In an extended "Note" to the essay, Rose raised similar objections to Derrida's subsequent readings of Hermann Cohen[9] and Walter Benjamin,[10] singling out his notion of the "mystical foundation of authority" as centrally problematic.

As part of her thinking into the Holocaust, Rose was engaged by the Polish Commission for the Future of Auschwitz in 1990, a delegation which included theologian Richard L. Rubenstein and literary critic David G. Roskies, among others.

[14]Rose's memoir, Love's Work, detailing her background, maturation as a philosopher, and years-long battle with ovarian cancer, was a bestseller when it was published in 1995.

"She has, hitherto, been a respected, weighty, but lone voice among a specialised readership," wrote Elaine Williams at the time, "[but] she has, since her illness, been driven to write philosophy which has created ripples of excitement among a wider critical audience.

"[16] In a review in The New York Times, upon the publication of the U.S. edition of the book, Daniel Mendelsohn wrote, "'Love's Work' is a raw but always artfully wrought confrontation with the 'deeper levels of the terrors of the soul'"[17] Love's Work was re-published by NYRB Books in 2011, in the NYRB Classics series, with an introduction by friend and literary critic Michael Wood and including a poem by Geoffrey Hill, which he had dedicated to her.

Rose's first book, The Melancholy Science, is a text that shows Adorno's most significant contribution to the sociology of culture is a Marxist aesthetic.

[19] Rose traces Adorno's Marxist critique of philosophy through the works of various philosophers such as Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger and essays on Kafka, Mann, Beckett, Brecht and Schönberg.

In addition, however, she scrutinises a few of the neo-Kantians (Emil Lask, Rudolf Stammler, and Hermann Cohen), Henri Bergson, and Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

According to Rose, the neo-Kantians seek to resolve the Kantian antinomy of law "by drawing an 'original' category out of the Critique of Pure Reason, be it 'mathesis', 'time', or 'power'", yet remain unable to do so because "[t]his mode of resolution ... depends on changing the old sticking point of the unknown categorical imperative into a new vanishing point, where it remains equally categorical and imperative, unknowable but forceful";[26] while other thinkers—including Lévi-Strauss and Henri Bergson—"fall into the familiar transcendental problem"[27] wherein the "ambiguity in the relation between the conditioned and the precondition is exploited.

"[28] The philosopher Howard Caygill—also Rose's literary executor—has taken issue with her readings of Deleuze and Derrida in Dialectic of Nihilism, going so far as to call some of them "frankly tendentious".

[33] In his review, John Milbank wrote, "this book is one of the most important written by a British philosopher and social theorist in recent times.

In the book's thematically connected essays, Rose deals with a range of topics, from modern philosophy's melancholic attachments to the failures of the politics of authority and representation.

Indeed, scholar of religion Vincent Lloyd comments: Everywhere I went I kept encountering professors who loved Rose's work, who thought she was brilliant and right, but who had for one reason or another never mentioned her name in print.

There were Jeffrey Stout and Cornel West at Princeton, both of whom taught Rose's books, Paul Mendes-Flohr at Chicago who knew her well, and Judith Butler and Daniel Boyarin at Berkeley.

[37] On the philosophy of Hegel, in a text of 1991, Slavoj Žižek writes, "one has to grasp the fundamental paradox of the speculative identity as it was recently identified by Gillian Rose.

"[38] Žižek here refers to Rose's second book Hegel contra Sociology (1981); subsequently, his Hegelianism was dubbed "speculative" by Marcus Pound.

[41] Two of Rose's students, Paul Gilroy and David Marriott, have emerged as key thinkers of critical race theory and have acknowledged her influence.

[48] An essay by literary critic Isobel Armstrong, which appeared alongside but not as a part of the special issue, turns on Rose's concept of "the broken middle" and presents a careful and appreciative reading of her work.

In 2015 the journal Telos released a special issue on Rose, gathering responses and critiques to her work from Rowan Williams, John Milbank, Peter Osborne, and Nigel Tubbs.

[49] In 2019, The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London established an annual Gillian Rose Memorial Lecture.

[50] (Andrew Shanks notes that "there is evidence, among the papers left behind from her final illness, that at one point [Rose] seriously considered the alternative of Roman Catholicism.