Derrida’s In/Voice by Chris Tysh
2022; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/abr.2022.0070
ISSN2153-4578
Autores Tópico(s)Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism
ResumoReviewed by: Derrida’s In/Voice by Chris Tysh Evan Reynolds (bio) derrida’s in/voice Chris Tysh BlazeVox http://wp.blazevox.org/product/derridas-in-voice-by-chris-tysh/ 106 pages; Print, $16.00 In case you were worried that theory was going out of style in American poetics, Chris Tysh has dropped a collection that should assuage your fears. Like the philosopher she invokes in the title, and indeed throughout the collection, this book takes as one of its concerns the politics of meaning, which cannot be so easily corralled into determinacy. To this end, the collection weaves together a tapestry of allusions and citations, spanning continents, time periods, even languages to produce a voice that is oddly singular in its multiplicity. The first section takes its titles from English translations of the first section of love letters, “Envois,” of Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (La carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà). The titles include such notable lines as “Without borrowing, nothing happens,” “Sometimes I wish all was illegible to them,” and “It’s not everyone who gets to fuck Socrates in the ass.” But the poems themselves are rich with citations as well: from Coup de torchon to Lost in Translation, from The Wire to “Monument to the Third International” to Agamben’s The End of the Poem consequently taking place at the end of a poem, Tysh’s plentiful citationality of cultural, intellectual, and historical documents echoes the opening poem’s bold proclamation: “Without borrowing, nothing happens.” And indeed, Tysh connects the economy of language with libidinal economy with political economy. In “They invent and ferry falseness” she writes: “modernity’s plunging neckline // the ineluctable narcissism of the 1% / nothing but a chorus line of shapely [End Page 155] legs / deep in the game.” The quickly shifting metaphors give way to the poetry wryly offering metacommentary on its own poetics: “the problem with this // phrasing on the page / decentered subject matter / fissures split-screen lyricism and cultural references à gogo // it only works . . . when the small window of the critic bangs shut.” Tysh’s poetry, like the thought of Derrida, seems to suggest that only when we have abandoned the quest for determinate meaning can we appreciate the bounty of meanings a text can produce. In a sense, we must shut off our inner critic to open up the meaning of a text. Indeed, Tysh’s collection sees “the irreducible foreignness / lodged within” the text, a text that is foreign to itself, riddled with contradictions such as “la gauche caviar (limo liberal, champagne socialist)” hiding behind a “flimsy barricade / that divides the social space / like traffic lanes in bright yellow.” The bourgeois and the revolutionary are held apart by mere convention. In the world of the poems, sense threatens constantly to go off the rails and change direction and collide, collapsing binaries which were always unstable to begin with. The ironies of the text blossom into deconstructive gestures such as citing Walter Benjamin’s “the art of citing / without quotation marks” within, of course, quotation marks. This in turn is contrasted with the collection’s unity of sonic pleasure. For example, in the poem “How is one to hit on the right tone with this fucking tongue?” in the first section, the sibilance glides down each line like a breath down the back of the neck: “cul par-dessus tête / head over heels / we stumble / from the tyranny / of nerves / that which stretches / stagnant / pool water / at the base of the spine / a trellised arch-way / between ribs.” Pleasure and eroticism, however, never stray far from the moments of deconstructive chaos: “intrinsic / language’s failure / to cover its object / without skipping / paradigmatic banks.” By the end of the poem, the erotic and deconstructive have been synthesized with the poem’s lovely sibi-lance: “Having said a mouthful / you exit the text / on the far side.” The second section, which the author calls a “semi-cento,” is woven together with a palpable sense of desire and longing: “You are my tarot reader / and the seer of my death / Without knowing it / you give me the word / Our mother...
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