Mis(re)cognition of God and man: the educational philosophy and politics of Gillian Rose

Rose cites Hegel’s fundamental speculative proposition as being that ‘religion and the foundation of the state is [sic] one and the same thing’. What Rose is drawing attention to here in her book Hegel Contra Sociology (first published in 1981) is the ‘logic’ within which modern bourgeois freedom presupposes and also reproduces the separation between thought and the absolute. Modern consciousness in Hegel and Rose, and in their speculative logic, is the contradictory self-relation of state and religion, that is, we think and we live in the divorce between modernity’s idea of God and its idea of freedom. In exploring the question of a political theology in her work I show that in working with the difficulties of thinking state and religion together and apart Rose finds a different logic of the thought of politics and God from within the illusions and misrecognitions of state and religion. With reference to the work of Nigel Tubbs, a former student of Rose, I argue this to be the educational logic of mis(re)cognition. I will show that this logic comprehends not only the religious nature of modern bourgeois freedom to be correspondingly the political actuality of religion, but that therein the absolute has its political and spiritual truth in and as education.