Abstract

This paper reflects a re-imagining of the relationship between the writer’s sense of self and the work of an ‘authored’ text. This relationship concerns problems to do with the following intellectual issues: ‘for what and why do I write’? ‘What does that writing mean’? (What does it mean ‘to write’?) And ‘who am I to write in any case’? It is my intention to bring these questions about the relationship between writing and the writer into better, or renewed, focus. A focus that is led, in the first instance, by Michel Foucault’s ‘What is an Author’ (1984), and honed, in the second, by John Law’s desires in After Method (2004) to think about the work of social and academic research in new, other, and more creative ways. The paper concludes with a discussion of how this relationship – when re- imagined from the perspective of the individual writer (as opposed to the theoretical text) – is one that is powerful and subjectively intimate to the development and construction of a writer’s sense of self. That in attending to these ‘interferences’ between the work of an author, and the work of her text, is to imagine academic writing as a way of writing that is not just a ‘means to other ends’ and rather, one that creates exciting thresholds for the production of good intellectual authors and the work of ‘authoring’ good academic texts.