Séminaire Aliénation/Emancipation : Nicolas Boileau

Woolf has become a paragon of feminism despite her claims that the term itself did not encapsulate the essence of what she stood for. If the question of war and peace, not entirely unrelated to her passion for Russian literature, has now become one way of analysing her ambiguous stance, her resistance to a collective movement is also marked by her clear understanding of the processes of inclusion and exclusion, alienation and emancipation, the subjection to the signifier and her qualms about the possibility of debating, discussing and challenging even the most accepted views of her time. Seeing her 'ambiguity' (a term often used when dealing with Woolf) as a sign of resistance, this talk will also try to show how this case-study led to an object of research on women's resistance to feminism (Projet Horizon LERMA, A*MIDEX pépinières d'excellence 2018-20) and the questions raised by the inclusion of this example into a larger framework to look at the difficult relation between individuals and ideologies.