The political problem of the bond of solidarity: an approach between Virginia Woolf and Spinoza
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2447-9012.espinosa.2025.237235Keywords:
Ethics, imagination, Solidarity, Spinoza, sympathy, Virginia WoolfAbstract
In 1931, Virginia Woolf published the essay Introductory Letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies, which served as an introduction to the book Life as We Have Known It: a collection of memoirs and accounts of the lives of working women who were members of the Women’s Co-operative Guild. In this text, Virginia reflects on the role of the Guild’s working women in the process of social transformation and on the relationship that is established between the working class and people of her own class. To express the bond that unites them, she coined the term fictitious sympathy, the sympathy of the eye and the imagination. An imperfect sympathy because, for her, class difference constitutes an insurmountable barrier to a sympathy of the heart and nerves. Since the Spinozan echo is present in several of the author’s writings, we propose in this article an approximation between Virginia Woolf and Spinoza, seeking to understand this duo – fictitious sympathy vs. sympathy of the heart and nerves – based on the theory of imagination and sociability present in the Ethics.
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