Grosz is absent, not dead

This week i've gone back to Elizabeth Grosz (volatile bodies & space, time & perversion). Feels like stepping back in time, but not, because I'm entering these texts from a different angle now. My approach is different from that of my honours thesis, when I last engaged with Grosz. Though I find myself being seduced back into the fold of the body, into a central focus on bodies as material sites of knowing, being, practicing our selves. And it leads me back to the question of difference, from which I've strayed.

In attempting to solidify or capture a central argument, I find myself returning to my introduction. When I read things like the following, I want it to be my starting point, my opening.

It would be good to dynamize thinking, to think of a text, whether book, paper, film, painting, or building, as a thief in the night. Furtive, clandestine, and always complex, it steals ideas from all around, from its own milieu and history, and, better still, from its outside, and disseminates them elsewhere. A conduit not only for the circulation of ideas, as knowledges or truths, but also passage or point of transition from one (social) stratum or space to another (Grosz 1995, ST&P, 125).

I find comfort in considering my thesis as a text in this sense. A thief in the night. Stealing from the likes of Grosz and others, stealing from the mouths and minds of young people, health promoters, theorists. Taking and shaping and making something else that is not necessary new, but a new assemblage of current ideas and words. Text as collage. Text born from an author, but inhabiting its own pulsing body, transcending its birth.

In chatting to Jessie about 'the academic', I realised that I wish to sever authors from texts. I want to engage with the thoughts (text) rather than the thinker (author). Likewise, I want my words to travel and resonate within the text I give birth to. I don't want to be forever accountable to my text. Once released, I don't need to explain its actions or motives. Cut from my hands, it will have its own llife.

I want to read without a desire to know the author, the maker, the mother behind the text. The work must speak to me, unsupervised. The mother is absent, not dead. She is just away, somewhere else, gestating another thieving text.