Reading Virginia Woolf: Beyond Gender Binarism and Constant Enunciative Vibration

Radically opposed to all neutrality, but also to all identity, whether heterosexual or lesbian, Virginia Woolf has made her writing the site of a constant enunciative vibration, beyond gender binarism.

A text is a strange creature. An inorganic and inert sign, it comes to life when it comes into contact with those who read it. The literary work is not co-created by the reader, as Hans Robert Jauss and Umberto Eco wanted, but, as William Burroughs suggested, it is an unpredictable virus that infects the reader and causes him to mutate. Faced with a work of art, the reader is more of a “brundlefly”, the scientist who has become a fly in Cronenberg’s film, than an assiduous player who adds the last piece to a puzzle imagined by the author. Reading is not co-creation, but mutation.

Few texts have mutated and caused as many mutations as those of Virginia Woolf. His work, like almost no other (with the exception of Shakespeare or Proust), has been the subject of successive and sometimes contradictory hermeneutic movements. Until the publication ofOrlando in 1928, his work was considered difficult to access and experimental, and both the gender and the sexuality of Vi