The Other Emerson (review)

That a portion of Emerson's signature blazes across the cover of The Other Emerson, a provocative new collection of essays edited by Branka Arsić and Cary Wolfe, suggests an intriguing subtitle for the volume: The Other Emerson: Emerson. Such a subtitle would seem to claim that there is no Emerson that is not other, or, as the introduction to the collection puts it,

The "otherness" we thus have in mind in titling the book The Other Emerson is not oppositional in that it does not primarily oppose this or that particular interpretation of Emerson. Rather, it is an otherness that emerges from the weaving of various philosophical traditions and the forms of understanding they make available that need not finally converge into an image or icon.

(xxxi)

Indeed, The Other Emerson, which includes new and previously published pieces, does more to invite new work that presents a consolidated image of an "other" Emerson. This effect does much to justify what might otherwise be seen as the collection's more discontinuous moments. For example, it allows contributors to contradict one another, and even offer different readings of the same passages from key texts like "Self-Reliance" and "Experience."

Emerson's signature as subtitle and cover image also hints at several of the scholarly commitments that the editors name explicitly. First, the essays hope to trigger a "kind of dislocation in our readers regarding the dominant understandings of Emerson's work since the inception of American studies" (ix). Second, they "release Emerson from the American Renaissance context in order to relocate him within

the tradition of Western philosophy" (xxvi). Third, the collection aims to "reshape the image of [Emerson's] philosophy, even if . . . that image is finally of no image, as befits a nonrepresentationalist philosophy" (xxxi). Toward these ends, the collection is divided into three sections that address separate "terrains" of inquiry: subjectivity, the political, and philosophy. These terrains are also, of course, intimately related, and the findings of each section accumulate across the ten essays. For example, the essays on the political and philosophy take for granted and try to come to terms with the claims made about the Emersonian subject in the first section. Likewise, the first two sections are not at all shy about treating Emerson as one philosopher among others.

Despite its divergent methods, arguments, and intentions, there is something, or more precisely someone, who holds these essays together and that is Stanley Cavell, whose short and sweet afterword celebrates the collection as part of an ongoing "Emerson revival" (302). It is his 1987 talk "Finding as Founding" that the editors cite as the first major intervention into longstanding interpretations of the Emersonian self as a closed and heroic one—an intervention that in some way grounds every major argument in the collection. All ten of the essays in The Other Emerson invoke Cavell's work, lending the collection a certain thematic consistency: the "other" Emerson is more philosophical, less cheerful, and simply put, more complicated, than the Emerson we may feel we already know and love.

The first section, "Rethinking Subjectivity," finds in Emerson's texts a notion of the self that anticipates phenomenological and poststructuralist approaches to subjectivity, such as "there is no identificatory extra essence . . . on which a discrete or personal identity can be founded" (Sharon Cameron, 3); that Emerson's writing "reveal[s] and enact[s] . . . instabilities" (Russell B. Goodman, 57); and that it is "language itself that constructs us and speaks us" (Arsić, 91). Additionally, all three essays are interested in Emerson's treatment of "moods," an interest that echoes Arsić's remark elsewhere that "one may say, Heidegger is waiting for Emerson" (On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012], 324). Arsić's close readings are especially patient, as she shows how Emerson rejects the Cartesian model in lectures like "The Transcendentalist" where "'I' is only one thought among others, not their condition" (82). Similarly, she argues that "Intellect" shows that...