Bloomsbury Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy

Revisiting Virginia Woolf's most experimental texts, Elsa Hoegberg explores how Woolf's writing prompts us to re-examine the meaning of intimacy. In Hoegberg's readings of Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, intimacy is revealed to be not just affective connections with loved ones, but primarily those painful encounters which unsettle our knowledge of who we are and the world around us. Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy demonstrates how this troubling and thought-provoking notion of intimacy is central to Woolf's ethical and political stance against violence, patriotism and fascism. Drawing on contemporary theory - including the works of Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva - it reads Woolf as a writer and political thinker whose vital contribution to the modernist scene of inter-war Britain is strikingly relevant to debates around intimacy, power and vulnerability in contemporary theory. Review "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." --Laura Marcus, Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford, UK"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." --Jane Goldman, Reader in English, University of Glasgow, UK About the Author Elsa Högberg is Research Fellow in English Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden and at the University of Glasgow, UK.