Abstract
Emily Dickinson’s writings incessantly posit a time when one would not be writing, when there would be no need for writing because one would be face to face with another person. Yet this ideal of a face to face encounter is itself posited in writing, because only in writing can she distance herself from the place of passion and recognize it as passion — understood as both a passive suffering in one’s self, and as an active desire for another. This distancing involves her in a paradox because only in writing can she face facing another.
Proximity is not a state, a repose, but, a restlessness, null site, outside of the place of rest.... No site then, is ever sufficiently a proximity, like an embrace.1
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References
Dickinson, Emily, The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. 3 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.
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Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. 3 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.
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Sewall, Richard. The Life of Emily Dickinson. 2 vols. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974.
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© 1995 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Sullivan, D. (1995). Inter-View: Emily Dickinson and the Displaced Place of Passion. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Elemental Passion for Place in the Ontopoiesis of Life. Analecta Husserliana, vol 44. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3298-7_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3298-7_10
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