The Other Emerson, a collection of essays edited by Branka Arsić and Cary Wolfe, closes with an afterword by the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, and it might be said that the long foreword to the collection is Cavell's work on Ralph Waldo Emerson, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, which was collected as Emerson's Transcendental Etudes in 2003. The hallmark of Cavell's engagement with Emerson is philosophical seriousness, powerfully challenging the long-held reputation of Emerson as a genteel amateur in the more rigorous arts of thinking. It is, indeed, a joy to read so many essays which feel no need to engage with this tradition and just get straight into thinking with, through and against Emerson. This said, there is some mention of this history in the fairly long Introduction, but even so, what I liked was that the essays that follow should go a long way to making this throat-clearing gesture redundant. The ten essays themselves are divided, somewhat falsely, into three sections. The first is called “Rethinking Subjectivity,” the second “Rethinking the Political” and the third “Rethinking Philosophy.” I say falsely because the first and third sections are both philosophical in their direction. “Rethinking Subjectivity” begins with Sharon Cameron's “The Way of Life by Abandonment: Emerson's Impersonal.” Cameron's is a crucial intervention in Emerson scholarship which argues, convincingly, that even though Emerson is held to be the prophet of individualism, it is actually that which is outside the self, the non-egotistical, the impersonal, which is the key to understanding Emerson's work and his idea of a self which, she demonstrates, does not belong to itself. One concern with Cameron's essay (and it holds for all the essays in the volume in different ways) is the lack of attention to Emerson's journals. While it is true that impersonal statements and cold generalizations are characteristic of Emerson's published style, there is the profoundly personal Emerson of the journals, who, if not to contradict Cameron's argument, should have been examined. The third essay in the collection, Branka Arsić's “Brain Walks: Emerson on Thinking,” taken from her marvellous and very important book On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (2010), takes Cameron's arguments further and deeper. What Arsić is able to show, through a coherent and persuasive reading of Emerson's own metaphors, is the consequence of reading the impersonal for Emerson as a thinker – indeed what thinking itself is, namely something which happens to the self – impersonally – rather than something that the self does. This leads to a radically discontinuous self, acknowledging Cameron's work, which finds itself rather than makes itself. Thinking, then, is not a conscious activity, but something anterior upon which we can only reflect and mark the loss. I have dilated at length upon these two essays because they seem to me the most complete and original and the least speculative of the ten. I would, though, like to make some brief comments on the others. Russell Goodman's essay is a model of clarity and charts the range of Emerson's thought through the apparent contradictions of process and stability. The middle essays, “Rethinking the Political,” are the most problematic. It seems to me that trying to engage with Emerson politically is always disappointing. What he said about slavery – despite a lifelong hostility toward it – was always too late and too little: too “impersonal” – and thus the failures in Emerson marked by Donald Pease are hardly surprising and do not convincingly merit the energies of his argument. A focus upon the ethical, as put forward by Eric Keenaghan and Sandra Laugier is, I think, more fertile, as “the conduct of life” was always central to Emerson's public and private concerns. In terms of fertility, Eduardo Cadava's essay on the historical resonances of guano in Emerson's writing would take some beating. The last three philosophical essays are immensely productive in that they align Emerson with a number of expected and unexpected figures. William James and Cavell are not unusual, but Gilles Deleuze and Niklass Luhmann certainly are. The essays here by Gregg Lambert, Paul Grimstead and Cary Wolfe announce challenging and suggestive ways to examine Emerson, but in the emphasis on relatively contemporary philosophers Emerson becomes decontextualized and also can get a little lost. In sum The Other Emerson is a fascinating example of the vital movement in Emerson scholarship towards philosophy which, though at times still speculative, shows in this volume some of the first signs of its maturity and its potential to command the field.