“A Stratagem for Self-Oblivion”: Rosselli, Real Talk, and the Abolition of the “I”

Abstract

This essay analyzes the poetry of Amelia Rosselli alongside accounts of urban displacement, deinstitutionalization, and political militancy. I show that Rosselli comes to see poetry as allowing for a suspension of the self that is also a way of taking distance from the demands addressed to it, including the demands that it defend itself, assert itself, pursue its interests, and reproduce the same. Poetry becomes a means of resisting ideology and its “lure of identity,” a practice on its way to what Rosselli, translating and altering a phrase from Charles Olson, calls “the abolition of the I.” Before turning to this process as it plays out in Rosselli’s poetry, I ask what gets in the way of the self’s suspension, what thwarts self-abolition, making it appear unthinkable and impossible. I take bourgeois ideology to be one answer to this question, and I argue that ideology sustains the “reparative” and “postcritical” tendencies traceable to the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Analyzing a key scene in Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” that stages a refusal to read, I study the implications of this refusal and consider counterfactual alternatives.