Sunday, February 25, 2007

sexuality ≈ the improvisative?

It’s been a little while since the last paraphrase, but here’s a potentially provocative one:

First, the improvisative can be understood as a drive, an impulse or form of propulsion, directing a subject toward an object. …Second, the improvisative can also be understood in terms of an act, a series of practices and behaviors involving bodies, organs, and pleasures…. Third, the improvisative can also be understood in terms of an identity. …And fourth, the improvisative commonly refers to a set of orientations, positions, and desires which implies that there are particular ways in which the desires, differences, and bodies of subjects can seek their pleasure.
As a concept, the improvisative is incapable of ready containment: it refuses to stay within its predesignated regions, for it seeps across boundaries into areas that are apparently not its own. As drive, it infests all sorts of other areas in the structures of desire. …As a set of activities and practices, it refuses to accept the containment [of place and context]…. It is excessive, redundant, and superfluous in its languid and fervent overachieving. It always seeks more than it needs, performs excessive actions, and can draw any objects… any number of subjects… into its circuits of pleasure.
paraphrase of Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. viii.
Replace ‘the improvisative’ with ‘sexuality’, and you’re back to the original text.

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