Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy

Revisiting Virginia Woolf’s most experimental novels, Elsa Högberg explores how Woolf’s writing prompts us to re-examine the meaning of intimacy. In Högberg’s readings of Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, intimacy is revealed to inhere not just in close relations with the ones we know and love, but primarily within those unsettling encounters which suspend our comfortable sense of ourselves as separate from others and the world around us. Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy locates this radical notion of intimacy at the heart of Woolf’s introspective, modernist poetics as well as her ethical and political resistance to violence, aggressive nationalism and fascism. Engaging contemporary theory – particularly the more recent works of Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva – it reads Woolf as a writer and ethical thinker whose vital contribution to the modernist scene of inter-war Britain is strikingly relevant to critical debates around intimacy, affect, violence and vulnerability in our own time.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: Towards an Ethics of Intimacy 1. Jacob’s Room: Modernist Melancholia and the Eclipse of Primal Intimacy 2. “An inner meaning almost expressed”: Introspection as Revolt in Mrs Dalloway 3. Post-Impressionist Intimacy and the Visual Ethics of To the Lighthouse 4. Chalk Marks: Violence and Vulnerability in The Waves Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Elsa Högberg is a research fellow in English Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Review :
Provides a compelling and uncommonly detailed examination of the ethical and political dimensions of Modernist interiority in Virginia Woolf’s fiction. This major new contribution to Woolf and modernist studies combines brilliant close readings of the novels with a sophisticated and searching theoretical framework. It opens up questions of intimacy and interiority, ethics and affect, and principles of non-violence, in highly original and compelling ways. Developing a model of an ethics of intimacy and politicising Woolf’s modernist writing of interiority, it affords new ways of understanding the place of ethics and aesthetics in the charged context of the interwar years. Intimacy itself is knowledge is the startling revelation of Virginia Woolf's writing, Elsa Högberg convincingly argues, in this stunningly insightful and truly timely new work, Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy. Högberg recognises and lucidly delineates Woolf's importance for more recent developments in an emergent and compelling post-Levinasian ethics and aesthetics of intimacy evident in major late twentieth-century and twenty-first century feminist works such as Julia Kristeva's Intimate Revolt, Luce Irigaray's Sharing the World and Judith Butler's Frames of War. Like waters poured into one jar, Högberg places these thinkers in fluent and intimate dialogue with Woolf's writings—unfolding scintillating new readings of Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves and likewise reflecting back on the achievements of Kristeva, Irigaray and Butler—in order to clarify an emergent and radical ethics of intimacy that revises received understandings of autonomous subjectivity and subjects-in-process, of encounters with the other, of vulnerability and violence, of interiority and affect. If you think you understand what Woolf meant by her famous injunction 'Look within', then think again: Högberg will help you grasp anew the political and ethical radicality of that injunction. Pay full attention to this thrilling and urgent work of outstanding scholarship which makes possible a powerful ethical model of radical intimacy with a capacity for non-violent resistance to patriarchy, fascism and war, and also for a replenishing affective intensity, a reparative lyric jouissance by which we might begin to think peace into existence.