摘要：What is often overstated by democratic theorists enthralled by the poetic vision of Walt Whitman is the extent to which he excised the self in order to exalt a world where the sensed and the sensing collapse into reversibility. Throughout “Song of Myself,” I argue, Whitman experiments with an arts of attention—which he describes as “witnessing and waiting”—that adapts the self to the surplus vitality immanent to perceptual and sensual experience. I contrast this with democratic theories of “relational surrender” that stress self-sacrifice as the precondition for democratic sovereignty. In particular, I contrast Whitman’s poetics of touch with Elaine Scarry’s theory of beauty, which favors what she calls “opiated adjacency,” a vivid pleasure experienced in self-loss. By contrast, Whitman discloses a vision of democracy that emphasizes “cleaving things asunder,” a sense of intensified awareness that forms in spaces of proximity that are also spaces of separation.
