‘Shooting Total Strangers’: Unmasking Militarism in Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Society’ and ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’

Abstract

This article presents what Slavoj Žižek calls ideological ‘unmasking’ as a central feature of Virginia Woolf’s pacifist agenda. Accompanying the rise of extreme nationalisms during the 1930s and 40s, the article argues that militaristic discourse ‘masks’ the bodies of unknown others as dangerous antagonists in order to justify their violent deaths. Patriotic commemoration, however, renders domestic soldiers free from this precarity as men whom Judith Butler calls ‘grievable’ subjects, or those who continually engage in acts of warfare on their nation’s behalf because it grants them cultural visibility despite their bodily undoing. In Woolf’s pacifist writings, then, a stylistic use of terminological clashes and ambiguities undoes this antagonism by highlighting a transgressive site of shared vulnerability where a new, more peaceful language for understanding the diversity of human existence arises. Ultimately, this literary aesthetic invites reformed styles of international diplomacy by upholding otherness not as something or someone in need of erasure but a locale where pacifist thinkers can foster productive, ethically-engaged dialogue among all individuals, places, and beliefs.