Virginia Woolf once appealed to women to be wary of the offer presented to them of being able to build a career at university. Vinciane Despret and Isabelle Stengers have for their part constructed university careers. ‘What have we learnt,’ they wonder, ‘as girls disloyal to Virginia who have de facto joined the ranks of ‘learned men’?’

In 1938, at a time when the Spanish Civil War was coming to an end and the Second World War was taking shape, Virginia Woolf published The Three Guineas, a work of resistance at the edge of despair and a response to a letter in which she had been asked the question: ‘What can we do, in your opinion, to prevent the war?’ Her correspondent in addition suggested that she sign a manifesto committing itself to ‘protecting culture and intellectual freedom.’ And yet, against all expectation, Virginia Woolf would refuse to sign the manifesto, not because she considered the war inevitable, but because she refused all loyalty to her homeland and its values. Paying scant disregard to any scandal she dared to suggest that her sisters do not enlist at the side of their fathers and their brothers, these ‘learned men’ who were appealing to them to defend their world, a world from which women had been excluded. ‘We must not,’ she wrote, ‘‘join this procession of men laden with honours and responsibilities’, we should distrust these institutions in which conformity and violence reign.’

Considering this position, Vinciane Despret and Isabelle Stengers, both of whom teach philosophy, the former at the ULg, the latter at the ULB, have wondered: ‘What have we learnt, us, the girls disloyal to Virginia who have de facto joined the ranks of ‘learned men’?’ (1). And how to today extend Woolf’s rallying cry – ‘Think we must!’ – in a university now given over to economic interests, competition, the will to excellence and knowledge which is practical and useful? ‘We have the feeling that we are witnessing the end of an era, one in which we could delight in seeing young women (and young men as well) develop a taste for research, venture wherever questions would lead them, in other words become capable of this freedom which the two of us have both benefited from’ (p.11).

Beyond the differences, it is the capacity or the wish to resist, to not accept the problems in the terms in which they have been set, which plots a path of continuity between Woolf and the authors. ‘If Virginia Woolf speaks to us today, if she can help us to bring to the challenge the power to situate ourselves, it will not be to defend a university in thrall to the market and forced to betray its democratic vocation’ (p.27).

(1) Vinciane Despret et Isabelle Stengers, Les faiseuses d'histoires. Que font les femmes à la pensée? Ed. La Découverte, collection les Empêcheurs de penser en  rond, 2011