Autotheory converts theoretical claims into bodily sensation at the expense of mediation

Evidence

The infinity of traces becomes a refrain, as she undertakes “a body archive” (a trope callback to Preciado’s send-up of Derrida’s Archive Fever) as “an assembly of history’s traces deposited in me,” filling her book with singular paragraphs floating in a sea of white space, disjunctive from one another. … Moans of pain are figured as especially “inarticulate traces,” which repeat ineptly the infinite traces of historical processing and self-production, and the unfulfilled promises of uncarried acts, that accrete in “my impossible archive” and that entwine not in meaning but in guttural chorus, assembling “a body that is in excess,” as the book’s last line has it. Traces as the less than written, gasping sounds as inarticulacy, excessive bodies unavailable to prose, historical processes inimical to mediation—these are profoundly evocative shards of Singh’s autotheory, and they burble with immediacy. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 269

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete specimen of how autotheory’s signature move works — hailing theory to dissolve it into bodily immediacy.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior notes on autofiction and the collapse of mediation in the immediacy cluster; this is a concrete case of the ‘impossible archive’ of bodily excess.
• SEED: The reading purpose involves identifying ‘immediacy’ features in real works — Singh here is a specimen work she could cite in her defense of mediation.