ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a feminine and implicitly lesbian hermeneutics based on the conversation between Alison Bechdel and Virginia Woolf. In personifying literature and psychoanalysis through Woolf and Donald Winnicott, the memoir renders them distinct, but they cross paths both literally and figurally—literally in the scene where Bechdel imagines them almost meeting in Tavistock Square in 1924. Unlike Jacques Derrida and Adam Phillips, Bechdel pursues a complex reading strategy premised on the deconstruction of the putative opposition between literature and psychoanalysis, much as Shoshana Felman does. In so doing, she deploys an interpretive method based on openness rather than closure, playing in the space between Winnicott’s notion of analytic play and Derrida’s discussion of linguistic play. In the overheated rhetoric of Derrida and Phillips, contingency is a life that might be violently snuffed out, a presence easily negated, due to its association with literariness.
