Criticism of Rosmarie Waldrop's Driven to Abstraction has centered around her fascination with the notion of zero as both a negation and the locus of infinity, but has so far neglected to discuss the implications that this lacuna has on the role of the subject. True to its title, Driven takes the reader on a journey toward nothingness where desubjectification is made into the subject of the work. Through the use of the prose poem which eschews traditional poetic form and conventional syntax, Waldrop employs a collage that not only provides material representation of abstract concepts, but also demonstrates the tenuous relationship between language, the self, and reality. As a forerunner of contemporary women's experimental poetry as well as a German-born immigrant with extensive experience in translation, Waldrop's ability to manipulate language and acknowledgement of the contingent relationship between the sign and referent proves her to be an authority on subjective loss and displacement. Her poem "Time Ravel" from Driven is a meditation on the reflexive nature of subjectivity which illustrates the poststructuralist idea of a decentered subject that is comprised of cultural and linguistic relationships. Waldrop's poetics reflect this disjunction between the self and the notion of an objective reality, while also suggesting that through the medium of poetry can one regain the agency that philosophy has long since disavowed. Through a close reading of Waldrop's poem in conjunction with theoretical readings on the postmodern idea of a subject, I will explore how one's identity and location in the political spectrum is formed through the tenuous relationship between language, history, memory, and time.

As a poet, Waldrop's primary concern is with linguistic displacement, but she presents it through the lens of the personal and the collective in terms of memory and history in order to draw attention to the ways in which time shapes our notions of subjectivity. Her unconventional syntax employs a variety of rhetorical devices in order to draw attention to the mechanics of meaning rather than the object itself. The syntactical vacancies provided by Waldrop's elliptical expressions, namely anacoluthon and anapodoton, in which seemingly-necessary grammatical structures are omitted, mirrors the theme of displacement present throughout the poem. The subject has been consumed by the signifiers, leaving an empty container that simultaneously tempts with the promise of meaning while proclaiming there is none. "If the mechanisms of subjectivity are disturbed," Waldrop writes, "it requires a total restructuring of the world." Since what we know of "the world" is based solely on our perceptions, the root of all memory, and may only be comprehended and expressed through language, then a distorted subjectivity raises not only epistemological concerns, but also has profound ontological implications. In this essay, I will focus on how language displaces us or makes us cliche-ridden, as well as demonstrate Waldrop's ability to exploit this gap resulting from the missing signifier in order to demonstrate how language can help us to rethink creativity and subjectivity.