Central to any reading of the work of the late Professor Gillian Rose is her understanding of

Hegel's thought. Equally central to an understanding of her work, though, is an understanding of

her style. Despite and because of Rose's real and apparent critique of Adorno in The Melancholy
Science, Rose was compelled to introduce her own style (referred to explicitly as the facetious
style in The Broken Middle ) and, therefore, the issue of style for Rose is one which contradicts
itself. It should be noted that Rose was already the philosopher that she was however also yet to
become. It can, thus, be argued that both an understanding of the importance of Hegel to any
reading of Rose's work and the way in which the concept of style both undermines and upholds
itself are necessarily related. On the one hand, Hegel implicitly informed Rose's work on Adorno
in The Melancholy Science before he explicitly informed her work in Hegel contra Sociology (and
subsequent work) while, on the other hand, an assessment of the thought of Rose through an
understanding of Hegel’s thought is only possible through an assessment of the development of
their respective styles. Rather than exaggerating the concept of style, however, the aim here is to
demonstrate the necessity of those forms that Rose's works take as well as to argue that those
forms refer directly to Rose's acknowledgment and critique of prevailing social relations that her
understanding of Hegel illuminates.

The full import of Hegel's thought, Rose maintains, may only be appreciated when due attention
is paid not just to what he says but also to the way in which he says what he says, or to the form
and structure of his works and to his style. From Hegel's Aesthetics Rose detects several styles -
the severe, the ideal and the pleasing style - each of which are said to accord to specific historical
periods: "Hegel inquires into the possibility of art forms. He asks which forms of art and which
individual arts are possible under specific historical and social preconditions". Aesthetics, for
Hegel, Rose says, does not refer to the interpretation of art but instead to the relation between
social structure and individual art forms. Hegel's lectures on aesthetics, therefore, are both
transcendental and sociological. Hegel assumes actual art forms and then examines the
conditions of their possibility through an analysis of the social structure within which particular art
forms appear. Rose also argues, however, that the logical order of Hegel's thought both precedes
and succeeds his identification of particular forms - be they art forms, property forms or
configurations of consciousness - with particular historical periods. It is thus also possible for a
particular form of style to occur in all societies and for all forms of style to occur in a particular
society. Something written in either the severe or the pleasing style, when the conditions that
render them logically necessary are understood, may, thus, at the same time also assume the
identity of the ideal style and thenceforth acquire a grace of their own. Grace, Rose says, "does
not imply an eagerness to please", which is not graceful at all, but refers to the "perfect harmony
between the substantial topic and the experience of the spectator".

In this context, it is argued that both Rose's so called early and late works are neither severe,
pleasing nor facetious but ideal instead. The difference in form and style, for example, of Hegel
contra Sociology and Love's Work, the one severe in its style and the other pleasing, is both real
and apparent. The severity of Hegel contra Sociology not only obscures the irony that
necessitates such severity - and it is only when such severity is read against itself that its
necessity may be understood - but it also hides the vulnerability that is also its companion and
which cannot be divorced from her critique, and her own implication within that critique, of
prevailing social relations and which becomes her authority. Furthermore, the appellation
'pleasing' would seem to be a misnomer when you consider the subjects to which Rose
seemingly so curtly introduces us "without preliminaries" in Love’s Work and is finished with them
just as quickly as she introduces us to them. It is not her intention to shock us as such but instead
to recognise them and to let them be what they already are without pretending to have resolved
the difficulties that they imply.