Reviewed by: Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy by Elsa Högberg Pamela L. Caughie VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE ETHICS OF INTIMACY, by Elsa Högberg. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 234 pp. $108.00 hardback; $35.95 paperback; $28.76 ebook. Elsa Högberg's Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy is an intelligent and important book, but it is not an easy read. Its prose style is fluid, and its close readings illuminating, yet it rightly demands of the reader a theoretical sophistication and a studied attention appropriate to its subject matter. Steeped in the poststructuralist psychoanalytic theories of Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Krsiteva—especially their writings from the twenty-first century that together develop what the author calls "an ethics of intimacy"—this book revises our notions of both Virginia Woolf's narrative ethics and modernist concepts of intimacy (p. 8). Högberg writes that intimacy is "a central term in the academic discourse of our century," entailing relations other than familial, sexual, erotic, or compassionate to encompass face-to-face encounters with strangers with whom one may have no emotional connection (p. 6). Such encounters in Woolf's writings render boundaries separating subject and subject, as well as subject and object, porous, creating a "vertiginous state, into which the reader is drawn" (p. 13). To remain outside that state, to retain a distinctive self and to see the other as distinct from oneself, is to engage in a sort of "ethical violence" (p. 16). In Högberg's compelling account, Woolf's modernist aesthetics, her famed exploration of "the atoms as they fall," has profound ethical implications, and it positions Woolf's writings in the "historical genealogy of thought" that extends from the modernists to the poststructuralist theorists discussed here (p. 22). Intimacy, not empathy, becomes in Woolf's art a means of resisting violence and rendering national as well as individual boundaries permeable, unstable, and thus open to reconfiguration. As Högberg forcefully declares, "It is high time that we politicise Woolf's modernist writing of interiority" (p. 28). This book shows us how this is possible, if we have the patience to work through its intricate and elegant argument. Högberg's deep familiarity and engagement with contemporary Woolf criticism provides a useful overview of the current state of Woolf scholarship, even as it insists on the continuing value of the poststructuralist [End Page 357] approaches of the later twentieth century. In the poststructuralist psychoanalytic theories of Butler, Irigaray, and Kristeva—as in Woolf's mid-career novels, Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931)—Högberg finds "a more viable model for non-violent relations" than that offered by Freudian theory (p. 21). Rather than simply reading Woolf's novels through the grid of poststructuralist theories, Högberg more usefully understands these contemporary theories as comprising "a legacy of modernist configurations of intimacy" (p. 22). That historical genealogy is made all the more evident through Högberg's close readings of Woolf's aesthetics in accordance with writings by her contemporaries, such as Roger Fry, Walter Benjamin, and Bertrand Russell, as well as contemporary theorists. Pairing novels with theorists—for example, reading the melancholic structure of Jacob's Room in relation to Kristeva's writing on melancholia, and Lily Briscoe's and Woolf's aesthetic experiments in To the Lighthouse in terms of Irigaray's notion of intimacy as entailing both nearness and "irrevocable distance"—works to illuminate both the challenging theories and Woolf's particular aesthetic concerns in each novel (p. 116). Yet the chronological progression of chapters focused on a single novel can work against a more integrated understanding of the ethical consequences of Woolf's poetic experiments. If, for example, her reading of Jacob's Room aligns it more with Woolf's late work, as the author says, then perhaps presenting that reading in close proximity to The Waves might help readers make that connection. For all its brilliance in theorizing Woolf's modernist aesthetics of interiority as a non-violent ethics aligned with a new conception of intimacy found in the recent writings of Butler, Irigaray, and Kristeva...
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Feb 1, 2023
Matthew Robertson 
Open Access
