초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Eun-GwiChung“It [the calamity] does not touch me,” Emerson's seemingly merciless response to the death of his son, Waldo, has attracted considerable, sometimes severely harsh, attention to Emersonian self. Revisiting the very passage in “Experience” which brought about numerous caustic responses, this essay explores the nature of Emersonian mourning in the philosophical terrain of the 19th century and reevaluates the nature of Emersonian skepticism concerning experience and representation. Rather than being an object of a mourning elegy, Waldo, in “Experience,” is re-figured as the power of skeptical passiveness in this world. Though so many readers complain of the callous ruthlessness of Emerson, I argue that Emerson's aversion, ie, the impossibility of experiencing the death of the other, begets questions to the condition of life, “Where do we find ourselves,” or “Why not realize your world.” For Emerson, in the 19th century America, the mission of “Experience” is to nurture the condition of life within a philosophical practice of skepticism and is to be fulfilled in his writing of the unapproachable reality. In this sense, Emersonian poetics of mourning is rather to awaken us in this world where words fail us and reinvites us to the very world there is nowhere else to go find it.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
Emersonian self, death, mourning, experience, skepticism, finding
