What does a faithful life look like, a life informed by stories of faith such as those told about Abraham? Rose describes the life of faith as one in which an individual is continually “willing to stake oneself again” (1992, 148). By this she means that a person with faith will whole-heartedly participate in the practice of positing concepts (norms) and testing them against reality (practice), always willing to revise the concepts they posit. A faithful person will not exempt themselves from this process; he will remain sensitive to the evidence of experience, never dogmatically holding to concepts that are not supported by evidence, to norms not supported by practice. It is thus only faith “that prevents one from becoming an arbitrary perpetrator or an arbitrary victim; that prevents one, actively or passively, from acting with arbitrary violence” (1992, 148).
694 Journal of Religious Ethics
To hold dogmatically to a view of the world, as discussed above, is to act with arbitrary violence because it is to offer reprimands that are not supported by the evidence of experience and are only based on personal whims held as dogmatic truths. A faithful person does not imagine that she can act without violence; rather, she realizes that all actions are continually implicated in violence and yet she perseveres in acting, in positing concepts and testing them against realities. In this struggle, “‘violence’ is inseparable from staking oneself, from experi- ence as such—the initial yet yielding recalcitrance of action and passion” (1992, 151).
This is why Rose opposes much contemporary religious thought, both Jewish and Christian. She takes the project of religious thinkers, from Buber to Fackenheim to Metz to Milbank, to be one of “mending the world,” which has the effect of “betraying” the hard work of living (1992, 293). In short, they lack faith. They lack the commitment to persist in the “revel of ideas and risk” that is living and instead opt for an easy out, for the fantasy of an ethics purified of law (1995, 135). The “New Jerusalems” that they posit foreclose the possibility of critical analysis of social norms, of the worldly power and worldly institutions from which they recoil. “Against the tradition from St. Paul to Kant which opposes law to grace and knowledge to faith . . . the modern congrega- tion of the disciplines—from philosophy to architecture—loses faith when it renounces concept, learning, and law” (1992, 307).
If Kierkegaard identifies and describes the problem of anxiety, the solution he offers is a lifestyle of faith, on Rose’s reading. Anxiety is experienced any time one truly grapples with the law. To live life without anxiety would be to shut oneself off from a central feature of the world; it would be to live in delusion. Living life without anxiety is like living life without freedom—possible, perhaps, but only when one understands social norms to be absolutely rigid and static.
Rose notes Kierkegaard’s two-stage move, which demonstrates the relationship between law, anxiety, and faith (1992, 89–90). First, there is a movement “from law to anxiety.” A person who is living an ordinary life in the world experiences anxiety for some reason—perhaps because of a moment of crisis when social norms are suspended. Faith allows the individual to return back from the moment of anxiety to the law. Instead of despairing indefinitely because of anxiety, if the individual has faith, he is able to go back to ordinary life. However, the ordinary life of the individual before the experience of anxiety coupled with faith is different from that ordinary life afterwards. What was before simply a life lived with “ambivalence” becomes a life lived with full-blown existential angst, with deep “equivocation” (1992, 90).
Rose explicitly links freedom to anxiety—and hence to faith. “The art of power is ‘freedom’: how to be always all-ready for anxiety” (1992,
Secular Faith of Gillian Rose 695
87).

grey skin

Grey skinned girl, walking the streets of fire, turning herself into ashes.
Post to post, the vibrance of a wooden lemon, the zest of her own divine hope.
Dust might cover her, for she would rather be unseen,
flowers may, or may not -
The winter shall not be as grey as her, and the men should not ever own,
her light feet.
Gather the world, into heartbreak, ponder around like a mute.
Grey skin girl, where will you go now?
Home is long passed so now you must flee.

who made you this way?
who made you this way?

T/E/N/D/E/R

palanquin

Dear Creature, why is it so different, why is it the same, why do you exist too much?
You are too serious.
Dear Creature, its blissful and its painful and I dont know how to help you.
I didnt come to save you.
Hey Creature, little creature, what lovely eyes you have
Why are you crying? Stop crying! Do I look like christ?

"In Ivan I have lived, in Malina I will be dying"

field notes 2

'I'm just afraid "today" is too much for me, too gripping, too boundless, and that this pathological agitation will be part of my "today" until its final hour'

I had warned him, that I'm no longer subject to his will, that I've changed, from now on I'll treat everyone the way I'm treating him, with immediate retaliation for every breach of contract

Is spirit a form of matter?          Adopt me, embrace me.          the necessity of loss          The faith, the pain, the sorrow of an absent God          'the always already'          Does it end at the logic of essence?         

Are you a lawyer of the empire?

she suffered an invasion of christianity by her judaism

The Vegetative Soul

Ruin

'The ruin is not in front of us; it is neither a spectacle nor a love object. It is experience itself: neither the abandoned yet still monumental fragment of totality, nor, as Benjamin thought, simply a theme of baroque culture. It is precisely not a theme, for it ruins the theme, the position, the presentation or representation of anything and everything.'

Derrida.