Abstract

With this essay I would like to unite some insights from Virginia Woolf ’s book Moments of Being in order to elucidate the relationship between society, identity and violence. I’ll begin by extrapolating from some ideas in the essay “A Sketch of the Past.” The second half of the paper will explore a few ramifications of this theory, which, I hope, will lend support to the theses in Andrew J. McKenna’s book Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction, and in Eric Gans’ book The End of Culture. The word “identity” will have no formal definition in this discussion, but some characteristics of identity itself should become clear by the end