Abstract
Thus licensed, one searches through Emerson’s Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks for this errant and almost insignificant signifier, ce signifiant presque insignifiant (“it is not insignificant; it simply signifies little, and always the same thing”). Three entries, all written on December 28, 1834:
I honor him who made himself of no reputation.
“He made himself of no reputation.” The words have a divine sound.
Excite the soul, & the weather & the town & your condition in the world all disappear, the world itself loses its solidity, nothing remains but the soul & the Divine Presence in which it lives.
(JMN IV: 380, 382, 383)2
This signifier of little, this discourse that doesn’t amount to much, is like all ghosts: errant. It rolls (kulindeitai) this way and that like someone who has lost his way, who doesn’t know where he is going, having strayed from the right path, the right direction, the right of rectitude, the norm; but also like someone who has lost his rights, an outlaw, a pervert, a ruffian, a vagrant, a bum. Wandering in the streets, he doesn’t even know who he is .... uprooted, anonymous, unattached to any house or country, this almost insignificant signifier is at everyone’s disposal....
Jacques Derrida1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 143–44. The original passage appears in La dissémination (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972), p. 165. I have modified Johnson’s translation slightly.
With certain exceptions, citations of Emerson’s writings are inserted in parentheses directly into the text. For the convenience of my readers, and to avoid unnecessary clutter, page numbers refer to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays & Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983). As is customary, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman et al. (JMN), 16 volumes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960–1982) are cited with their appropriate volume and page number. In cases where a cited work by Emerson is not included in his Essays & Lectures, references appear in the notes.
Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich (Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1964–74), Vol. III, p. 661.
Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Volume 3, The Growth of Medieval Theology (600–1300) (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 152. St. Bernard’s text reads: “Et modus quidem Dei exananitio est; fructus vero nostri de illo repletio”; in Sancti Bernardi, Opera Genuina (1845), Vol. 3, p. 477. Compare Emerson, writing in his Journal for 1827: “The Trinitarian urges a natural & sublime deduction from his creed when he says of the Saviour that as he became a partaker in our humanity so we also shall become partakers in his divinity” (JMN III: 74).
R. P. Martin, Carmen Christi: Philippians ii. 5–11 in Recent Interpretation and in the Setting of Early Christian Worship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 166–67.
Emerson, “The Poet,” in The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. III, 1838–1842, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Wallace E. Williams (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 365.
“Poetry and Imagination” (1875) in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, Centenary Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–4), Vol. VIII, p. 17. The final form of “Poetry and Imagination” results from the editing of James Eliot Cabot. Objecting to what he saw as needless repetition in Emerson’s proof copy, Cabot revised it heavily for publication.
Cited in Maurice Gonnaud, An Uneasy Solitude: Individual and Society in the Work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, trans. Lawrence Rosenwald (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 135, n. 99.
G. Oegger, The True Messiah, reprinted in Kenneth Walter Cameron, ed., Emerson the Essayist: An Outline of His Philosophical Development through 1836 (Raleigh, North Carolina: Thistle Press, 1945), pp. 83–99. In a note to Oegger’s text, Cameron writes: “This work is a translation of the introductory portions of Oegger’s La Vrai Messie, Paris, 1829, apparently made by Miss Peabody herself. It was probably her uncorrected manuscript that Emerson used in July and August, 1835” (83). Philip F. Gura explicates Oegger: “Because God never acted from mere whim, Oegger thought, but rather with a premeditated divine purpose, the visible Creation could not be anything but ‘the exterior circumference of the invisible and metaphysical world’ and as such spoke to man of what was behind its natural facade. Once the world was regarded as the perimeter of divine Creation, an extension of Logos, it became apparent that ‘material objects [were] necessarily scoriae of the substantial thoughts of the Creator ...’”: The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature in the New England Renaissance (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), pp. 86–87.
Kenneth Burke, “I, Eye, Ay — Emerson’s Early Essay ‘Nature’: Thoughts on the Machinery of Transcendence,” in Transcendentalisn and its Legacy, ed. Myron Simon and Thornton H. Parsons (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), p. 20.
This passage moves into Emerson’s lecture “Holiness,” in The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. II, 1836–1838, ed. Stephen E. Whicher et al. (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964) pp. 352–53.
See Stanley Cavell who, defending Emerson’s “uncanonical” style of argumentation, remarks on “its sometimes maddening quality of seeming never to come to the point”: Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 138. For Emerson: “The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point” (289). As early as 1850, Theodore Parker said of his friend Emerson: “He lacks the power of orderly arrangements to a remarkable degree. Not only is there no obvious logical order, but there is no subtle psychological method by which the several parts of an essay are joined together .... This often confuses the reader; this want appears the greatest defect of his mind,” in The Recognition of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Milton R. Konvitz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 37.
On the subject of the apparent disconnectedness of Emerson’s prose, see Barbara Packer: “Emerson once praised Landor for having ‘the merit of not explaining.’ Like most of Emerson’s comments about rhetoric, this tribute celebrates the virtues of absence, the exhilirations of discontinuity. Later in life he remarked to a young admirer that the best writing is that which does not quite satisfy the reader. ‘A little guessing does him no harm, so I would assist him with no connections’”: B. L. Packer, Emerson’s Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays (New York: Continuum, 1982), p. 1. (Packer is citing Charles J. Woodbury’s Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson [1890].) According to Emerson’s essay on Montaigne: “Truth, or the connection between cause and effect, alone interests us. We are persuaded that a thread runs through all things: all worlds are strung on it, as beads: and men, and events, and life, come to us only because of that thread: they pass and repass, only that we may know the direction and continuity of that line” (701).
The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume 2, ed. Teresa Toulouse and Andrew Delbanco (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1990), p. 192.
Henry James, “Emerson,” in The American Essays, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Vintage, 1956), p. 76. First published in Macmillan’s Magazine, December 1887, this essay was reprinted by James in his Partial Portraits (1888). On the subject of renunciation, see Emerson’s “Divinity School Address”: “The man who renounces himself, comes to himself” (77). See also Emerson’s comments on his contemporary, the Reverent Edward Taylor: “His sovereign security results from a certain renunciation & abandonment” (JMN IX: 259).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1992 Linda Munk
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Munk, L. (1992). Emerson: This Almost Insignificant Signifier. In: The Trivial Sublime. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22575-0_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22575-0_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-22577-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-22575-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)