Derrida, Heidegger and Virginia Woolf: The 'Cotton Wool of UnBeing'

As she once noted in her diary, Virginia Woolf thought that writing constituted the ‘synthesis’ of her Being. When she then wrote a short autobiographical essay entitled ‘A Sketch of the Past’ (1939), she used the image of ‘cotton wool’ to illustrate what she called ‘non-being’, a state of affairs during which no recording of information or experience takes place because the author does not write (record) or has no recourse to writing (recording). For Woolf, the thick impenetrability of cotton wool is seen as a metaphor for the impasse in which Being finds itself when it has no recourse to writing and is, therefore, unable to record the experience of being. By way of Heidegger and Derrida – especially via the latter’s critique of the former mainly in The Question of Being and History (2016) – I invert Woolf’s ‘cotton wool’ metaphor to retheorise (the) UnBeing, a radical new concept designed to describe Being in the age of AI. Moving on from the Heideggerian conceptualisation of Being as being-there but (re)deploying his Being-towards-death and potentiality-for-Being, I move to mobilise Derrida’s arsenal – trace, différance, iteration – with a view to showing that although Woolf’s ‘cotton wool’ metaphor may as well conceal Being, it nevertheless neatly elucidates UnBeing especially when Derrida provides us with the requisite critical wherewithal to tease apart its edges. In my work, (the) UnBeing does not inhabit the absolutes – presence/absence, human/non-human, visibility/invisibility – but the interstices, the ambiguities, the uncertainties. As such, (the) UnBeing becomes that which cannot be immediately seen or witnessed. This is the last instalment to my theorisation of (the) UnBeing, which started at the Derrida Today conference in Washington DC (2022), continued in Athens (2024) and, finally, in Paris (2026).