Tango 1

In his essay ‘Che cos7#x0027;e la poesia?’, Jacques Derrida responds to the question ‘What is poetry?’ by pronouncing a radical love. To love poetry is to ‘learn it by heart’; ‘one would like to take it in one's hands, undertake to learn it and understand it, to keep it for oneself, near oneself’. To love poetry, then, is to hold it close. Yet poetry also demands to be held at a certain distance. For Derrida, the poem is like ‘the hérisson, istrice in Italian, in English hedgehog’; it is ‘a converted animal, rolled in a ball, turned toward the other and toward itself’. ‘Prickly with spines’, ‘its pointed signs toward the outside’, the poem thus demands distance. Passionate and wounding, the poem loved, then, both invites and resists touch; we would like to take it in our hands even as its signifying points hold us at arm's length. This chapter explores the ways that the poem negotiates between proximity and distance, between touching and not-touching. It takes as its starting point another prickly poem – Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos – exploring the distance at its heart. In so doing, it also opens up a discussion of the poematic in Derrida's own writing – the ways that his own texts hold and withhold, the ways that they invite touch and yet demand tact. In ‘Envois’, for instance, Derrida writes that he must ‘distance myself in order to write to you’. This distance, I will show, is prefigured in the tango – a dance to hold long-distance lovers at an arm's length, at least. For Derrida's writing is always a dance of distance and différance. Yet it is also always an act of reaching toward, of tending, of tendering.