Notes from Source: This paper examines a poem written by Anne Carson in 1999 in response to a drawing by artist Betty Goodwin titled Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988). The critical issue both artist and poet explore is interrogation. For Goodwin, interrogation relates to the history of torture, forced disappearances and other state-perpetuated atrocities. Torture is not an overt theme in Carson’s poem but it remains central to the poem’s broader exploration of the meanings of interrogation as a mode by which Western culture has sought knowledge, truth, and certainty, which have as their stakes the objectification of others. Arguing that the poem retrieves a connection between the notion of truth (alethêia) and the ancient Greek practice of basanos – or truth by torture – the paper explores the formal strategies the poem uses to challenge the legacy of rationalist epistemology. Like Goodwin, Carson evokes and then refuses the grid-like structures of containment of syntax and sense. She also refuses to subject her words’ visual other to an interrogation by refusing to picture the picture; she will not frame, name, or make the image speak. Referring to the writings of Antonin Artaud, Gilles Deleuze praises the capacity of art to offer “a new image of thought.” 1 This paper shows how, in refusing representation as its central operational mode, the poem reaches “to the edge of the thinkable” to demonstrate art’s capacity to offer its own uncertain form of thinking that, in its dynamism, provisionality, and conditionality, brings into being “that which does not yet exist.” 2 In so doing, Carson’s poem draws on and draws out interrelationships that heal the subject-object split Goodwin’s art evokes.

Further Notes: Publisher: Routledge