WHAT I WANT TO DO NOW IS TO SATURATE EVERY ATOM. I MEAN TO ELIMINATE WASTE, DEADNESS, SUPERFLUITY: TO GIVE THE MOMENT WHOLE; WHATEVER IT INCLUDES. SAY THAT THE MOMENT IS A COMBINATION OF THOUGHT; SENSATION; THE VOICE OF THE SEA. (WOOLF, THE WAVES 209; D 3: 201)

THAT IS THE WHOLE…THE REVELATION OF SOME ORDER…SOME REAL THING BEHIND APPEARANCES…IT IS ONLY BY PUTTING INTO WORDS THAT I MAKE IT WHOLE. (WOOLF, MOMENTS OF BEING 71–72)

Virginia Woolf asks her readers to collaboratively discover—through personal and coequal awareness—the socially redemptive value of an art that allows audiences to contemplate human choices and find instances of agency in the real world. Moreover, her work suggests that a positive, politically–engaged aesthetic project might begin in the present moment of belief within the context of community, even in the midst of a terrifying monolith like fascism that will later be recalled as a horrific moment in “History.” Woolf 's contemporary cultural critic Walter Benjamin also valued the importance of personal perception in the construction of a more humanistic history. Woolf's “moments of being” coincide with Benjamin's fl ashes of insight: “the true picture of the past…The past can be seized only as an image which fl ashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and never seen again” (Theses 255). Through common engagement in what Benjamin calls the “redemptive optics” available in the newly democratized role of art, Woolf contends that audiences might collaborate and participate with a new version of living aesthetics. For these modernists, the seemingly small, vibrantly lived, personal moments serve as a counternarrative to authorized versions of History as told by fascist and/ or patriarchal institutions of power. Consequently, Woolf and Benjamin were proponents of artwork composed of fragmentary materials as a response to the seeming whole of the fascist threat. For Woolf, fascism is a totalitarian ideology stemming from patriarchal notions and the success of imperialism, dependent upon militarism, and implicit in British public and private life as well as abroad. Woolf 's work thus evinces a politico–aesthetics particularly concerned with the threat posed by fascism.