Gillian Rose and the promise of speculative sociology

While Gillian Rose (1947–95) is acknowledged to be one of the most important social theorists of the late-20th Century, her work continues to exist in a state of relative obscurity. The argument of the present paper is that there are good reasons for returning to Rose’s work, and in particular her vision of a speculative sociology. A defining feature of such a sociology, for Rose, is that ethical life begins with the attempt to think what Hegel terms the ‘absolute’. However, a sociological ethics does not feature prominently in Rose’s later texts, in particular Love’s Work and Mourning Becomes the Law, which centre on questions of death, love, time, and eternity. This article argues, by way of response, that a speculative sociology should be accompanied by an ethics of responsibility for the Other, and that such an ethics can be developed from the writings of Soren Kierkegaard, Max Weber and Zygmunt Bauman.