Abstract

Adorning the cover of Mourning Becomes the Law is a replica of Gathering the Ashes of Phocion, a painting by Nicholas Poussin. An Athenian beyond reproach, Phocion had been put to death by tyrants who had taken control of the city, his ashes left on the pyre. In the darkened foreground, Phocion’s wife gathers her husband’s ashes on her hands and knees while her female attendant shields her from the view of the city, which rises up behind them. With its glittering architecture and recreating citizens, the city seems impervious to this scene of mourning. Yet, Rose warns, there is not an unmediated opposition of individual love and worldly injustice here; rather, this act by Phocion’s wife is a finite act of justice that will have its bearing on the political life of the city. Mourning, “which draws on transcendent but representable justice”, becomes the law. Mourning Becomes the Law is the philosophical counterpart to Love’s Work, a memoir in which Rose reflects on the deaths of loved ones and, ultimately, her own impending death from cancer. Yet, while death haunts Love’s Work, she does not succumb to melancholia, but, rather, reaffirms her commitment to “staying in the fray.” In Mourning Becomes the Law, her final work, Rose again grapples with the meaning of death, but this time only as part of a broader theme that has preoccupied her for many years, namely, the nihilistic implications of postmodernism. Rose seeks to reveal the incoherence of postmodernism’s search for a “new ethics” that is divorced from the metaphysical inquiries of the tradition. By tearing ethics from metaphysics to give “the other” its absolute due, she argues, postmodernism has deprived itself of the resources necessary for an ethical project, and has thus “condemned itself to impotence and failure.” These resources, which are only to be found “in the politics which has been disowned, and in the theology which has been more thoroughly suppressed,” are drawn upon by Rose herself, who would “renew and reinvent” classical reflection “on the analogies between the soul, the city and the sacred”.