In Ursula Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, children are educated to engage only with what interests others; the opposite is considered self-indulgence, condemned as “egoizing”. The disowning of any idea of the self is considered a virtue, as is the ability to speak the language of others. Le Guin’s novel fictionalises a common narrative in processes of 20th and early 21st century art: the withdrawal of the self. In relation to concurrent processes that reclaim agency for those who are already dispossessed, that call for the legitimisation of systematically marginalised voices, is the withdrawal of the self merely a privilege? How might wilful dispossession and agency be related through difference, as interconnected transitions of power, in such a way that reveals theatricality in the construction of reality?