ABSTRACT
On December 9, 1995, the British philosopher and sociologist Gillian Rose succumbed to the ovarian cancer that had ravaged her body for the previous two years. She was forty-eight and the author of a series of remarkable books ranging with sovereign authority over the entire terrain of modern philosophy and social theory. None, however, gained her the audience of her last effort, Love’s Work, which wrested from her physical suffering a painfully eloquent autobiographical memoir. A unique exercise in proleptic self-mourning, it interlaced wrenching accounts of the deterioration of her body with personal reminiscences and philosophical meditations. Resolutely antisentimental, Rose somehow found an idiom to fuse the private and the public in a way that brilliantly avoided the confessional self-indulgences of contemporary culture. With only Althusser’s tortured L’avenir dure longtemps to rival it, Love’s Work can justly be called the most fascinating philosophical memoir of our age.
