DLLC Research Seminar - Timothy O’Leary

Timothy O’Leary (School of Humanities & Languages, University of New South Wales, Sydney)

‘Years and Years: The Distribution of the Sensible in Woolf and Ernaux’

In a talk she gave in 1931, Virginia Woolf suggested to an audience of professional women, “We must become the people that we were two or three generations ago. Let us be our great grandmothers.” But what are the barriers – and the advantages — to making such a leap? My suggestion in this paper is that Jacques Rancière’s concept of le partage du sensible [the “distribution of the sensible”], especially when read alongside the literary experiments of Virginia Woolf and Annie Ernaux, can help us address these questions in two ways; it can help us grasp some often-ignored elements of the social worlds we inhabit; and it can help us understand one of the contributions that literary works can make, not only to understanding those elements of partition and distribution, but also to modifying them. Since any given distribution of the sensible will be, necessarily, in a state of continuous mutation, one of the clearest ways to observe and map such a distribution will be to trace its modifications over time. I will argue that this act of exposing the fluidity of structures that may otherwise seem to be timeless and immoveable can have a destabilising effect on those structures themselves. Accordingly, I will focus here on two works that can be read as providing a critical map of this moving terrain: Virginia Woolf’s unfinished novel The Pargiters [and her novel The Years, 1937] that covers the years 1880 to 1930; and Annie Ernaux’s “impersonal autobiography” Les années [2008] (The Years, 2017) that covers the years 1940 to the early 2000s.

Timothy O’Leary is Professor of Philosophy in the School of Humanities & Languages at UNSW Sydney. He has studied and taught at universities in Ireland, France, Hong Kong, and Australia. He has published several monographs and edited collections on the work of Michel Foucault, including work on the ethics of fiction (Foucault and Fiction: The Experience Book, Continuum 2008) and the co-edited A Companion to Foucault (Blackwell, 2013). He recently co-edited The Ends of Critique: Methods, Institutions, Politics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). His current research focuses on the concept of sensibility and the possibility of critical interventions in ethical subjectivity, especially through the channel of literature. He is co-General Editor of the series New Critical Humanities at Rowman & Littlefield.