Rose's speculative philosophy insists on the need for a political work of mourning, in response to the trauma that attends the broken middle. For Rose, this trauma arises out of a diremption, or broken-ness, that is both philosophical and actual: it operates at the level of thought, which is permeated by one-sidedness and neglects the work of the middle, and at the level of lived experience, which is permeated by injustice and continuing ‘disasters of modernity’. Rose maintains that philosophical dichotomies reflect underlying social relations and that both should be responded to with a political work of mourning. A work of mourning encompasses inaugurated mourning and political risk and involves an anxiety-filled, uneasy journey towards comprehension, towards knowing and being known. It resists the temptation to avoid the difficulty of working through; instead, it obeys the dictum to ‘keep your mind in hell, and despair not’.

The Holocaust is often cited as embodying the absolute failure of the project of modernity, and Rose's engagement with the brokenness of modernity is also centrally concerned with reflections on the Holocaust, both on its own terms and in terms of its implications for thinking philosophically. This concern, for Rose, is more than philosophical: as a descendent of Polish Jews, she lost many relatives in the Holocaust. She also engaged with practical questions of how to remember the Shoah, acting as a consultant for the Polish Commission for the Future of Auschwitz.