The anxiety of beginning
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4480643 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Robert Lucas Scott (0009-0001-2837-5547, Jesus College, University of Cambridge, UK, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 186 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 137-152 |
| Publication date | 2025-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Thesis Eleven (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0725-5136 • E-ISSN: 1461-7455 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/07255136251315755 |
| OpenAlex | W4407558089 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 11 |
To shoot from a pistol: this essay explores the anxiety of beginning through a reading of Hegel and Gillian Rose. Hegel is anxious about philosophical beginnings and the presuppositions which they might take for granted. Yet he is also anxious to begin, to not waste time securing the beginning in advance, which would indefinitely forestall beginning altogether. For Hegel, one must take the risk of beginning, without any guarantees, if only to discover in retrospect the beginning's shortcomings and failings. Gillian Rose takes this up in her reading of the philosophical canon. Past works are not dogma, unquestionable authorities which tell us what to think, but the work of authorships which, if followed, open up a space for self-reflexive and self-corrective thinking. She also takes it up in her conception of identity. She does not write 'as a woman' or 'as a Jew', for that would presuppose and fix those identities in advance as a beginning without anxiety. Instead, writing is the means of anxiously developing these identities and discovering their plasticity. Furthermore, Rose takes up the anxiety of beginning in her critique of those philosophies which infer from our failure to think the absolute that the absolute itself is a failure. For Rose, the failure to think the absolute must be recognised as a failure determined by its beginning in the middle of bourgeois property law (or capitalism). In this, I mount a Rosean critique of Slavoj Žižek who transforms the determined failure to think the absolute into an undetermined metaphysics which says that the absolute is a failure. Finally, she takes it up in her notion of justice. Unlike Derrida, for whom justice is a messianic promise outside the law, Rose argues that justice may only be realised through the anxiety of beginning, through the risky activity of the assuming and exercising of power for the sake of the universal interest, activity arising from a comprehension of actuality. This essay will recover the essential point that the (broken) middle for Rose is not only a spatial term, but a narratological or temporal term, naming the passage between the beginning and the end, which at once undoes the certainty of any beginning or end. The essay ends with some reflections on the anxiety of beginning in Palestine
Anxiety · Epistemology · Political science · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Cultural Studies and Postmodernism · History · Philosophy · Psychology
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |