“Must I Join Your Conspiracy?”: The Politics of Passivity in Virginia Woolf’s The Years and Three Guineas

초록

Virginia Woolf’s 1937 novel The Years presents a problematic scene in which the figure of a Jew is entwined with issues of imaginative autonomy and intellectual privacy, issues that Woolf advocates in Three Guineas. The scene in the novel has led many critics who find in Woolf progressive and subversive political views, antifascism in particular, to examine the complexities of Woolf’s attitudes toward Jews. Critical debates on a possible allegation of Woolf’s anti-Semitism have been centered on her attitudes toward Jews both in textual and biographical grounds. This paper aims to further investigate the scene in relation to Woolf’s political and intellectual concerns in the 1930s, her analysis of the links between sexism, war and fascism in particular, which she directly addresses in Three Guineas. A close reading of the scene along with the drafts of The Years and its companion text Three Guineas helps the reader to map the episode in a cluster of issues related to not only anti-Semitism, fascism and the threat of war but also to women’s profession, economic autonomy and intellectual chastity. At the heart of both Three Guineas and the scene from The Years are Woolf’s anxieties about contamination and intellectual disinterestedness that ultimately call for the politics of passivity as Woolf’s famous proclaim of the outsiders’ society manifests. The contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of potentiality and inoperativity bring much light to the assessment of political and ethical implications inherent in Woolf’s assertion of the politics of passivity in that both Woolf and Agamben claim that there is something productive and transformative in the active noncooperation.

키워드