Abstract

This article reconstructs Gillian Rose's idea of ‘divine comedy’, from its first articulation in Hegel Contra Sociology (2009) to the development of the idea in later works; most importantly, Love’s Work (1995). This analysis demonstrates that Rose implicitly shifted away from her earlier, pessimistic, Hegelian account of the end of art and her insistence on the ‘severe style’. Divine comedy, it is argued, may satisfy the requirements that Rose articulates for speculative thought, by traversing the constitutive dichotomies of modern life – for example, between universal and particular, or between law and love – in light of individual experience. By reading Love’s Work as an exemplary modern divine comedy, this article argues for the ongoing viability of the ‘ideal style’, which Rose had previously dismissed. This, in turn, suggests a novel reading of Rose's oeuvre and affirms the possibility of a speculative poetics.