Substance is subject is style: On the speculative poetics of Gillian Rose

• Published in: Thesis eleven Vol. 186; no. 1; pp. 97 - 115
• Main Author: Marks, Gregory
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.02.2025; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903-1969); Contours; Gillian Rose; GWF Hegel; poetics; speculative fiction; hermeneutics
• ISSN: 0725-5136; 1461-7455
• DOI: 10.1177/07255136241312353

This article proposes a reading of philosopher Gillian Rose's works as predominated by the question of literary style. In contrast to Rose's professed antipathy for the linguistic and structuralist turns in 20th-century philosophy, this article contends that her thought makes recourse to distinctions of literary form (i.e. poetics) to resolve problems of philosophical expression. The contours of this poetics are traced from Rose's first works on the respectively ‘ironic’ and ‘severe’ styles of Adorno and Hegel, through to her final published work and its experimentations with the formal limitations of philosophical writing. Following Hegel's theorisation of the ‘speculative proposition’ as a statement of formal difference belying a conceptual unity, Rose's poetic thought is designated as a speculative poetics, which seeks a stylistic unity that does not efface the non-identity of its terms.