Emerson Attuning: Issues in Attachment and Intersubjectivity

Abstract

AbstractThis essay reads Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays in light of attachment theory, in particular the work of Daniel Stern. After providing an overview of attachment theory, it focuses on Stern’s argument that infants begin life in a relational state, gradually organizing a sense of embodied selfhood out of experiences of attuned interactions with other people. This image of subjectivity is presented as a corrective to the dominant conception of subjectivity in critical theory. The essay then uses Stern to argue that Emerson’s work elucidates an experience of early attachment trauma, driving a charged search for intersubjective contact and embodied presence in his work. This search informs Emerson’s response to the nineteenth-century logic of race: he understands race as a term for infinite connection at the level of biology, and responds to it with articulations of a different form of connection found at the level of the individual experience of the body within intersubjective relation. Subjectively oriented and embodied interdependency, visible in both Stern and Emerson, constitute a mode of interconnection crucially different from that which is the focus of actor-network-theory and critical work influenced by it.