The being that thinks in us

Résumé

This paper examines the aesthetics of self-alarm in several of Woolf’s novels.  Woolf’s narrative forms help her represent the experience of fascination or alarm at the very fact of one’s own first-person experience, at the structure of subjectivity itself as a horizon for experience.  She engages Kant’s insight in Critique of Pure Reason that every experience of any object is also an experience of one’s own first-person perspective, as a transcendental form, even though the subjectivity of the subject cannot be perceived except as an object: the thing in us that thinks can never be the thing thought.  Woolf investigates this conceptual and experiential limit as that which involves us intimately with others.