Jacques Derrida, Gillian Rose, and the question of home

Abstract This paper examines Jacques Derrida’s and Gillian Rose’s conceptions of “home” as an ambiguous realm between belonging and estrangement, rootedness and displacement. Both resist simple accounts of home as a stable refuge or secure place of origin, yet they differ in how they respond to its incompleteness. For Derrida, home is shaped by fear of dissolution and loss—loss of belonging, collapse of the safety that makes dwelling possible. This fear gives home a “spectral” quality, visible in the aporetic structure of hospitality and in the terror of linguistic homelessness. Rose, drawing on Hegelian speculative identity, understands home as a process of mediation, formed through the ongoing work of negotiating contradictions in the present. Through readings of texts from the 1980s and 1990s, this paper argues that their different orientations toward fear and mediation yield distinct ethical and political visions. Derrida’s “messianic without messianism” sustains the promise of justice precisely by refusing to settle it within a determinate order. Rose’s “inaugurated mourning,” by contrast, wagers that transformation remains possible through engagement with the “broken middle” of actuality.