Unworking poetic address: a comparative study on Emily Dickinson, Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan and Jean-Luc Nancy

This thesis studies the element of poetic address in the work of two poets for whom address is a relational element that is connected to an awareness of finitude: Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan. Their poems privilege the idea of sending rather than saying; and focus more on addressing, challenging, and diverting yet calling the reader rather than on building meaning. This relational emphasis is also at the center of a discussion on community and literature held between Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy in the 1980s, which is predominantly studied from political perspectives that regard their concern with the literary as imprecise or secondary. I claim that, in their quest to think of an alternative form of community that is not based on the production of a common essence by its members, the State and institutions, they privilege and revalue literary address. By thinking about literature in the light of dying and finitude, Blanchot and Nancy stress its potential to open up relations with others at the limit of what is common, present, and representable. Their reflections thus provide an illuminating framework to help us understand the notions of address developed by both poets. Moreover, I seek to show that the differences between these two philosophers’ positions correspond to certain significant differences in the notion of address in Dickinson and Celan’s work. This allows me to develop a comparative reflection on the pairs Blanchot-Dickinson and Celan-Nancy