Making Figures

As species, and as a culture, we recognize ourselves by our capacity for possession, so that personhood is made equivalent to ownership. If, however, the way in which we imagine objects predisposes our behavior toward them, art can encourage us to reorder how we comport ourselves in a world that is not meant to be owned, that is not even meant for us. To frustrate the desolation of avarice, we must enrich our view of things, and "Making Figures" takes the reader through the writing of Virginia Woolf, both the fiction and the nonfiction, at the service of this imperative.