Immanence as Indiscipline: Gilles Deleuze and Emily Dickinson by Jasmin Herrmann (review)
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Foregrounding personal reclusiveness and enigmatic fragmentarity, the poems of Emily Dickinson have entered the literary canon as manifestations of the productive repressions of a genius ascetic's otherworldly yearnings. Immanence as Indiscipline: Gilles Deleuze and Emily Dickinson confronts this inclination toward transcendence by studying Dickinson's work in the light of philosophical understandings of immanence. An originally metaphysical position most prominently championed by the early modern philosopher Baruch de Spinoza (1632–1677), immanence redefines the relation between God and Nature as one of affirmation and expression. In the immanent view, Nature explicates God's attributes through myriad modes of being, rather than doubling the eminent, [End Page 143] hierarchical, and analogical relation that, according to Descartes, holds between God and his creation. The metaphysical 'flattening' of these previously distinct ontological realms brings about an affective, pragmatist epistemology that rejects the epistemic value of abstraction, representation, the negative, and dialectics, instead espousing circumstance and relativity. It is Dickinson's adherence to an immanent view of being and knowledge, this dissertation argues, that accounts for her poems' fundamental "indiscipline," i.e., their systematic undercutting of lyrical conventions. The dissertation takes its conception of immanence from the French post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995). Since a dedication to a metaphysics of immanence inevitably registers on a rhetorical level, the argument for immanence is developed via a comparison of Dickinson's and Deleuze's lyrical and philosophical poetics. In the case of Deleuze, the comparison brings to light a fundamental transgression of the parameters of traditional philosophical discourse in favor of more artistic modes of signification. Rhetorically (re)producing his radical empiricism and pragmatism, Deleuze's texts advance serially rather than chronologically; they metonymically decenter their key concepts onto concrete practices; and they demand their audience's affective as well as intellectual engagement. Dickinson employs similar means to the same end, the dissertation argues. In order to deter referential closure and affective detachedness, she establishes her themes metonymically rather than metaphorically, producing singularities rather than generalizable representations. Many of her 'nature' poems, for example, invoke the site and time specificity of the natural phenomena they (re)create rather than supplying representative images or symbols. They ask their readers to supply their own experiences of such natural phenomena and, at the same time, reflect these hermeneutic attempts at making (poetic) sense of the occurrence. She thus creates—often paradoxically—multi-dimensional planes of reference that forestall identity, substitution, and transcendent referents in favor of textual and philosophical immanence. Like Deleuze's philosophical manifestos for immanence, Dickinson's poems work to explode the hermeneutic frame of lyrical signification. It is in this sense, in the way that her adherence to an immanent view of being causes her to overstep conventional genre boundaries, the dissertation argues that a metaphysics of immanence can positively account for the 'indisciplined' character of Dickinson's work. [End Page 144]
Jasmin Herrmann has been working as a lecturer and research assistant for the chair of American Studies at the University of Cologne, where she teaches undergraduate courses in American literature and culture. She received an M.A. in English and Philosophy from the University of Cologne, Germany in 2011. In 2016, she completed her doctoral thesis on the rhetorical resonances between the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson and the twentieth-century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. She is professionally interested in the relationship between philosophy, literary theory, and methods of literary analysis.
