Abstract

This study pairs the writing and the thinking Virginia Woolf with that of ancient and recent philosophers/psychoanalysts to argue that Woolf's work allows us to see what has been left out of the rationality based episteme founded by Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes. Woolf's work also demonstrates what is yet to be thought by Heidegger, Lacan, Derrida who have questioned and problematized the rationality privileging systems put forward by early Western philosophers. ;There is a supplementary--and ethical--relationship between Virginia Woolf and these philosophers/psychoanalysts, and the implications of this ethical relationship have ramifications for a radical rethinking of the "subject" of composition pedagogy, both in terms of composition pedagogy's understanding of subjectivity and composition pedagogy's traditional "work" . ;This study argues that the writing of Virginia Woolf, in particular, the essay, A Room of One's Own, and the novel, The Waves, puts forward philosophically and enacts rhetorically a libidinalized textual feminism whose elements may frame and supplement Heidegger's meditation on thinking, Lacan's understanding of subjectivity and transference, and Derrida's redefinition and politicization of writing . This libidinalized textual feminism works by way of cultural critique to question and undermine the discourses of reason that have characterized "the subject" as unified and self-present and defined "writing" solely as textual inscription, understandings that Heidegger, Lacan, and Derrida have also seen it as their work to question. ;Woolf's work supplements theirs by foregrounding the issue of gender and the morphologic that equates logocentrism with phallocentrism. Her work also contributes to the deconstructive reunderstanding of the word "writing." Woolf makes evident the extra-discursive roles the emotional and the libidinal play in relation to language, emphasizing that which is felt rather than thought, and she underscores the emotional and the libidinal forces cathected to language, both in her writing practice and in her statements about writing. ;The writing of Virginia Woolf evokes and values this relation of the word to the body, turning those of us who "let learn" writing, differently, toward change