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​ orking with Foucault and Woolf on Becoming Ethical Subjects

Ethics of the Outsider​: W

In his work, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” Michel

Foucault outlines four aspects of ethics, examining the effects and behaviors of those people who

are seen as moral within a society. Sometime before Foucault’s work, Virginia Woolf tried to

contain her summa within in her book, ​Three Guineas​, presenting actions a society can take to

prevent war and describing several social and subjective diseases which had infected early 20​th

century England. Woolf’s work is a fully-realized critique of the fascism and patriarchy of her

time, and she invokes for her readers multiple means in which to resist subjective diseases. Both

these authors, whose writing reaches global influences, expose the systems of power which

create society and outline ways to live a non-fascist lifestyle and to become other than what one

is prescribed to be. By examining the connections between Foucault’s writing on ethics and

Woolf’s writing on resisting fascism, a holistic examination of the applications of Foucault’s

pillars of an ethical lifestyle becomes apparent within the applications of Woolf’s work.

In order to properly understand Woolf’s ​Three Guineas a​ s an ethical text, there must be a

proper examination of Foucault’s work on ethics. Within Foucault’s four aspects of ethics, there

is first the ethical substance (Foucault 263), which is the part of oneself concerned with truth.

The ​substance éthique ​is “the material that’s going to be worked on by ethics” (Foucault 263),

though that material changes by society. Foucault uses an example from his genealogical study

of Greek ethics to demonstrate the different types of ethical substance; for the Greeks, “the

ethical substance was acts linked to pleasure and desire in their unity,” which is “very different”

from a Christian ethical subject, such as flesh (263-64). For a Greek in love with a boy, his

behavior was valued when he did not touch the boy, and engaged with the question of whether or
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not to he should touch the boy. For Foucault, “That’s the ethical substance: the act linked with

pleasure and desire” (264), and it has changed since Greco-Roman times.

Foucault’s second aspect of ethics, the mode of subjection, is the way people “are invited

or incited to recognize their moral obligations” (Foucault 264). This ​mode d’assujettissement​ can

be a form of divine law, such as Biblical text, or natural law. Orders and rules can also be a mode

of subjection, as well as “the attempt to give your existence the most beautiful form possible”

(Foucault 264). In essence, the mode of subjection is a means, action, text, or ordination which

incites a person to work on their ethical substance.

The third aspect of ethics is “​asceticism​ in a very broad sense” (Foucault 265). The

self-forming activity of becoming an ethical subject is to identify the means to change oneself, to

“work on this ethical substance” (265), moderate actions, and decipher oneself to become an

ethical subject that becomes other than what is prescribed. This, like with all aspects of ethics,

can take different forms depending on a society; through aspects of ascesis, working on oneself,

we can seek to “eradicate our desires, or use our sexual desire in order to obtain certain aims

such as having children, and so on” (Foucault 265). What you do to the self, the “elaboration of

ourselves in order to behave ethically” (Foucault 265), is the means of self-forming to become an

ethical subject and must be a constant and consistent work of the ethical subject.

Lastly, the fourth aspect is the aspirations of the ethical subject. To describe this,

Foucault presents the telos, or the kind of being in which moral behavior is exemplified and to

which we aspire when we behave in a moral way. Foucault sees “in what we call morals, there is

the effective behavior of people, there are the codes, and there is this kind of relationship to

oneself with the above four aspects” (265), which is the​ télélogie.​
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The telos, however, is considered unattainable. Through ascesis and self-formation, work

is done on the ethical subject which, as Foucault states in a different text, is “the work that one

performs on oneself in order to transform oneself or make the self appear which, happily, one

never attains” (Foucault 137). Through critique, ascesis, and constant work and care of the self,

we can achieve better work on the ethical subject, but will never reach a teleological endpoint in

which we can say care of the self is finished. Ascesis is a continuous action which Foucault

describes as happy because it will always lead the ethical subject into furthering the relationship

of self to self.

While Foucault’s four aspects can have a certain kind of independence, they also contain

relationships between them, differing from each society and each goal. For Foucault, “if the goal

is absolute purity of being, then the type of techniques of self-forming activity… are not exactly

the same as when you try to be master of your own behaviour” (Foucault 265). When examining

Virginia Woolf’s work of ethics in ​Three Guineas​, the relationship between Foucault’s four

aspects becomes apparent for Woolf in her present. Published in 1938, seeking to show the

means of how to prevent war while on the cusp of World War II, ​Three Guineas ​seeks to

actualize Woolf’s present, and by doing so becomes ethics exemplified.

Woolf’s work in ​Three Guineas ​is concerned with critiquing women’s subjectification,

which are the acts of power which work upon women, such as the effects that the powers of

fascisms and patriarchy exert upon women of the time. ​Three Guineas i​ s told through a series of

letters involving organizations who ask for Woolf’s donation of a guinea. In her response, Woolf

explores the workings of early 20th century English and global society through her responses of

whether or not she will contribute a guinea. Woolf offers an understanding that a person must
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overcome the exertions of desire that power has produced and focuses on critique to make

ascesis possible. Within the book are actions of all four aspects of Foucault’s ethics.

For Woolf, the ethical substance is the psyche, a transformation and overcoming of

desires subjectively produced by power which strip women, as well as men, of autonomy and

subjectivity, which is the ability to deploy power over oneself to become other than subjectified.

Within ​Three Guineas,​ Woolf identifies two social and subjective diseases. These diseases are

the result of patriarchy, which Woolf identifies as a form of fascism which each person is

capable of and has already enacted, and which result directly in war and imperialism. Only

through careful critique can there be freedom from these diseases.

The first subjective disease Woolf identifies is men’s “infantile fixation,” which is a

man’s need to dominate women, control their actions, and keep them categorized as inferior

(Woolf 149). Woolf provides several examples from biography in which fathers act in great

emotion to control their daughters, such as Charlotte Brontë’s refusal to marry the Rev. Arthur

Nicholls because her father “always disapproved of marriages” (Woolf 155). Brontë feared “the

consequences” of her father, and stripped of agency, she promised her father a refusal to Mr.

Nicholls (Woolf 155). Woolf’s critique also targets men as being subjectified by the form of the

institutionalized desire of infantile fixation, instilling desire for war and imperialism.

The second subjective disease Woolf identifies as “the womanhood emotion,” which is a

woman’s own identification with infantile fixation. She provides an example which involves

both infantile fixation and the womanhood emotion in the case of Mr. Jex-Blake and his daughter

Sophia, who was offered a paid position teaching mathematics, but upon requesting permission

of her father, was furiously refused. Her father indicated that receiving money for teaching was
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“beneath her,” and being paid to work “would lower you sadly in the eyes of almost everybody”

(Woolf 156). Sophia argued that “taking money for work did not lower Tom in anybody’s eyes,”

to which Mr. Jex-Blake responded that Tom “feels bound as a man… to support his wife and

family” (Woolf 156). Mr. Jex-Blake wished to keep his ability to exert power over his daughter,

and Woolf examines that if Sophia took money from another man, she would become dependent

on another man. Mr. Jex-Blake did not object, it would seem, to Sophia “taking money; what he

objects to was her taking money from another man” (Woolf 157).

Mr. Jex-Blake appealed directly to “the very deep, very ancient and complex emotion

which we may, as amateurs, call the womanhood emotion” (Woolf 158). Woolf furthers her

critique of Mr. Jex-Blake actions and the womanhood emotion, stating, “Whenever a man makes

the appeal to a woman he rouses in her… a conflict of emotions of a very deep and primitive

kind which it is extremely difficult for her to analyze or to reconcile” (Woolf 158). The

womanhood emotion, coming from the subjections of institutionalized power and patriarchy,

works with infantile fixation to keep both men and women subjectified and without agency.

Having identified these two diseases, which within the work of Foucault would be

labeled as what keeps someone from becoming an ethical subject, Woolf’s entire text of ​Three

Guineas i​ s a mode of subjectivation and an invitation to recognize moral obligations as she

presents an alternative to fascism and patriarchy in the form of a collectivity of those who have

performed ascesis and have gone outside prescribed subjection.

To overcome the two diseases of infantile fixation and the womanhood emotion, Woolf

introduces a collectivity of what she names “the Society of Outsiders” (134). This society has the

same goals as men who seek “freedom, equality, peace” (Woolf 134), however, this society will
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consist of those who, like Woolf, are daughters of educated men. The society seeks to achieve

freedom, equality, and peace “by a different means that a different sex, a different tradition, and

the different values which result from those differences have placed within our reach” (Woolf

134). Where men who are inside society turn to “leagues, conferences, campaigns, great names,

and all such public measures” that “wealth and political influence” provide, the Society of

Outsiders, being on the outside of society, “will experiment… with private means in private”

(Woolf 134). Woolf explores the means by which the Society might do this:

The outsiders will dispense with pageantry not from any puritanical dislike of
beauty. On the contrary, it will be one of their aims to increase private beauty; the beauty
of spring, summer, autumn; the beauty of flowers, silks, clothes... But they will dispense
with the dictated, regimented, official pageantry, in which only one sex takes an active
part - those ceremonies, for example, which depend upon the deaths of kings, or their
coronations to inspire them... They will dispense with personal distinctions - medals,
ribbons, badges, hoods, gowns - not from any dislike of personal adornment, but because
of the obvious effects of such distinctions to constrict, to stereotype and to destroy. Here,
as so often, the example of the Fascist States is at hand to instruct us - for if we have no
example of what we wish to be, we have, what is perhaps equally valuable, a daily and
illuminating example of what we do not wish to be. With the example then, that they give
us of the power of medals, symbols, orders and even, it would seem, of decorated
ink-pots to hypnotize the human mind it must be our aim not to submit ourselves to such
hypnotisms. (Woolf 134-35)

Woolf shows the way in which the Society of Outsiders may perform ascesis in order to

become other than what fascism has prescribed, in effect “not to submit” themselves to the

“hypnotisms” of fascism, infantile fixation, or the womanhood emotion. The concept of these

outsiders are, in relation to Foucault, the telos, or moral beings to which one can aspire. Having

already undergone the ascesis herself by the work she has done on herself through writing,

Woolf calls the collectivity of outsiders into existence through ​Three Guineas.​ While the work of

the self can never be completed, Woolf shows through herself and the Society of Outsiders how
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to incite those living in early 20th Century Europe to self-forming activities, ascesis, and

becoming ethical subjects.

In addition, Woolf furthers examines fascism in the last pages of ​Three Guineas ​and

draws an important connection. Examining a photograph of an unnamed fascist figure, Woolf

states that, “We cannot dissociate ourselves from that figure but are ourselves that figure” (168).

Each person, due to the social and subjective diseases brought about by patriarchy in the form of

infantile fixation and the womanhood emotion, is part of the “tyrannies and servilities” of

fascism (Woolf 168). Woolf then offers that “we are not passive spectators doomed to

unresisting obedience but by our thoughts and actions can ourselves change that figure” (168).

Her text as a mode of subjectivation incites the reader to ascesis and toward living an ethical and

non-fascist life.

​Three Guineas​ exemplifies ethics as at once the text itself functions as a mode of

subjectivation and Woolf’s work on herself. Foucault’s work in “A Genealogy of Ethics: An

Overview of Work in Progress” outlines four the aspects of ethics with which can be identified in

the success of ​Three Guineas ​call to non-fascisms. Woolf’s final statements on war reveal that

Woolf and those who practice outsidership will help prevent war by not joining the society

which seeks to prevent war, but remaining outside “in co-operations with its aim… to assert ‘the

rights of all - men and women - to respect their persons to the great principles of Justice and

Equality and Liberty’” (Woolf 170).

Radical for its time and today, Woolf’s work is a critique and treatise on living an ethical

life within early 20th Century England among the threat of war, and through steady and

unwavering critique of the subjection of women, undergoes the extraordinary task of authoring
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rules for an ethical life, overcoming subjective diseases, and by that means, overcoming fascism.

Connected to Foucault’s four aspects of ethics, Woolf’s work in ​Three Guineas​ illuminates the

ethical lifestyle in practice.

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Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. ​Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. ​Ed. Paul Rabinow. The New Press, 1994. New

York. Print.

​ arcourt, Inc, 1938. Orlando. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. ​Three Guineas. H