Love's Work

by Gillian Rose

Love’s Work is at once a memoir and a work of philosophy. Written by the English philosopher Gillian Rose as she was dying of cancer, it is a book about both the fallibility and the endurance of love, love that becomes real and lasting through an ongoing reckoning with its own limitations. Rose looks back on her childhood, the complications of her parents’ divorce and her dyslexia, and her deep and divided feelings about what it means to be Jewish. She tells the stories of several friends also laboring under the sentence of death. From the sometimes conflicting vantage points of her own and her friends’ tales, she seeks to work out (seeks, because the work can never be complete—to be alive means to be incomplete) a distinctive outlook on life, one that will do justice to our yearning both for autonomy and for connection to others. With droll self-knowledge (“I am highly qualified in unhappy love affairs,” Rose writes, “My earliest unhappy love affair was with Roy Rogers”) and with unsettling wisdom (“To live, to love, is to be failed”), Rose has written a beautiful, tender, tough, and intricately wrought survival kit packed with necessary but unanswerable questions.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Memoir, Essays, Biography, Autobiography, Biography Memoir

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

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

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started this without any prior knowledge of the author or her book (I now see that I read two friends' reviews of it, but I have no memory of that from several years ago), only that it was being read by the #NYRBWomen23 group and it was available through my library. Gillian Rose’s personal story, including her friendships of other strong personalities, is interesting; but even better is how she weaves her “memoir” with philosophy, which is her passion and profession. I didn’t understand everything she was trying to convey, but it still wormed its way into my consciousness.

The account of her friend Jim (last name not given) was interesting to me as a Shirley Jackson fan, as Jim is asked to leave Bennington College as a philosophy teacher “on the charge of corruption of students.” Except for a reference to Socrates, she doesn’t elaborate on what that means, but Jim was gay (bisexual?) and I was reminded of Jackson’s husband, Stanley Hyman, who was apparently rather cozy with some of his students. At Bennington, Jim met Camille, another teacher, and they became co-dependent friends. After “a fistfight at a college dance,” Camille was also asked to leave. Her last name is not given either, but the book she was working on at the time is named, so we know it’s Paglia. In contrast to Camille, Jim goes into a decline after their respective dismissals. He remained a close friend of Rose until his death.

Rose addresses her own impending death, specifically, and the human condition in general, sometimes in a wry tone; perhaps all of it in the comic—comic in the philosophical sense, as far as I can understand.

[Fionnuala]

This book is like a cross section of a landscape, solid rock compressing more porous deposits as upheaval follows upheaval beneath the earth’s surface.

The author doesn’t use that exact image but this memoir is nevertheless layered with the tough and the tender. Her father’s name was Stone, and in an act of rebellion at age sixteen, she went to a considerable effort to change her name from Stone to Rose, the name of her new step-father, making her, according to the birth certificate people, a child spinster, an odd term conjuring opposite qualities, innocence and cynicism, soft and hard.

Love’s Work is a series of such dichotomies. Work, for Gillian Rose, was the hard and demanding path she chose while still very young. She taught herself German, the harsh sounding language rejected by her Polish grandparents, and went on to study philosophy and the rigours of Adorno’s forbidding universe all of which lead eventually to a career teaching philosophy and writing scholarly books on Adorno, and later Hegel.

She took some time between chapters of work for little episodes of love, some of which she describes gloriously, both the comedy and the tragedy of the experiences. But the impression we are left with is one of love being sadly squeezed by work, her own or others, making us ponder the difficulties of being successful in both domains.

The crux of the memoir, however, is an even starker juxtaposition: a hardness found in the softness of her very centre: a tumour in her ovaries while she is still in the full bloom of her middle years. The manner in which she writes of this, the initial tests, then the treatment and eventual outcome, is simply astounding. In the full knowledge of what she may face in the future, she continues nevertheless to live by her own creed of love and work:
I will stay in the fray, in the revel of ideas and risk: learning, failing, wooing, grieving, trusting, working, reposing - in this sin of language and lips.

[Declan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is not until page 78, approximately half way through the book, that Gillian Rose discloses the circumstance in which the book is being written:

"If I were to explain that, in my early forties, I have cancer, say, advanced ovarian cancer, which has failed to respond to chemotherapies, and is spread throughout the peritoneum, the serous membrane lining the cavity of the abdomen, and in the pleura, the serous lining of the lungs, you would respond according to the exigencies of taxonomy, symbol and terror, according to ignorance rather than knowledge, although there is, in fact and in spirit, no relevant knowledge".

In characteristic style she goes on to question our possible responses. But, since the blurb has already told us that the book was written "as she was dying of cancer" we have, since beginning the book, been aware of the particular situation in which it came into being. It can't but condition our reaction to what we find there and, although she avoids mention of her cancer for several chapters, it must have impacted on the manner in which she choose to write about all of the subjects in this book: her friends and her lovers; her early dyslexia and her immersion in philosophy; her difficult relationship with her father and the comfortable relationship with her stepfather. So, while there isn't a sentimental moment in the entire book, even she - tough and thorough academic though she was - must have felt more keenly than most, the matchless, unrepeatable essence of all experience.

What results is a book that is both fascinating and frustrating. The lack of linearity in the book would not be a problem if she didn't veer away from a subject just as she has gained our interest. Typical of this tendency is her recounting of an affair she had with a catholic priest. She describes in detail the circumstances of their meeting, gives some impression of their time together and then, when a multitude of questions come to mind, she begins a philosophical meditation on "Why it is so agonising to the Beloved when the Lover wards off love?" , and there is no more of Fr. Patrick Gorman. Of course this disquisition is very interesting too, but perhaps it could have waited? The binary division between the Beloved and the Lover is characteristic of a tendency throughout the book to set things in opposition to one another: the powerful and the vulnerable; the father and the stepfather and above all Stone and Rose. Those latter two being surnames. Stone, her father's name, and therefore her surname which, when legally possible, she changes to Rose, her stepfather's name. Again and again she wrings meaning from that change, and from the resonant possibilities in the meanings of both words. No Rose [Life] without its Stone [Pain]; no Rose - although she doesn't say this - without its thorns.

One of the chief virtues of the book is Rose's ability to surprise the reader, to suddenly move towards an unexpected position. Another of her contrasts is between the teacher and the taught, although here she allows that one can be both at once, which brings her, not for the first time to a critique of feminism: "Feminism does not discern the beauty or the limitation of such a love in which each is equally teacher and taught, Lover and Beloved". The book is full of such interesting insights, such original thinking. She always recognizes how easily one role mutates into another and how in a true "marriage" [her quotes] "the singleness of each is enhanced by the communion" (so even two contrasted wings can come together and fly!).

Of course, as I mentioned, all of this is, in a way, beside the point. The point being that the woman who is thinking about all these matters has very little time left to live and the chapter in which she details the condition of her body and the operations she has been through, and another binary opposition, this time, more alarmingly, between two doctors, is frequently almost impossible to read. the contingency, to which she often alludes, is just too real, too immediate and present. All of her best intentions are being mocked. This is something she returns to in one of my favorite chapters in the book, the last one, in which she recounts and interprets the story of King Arthur and Camelot. The idealism of the king, his wish to be a just leader falters and then fails when the trusted knight Lancelot falls in love with his wife creating unsolvable dilemmas for Arthur. " Whatever King Arthur chooses, whether to overlook the betrayal or to prosecute the crime, the choice is not the issue. For, one way or the other the King must now be sad...Sadness is the condition of the King. For he has to experience his power and his vulnerability, his love and his violence, within and without the law" Throughout the book it is the ever-present conflicts within all of us that Gillian Rose explores with such erudition, giving them their due complexity. It is a book which yields up no easy pleasures but which rewards close, and repeated, reading. A book which asks questions without answers and which interrogates the unfathomable because, as she says "there is no rationality without uncertain grounds".

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not long before her death from the spread of ovarian cancer, philosopher Gillian Rose produced these episodic reflections on her life in particular the place of love and desire. Philosophy from Hegel to Adorno mingles with memories of encounters with others facing loss, grappling with mortality. Here are the friends whose response to illness, whose thoughts about relationships left an indelible mark: 96-year-old, New Yorker Edna first diagnosed with cancer at 16; dishevelled Jim who’d lost his lover to AIDs and now faces his own demise; Yvette whose outward appearance of demure, elderly woman disguises a fascination with all things sexual and a firm belief in pleasure without guilt. The aftermath of a colostomy stirs memories of discussions with a Holocaust scholar on plans for the disposal of human waste/excrement at Auschwitz. A visit to Auschwitz itself connects to Rose’s ambivalent relationship with her Jewish ancestry and Jewish theology, stemming from her difficult childhood and fractured family. It’s challenging to sum up, brief but packed with ideas. It’s sometimes dense and demanding, often provocative, sometimes deeply felt. First published in the late 1990s, this new edition's introduced by translator and poet Madeleine Pulman-Jones.

Thanks to Netgalley UK and publisher Penguin Modern Classics for an ARC

[K.D. Absolutely · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unforgettable tour of the soul.

There are books that talk to the heart. There are those that speak to the mind. This book, being both memoirs and philosophical talk to both and it challenges the way we view death and life, like the former actually being part of the latter. It illuminates the comedy of life and the tragedy highlighted by philosophy and the resulting inseparability of the two.

Gillian Rose died in 1995 and while dying, she was able to write and publish this book. Rose was a professor at the University of Warwick in England, where she taught modern European philosophy, social and political thought, and theology. Her books include Dialectic Of Nihilism: Post-structuralism and Law, The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society and Judaism and Modernity. At the time of her death, Rose was 48.

The book opens with Rose meeting Edna, a New Yorker in her nineties that has been diagnosed with cancer in her twenties. It says in the blurb though that this is a memoir about the author (Rose) who died of cancer so at first I thought that this was about her accounts: being diagnosed, initial shock and denial, chemotherapy sessions, maybe some operations, failing (because she died and it says so on the back blurb) and her last words. You know, the works. But no, it is not. Rather, it talks about her thoughts on social philosophy including her criticism of neo-Kantianism and post-modernism, along with what has been described as "a forceful defence of Hegel's speculative thought. She also talks about Judaism and Protestantism, her family, for example, her decision to change her surname from "Stone" (his own father's surname) to that of "Rose" (her stepfather's who she became closer following the divorce of her mother and father when she was very young) her reason that she drifted away from his own father and what she thought changed on her resulting to this decision.

This memoir is slim with big fonts but requires a slow pace to give time to think through about its message: that life is full of contradictions and philosophy does not help us understand them. Rose died young, single, budding modern-day philosopher, author of great books and a flourishing career in academics. Yet, she died and did not last till her nineties like Edna. Like her stand in neo-Kantianism and post-modernism, life seemed like a big tragedy for Rose.

Reading her reminded me of Simone de Beauvoir but with more heart and warmth.

[emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Poetry’s its own agon that allows us to recognize devastation as the rift between power and powerlessness. But when I say poetry I mean something impossible to be described, except by adding lines to lines that are sufficient as themselves.’

‘The only paradises cannot be those that are lost, but those that are unlocked as a result of coercion, reluctance, cajolery and humiliation, their thresholds crossed without calm prescience, or any preliminary perspicacity. Reading was never just reading: it became the repository of my inner self-relation: the discovery, simultaneous with the suddenly sculpted and composed words, of distance from and deviousness towards myself as well as others.’

‘To the bearer of this news, the term “cancer” means nothing: it has no meaning. It merges without remainder into the horizon within which the difficulties, the joys, the banalities, of each day elapse. Dare I continue? Are you willing to suspend your prejudices and judgement? Are you willing to confront and essay a vitality that overflows the bumble mix of average well-being and ill-being—colds and coughs and flu, periodic lapses in the collaboration with culture, or headachy days, when one feels gratuitously lacking in inclination, never mind inspiration? For what people now seem to find most daunting with me, I discover, is not my illness or possible death, but my accentuated being; not my morbidity—.’

‘If I am to stay alive, I am bound to continue to get love wrong, all the time, but not to cease wooing—.’

‘If I have understood the limitations of my speaking in the esoteric but fatal language of clinical control, it is far more difficult to articulate the deadly blandishments of the exoteric language of cosmic love. This language propagates the paradox and pathos of the lonely-hearts column in the New York Review of Books. Literati describe themselves with the same cultured and idealising fantasy that has led them, after decades of semi-experience limited by just that fantasy, to the desperation of self-advertisement in those august columns. O violence in love!’

‘Who is entitled to write his reminiscences? Everyone. Because no one is obliged to read them. In order to write one’s reminiscences it is not at all necessary to be a great man, nor a notorious criminal, nor a celebrated artist, nor a statesman—it is quite enough to be simply a human being, to have something to tell, and not merely the desire to tell it but at least have some little ability to do so. Every life is interesting; if not the personality, then the environment, the country are interesting, the life itself is interesting. Man likes to enter into another existence, he likes to touch the subtlest fibres of another’s heart, and to listen to its beating…he compares, he checks it by his own, he seeks for himself confirmation, sympathy, justification…’

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rose, a British philosopher who died at age 48 of ovarian cancer, has written a jagged memoir of her short life. It’s jagged in that it glances from one shard, or aspect, of her life to another, in only loosely chronological order – her tortured Jewish relationship with her parents, her interest in modern philosophy, holocaust implications , relationships with her lovers, and fusing all of these, her reaction to her cancer and imminent death.

Of her mother who was so traumatized by fifty members of her extended Jewish family being killed by the Nazis, she writes that she suffered so deeply that she denied it happening. Rose calls it “unexamined suffering, the unhappiness of one who refuses to dwell in hell, and who lives, therefore, in the most static despair.” Only by living in hell, and admitting it, can one achieve some kind of integrity and self-respect. The alternative is despair, whether acknowledged or not.

Her Judaism is an essential part of her integrity. She sees the modern world as a revolt against tradition, beginning with protestantism which protested the authoritarian corruptions of the church, the enlightenment in turn being a protest against what it considered any kind of superstition, and finally, the post modernist revolt against rationality itself. With this development she had no tolerance and led her back to her Jewish roots, although she admits that it “has been imbibed with the vapours of the culture”. She insists that her Judaism is “cerebral”, but seems to have some tolerance for the kind of “ Orthodox Jew who doesn’t have to worry about whether he believes in God, as long as he observes the law”.

But there is a price to pay for this independence from authority, and Rose, whose has a background in sociology as well as philosophy, says it is a deep and incessant anxiety, one that the Orthodox Jew doesn’t experience. It may not even be admitted, as individuals sidestep their anxiety and become adept at evading this core issue by distracting themselves in worldly manipulations.

What brings Rose up short from her advancing career in academic philosophy (for example, she wrote a dense book on Theodore Adorno, dense with his own commentaries on other philosophers) is the sudden diagnosis of her fatal cancer. She writes that illness is like an unhappy love – it has to be taken in and absorbed in all of its implications before letting it go, either the lover or the disease. “This is the hardest work”, she says, and is reflected in the title of the book. The temptation is to think that you have no control over your malady and to seek a kind of blissful emptiness. Rose ferociously insists that human existence is always a matter of “conditionality” and if I understand her right, there can be no love of anything without acknowledging power. Others (or disease) have power over us, they may pity us, but we in turn have power over them in how we regard them. It’s again, “living in hell.” Only if you admit your plight, do you gain the right to confront it honestly.

This confrontation involves what Rose calls “life’s work”. When any two individuals interact with one another, unpredictable configurations emerge. “Work is the constant carnival; words, the rhythm and pace of two, who mine undeveloped seams of the earth and share the pleasure.” Rose’s body has let her down, but her mind still functions. It exposes the anarchy of her cancer, it cures folly by more folly, balances contradictions. “Suffering can be held by laughter, which is neither joyful nor bitter”, but it’s not easy, it’s work of the highest and most difficult order. At the end of the book, she hopes that she will not be deprived of old age. “I will stay in the fray”, but of course she doesn’t.

Rose has not written a conventionally satisfying book. No answers to her plight, her dwelling in hell, but no reason to despair either. Alternative healing in whatever form, conventional medicine, neither help her in the least. Any human life, precisely because it is human, she argues, is worth examining in all of its incompleteness and fragmentation,, and she gives us hers, on her terms. It’s difficult life to absorb with its balancing, or maybe juggling is a better word, of contradictions. Collapse is always imminent.

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I devoured this little book last night in one hit. Whilst reading it, I felt as though all of my senses had been pricked to this kind of stinging, such is Gillian's prose, so incredible is her mind. I think everybody should read this diamond.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had it in mind that this is a cancer memoir, and while receiving a terminal diagnosis of ovarian cancer in her early forties is indeed an element, it is a wide-ranging short book that includes pen portraits of remarkable friends – an elderly woman, a man with AIDS – she met in New York City, musings on her Jewish family history and the place that religious heritage holds in her life, and memories of the contrast between the excitement of starting at Oxford and the dismay at her mother’s marriage to her stepfather (from whom she got her surname, having changed it by deed poll at age 16 from her father’s “Stone”) falling apart.

The mishmash of topics and occasional academic jargon (e.g., “These monitory anecdotes indicate, however, the anxiety of modernity” and “Relativism of authority does not establish the authority of relativism: it opens reason to new claimants”) meant I didn’t enjoy this as much as I’d expected to.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 4 out of 5]

You may be weaker than the whole world, but you are always stronger than yourself.

Normally I skip the introduction before reading a book, and maybe I should have done in this case as well, but I didn't (because I'm a fan of Michael Wood). So I knew going in that this was a book written by a dying philosopher. I appreciated throughout the clarity of Rose's thought and feeling, the absolute honesty by which she evaluates her life and family and lovers. She takes as her epigraph the injunction "Keep your mind in hell, and despair not." Then she shows us how that's done. This is philosophy as a form of life, plain and fierce.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

like gillian i hope to spend my life "learning, failing, wooing, grieving, trusting, working, reposing"

[Megan Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

This had been on my TBR for ages, so I was happy to finally read it and it was well worth the read. A captivating memoir, Gilliian Rose pulls at your heartstrings and thoughts with Love's Work in a novella that is both heartbreaking and somewhat hopeful. It is one of the most ethically important books I've read, reading Gillian Rose's words as she dives into her past and allows herself to be bluntly vulnerable without sugarcoating her pain or trials.

That's not to say it was an easy read. For as small as Love's Work is, it is at some points difficult and took me a few days to get through it. But, that didn't make me enjoy it less, in fact, I'd say Gillian Rose's bluntness gave it its own charm that makes it stand out as a memoir.

Overall, Love's Work is a brilliant memoir with a beauty in it that many cannot accomplish; it's blunt, it's thought-provoking, and it pulls at your heartstrings. It is a must-read that you absolutely cannot miss if you want a captivating memoir.

Thank you, NetGalley and Penguin Press UK for sending me an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

[Lily · Rating 5 out of 5]

A short book but an intense one, both emotionally and intellectually. Written near the end of Gillian Rose's life, it is partly a memoir that examines her experiences of love, language, and vocation - sometimes drawing elegant connections among them, other times leaping across the intervening gulfs. It is also a philosophical exploration of how one may confront pain and loss, including the impending loss of one's own life. A recurring theme is the necessity of acknowledging and passing through the sometimes hellish aspects of existence, as part of the larger work of learning to love and live fruitfully. The book is frank about some of the bleakest experiences of the author's life, while also maintaining a thread of tirelessness. What it offers is not exactly the sweetness of hope or optimism, but something that I can only describe as hunger: a sharp yearning to absorb and understand as much of life as possible, despite all the things that can go wrong. Which, after all, is maybe the most hopeful thing of all.

I'm not sure I have quite enough grasp of philosophical terminology to absorb some of her more involved points. But from the parts that I did understand, there were many passages that stood out, so the rest of this is just a collection of quotes:

"In my mother's family I find only devastation, made doubly demonical and destructive by the diversion of vast amounts of psychic energy devoted to its denial."

"The independence gained from protest against illegitimate traditional authority comes at the cost of the incessant anxiety of autonomy."

"This is the kind of magic which Edna believes in: the quiet and undramatic transmutation that can come out of plainness, ordinary hurt, mundane maladies, and disappointments."

"The victim will not become good: she makes her own the violence that she is dealt."

"The more innocent I sound, the more enraged and invested I am."

"Imagine how a beloved dog or child would respond, if the Lover turned away. There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy."

"My desire to possess Roy Rodgers for my love was indistinguishable from my equally unshakeable desire to be him."

"Happy love is happy after its own fashion: it discovers the store of wonders untold, for it is the intercourse of power with love and of might with grace. Nothing is foreign to it: it tarries with the negative; it dallies with the mundane, and it is ready for the unexpected."

"Does 'love at first sight' mean that you fall in love the instant you meet someone, or does the first sight occur when you suddenly fall in love with someone you may have met or known for any amount of time?"

"A soul which is not bound is as mad as one with cemented boundaries."

"If the Lover retires too far, the light of love is extinguished and the Beloved dies; if the Lover approaches too near the Beloved, she is effaced by the love and ceases to have an independent existence. The lovers must leave a distance, a boundary, for love: then they approach and retire so that love may suspire."

"I must continue to write for the same reason I am always compelled to write, in sickness and in health: for, otherwise I die deadly, but this way, by this work, I may die forward into the intensified agon of living."

[Fatima Sheriff · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 - approximately the amount of the book that I understood and enjoyed. I agree with Carmen's assessment that her reflection and stories of everything else is more gripping than her introspection. Some sections equire more excavation for me but I'm hoping a re-read and a discussion in book club will help.

[Sam Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

“If I am to stay alive, I am bound to continue to get love wrong, all the time, but not to cease wooing, for that is my life affair, love’s work.”

Love it when someone really introspective and concise assembles a meditation on what it means to live! Especially when they’re a complicated person! This was just a splendid read. A pearl of a book and wiser than I can appreciate.

[Anya Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5 - the major moment surrounding Gillian rose’s reckoning with mortality were beautiful and gripping, the discussions of philosophy definitely lost me

[Maddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

finished but going to reread immediately.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written while the author is dying from ovarian cancer, this book is as much philosophy as it is memoir. I read it with a dictionary and a pencil, and it seemed like I needed one or the other on every page. Full of lovely little snippets, deeply insightful, unflinchingly honest in her dissection of her life. Some of the chapters seem disjointed to me, and it never seems unified to me, but that is easily forgiven, and probably indicative of the author not finding unity at the end of her life.

"If I am to stay alive, I am bound to continue to get love wrong, all the time, but not to cease wooing, for that is my life affair, love's work."

[Becky · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel bad for really not taking more from this short meditation on life and death. Written as she was dying from cancer, Gillian looks back at some of the challenges she faced through her life, dyslexia and education, her lovelife, her Jewish faith, and tries to derive some sense of meaning from these experiences as she faces her final days. I wanted something to touch me, but I think I've read too many books from this list, as even in this short space of time it felt like too much devotion to esoteric thinking, at a time when there's not much time left.

I don't really feel right for saying that though, so I'm going to stop now.

[Lillian Crawford · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extremely beautiful little book with an exquisite introduction to match from my good friend Madeleine Pullman-Jones. Her raw honesty sits movingly beside that of Rose, the parallels between their lives bringing me to tears.

One passage that struck a particular resonance with me recalls talking to Gillian’s sister, the equally formidable Jacqueline Rose, after her incredible work on Plath and Sexton. She sighed and said, “I’ve had enough of mad girls.” I’ll always love my mad girls, but I am glad to move on.

[Deanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written when the author was dying of cancer, the book discusses love and death. The different types of love we all experience.
Her description of her treatment is factual but also makes me wonder how hard was it for her to write.

[Gloria]

And now I am going to read it again.

[māris šteinbergs · Rating 3 out of 5]

hey, I don’t want to say anything…
but I’m going to say something

the story leaves an absolute lacklustre feeling coming from a book of title ‘love’s works’. is love’s work emotional resonance blunted by its own opacity?

felt also lacklustre in both emotional impact and accessibility. it attempted to fuse memoir with philosophical reflection, but the result was frequently uneven - too abstract to be moving as a memoir, and yet too personal and impressionistic to satisfy as serious philosophy. neither here nor there. basically as every other book, which collapses under the weight of its own ambition!

[Sally Elhennawy · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I must continue to write for the same reason I am always compelled to write, in sickness and in health: for, otherwise, I die deadly, but this way, by this work, I may die forward into the intensified agon of living.”

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some passages that left me scratching my head, a few more of creeping lyric essayism (it was the nineties), but in the main beautiful, moving, and convincing.

[Kristin Boldon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the more challenging books I've ever read. There is no way I could take it in on one read. I need to read up on this book and re read it. It is staggeringly intelligent, and deeply sad.

[Christina Ek · Rating 5 out of 5]

This memoir is a collection of thoughts, stories and frank observations from the life of the British philosophy professor and thinker, Gillian Rose (1947-1995).

Truly grateful to K.M. who included this incredible memoir in her series, #NYRBWomen23 (twitter) - unable to stop reading after today's chapter!

[Lucy · Rating 5 out of 5]

no book in recent memory has made me say ‘fuck’ out loud, in awe!

[Catherine · Rating 2 out of 5]

The language in this was a stumbling block. I have a wide passive vocabulary, have met academics who talk like Gillian Rose, and didn't need a dictionary to understand individual words, but the sheer number of obscure terms in many of the paragraphs made it slow going and added to the feel of it being a series of unconnected reflections on events from the author's life. I didn't get any sense of progression, any reason why the sections were organised as they were and paused for some light distraction having read the first half of the book.

On returning to it, things became easier: don't know if I was more alert, had become used to her style, or she was less pretentious, but there were sections which intrigued, interested or moved me: her discussion of spending the night with a lover, her likening of members of the medical (&pseudo-medical) professions to a hierarchy of exterminating angels, the quote from Herzen and the penultimate paragraph.

L'amour se revele en se retirer. If the Lover retires too far, the light of love is extinguished and the Beloved dies; if the Lover approaches too near the Beloved, she is effaced by love and ceases to have an independent existence. The Lovers must leave a distance, a boundary, for love: then they approach and retire so that love may suspire. This may be heard as the economics of eros; but it may also be taken as the infinite passion of faith: Dieu se revele en se retirer. Love and philosophy may seem to have had the most to say, but friendship and faith have been framing and encroaching by night and by day.

More one to study than read for readings sake methinks.

[Mau · Rating 5 out of 5]

I spent the better part of my day writing a review of this and Goodreads has been shit enough to make it vanish and disappear! All I can say—and will say until I read the rest of Gillian Rose's books—is that this felt deeply significant. It is not so much a memoir as a vocation manual, and the vocation is love, the possibility of being given shape through others, the openness to being vulnerable, bound and unbound: 'To grow in love-ability is to accept the boundaries of oneself and others, while remaining vulnerable, woundable, around the bounds. Acknowledgement of conditionality is the only unconditionality of human love'.

Somewhere here, in what Rose tells us about her life, the vision of a polity where we might attend to others in such way arises.

'Now, Love’s Work is a profoundly Kierkegaardian work: it allows one to pass unnoticed. It deploys sensual, intellectual and literary eros, companions of pain, passion and plain curiosity, in order to pass beyond the preoccupation with endless loss to the silence of grace.' (Paradiso)