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In a recent interview, feminist theorist Drucilla Cornell argues that what we need now is an '"ethical feminism' which would try to examine the components of feminist theory, and its relationship to a feminist practice, in terms of the relationship between the aesthetic, the ethical, the political, the moral, and the legal" (438). Despite her position as a professor of political science whose training is in law, she places emphasis on the aesthetic aspects of this ethical feminism, saying that "feminism demands an articulation of the realm of the aesthetic" in order to understand the relationship of ethics to material life (439). This article will attempt to begin such an articulation through the example of Virginia Woolf's work, taking seriously the notion that the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and feminist ethics is one that is elaborated in writing and is particularly visible in Woolf. Here I will push toward a feminist model of ethics that is posed between the radical alterity of Levinas and its seeming opposite, the ethics of care (or eros), by way of the figure of "the fold."1 Ethics, then, will be seen as inhabiting the fold between beings that brings them into relation, though not necessarily into a realm of familiarity, normativity, or consensus. In Woolf's work we can see public ethical and political responsibility arise from the private moments of eros or care as well as from the call of the radically other stranger, and we can understand her aesthetic inscription of this ethics as the folding of one over the other in the process of what Emmanuel Levinas might call the "saying."
Intimate Ethics
Levinas's ethical thought rests upon the stark division within the moment of ethical awareness between the self and the face of the other-startling in its otherness, compelling in its demands upon the self. His writing insists upon the other as "infinitely foreign" ( Totality 194)-the responsibility one feels in the face of the other must arise from beyond the call of the known. Without this otherness one never encounters the ethical or enters into the possibility of ethical existence, which Levinas terms "being otherwise": "being must be understood on the basis cfi being's other"{Otherwise 16). This is the radical challenge that Levinas's thought, from its...