This article attempts to open up the possibility of debating the writing process as both an individual and shared academic experience. It proposes a discussion on the historically contingent hindrances that affect the production and circulation of academic texts, based on specific concepts drawn from two dissertations in the field of history of education. Both provide conceptual tools aimed at displaying the connection between past and present ontology of education: the notions of police and genius. The denaturalization of these contemporary notions is used as a topical, tailor-made solution devised to temporarily suspend the historical endurance of two familiar characters: the scholar and the apprentice. It is further argued that these polarized and complementary personae are incapacitated by the positions of authority and ingenuity in which they have been cast in relation to the creative process. First, a particular concept of police is devised to analyze the subject of the scholar's authority. Secondly, the genius is identified as a naïve apprentice. As a result of this exercise, it became possible to circumvent both the certainty of the scholar's prescriptive discourse and the inexperienced student's fear of writing by resorting to the ambivalent image of the scholar-apprentice: the ephemeral status of the writer when conducting his research. This dialog is rooted in the post-structural perception of life as a work of art, interpreted as the ability to critically ponder the possibility of simultaneously embodying the subject and the object of one's own writing.
Graduate studies; Academic research; Inventiveness