Abolitions mortelles : spéculations démocratiques dans la poésie d’Emily Dickinson

International audience; The ever disappearing I of Emily Dickinson’s poetry is, this paper argues, an audacious poetic wager that politically speculates on death as both a term and "a term between", and stages the ultimate dissolution of subject, voice and representation through an endless play with, and pleasurable suspension of, the poetic sentence. Holding to the body (of the poem, of the poet) while poetically erasing the marks—color, caste, gender—that shut it out of political representation is an aesthetic experimentation with the limits and constraints of a certain form of democracy that wagers on impersonality as the precondition of impersonation. In Dickinson’s poetry, however, the dying is palpable, sensitive, erotic. The poem resists doing away with the body; it does not take for granted the posthumous recognition of a soul "at the white heat". Rather, Dickinson’s poetry embodies the "space between" and proves it "possibler". Doing the dying, in that sense, may well be the poet’s cunning response to the injunction of abstraction of mid-nineteenth century political representation.