The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society

by Gillian Rose

The Broken Middle offers a startlingly original rethinking of the modern philosophical tradition and fundamentally rejects the anti-philosophy and anti-theory of post-modernity. Extending across the disciplines from philosophy to theology, Judaica, law, social and political theory, literary criticism, feminism and architecture, this book stakes itself on a renewed potential for sustained critique. Against the grain of much contemporary thought, this work of criticism offers the reader a way beyond the spurious alternatives of "totalization" or acknowledgement of the "other".

The Broken Middle expounds the phenomenology of the diremption of law and ethics. By reconstructing the suppressed political history of modernity, it shows that contemporary thought belongs to a tradition which has become ancient. Following this drama in the configuration of anxiety of beginning, equivocation of the ethical, and agon of authorship, the logos opens out of the pathos of the concept.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

356 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Gillian Rose (20 September 1947 – 9 December 1995) was a British scholar who worked in the fields of philosophy and sociology. Notable facets of this social philosopher's work include criticism of neo-Kantianism and post-modernism, along with what has been described as "a forceful defence of Hegel's speculative thought."

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. It is extremely difficult. Word to the wise: don't give up on it, you'll regret it. Her overarching argument that reason is triune successfully refutes any cognitive scheme grounded in dualism. Neglecting the broken middle leads one to fantasize a holy middle. Rose takes religion seriously but isn't satisfied with the consolations of myth and ritual. And rightly so. Only the messy process of investigating the brokenness of the middle yields what she calls the 'pathos of the concept.' Her goal is to "challenge the prevailing intellectual resignation; to urge comprehension of diremption in all its anxiety and equivocation; to aim - scandalously - to return philosophy from her pathos to her logos." Those of us that claim to love Sophia should want to see her regain her logical powers after being stuck in mindless exile.

Her discussions of Kierkegaard and Kafka are...devastating. Her critiques of Girard, Levinas and Rosenzweig hit their target exactly. It gets better - in the last few pages she swings for the rafters and lays waste to the communitarian fetish. Since few people make this argument, it's worth quoting at length:

"'Community' is opposed to imperium as a type of non-coercive social cohesion maintained not only without politics but without sociology - without addressing the question of how its authority is legitimized. For that is achieved by the opposing terms on which the idea of the community relies: the charismatic appeal of the Prince is smuggled in iconologically to distinguish the community from the type of legal-rational domination exemplified by impersonality, bureaucracy, technology."

The question of authority is non-trivial. The charisma of the Prince isn't actually less coercive than imperial authority, it's just more subtle.

[Caroline Loftus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gillian Rose..GOAT of 90s British academia… Nick Land is in the acknowledgments of this book, lol.

[Stuart Murden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Only giving this book three stars as it's a heavyweight work of philosophy. Some background in the history of western thought helpful. Where are we, Ancient Athens or New Jerusalem? Maybe the middle is always 'broken'.

[Micah Enns-Dyck · Rating 5 out of 5]

A read that is as rewarding as it is difficult.