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Abstract
This study treats together two problems which have been kept separate by the Western philosophical tradition: community and the sublime. In a critique of Jean-Luc Nancy's The Inoperative Community, I demonstrate first that his theory of community relies on a logic of presencing which derives from Kant's Analytic of the Sublime and then show the roots of his thought in Husserl's phenomenology, Derrida's deconstruction, Heidegger's existentialism, and Bataille's theory of inner experience, sovereignty, economy and religion. The following chapters textualize different aspects of this problematic.
Through a thematic and figural analysis of certain poems, I show how Emily Dickinson's poetry appropriates the framework of the Kantian sublime for a more existentialist meditation. I discuss death, solitude, time, mood, nature, thought, community, and ecstasy to show how Dickinson, both exemplifying and extending Bataille's critique of Christianity and capitalism, departs radically from Rousseau and her Transcendentalist contemporaries Emerson and Thoreau.
Paul Valery's Monsieur Teste and the "Teste" notes in his Cahiers all belong to a thought-experiment that Valery could never solve. To show this I present the necessary yet limited role that Husserl's phenomenology plays in bringing to presence the figure of Teste. I then introduce and explicate the word-concept of automimesis to name the problem of Teste as an ecstatic and yet private mode of mimesis. Drawing on Wittgenstein and Mallarme, I link Teste to writing and examine two difficult but essential components of automimesis: private language and the infinite regress of thought.
This chapter elucidates key aspects of the "encyclopedic" and "sublime" textual community of Finnegans Wake. Comparisons with Pound, Laforgue, Croce, Hegel, and Beckett along with discussions of early Wake writings, critical works, Stephen Hero, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man show how Joyce's early dedication to Hegel's materialism and idealism destined his later writing by providing a system for decadence, aestheticism, logopoeia, medievalism, and children's language.
