'In this book Kate Schick brings off the seemingly impossible: she renders Gillian Rose's thought clear without losing sight of its subtle profundity and obstinate difficulty. In doing so she makes it apparent just why we might now be more receptive to this thought and what it still has to teach us: that against the already actualised dystopic utopia of the right, and an increased left oscillation between impossible utopia and entire resignation to evil, Rose offers us the abstract contours of a hopeful realism or a realistic hope. Schick rightly edges that vision a little further away from aporia and a little further towards practical realisation. Thereby she has crafted a real contribution not just to scholarship and political theory, but to the future of political practice in the UK and beyond.' John Milbank Taking on the Political Series Editors: Benjamin Arditi, Jeremy Valentine and Alex Thomson International Advisory Editors: Michael Dillon and Michael J. Shapiro Offering new perspectives on contemporary political theory, books in this series 'take on' the political in accordance with the ambivalent colloquial sense of the phrase - as both an acceptance and a challenge. They interrogate received accounts of the relation between political thought and political practice, criticize and engage with the contemporary political imagination, and reflect on the ongoing transformations of politics. Concise and polemical, the texts are oriented towards critique, developments in Continental thought, and the crossing of disciplinary borders. Makes the case for the rediscovery of British philosopher Gillian Rose's unique but neglected voice Gillian Rose draws on idiosyncratic readings of thinkers such as Hegel, Adorno and Kierkegaard to underpin her philosophy, negotiating the 'broken middle' between the particular and the universal. While of the left, she is sharply critical of much left-wing thought, insisting that it shirks the work of coming to know and of taking political risk in pursuit of a 'good enough justice'. In this book Kate Schick presents the core themes of Rose's work and locates her ideas within central debates in contemporary social theory (trauma and memory, exclusion and difference, tragedy and messianic utopia), engaging with the works of Benjamin, Honig, Zizek and Butler. She shows how Rose's speculative perspective brings a different gaze to bear on debates, eschewing well-worn liberal, critical theoretic and post-structural positions. Kate Schick is a Lecturer in International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington. She is co-editor of /The Vulnerable Subject: Beyond Rationalism in International Relations/ (2012).