Virginia Woolf, Immanence and Ontological Pacifism

Abstract

In these times of pandemics, increasing social inequalities, civic unrest and the rise of illiberalism, populism, anti-European Union politics and the ‘fake news’ ideology, it is important to revisit Woolf’s pacifism and anti-war and anti-fascist activism. Woolf’s writing offers a mode of understanding emotional economies of despair at this moment of the posthuman convergence and reworking these negative passions into the building blocks of a sustainable present and an affirmative future. Approaching Woolf from a feminist neo-vitalist position as a thinker of immanence, sexed matter, and affirmative ethics, she shows us how to embody the cracks or wounds of existence in ways accountable to our times.