough. Do you know the story of how, when he was preaching on one occasion, a blackbird flew into his face and, taking it by its wings, he tore it in two, commenting, “that is the last time you will fly in the face of God’s word”?’

The violence of this threat to me opens up a surprisingly fruitful didactic.

In his De Laudibus Virginis Matris (On the Praise of the Virgin Mother, Migne Patrologia, vol. clxxxii, col. 56), St Bernard described the sacramental relation of the visible to the invisible world: ‘full of supernal mysteries, abounding each in its special sweetness, if the eye that beholds be attentive’. This applies to the mystery of the blackbird as well, to the mystery of Edna’s hiddenness, and to the mystery of St Bernard.

St Bernard was the most adamant and powerful man: he began preaching the Second Crusade in the Cathedral at Vezelay on Palm Sunday 1146; he silenced Abelard’s anticipation of the rediscovery of Aristotelian logic; he opposed (unsuccessfully) Suger’s plans for the first Gothic Cathedral, at St Denis, north of Paris, when Suger, who had accompanied the King, Louis VII, to Vezelay to hear St Bernard preach the Crusade, returned inspired more by the potentialities of Vezelay’s architectural form for an urban and regal setting than by the call for the Crusade.

Bernard’s combination of political power and spiritual humble- ness, his combination even of the pride of preaching and the solitary devastation of prayer, are not mutually reproducing dialectical contraries that, in a superficially wise way, might be referred to a soul out of touch with its different strata. Let us leave it for the moment as the mystery of Bernard’s visibility and his hiddenness.