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Nihilism and faith: Rose, Bernstein and the future of Critical Theory
Tony Gorman
In a succession of books the late Gillian Rose and Jay Bernstein have sought
to defend and elaborate upon the Adornian inheritance both within Critical
Theory, contra Habermas,1 and beyond Critical Theory, contra post-structuralist
and postmodernist thought.2 In these works, Rose and Bernstein are clearly
engaged in a shared project and present a common front to the philosophical
world. The central features of this shared project are a commitment to the
method of immanent critique, genealogy and phenomenology without historical
completion, as a means of rescuing lost forms of knowledge, political wisdom and
ethical life. Their aim is to trace the historical roots of the deformation of
reason, as it is reflected in modern/postmodern social theory, jurisprudence,
politics and aesthetics, in order to open up new ways of resuming the values of
classical theory (i.e. the Platonic–Aristotelian praxis and phronesis) within
the present. However, this work of recovery is tempered by the recognition that
the deformation of reason renders impossible the direct expression and
reinstatement of these values. Accordingly, they conceive Critical Theory to be
an essentially negative and aporetic project: its task is to narrate and explain
the deformation of reason as it is reproduced and reinforced in the human
sciences from the standpoint of an expanded notion of rationality, while
remorselessly criticizing as hopelessly utopian all attempts, including its own,
to transcend in thought the limitations that deformed reason imposes in
actuality.
However, in the Broken Middle (1992),3 Rose implicitly departs from this
shared consensus with Bernstein. The most immediate expression of this change in
orientation is Rose’s explicit criticism of Adorno, which builds upon and
further elaborates the critique of negative dialectics stated in her 1987 paper
‘From Speculative to Dialectical Thinking: Hegel and Adorno’ (which would have
been more aptly subtitled ‘Rose and Adorno’).4 In addition to the critique of
Adorno, The Broken Middle introduces two innovations not contained in Rose’s
first three works. First, drawing heavily on Kierkegaard, it advances, embraces
and defends a notion of faith. Second, Rose switches the axis of genealogical
origin from the Greek polis to the Talmudic Judaic community. Rose’s motivation
for this changed point of departure is two-fold: first, to show that faith is a
necessary condition of love without domination in personal relationships;
second, to demonstrate in opposition to Christian dogmatics that grace is not
opposed to law but is the means of its deliverance. The genealogical function
that Talmudic Judaism is made to serve in The Broken Middle is the idea of a
post-sacrificial, ethical community, conceptually prior to the Christian
separation of love and law and the modern diremption of law and ethics, and yet
mediated by tradition and reason and thus open to history. Rose then
reconstructs the fate of modern Judaism from the standpoint of this fictional
community to show how modern Judaism and Jewish secular thought re-present the
broken Talmudic mediation and how this in turn is a consequence and expression
of the antinomies of modernity as a whole. Rose situates herself within the text
as the ‘single one’ who must negotiate the ‘breaks’ between the universal (the
modern state and the discourse of human rights) and the particular (religion and
ethnicity). This engagement is pursued through an immanent critique of Christian
and Judaic political theology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, political theory
and literature. In this extended narrative, the Marxist dimension of the first
phase of her work almost completely drops out of the account. Rose in effect
abandons her earlier project of a Hegelian Marxism in favour of a Kierkegaardian
Hegelianism.5
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