Whitman and Democracy: The “Withness of the World” and the Fakes of Death
Extending the reading of metonymy in the previous chapter to enchain the figure of the reader as the future presence of Whitman’s poem, this chapter also considers Whitman’s vexed relationship to particularity and to the ethics of democracy in a secular age. I argue that this remains an ethics of alterity not identity, an ethics of the surface and of the limits that surfaces pose when considering alterity. Whitman emerges as the poet of democratic problematics rather than the simple singer of democracy or the word en masse. The modernity of his voice emerges in his consistent refusal to allow meaning to reduce alterity, an alterity that in a secular age is the primary fact of what William James called the withness of life.
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2017 ◽
Vol 225
(4)
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pp. 324-335
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2020 ◽
Vol 63
(10)
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pp. 25-37
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2018 ◽
Vol 1
(1)
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pp. 29-40
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