Rose finds in Hegel a radical speculative philosophy that informs her whole oeuvre: an approach saturated by critical reflection and recognition. In Rose's work, everything starts with Hegel and is grounded in her speculative interpretation of his thought. She arrives at this reading through critical engagement with what she sees as Adorno's provocative, but problematic reading of Hegel. In this chapter, I provide an exegesis of the speculative Hegelian core of Rose's philosophy by situating her interpretation of Hegel against her interpretation of Adorno.

Speculative philosophy takes the political seriously: it does the difficult work of the middle, rather than taking easy, one-sided paths, pervaded by conceptual dualisms. Rose emphatically rejects both Enlightenment and postmodern thought. She argues that exclusive universalism and exclusive particularism choose euporia – the easy way – by refusing to attend to the relation between universal and particular. Instead, she embraces a speculative approach to political theory that attends to the broken middle, referencing a brokenness between law and ethics, universal and particular that is both conceptual and actual. A speculative approach refuses to privilege one category over another and examines the relatedness of supposed opposites. It is a struggle-filled approach, one that emphasises the need to work towards a greater comprehension of socio-political realities, to see how we are implicated in the challenges we face and to take the risk of acting politically.