Ebook: The Broken Middle: Out of our Ancient Society

The Broken Middle offers a startlingly original rethinking of the modern philosophical tradition and fundamentally rejects the anti-philosophy and anti-theory of post-modernity. Extending across the disciplines from philosophy to theology, Judaica, law, social and political theory, literary criticism, feminism and architecture, this book stakes itself on a renewed potential for sustained critique. Against the grain of much contemporary thought, this work of criticism offers the reader a way beyond the spurious alternatives of "totalization" or acknowledgement of the "other".

The Broken Middle expounds the phenomenology of the diremption of law and ethics. By reconstructing the suppressed political history of modernity, it shows that contemporary thought belongs to a tradition which has become ancient. Following this drama in the configuration of anxiety of beginning, equivocation of the ethical, and agon of authorship, the logos opens out of the pathos of the concept.

Gillian Rosemary Rose (née Stone; 20 September 1947 – 9 December 1995) was a British scholar who worked in the fields of philosophy and sociology. Notable facets of this social philosopher's work include criticism of neo-Kantianism and post-modernism, along with what has been described as "a forceful defence of Hegel's speculative thought." Much of her work focused on the failure of the social sciences (particularly law, sociology, and philosophy) to understand the gap between ethical life and the law as embodied in its institutions.

Her other works include an introduction to the thought of Theodor Adorno (1978), Hegel contra Sociology (1981), The Dialectic Of Nihilism: Post-Structuralism and Law (1984), Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (1993), and Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (1996).

Despite her early passing, and a sometimes marginal place in official accounts of late 20th-century thought, Gillian Rose's work has had a profound impact on a wide variety of contemporary philosophers and other scholars in the humanities (most notably Slavoj Zizek, John Milibank, and former Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams).

She is the sister of the literary scholar and psychoanalyst Jaqueline Rose.