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Introduction: Being-In-Question1
Subjectivity, noise, and hospitality are key themes spanning Erín Moure's oeuvre. There has been much critical attention paid to Moure's theories of citizenship and subjectivity (Carrière, Dowling, Fitzpatrick, MacDonald, Moyes, Rudy, Skibsrud), as well as recent articles drawing connections between Moure's poetics and queer affect theory (Moore, Williams and Marinkova). However, the only critical writing (other than Moure's own) that addresses her theories of noise in depth is Heather Fitzgerald's MA thesis, Finesse into Mess: Entropy as Metaphor in the Queer Poetics of Erin Mouré (1997). Published five years before O Cidadán, Fitzgerald's study focuses on what she calls "entropic grammar" and explores the connection between asthma and sexual difference in Moure's earlier work through "a theory of asthma as entropic writing practice" (95). While my argument is conversant with Fitzgerald's theory of entropic grammar, it also diverges from hers. It is my purpose to show how processes of encounter such as hospitality, estrangement, and translation are thrown into relief by a reader's careful attunement to Moure's use of noise as both poetic medium and tool in O Cidadán. In her exploration of vibrant relationships among the poet, translator, reader, and text, Moure crosses over and draws attention to the insufficiencies of the old paradigm of Western hospitality-with its hostguest-stranger-barbarian-hostage dispute over property and threshold-by setting the framework of recognition off-kilter.
In O Cidadán, Moure offers an innovative staging of the question of estrangement: "What if we listen to the noise and not the signal?" (102). This question forms the backbone of Moure's political and poetic inquiry, placing her poetry in dialogue with Jacques Derrida's work on hospitality. The question of hospitality is, for Derrida, focalized by what he calls "the question of the foreigner" (Of Hospitality 3). Derrida suggests that ethical responsibility-or the hospitable relation-is initiated by the stranger's unbearable proximity to the host, an intimacy that draws us towards limits of recognition and the limits of the law. It is, he suggests, "As though the foreigner were being-in-question, the very question of being-in-question, the question-being or being-in-question of the question. But also the one who, putting the first question, puts me in question" (Of Hospitality 3). In O Cidadán, Moure casts the lesbian subject as a being-in-question, that is, as a...