Ethical Folds: Ethics, Aesthetics, Woolf

This article takes up the connection between feminist ethics and aesthetics through the example of Virginia Woolf's work. It argues for a feminist model of ethics posed between radical alterity and its seeming opposite, the ethics of care, by way of the Deleuzean figure of the fold. In Woolf's work we can see public ethical and political responsibility arise from private moments of eros or care. Woolf's writings bring the epistemological and the ethical into conversation with each other, using aesthetics to make an ethical realm­­or a fold­­between the potentially universal and the personal.