What is an author?


A person who writes books.

NOT “a sociohistorical analysis
of the author's persona.”

“I want to deal solely with the
relationship between text and
author and with the manner in
which the text points to this
'figure' that, at least in
appearance, is outside it and
antecedes it.”
 The problem of writing

Not something completed, but a practice.

Writing and death.

Ward off death

Sacrifice: works kill their authors.

“Effacement of the writing subject's individual
characteristics.” Absence.
 Has Theory Killed the Author?

“A certain number of notions that are intended
to replace the privileged position of the author
actually seem to preserve that privilege and
suppress the real meaning of his
disappearance.”

Work.

Writing.
 Work

What is a work?

“A theory of the work does not exist, and the
empirical task of those who naively undertake
the editing of works often suffers in the absence
of such a theory.”

“It is not enough to declare that we should do
without the writer (the author) and study the
work itself. The word work and the unity that it
designates are probably as problematic as the
status of the author's individuality.”
 Writing

“We try . . . to imagine the general condition of each
text, the condition of both the space in which it is
dispersed and the time in which it unfolds.”

Religious principle: test of oblivion and repression:
hidden meaning (requires interpretation). Parables?

Critical principle of implicit significations, silent
determinations, and obscured contents (require
commentary).

Killing the author plays the religious & critical
principles against one another & erects transcendent
barriers.
 Author's Name

Classifcatory function.

Groups, defines, and differentiates texts.

Privileges certain texts.

Author function: “characteristic mode of
existence, circulation, and functioning of certain
discourses within a society.”
 Author function
• “Linked to the juridicial and institutional system that
encompasses, determines, and articulates the
universe of discourses.”
• “Does not affect all discourses in the same way at all
times and in all types of civilization.”
• Defined “by a series of specific and complex
operations.”
• “Does not refer purely and simply to a real individual,
since it can give rise simultaneously to several
selves, to several subjects—positions that can be
occupied by different classes of individuals.”
 Founders of discursivity
• “They are unique in that they are not just the
authors of their own works . . . they have
established an endless possibility of
discourse.”
• “Obviously, it is easy to object.”
• “They made possible not only a certain
number of analogies, but also (and equally
important) a certain number of differences.”
Heterogeneous.
 “Reverse the traditional idea of the
author”
• “The author does not precede the works; he is
a certain functional principle by which, in our
culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in
short, by which one impedes the free
circulation, the free composition,
decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. . .
The author therefore is the ideological figure
by which one marks the manner in which we
fear the proliferation of meaning.”
 Ask different questions
• “What are the modes of existence of this
discourse?”
• “Where has it been used, how can it circulate,
and who can appropriate it for himself?”
• “What are the places in it where there is room
for possible subjects?”
• “Who can assume these various subject
functions?”