Exhausted bodies with bad attitudes

Contemporary criticisms of autotextual forms, from Merve Emre to Benjamin Bratton, and most characteristically Anna Kornbluh’s book Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism , read the tendency to theorize from the first person back to a generation scripted to operate within the illusory coherence of the ‘I’. Against a clear-cut, totalizing understanding of every other turn to the ‘I’ as an immediacy fetish, this article turns to Anne Boyer’s The Undying to argue that autotheory rather appears preoccupied with the material grounds of life and experience, negating the ‘I’ in the same gesture that it appears to assert it. Finally, I aim to trace how Boyer’s efforts conjure a non-re/productive image of thought that makes of autotheory a generative poetics of negation.