Sensibility, Parochiality, Spirituality: Toward a Critical Method and Ethic of Response in Woolf, Spivak, and Mahmood

Abstract

Benjamin Hagen’s essay triangulates the work of Virginia Woolf, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Saba Mahmood and explores a critical method and ethic of response that he develops from the conceptual resonances between their thought and writing. More specifically, Hagen elaborates the relevance of three concepts—sensibility, parochiality, spirituality—that frame the method and ethic he maps. Central to his analysis is the problem of how to respond to extreme or overwhelming conditions that seem to beggar one’s capacity to respond at all: to World War II, to terror attacks and the supposed “war on terror,” and to religious violence and moral injury. A common cause that connects Woolf, Spivak, and Mahmood, he shows, involves the problem of imagining the other as a self, a problem that sketches out the precondition for altering how one might come to care about, respond to, and affect the here and now—locally and globally.

I started reading Saba Mahmood’s work in the spring of 2010, and since then I have wanted to write something about her, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Virginia Woolf. This desire intensified when I had the privilege of studying with her later that year at the School of Criticism and Theory. (She led a six-week seminar entitled, “The Politics of Religious Difference.”) Her death early in 2018 shook me deeply. I was never, formally, her student. We never spoke again after the end of the 2010 summer session. In subsequent years, I always had the intention of writing to her. She had asked me, when we last saw each other, to let her know where I ended up. I started emails several times, but I never finished one. Never sent one. And now I never will. I should have let her know how much her work has meant to me. My hope is that this essay can, in its own way, serve as the now impossible response I had always meant to send her.