369Joanne Feit Diehl

American Imago, Vol. 66, No. 3, 369–381. © 2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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JOANNE FEIT DIEHL

The Poetics of Loss: Erotic Melancholia in Agamben and Dickinson

Remarking upon “Mourning and Melancholia,” Giorgio Agamben notes that Freud writes with “a certain discomfort” of melancholia “‘that a loss has indeed occurred, without it being known what has been lost.’” Agamben’s elaboration of how a fictive introjection of absence allows melancholy to “open . . . a space for the existence of the unreal” leads to a psychodynamic picture that fuses the mortuary with the erotic. I argue that this psychodynamic observation offers a means for understanding Emily Dickinson’s highly erotized, death-driven work. The Dickinsonian “I” gains poetic power to the extent that she simultaneously “buries” the absent other and claims amorous possession as he departs. Through close syntactic and rhetorical readings of canonical poems, I demonstrate that Agamben’s psychosexual speculations on melancholia can provide a conceptual frame for a psychoanalytically informed interpretation of this enigmatic, impassioned poet’s work.

“The stimulus of Loss makes most Possession mean.”—Emily Dickinson, in a letter to Susan Gilbert Dickinson

“. . . and what could never be possessed because it had never perhaps existed may be appropriated insofar as it is lost.”

—Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas

In Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1979), the contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben draws upon Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) to explore the dynamics of desire, specifically the relationship between loss and the reconstitution of the missing object. Agamben’s chapter “The Lost Object” takes as its origin what he perceives as Freud’s “embarrassment before the undeniable proof that, although mourning follows a loss that has really occurred, in melancholia not only is it unclear what object has been lost, it is uncertain that one can speak of a loss at all” (20). Swerving from and expanding upon Freud, Agamben presents his own

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theory of how melancholia reinscribes that always-already-absent object and thereby creates a phantasm of the other that can be loved.

In what follows, I assert that Agamben’s paradigm offers a strong heuristic model for literary interpretation. Indeed, the haunting, often enigmatic poems of Emily Dickinson frequently assume the stance of the mourner to establish the possibility of creating and maintaining a relationship with the beloved, mysterious other who inhabits her work. The necrophilia that lies at the heart of Dickinson’s poetry can be understood, I argue, as an elaboration of the psychodynamics articulated by Agamben.

Briefly to review the main tenets of Agamben’s theory: he takes as the origin of his own paradigm Freud’s unease with not being able to locate an object that precedes the melancholic’s sense of loss. He notes that “Freud writes with a certain discom-fort, ‘that a loss has indeed occurred, without it being known what has been lost’” (1979, 20). Agamben further remarks that Freud does not resolve this apparently paradoxical situation, but makes “an attempt to gloss over the contradiction posed by a loss without a lost object [when] Freud speaks of an ‘unknown loss’ or of an ‘object-loss that escapes consciousness’” (20). “In fact,” Agamben continues,

the examination of the mechanism of melancholia, as described by Freud and [Karl] Abraham, shows that the withdrawal of libido is the original datum beyond which investigation can go no further; if we wish to maintain the analogy with mourning, we ought to say that melancholia offers the paradox of an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object. (20)

It is precisely here that Agamben chooses to focus his analy-sis. Drawing upon an analogy with the sin of acedia or sloth as described by the early Church fathers, he asserts that “it might be said that the withdrawal of melancholic libido has no other purpose than to make viable an appropriation in a situation in which none is really possible” (20). This observation leads to Agamben’s major insight into the dynamics of melancholia: “From this point of view, melancholy would be not so much

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the regressive reaction to the loss of the love object as the imaginative capacity to make an unobtainable object appear as if lost” (20). He elaborates, “If the libido behaves as if a loss had occurred although nothing has in fact been lost, this is be-cause the libido stages a simulation where what cannot be lost because it has never been possessed appears as lost, and what could never be possessed because it had never perhaps existed may be appropriated insofar as it is lost” (20).1

Dickinson’s voice, I suggest, can be heard issuing from this scene, for Agamben’s psychodynamics of melancholia reflect a central paradigm in her work in which “the object is neither appropriated nor lost, but both possessed and lost at the same time” (1977, 21). What this stance offers Dickinson is a position from which to speak that is based upon her complete control of the object/other. Mourning becomes a means to reinstall the phantasmatic object, thereby mastering an absence that prefigures the existence of the other. Thus, the writer acquires an affective freedom, for, as Agamben notes, “the object of the melancholic project is at once real and unreal, incorporated and lost, affirmed and denied” (21). Such apparently opposite effects demonstrate the binaries offered by the melancholic process to the poetic imagination.

Assuming various subject positions associated with the mourner, Dickinson acquires rhetorical control over intense feeling states that otherwise threaten to overwhelm her. Speak-ing in the voice of one engaged in a continuous process of mourning, Dickinson’s poems attest to an authority that magis-terially recuperates an absence through the projection of loss.2 By identifying the poems’ speakers as mourning subjects, she wins access to a psychological apparatus that fills as it creates a gap between self and other. Affirming this link between art and melancholia, Agamben asserts that “the traditional association of melancholy with artistic activity finds its justification precisely in the exacerbated phantasmatic practice that constitutes their common trait” (25).

Consider the following poem by Dickinson in which pos-session of the other depends upon a projected loss that func-tions as a gain:

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Mine—by the Right of the White Election!Mine—by the Royal Seal!Mine—by the sign in the Scarlet prison—Bars—cannot conceal!

Mine—here—in Vision—and in Veto!Mine—by the Grave’s Repeal—Titled—Confirmed—Delirious Charter!Mine—long as Ages steal! (Poem F411)3

The poem opens with a declamatory usurpation. The speaker asserts her possession of the unnamed other in the terms of traditional Calvinism and secular authority. Exactly who grants her the possessive authority of religion or secular power remains ambiguous; nevertheless, religious and legal discourses combine to articulate a process whose fundamental characteristic is a blazingly intense ambiguity that manifests itself through power. It is just this capacity to convey extreme feeling while retaining diametrically opposed meanings that the melancholic process affords the author. Exuberance infuses the text, climaxing in “Mine—here—in Vision—and in Veto!” The speaker celebrates her ownership of the other, who is verbally absent from the poem.

Furthermore, ownership depends upon a “Repeal” that sug-gests various meanings: first, that the grave rejects the other, thus leaving him or her alive; second, and more aligned to orthodox faith, that the grave rejects the soul, thus conferring upon it eternal life, and, finally, that possession for the speaker is won precisely because the grave has taken the other away, that the other is summoned to return from life to death. This ambigu-ity is further confirmed in the poem’s final voice of victory: “Mine—long as Ages steal!” “Steal” can, of course, mean to “take the property of another wrongfully,” or, alternatively, to come or go “unobtrusively” or “gradually.” Either possession of the other will extend over the slow passage of time or possession depends upon the ages taking away the other, eternity claiming the other for itself, thereby creating an absence that the lover fills with an imaginary, projected presence. In religious typology, if the other has been chosen by God to be one of the Saved, then he

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will win everlasting life. The Charter won by the self, a grant or guarantee of possession, would therefore depend upon either the self or the other experiencing the White Election of being impressed by the Royal seal. Vision and veto stand in an ironic yet essential relation whose principle is vested in negation.

Through alternative, mutually exclusive yet simultaneous conditions, the self acquires power by the death or the phantas-matic resurrection of the other. The repetition of “mine” rein-forces the strength of the speaker’s assertion. Thus, Dickinson’s poem deploys a language of presence predicated on loss, a language that reflects the goal that, according to Agamben, gov-erns artistic melancholy. For in Dickinson’s poem, the “funereal strategy,” to borrow his phrase, results in the “impossible capture of the phantasm.” Literal death and the myth of resurrection serve to instill in the speaker an ecstatic belief that possession of the phantasm—the price of making the unreal real—is precisely the loss of the object through its imagined death.

Yet, according to Agamben, the phantasm changes when it is introjected by the self. Explaining the peculiar status of what he calls the “unreal object” vis-à-vis the phantasm and the sign, he writes: “No longer a phantasm and not yet a sign, the unreal object of melancholy introjections opens a space that is neither the hallucinated oneiric scene of the phantasms nor the indifferent world of natural objects” (1979, 25).

While Dickinson invokes the process of erotic, melancholic introjections along with a host of other writers, what sets her work apart is the almost obsessive use of literal death as a meta-phoric bridge that conveys the loss constituting a gain for the imagination. That these poems of mourning become occasions for the lover to speak to her beloved is a further indication of the degree to which the erotic and the dynamic of mourning are fused. Typically, Dickinson’s poems, such as the one I cite below, open with a reference to a reified object, an unspecified other, that, through the work of the poem, acquires an identity whom the speaker directly addresses.

This transformation from “it” to “you” transpires through the poem’s internalization of the other, of the “real” into the speaker’s consciousness. Dickinson makes bold claims through such a process; she may even address the imagined, dead other in a postmortem colloquy:

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If I may have it, when it’s dead,I’ll be contented—so—If just as soon as Breath is outIt shall belong to me—

Until they lock it in the Grave,’Tis Bliss I cannot weigh—For tho’ they lock Thee in the Grave,Myself—can own the key—

Think of it Lover! I and TheePermitted—face to face to be—After a Life—a Death—we’ll say—For Death was That—And This—is Thee—

I’ll tell Thee All—how Bald it grew—How Midnight felt, at first—to me—How all the Clocks stopped in the World—And Sunshine pinched me—’Twas so cold—

Then how the Grief got sleepy—some—As if my soul were deaf and dumb—Just making signs—across—to Thee—That this way—thou could’st notice me—

I’ll tell you how I tried to keepA smile to show you, when this DeepAll Waded—We look back for Play,At those Old Times—in Calvary.

Forgive me, if the Grave come slow—For Coveting to look at Thee—Forgive me, if to stroke thy frostOutvisions Paradise! (Poem F431)

Note that the first, ungendered, objectified “it” is subse-quently converted (in line 7) to the form of direct address, “Thee.” The speaker asks him to forgive her because she prizes his death above his life. Before his death, she cannot measure the

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“bliss” he offers her; only after he is in the grave can she actually “weigh” her joy in his presence. She asks him to contemplate her describing to him the experience of dying that she herself will have undergone, how she will have striven to make contact with him: “Then how the Grief got sleepy—some— / As if my soul were deaf and dumb— / Just making signs—across—to Thee— / That this way—thou could’st notice me.” In this projected future, she will describe her attempts “to keep / a smile” “to show” “thee.”

Where the lovers geographically find themselves, however, is in Calvary, where Jesus was crucified—a site of suffering and sorrow. But if Jesus died for our sins, a basic tenet of Christian doctrine of which Dickinson was most deeply aware, then Cal-vary signifies a place of redemption as well. Thus, the close of the poem creates a scene where the speaker seeks forgiveness for three things: first, the fact that she is still alive and not near death; second, that she desires to be reunited with him so that she might gaze at him; and third, and most astonishingly, that her experience of stroking or caressing this same “other” out-shines the ecstasy that would be attained in Paradise itself. If by Paradise Dickinson is alluding to the orthodox Christian heaven, then she may be asking a believing Christian to forgive the act of heresy that her love signifies. Apparently more Orthodox than she, the deceased You of the poem is in the ironic position of being asked to forgive the speaker for the transgressive bliss she experiences when she is with him. The capacity to measure her love and the tactile expression of it both arise after death. Literal loss of the other establishes the subject-speaker as the mourner, and it is from this vantage point that she is able to acquire the other whom, up until this point, she has not fully possessed. I would further suggest that it is in the very change in status of the other from reified object to feeling subject that the speaker’s voice comes into its own, that she can only be intimate with the other after he is locked in the grave—indeed, that he can only come fully into “being” for her through his death, changed from a thing into an always-already-occluded self.

If death for Dickinson creates the conditions that enable reunion and the acquisition of personal identity, it is also the necessary condition for achieving erotic fulfillment. She asserts, “Till Death—is narrow Loving—” (Poem F831, l. 1). Only after

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death, the loss of the “other,” does the self turn away from nature and enter solely into relationship with him or her:

Till Death—is narrow Loving—The scantest Heart extantWill hold you till your privilegeOf Finiteness—be spent—

But He whose loss procures youSuch Destitution thatYour Life too abject for itselfThenceforward imitate—

Until—Resemblance perfect—Yourself, for His pursuit Delight of Nature—abdicate—Exhibit Love—somewhat— (Poem F831)

Not only does death afford the lover the capacity for abso-lute devotion to the loved object; it also offers a more complete transformation of perspective. Because of death, what Dickin-son elsewhere names “the Admirations—and Contempts—of time—” (Poem F830), both literal and metaphoric, undergo a momentous transformation. In F831, loss itself, the destitution of death, is the progeny of love. So intense is the suffering she experiences due to loss, the speaker can only feign the attri-butes of her previous existence. But this “imitation” finally fails, and the love she has felt for the “Delight of Nature” abdicates before her love for “His pursuit.” Here the capitalization of the personal pronoun raises a characteristic node of interpre-tation: is she pursuing Christ, the sacred persona of her faith, or a human other, whose pronoun is capitalized because of his private importance?

The problematic “somewhat” introduces the possibility of another equivocation: in a formidably characteristic use of el-lipsis, the word can adhere to the preceding phrase, with the implication that the delight of Nature will be abdicated; second, it can mean that the pursuit for “him” will be modified by the delight she takes in nature; and finally, there is the religious possibility that the speaker will “exhibit love” only partially

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until becoming one with Christ after death. It is just this kind of alterity that undercuts as it complicates Dickinson’s poems; but however one chooses to interpret this “somewhat,” the lost lover has turned the speaker into a feigned image of her former self.

Not only may death afford the lover the capacity for abso-lute devotion to the loved “other”; it also offers a more com-plete transformation of perspective, what Dickinson describes in another context as “another way to see” (Poem F696, l. 24). Postmortuary existence undergoes a momentous experiential transformation:

The Admirations—and Contempts—of time—Show justest—through an Open TombThe Dying—as it were a HightReorganizes EstimateAnd what We saw notWe distinguish clear—And mostly—see notWhat We saw before—

’Tis Compound Vision—Light—enabling Light—The Finite—furnished—With the Infinite—Convex—and Concave Witness—Back—toward Time—And forward—Toward the God of Him— (Poem F830)

The optics of mortality abide as one of Dickinson’s over-arching tropes. Here, with the advent of the Infinite, earthly sight is enhanced by its opposite, “Light—enabling Light— / . . . / Convex—and Concave witness—,” thereby positioning the speaker between the Finite and the Infinite, mortality and eternity. The “open tomb” figures telescopically, offering a view of an otherwise invisible world. Here again, death itself, surrounded by visual associations, enables the speaker (and by inference the reader) to “distinguish clear” what has hitherto been obscured. These lines find their corollary in Agamben’s

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assertion that the “other” comes into being through loss. In Dickinson’s poem, the melancholic mourner is endowed with the gifts of judgment and vision—what she had been deprived of in life. “Compound vision” might well be the phrase used to describe the combination of eros and phantasm that for Agamben signifies the possibility of cultural power (and, for Dickinson, aesthetic power).

But the optic trope of Dickinsonian death is hardly static. Instead, ocular perception marks significant changes in the ways the speaker views the dead. In F442, for example, death illumines the grave so that it offers the “best” vantage point from which to see the corpse. With a refractory sensibility that matches her perverse perception, the speaker banishes daylight, to choose instead the illumination of the dark.

I see thee better—in the Dark—I do not need a Light—The Love of Thee—a Prism be—Excelling Violet—

I see thee better for the YearsThat hunch themselves between—The Miner’s Lamp—sufficient be—To nullify the Mine—

And in the Grave—I see Thee best—It’s little Panels beA’glow—All ruddy with the LightI held so high, for Thee—

What need of Day—To Those whose Dark—hath so—surpassing Sun—It deem it be—Continually—At the Meridian?

In this refrain of comparisons—“better,” “better,” best”—the speaker eschews the conventional source of daylight so she herself illuminates the grave, as though she bears the “Miner’s Lamp,” which does not simply shed light on the mine but “nullifies” hidden darkness. The ruddy light with which she

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irradiates the grave creates a bloody, macabre glow that may seem to imitate life itself, and finally, day is banished because her extranatural, inner, subterranean light proffers a more powerful alternative form of illumination.

The speaker’s insistence on her sole power recalls a more expansive fundamental psychological position to which Dickin-son’s poems—and those of the other major Romantics—keep returning: the underlying belief that the experiential subject acquires the greatest perception and appreciation of someone or something through its absence or loss. This leads us back to Agamben’s formulation of the relationship between the condi-tions of loss and the hitherto absent object, as loss becomes, in Agamben’s melancholic logic, a precondition for possession. Be-yond this observation, according to Agamben, we cannot go if we wish to trace the origins of the psychodynamics of melancholia, for no object exists that precedes the act of introjection.

The “intention to mourn” (Agamben 1979, 20) is central to Dickinson’s poetic impulse, for mourning is predicated upon an inherent separation or distance between lover and imagined beloved; mourning frees her poems’ speakers to declare their complete devotion to the otherwise absent because always-already-nonexistent other. Dickinson may choose to speak more abstractly of the desired other that lies just out of reach:

To disappear enhances—The Man that runs awayIs tinctured for an instantWith Immortality……….Of Death the sternest functionThat just as we discernThe excellence defies us—Securest gathered then

The Fruit perverse to pluckingBut leaning to the SightWith the extatic limitOf unobtained Delight. (Poem F1239)

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Yet, paradoxically, it is because the fruit cannot be plucked, through its escape beyond reach, that it is “Securest gathered then”; the absence of possession creates a perverse security within a psychic economy where scarcity signifies fulfillment. Just as with the fruit we cannot pluck, what feeds our desire is the absent presence of death itself.

So we are led full circle back to Agamben’s meditations, for the impetus of erotic melancholia is to imagine an absence converted into presence through the predication of its loss. It is in loss that we can discover what otherwise evades us because it has never hitherto existed. Through this strategy, Dickinson instantiates the beloved. Her necrophilia and her yearning for the unobtainable speak to the power of the projection and in-ternalization of absence, a dual process that in its very disavowal of the object ensures its presence. Just as Dickinson envisions death as fueling erotic desire, so the literary imagination more generally deploys the paradox of mourning to wrest for culture that “epiphanic” moment wherein, as Agamben asserts, “the creations of human culture will be situated one day” (1979, 25). Dickinson’s poems constitute such “epiphanic” moments as they inscribe the paradoxical dynamics of Agamben’s vision, for it is precisely in melancholy’s phantasmatic, elusive embrace that Dickinson constitutes an “other” that can be loved. By so doing, she transforms the “other’s” death into a self-generated, subjective act that for the first time serves to reunite the poet with her desire.

Department of EnglishUniversity of California

Davis, CA 95616jfdiehl@ucdavis.edu

Notes1. Expanding upon the implications of his argument, Agamben states that “covering

its object with the funereal trappings of mourning, melancholy confers upon it the phantasmagorical reality of what is lost; but insofar as such mourning is for an unobtainable object, the strategy of melancholy opens a space for the existence of the unreal and marks out a scene in which the ego may enter into relation with it and attempt an appropriation such as no other possession could rival and no loss possibly threaten” (1979, 20).

2. Characteristically, the poems that evoke death inhabit the stance of the mourner, thereby obtaining a poetic freedom that stems from the process Agamben ascribes to melancholia. He writes, “The imaginary loss that so obsessively occupies the

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melancholic tendency has no real object, because its funereal strategy is directed to the impossible capture of the phantasm. The lost object is but the appearance that desire creates for its own courting of the phantasm, and the introjection of the libido is only one of the facets of a process in which what is real loses its reality so that what is unreal may become real” (1979, 25).

3. As is customary, subsequent references to Dickinson poems are to poem numbers in the Franklin edition.

ReferencesAgamben, Giorgio. 1979. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Trans. Ronald

L. Martinez. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Dickinson, Emily. 1999. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Ed. R. W. Franklin.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Freud, Sigmund. 1917. Mourning and Melancholia. S.E., 14:243–58.