Inter-View: Emily Dickinson and the Displaced Place of Passion

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