The chaff and the wheat: Emily Dickinson and Maurice Blanchot

Abstract

In this article, I examine how Emily Dickinson consigned her work to loss and powerlessness instead of profit and power in the light of Maurice Blanchot’s understanding of ‘the unworking’, a concept he developed in dialogue with French philosophers Jean-Luc Nancy and Georges Bataille. The aspects of Dickinson’s writing practice that I relate to ‘the unworking’ are its materiality, strategies of address used in poems, spider poems, and the way she writes about dying. These aspects are marked by powerlessness, unemployed negativity and loss. Thinking about these elements in dialogue with Blanchot also provides a better comprehension of the relationship he established between ‘the unworking’ and literature.