The Birth of Janus

The Birth of Janus Mens tibi sit consulta, petis?sic consule menti; Aemula sit Jani, retro speculetur et ante.[Your mind must be consulted, you say?Well, consult your mind; Let it emulate Janus, looking before and behind.]-John Skelton, Garland of Laurel (1495) 1The Name-there is yet the Name.-Gillian Rose, Love's Work (1995) 2A Roman god of obscure origin, Janus is most famous nowadays for having twice the faces of most people and, indeed, of most gods.In Gillian Rose's The Broken Middle, Janus shows his faces with remarkable frequency: he accompanies Levinas, 3 goes forth 'masked as gender', 4 'equivocate[s]' in 'our failing', 5 symbolises the concept of anxiety for Kierkegaard as for Freud 6 and pops up again just in time for 'the founding historical diremption' at the heart of Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism.7 This is a long list of Janus's appearances and not an exhaustive one at that, but because this figure recurs so often in The Broken Middle, it might be easy to overlook the fact that Janus is a bit at odds with Rose's title, for Janus himself has suffered no sundering.His middle is perfectly intact, and at least as far as extant records take us, his two-faced situation evokes neither hypocrisy nor problematic excess.8 A 'Janus-faced form' 9 seems pretty comfortable-for Janus.Having two faces suits the god of doorways, gates and January, whose condition requires him to look back and forward at once, to grasp the past and the future without getting bogged down exclusively in reminiscence or anticipation and, perhaps most importantly, to be able to tolerate ambivalence, equivocation and being pulled, if only by looking, in two directions.For Rose, then, there is hardly an apter figure '[t]o keep this work in the middle', 10 and yet Janus's own 'middle' remains unbroken.