Auto-thanato-theory: Dark Narcissistic Care for the Self in Sedgwick and Zambreno

this essay advances what i call "auto-thanato-theory," which I draw from certain aspects of autotheory.¹ I am particularly interested in two texts that look toward death, namely Eve Sedgwick's A Dialogue on Love (1999) and Kate Zambreno's Appendix Project (2019). Even though Sedgwick's text predates the announcement of the term "autotheory" in the contemporary theoretical scene, and Zambreno's text has yet to be embraced as autotheory, they can nonetheless be considered to be part of the genre's growing archive. This is because, if we take autotheory to be a genre-fluid mode of writing where a self—in all its history, biography, and psychology—intercalates itself explicitly within a theoretical reflection on a contemporary being-in-the-world, A Dialogue on Love and Appendix Project share these features.² But at stake in A Dialogue on Love and Appendix Project is a self that desires to be done with existence, if not a self that feels already dead. Such a disposition seemingly goes against the optimistic horizon, or even celebratory intention, of foregrounding the self in autotheory, the aim of which is arguably to give its critique of being-in-the-world a more complex, affective, and perhaps authentic layer, rather than leaving critique at the level of theoretical deftness or rhetorical ruse. And yet, if a self that looks toward death or feels itself already dead finds a discursive space today, I would say that such a space was opened up by autotheory, precisely through its narcissistic dimension, one which arguably gets us to rethink narcissism as a "care for the self" in the Foucauldian sense.³ As I hope to make clear, there is an important reckoning to be made in the discussion of autotheory with respect to the self that desires its departure from the world.

Autotheory, or from narcissism to a care for the self

Let me first elaborate on the narcissistic dimension in autotheory by turning to two seemingly foundational texts: Maggie Nelson's Argonauts (2015), in which the term autotheory first entered into contemporary theoretical discourse, and Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie (first published in Spanish in 2008 and translated into English in 2013), in which the opening proclamation as "self theory" serves as inspiration for Nelson's own work (11). These autotheory texts make the self an extensive foreground, and they do so by giving equal, if not greater, exposition of the self's experiential engagements and affective responses in their respective theoretical critique of a contemporary being-in-theworld. They also inscribe, explicitly at the outset, the self's queer sexual desires and activities: The Argonauts opens with anal sex between the narrating/theorizing self and the transgender lover while Testo Junkie offers the theorizing/transgender narrator filming himself masturbating while addressing his dead lover. In both scenes, a certain narcissism is depicted. Nelson acknowledges as much through both her allegiance to Eileen Myles, who has disclosed the "dirty secret" that everything she writes is about herself, and her declaration that all the affects she negotiates while being in a queer relationship and raising a child with her transgender partner are nothing short of "the personal made public" (60). Nelson qualifies this narcissism as distinct from the narcissistic performance that is the "instantaneous, noncalibrated, digital selfrevelation" afforded by contemporary social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, which Nelson finds alienating (60–61). Her narcissism, she claims, is more deliberative, ethical even, which furthermore has an ontological basis: it exhibits itself as "writing that dramatizes the ways in which we are for another or by virtue of another, not in a single instance, but from the start and always" (60). This is a kind of ethico-political narcissism in the sense of actualizing a veritable queer theory, advanced by a "self-involved thinking," that, in Nelson's view, reaffirms Eve Sedgwick's dictum that the use of the first-person pronoun serves to disseminate and affirm queer subjectivities (41). As Nelson notes, "Sedgwick once proposed that 'what it takes—all...