Emily Dickinson at the Edge of Analogy: Levinasian Enigma

Abstract:Like a number of nineteenth-century thinkers including Nietzsche, Emerson, and Whitman, Emily Dickinson challenges the metaphysical map that had charted thought in religion and philosophy along analogical paths since Plato. With far more anxiety than her contemporaries, she challenges the rule of analogy as what grounds, aligns, and configures experience, with radical implications for poetics, for metaphysics, and for the risks of post-metaphysical meaning. Dickinson's work balances on the edge of analogy, at a break in its idealization and its reign of/as intelligibility. Her resistance to analogy threatens incoherence but also points to new senses in which the rupture of likeness within unity is affirmative. In the twentieth century, Emmanuel Levinas explores the possibility of such a positive post-metaphysics, theorizing a mode for valuing multiplicity rather than unity in both the world and art. His challenge to totality points not to a destructive collapse of coherence but to another kind of making-sense of experience, both in conduct and interpretation. Does Dickinson also? Do her moments of disorientation also open to reorientation? Sometimes. Dickinson's verses are terse and lapidary, and closer analysis shows them to be self-interruptive, full of cracks and breaks that rupture what at first seem declarations or definitions or iconic representations of states or observations. Yet these interruptions can be positive ventures, where the limitations of analogy are exposed, and its ruptures experienced not only negatively but also positively, in ways that are clarified in Levinasian terms.