Citizens of Paradise: Dickinson and Emmanuel Levinas's Phenomenology of the Home

Zapędowska, Magdalena

doi:10.1353/edj.2003.0014

edj

2003

DOI: 10.1353/edj.2003.0014

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Citizens of Paradise: Dickinson and Emmanuel Levinas's Phenomenology of the Home

Magdalena Zapędowska¹

Abstract: There is a similarity between ED's poetry and Levinas's philosophy in that both depend on experience and reject the principle of unity - the main tenet of romantic thought. The paper discusses interiority, which is a key aspect of ED's work. The I discovers itself in enjoyment of the elemental and realizes its selfhood by withdrawal in the home, which is a realm of absolute, happy independence, provides shelter, and mediates between the I and nature. The home is conceived in different ways in ED's poems but al… Show more

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Cited by 3 publications

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Astonishing Politics: Emerson, Levinas, and Thinking Beyond Virility

Mastroianni

2014

Comparative Literature

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This essay brings together Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emmanuel Levinas, two thinkers who are almost never paired, to examine their shared interest in the political implications of astonishment. The two have in common a way of inviting readers, persistently but enigmatically, to understand the political significance and performative force of their philosophical writing. The essay attends to the resonance generated when each thinker's words become the circumstances for reading the other's. In the disarming experience of astonishment Levinas and Emerson seek alternatives to conceptions of politics that celebrate the “virile virtues” of fixture, resistance, and comprehension. The essay focuses on three points of resonance: figures of imperiled but resilient selfhood, meditations on the power of thinking to astonish, and the use of figures of the hand to rethink established political concepts. Centrally, both Emerson and Levinas cast virility as a firmness or “fixture” that desirable political labor would relax. Fixture does not account for a kind of power so mobile, flexible, or fluid that it cannot even be said to resist that over which it exerts power. Reading Emerson and Levinas side by side allows a fresh approach to vexing aspects of their work, including the tension between Emerson's political activism and philosophical thought, and the dearth of Levinas's reflections on the transitive force of his own writing.

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Astonishing Politics: Emerson, Levinas, and Thinking Beyond Virility

Mastroianni

2014

Comparative Literature

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Index to Volumes I-XIII (1992-2004)

Thomas¹,

Stonum²,

Brown³

2005

edj

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Dickinson’s Delight

Zapędowska¹

2012

edj

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Although Dickinson’s writings explore a variety of affects and psychological states, she is often seen as a poet of pain, lack, and despair. By contrast, this essay argues that Dickinson views delight as the primary affect that creates the basis for all other feelings. Throughout her career Dickinson tests the expressive and representational limits of language against an excess of happiness, and she meditates on happiness when it eludes her. Emmanuel Levinas’s idea that selfhood originates in happiness helps to elucidate both the importance of delight in Dickinson’s poetry and Dickinson’s insistence that poetic subjectivity originates in amplitude rather than lack. Her early poems of delight reveal a subjectivity happily immersed in the elemental world, secure in its happiness, drawing strength from the most basic, physical level of being. This happy, empowered subjectivity never entirely disappears from Dickinson’s poetry. While scholars of female sentimentalism have demonstrated that physical pain offers nineteenth-century American women a culturally acceptable opportunity for embodiment, Dickinson shows that delight provides an alternative opportunity to experience the body through sensual satisfaction. Moreover, Dickinson asserts that female creativity arises from an emotional, intellectual, and verbal abundance that demands to be expressed in language. This insistence on delight allows Dickinson to affirm female poetic subjectivity, which many of her female contemporaries found problematic.

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Citizens of Paradise: Dickinson and Emmanuel Levinas's Phenomenology of the Home

Cited by 3 publications

References 13 publications

Astonishing Politics: Emerson, Levinas, and Thinking Beyond Virility

Astonishing Politics: Emerson, Levinas, and Thinking Beyond Virility

Index to Volumes I-XIII (1992-2004)

Dickinson’s Delight

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