ABSTRACT
For Giorgio Agamben, death and language are yoked together in Western metaphysics by negativity. Insofar as the capacity for language represents the proof of, and people's only access to, human subjectivity, the inevitability of death represents the conclusive limit of that subjectivity. To an extent, the two propositions resonate with Agamben’s own notions of poeticity. It is at the places where Agamben departs from DuPlessis and Shoptaw, though, that he finds the beginnings of a fascinating dilemma. Comparing Yeats to his own oeuvre, people may see that the visual enactment of the lover-subject and the beloved-object relation is par for the course in his other work as well. Stripped of the sexualizing implications of Donne’s piece, people can see how the subject-object problem of the gaze in the love poem is fundamental to the specific construction of the lover-beloved binary.
