Gillian Rose's Mourning Becomes The Law

In Mourning Becomes the Law Gillian Rose boldly suggests that Arendt ‘died at the walls of the third city’ (Rose, 1996: 39). While Arendt and Rose’s notions of remembrance may seem to be in conflict to one another – I will suggest that they can in fact be mutually reinforcing and that in truth, reconciling difference between the public and private realms is necessary to constructing an engaged collectivity that acknowledges memory as a point of interpretation, not as a public space which represents the end of interpretation but rather as a place for beginning. Rose denounces Athens, as the polis; arguing that “the city of rational politics has been abandoned…[for] enlightenment thought is domination” (Rose: 1996, 20). Yet, for Rose domination begins with acceptance by the individual who ‘imagines [her participation within the community] when she is confronted by legitimate authority which seems to exclude her’

Democracy, while remaining shrouded by the Protestant work ethic remains resourceless to oppose Fascism. Yet it ‘shares one of the the most destructive features of Fascism’ that is, of Protestant Innerlichkeit or (inwardness) (Rose, 1993: 206). Drawing on Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Rose describes how protestant salvation forms ‘a hypertrophy of inner life’ and thus, an ‘atrophy of political participation’ (Rose, 1993: 180). This ‘political melancholy’ is ‘not the work of remembrance’ (Rose, 1993: 206). As it in it’s mourning it remains redemptive, ‘leav[ing] everything as it is; to restore the old regime; or inaugurat[ing] a greater violence’ (Rose, 1993: 206). However ‘the politics of Zakhor, remembrance, are equivocal’, for ‘inaugurated mourning bears the fruits of forgiveness: it may become silent’ (Rose, 1993: