Critical theory’s explosive revamping of the humanities in the late twentieth century entailed a radical critique of the individual, that figure of self-authorization that has been central to the historical advance of both liberal democracy and capitalism. By challenging humanism’s faith in individual agency and autonomy, critical theory insisted that we talk about “the subject” (not the self) and approach it not only as a historical invention but as the most powerful of all modern fictions. But while indispensable, this critique has hardly settled the issue of how modern subjects inhabit the fiction of self-knowing or what we do with the conception of the self that has shaped the ways we are taught to think and talk about ourselves.

This special session explores the cleavages found here by thinking through writing that has come to be called “autotheory,” a term increasingly used in both publishing venues and literary criticism to designate work that purposely transgresses established understandings of both autobiography and critical theory. In some accounts, such as that offered by Lauren Fournier, autotheory is a distinctly feminist genre, one that puts “flesh” on disembodied theory by revealing the lived experience that quite literally engenders subjectivity. In other accounts, autotheory shares a kinship with transgender theory as both modes of address rupture the normativities safeguarded by genre conventions. In still other accounts, autotheory is distinct from its closest literary cousin, autofiction, in that it transforms the gestures of what Ralph Clare calls “anyperson memoir” into a more generative confrontation with the theoretical imperatives at stake in twentieth century thought. Here, theory drives the decomposition of the auto, reversing the authority of the autobiographical to revise, as Fournier would have it, the faulty impersonality of theory.

Contributors to this session are less interested in threading the needle of these debates, no matter their critical importance, than in exploring the problem of the singular that haunts autotheory. We understand this problem as arising from multiple directions but the most salient include: 1- traditional autobiography’s emphasis on the singular subject and the grammatical forms that have accompanied it; and 2- critical theory’s emphasis on exceptional individuals, as revealed in its canonization of singular names (Marx, Freud, Benjamin, Foucault, Deleuze, etc.). Our collective thinking about the singular moves across these registers, revisiting the fantasy of autonomy that adheres to the grammar of the humanist I by disassembling it from the vantage point of the inhuman (Freccero), the Anthropocentric (Huffer), and the black feminist poetic (Shockley).

Carla Freccero opens the session by reading the renewed emphasis on the auto- as a symptom of a humanism that just won’t let go. In “The “Auto” of Theory” she asks: What does it mean in the current conjuncture to combine the speculative contemplation at the origin of “theory” with the “auto” of the self-same, or the “auto” of automatism and repetition? Does the auto- constrain the imperial ambitions of the theoretical or does it renounce the theoretical’s aspirations to collectivity? Is auto-theory autoimmunitarian or is it immunity? Taking her cue from Jacques Derrida’s invocation of autozoobiography, she explores the possibility of an auto- beyond the human, invoking the horizon of what she calls an auto-zoo-theory. Such a theory, she posits, suggests a collectivity for autotheoretical meditations that move beyond the privileged arena of humanism’s eternally dangerous narcissism.

In “An Essay Is Being Written: Anthropocene Self Unsaying,” Lynne Huffer offers her own creative answer to Freccero’s questions by meditating on a series of distinct forms of self-writing. These forms include autocollage, autothermograph, vial, and chiasmus, and function as examples of an autotheoretical practice that can unsay the self and the Anthropocene to which that self is bound. Thinking these forms in relation to the “invention” of the self as Man (anthropos) in the work of Michel Foucault and Sylvia Wynter, Huffer looks back to history’s earlier disasters of genocide and the slave trade to show how they constitute the foundations of today’s self-as-anthropos. To echo Blanchot in Writing the Disaster, Huffer stages her own mobilization of the “I” to “unsay myself” as a project of refusal not reparation. As she tells it, the point of her essay’s performance is to model resistance to the solace offered by both the ideals and cruel optimisms that have served historically to mask the overlooked realities of life’s annihilation. Her paper’s ultimate purpose, then, is to consider how we might cultivate autotheoretical writing as a practice of the self that works to undo it: to write an ethics of self-unsaying for being with what is.

In the panel’s final presentation, Evie Shockley is similarly drawn to the poetics of autotheoretical meditation and the challenge of reinventing a critical grammar for political endurance. Her presentation, “‘I am you, the author says’: Auto-Theory, Experimental Poetics, and Black Feminist Thought,” examines two recent texts that have autotheoretical resonance: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk. Focusing on these poets’ distinct uses of a “lyric-you,” Shockley delineates what this form of address enables: how it calls readers to identify with the implicitly racialized (black) speaker or reckon with our inability/refusal to do so (in Rankine); or how it challenges us to take a side in the aesthetic debate between the “clerk” and the “author” who personify aspects of the writing process for the writer whose “body has been deconstructed as itself, and reconstructed as a set of practices in un-freedom” (in Brand). In both texts, this “lyric-you” facilitates the production of knowledge about the self, but this is a racialized, gendered self that has been exploded or magnetized into plurality, collectivity, and relationality. Rankine’s and Brand’s innovative uses of the “you” in auto-theory thus highlight, Shockley contends, the importance of two of the genre’s key tributaries: experimental poetics and black feminist thought.

The intended audience for this session includes not only scholars currently working on contemporary literature and critical theory, but anyone interested in ongoing contestations over the category and utility of the human for the humanities in our contemporary moment.