Excerpt

Gillian Rose, as a strict Hegelian, was a thinker of the primacy of the political. From the beginning to the end of her remarkable oeuvre, she targets remorselessly the dangerous self-deceit of those who try to think away this primacy—in favor of the alternative primacy of the social, the ethical, the individual, the linguistic, or the religious. Human life is fundamentally and overwhelmingly political, and this means that it is based at once in the violent imposition of the power of some human beings over others, and in a claim for the legitimacy of this power. There is force and…