Trauerspiel or Comedy? Modernity and Violence in the Philosophy of Gillian Rose
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis broaches an understanding of the perplexing concept of violence in the philosophy of Gillian Rose (1947-1995) by examining her sporadic appeal to the dramatic category of the Trauerspiel (mourning-play) and its opposite, comedy. Understood in their context as contrasting images of philosophy’s project in the aftermath of 20th century catastrophe, the dramatic categories of the Trauerspiel and comedy are shown to be critical conceptual resources for making sense of the function of violence in Rose’s late work. I begin by contextualizing Rose’s invocation of the Trauerspiel through an exploration of Rose’s engagement with Walter Benjamin’s study of 17th century German mourning-plays. In this 17th century context, the Trauerspiel dramatizes the melancholic aftermath of the Lutheran repudiation of “good works” and its implication in violence and political intrigue. Building on Benjamin’s intimation of the enduring significance of this link between melancholy and violence, I show how Rose uses the dramatic image of the Trauerspiel to characterize the predicament of postmodern philosophy. Philosophy, conceived as a Trauerspiel, interminably mourns the losses produced by the diremptions of modernity. By refusing to complete this work of mourning, however, the dirempted conditions of violence are left intact, thereby re-enforcing and reifying what is abhorred. Against this melancholic conception of philosophy as a Trauerspiel, Rose gives an account of philosophy as a comedy that figures violence, when reckoned with, as a precondition of education in the law. Through a comedic double movement, violence is understood retrospectively as a representable aspect of modernity’s dirempted history and prospectively as a necessary risk of thinking and acting in a dirempted world. By attending to this comedic aspect of Rose’s conception of violence I am afforded an interpretive position from which to criticize two prominent interpretations of Rose that over- and underemphasize the stakes of her investment in the question of violence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".