Against the backdrop of a 21st-century addicted to ‘origins’ and ‘ends,’ this seminar uses the work of Gillian Rose (1947-1995) to explore the possibilities of ‘the broken middle’. Contemporary politics and literature too often eschew the middle in favour of posited utopias: perceiving in the crisis of the present an imminent transcendence towards redemption (the nation-state made great again) or catastrophe (climate apocalypse); attempting to circumvent social institutions and the media in favour of direct relationships with the other; believing fervently in materiality, affect or corporeality ‘beyond’ the mediation of language (even as its residue). What would it mean, instead of holding out for this ‘u-topia – without a place’, to inhabit what Rose called the broken middle: an ‘a-poria – without a path’? Whereas the utopia promises finality, middles are necessarily places of ‘anxiety and equivocation’. How can we theorise and/or practise this anxious intermediacy? What are recent literary and critical conceptions of the middle? And how might the middle relate to beginnings and ends? On the thirtieth anniversary of Rose’s death, we invite participants to consider ways of remaining with - even mastering - these broken middles.
Provided they are mediated by Rose’s thought, we welcome proposals tackling a wide variety of questions, though especially those related to politics and aesthetics, e.g.:
Can aesthesis offer a response to the broken middle of form, as Isobel Armstrong suggested in The Radical Aesthetic (2000)?
Might poetry, in its failure to ‘transcend representation,’ as Ben Lerner describes it, be a way of remaining with the broken middle? Or is poetry undermined by a ‘utopian ideal’ that orients every actual poem towards an ‘outside that poems cannot bring about’? (The Hatred of Poetry, 2016)
Does Rose’s work, with its emphasis on the mediate, offer a sufficient response to immediacy, the ‘style’ of what Anna Kornbluh has called ‘too late capitalism’? (Immediacy, 2024)
How does Rose’s work confront the eschatological impulses in our politics, so reminiscent of Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending (1967)?
How does the broken middle bear on those figures – Fred Moten’s ‘fugitives,’ or refugees for Giorgio Agamben – that live between the ideal of the nation-state and the biological life it has come to govern?
How does Rose’s response to the theoretical climate of postmodernity speak to our present?
How might Rose’s Judaism help us grasp her philosophy of the middle, especially in light of those who, like Martin Buber, claim that Judaism is uniquely characterised by the belief that our ‘sojourn on earth’ is not a ‘forecourt of the true world,’ but is itself the only ‘true life’?
In particular, we invite proposals that draw on the broken middle, that elusive present continually overlooked by politics and theory alike, without deforming its a-poria into yet another u-topia.