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Love's Work is a profoundly Kierkegaardian work. … It deploys sensual, intellectual and literary eros, companions of pain, passion and plain curiosity, in order to pass beyond the preoccupation with endless loss to the silence of grace.
Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death …
Our unconscious then does not believe in its own death. It behaves as if it were immortal. We cannot imagine our own death and when we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still spectators, hence, no one believes in his own death.
I discovered Love's Work , a memoir by British social philosopher Gillian Rose , quite by accident, having found it while searching on Amazon for the next book to read. Love's Work is unlike any memoir I've read; the writing is bold, blistering, graphic, and defiant. Rose, diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer in her mid-40's, died two years after the diagnosis, the same year the memoir was published. She lived to see and enjoy the book's positive reception: ‘Rose relished the irony that it was Love's Work [rather than her scholarly books] - her most difficult and esoteric act of indirect communication - that gave her popular success’ (Caygill, Paradiso, p. 8). The voice in Love's Work - confrontational at times, confessional yet elliptical - has imprinted itself in my psyche; writing is my attempt to better understand its impact on me. While the title announces a work about love, images of death and decay disrupt and interrupt the theme of Eros, not surprising given that the book was written in the wake of a devastating diagnosis.
What does Rose mean by love's work? In his introduction to the memoir, Michael Wood writes, ‘The work of love, for Rose, is what she calls her “life's affair”: a matter of getting love wrong, and going on getting it wrong, but not only getting