Sean Burke The Death and Return of the Author : Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida.

The situation of Barthes, Foucault and Derrida at this juncture in French intellectual history is
decisive. A strong case could be made that poststructuralism itself could only have been born at
this crossover, in the form of a movement which wishes to push the structuralist renewal of
language toward the eventual dissolution of both the notions of subjectivity and those of universal
structural categories. 17 In terms of the development of the idea of the death of the author, the
effects of this particular historical situation are beyond doubt. Earlier movements against the
author had taken the form of reactions against biographical positivism. The author was simply to
be removed or sidelined in order to focus in New Criticism on 'the words on the page', in Russian
Formalism on 'the literariness of literature', but these exclusions remained essentially provisional
and did not take the form of a prescriptive or eidetic statement about discourse.
The intersection between phenomenology and structuralism, however, produced an iconoclastic
and far-ranging form of antisubjectivism. Having been schooled in phenomenological method,
and having seen two of the great sciences of the human subject—anthropology and
psychoanalysis—dispense with the subject under a structuralist sign, Barthes, Foucault and
Derrida were not content with simply sidelining the authorial subject as in earlier formalisms. A
phenomenological training had taught them that the subject was too powerful, too sophisticated a
concept to be simply bracketed; rather subjectivity was something to be annihilated. Nor either
could they be content to see the death of the subject as something applying merely to the area of
literary studies. The death of the author must connect with a general death of man. At the limit,
therefore, between phenomenology and structuralism the discourse of the death of the author as
we know it comes into its being. An era of theory is underway in which language is 'the destroyer
of all subject'18—the author of literary studies, the transcendental subject of philosophies of
consciousness, the subject of political theory, psychoanalysis, anthropology.
For Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, the expulsion of the subject from the space of language is
thus seen to extend right across the field of the human sciences, and to call into question the idea
that man can properly possess any degree of knowledge or consciousness. For should it be that
all thought proceeds necessarily by way and by virtue of language, then the absence of the
subject from language translates into the absence of the subject or consciousness from
knowledge. If knowledge itself, or what we take to be knowledge, is entirely intradiscursive, and if,
as it is claimed, the subject has no anchorage within discourse, then man as the subject of
knowledge is thoroughly displaced and dislodged. Cognition and consciousness arise as
intralinguistic effects or metaphors, by-products, as it were, of a linguistic order that has evolved
for thousands of years before any subject comes to speak. Man can no longer be conceived as
the subject of his works, for to be the subject of a text, or of knowledge, is to assume a post
ideally exterior to language. There can thus be no such thing as subjectivity whilst the subject or
author—as has classically been the case—is conceived as prior to a language which exists as an
entirely transparent vehicle or medium for his uses, his designs. As Foucault predicts, man as the
subject and object of his own knowledge 'is in the process of perishing as the being of language
continues to shine ever brighter upon our horizon'. 19 The idea of authorial absence thereby
connects with the epistemological upheaval in Western thought which the theorists of the 1960s
believed to be underway in the linguistic decomposition of subject-centred philosophies. Where
philosophy and the human sciences had registered man, or the subject as the necessary
beginning and end of knowledge, knowledge and the subject are seen to be fictive emanations of
a language and a writing which endlessly subvert all attempts by the human agent to assert any
degree of mastery or control over their workings.
This movement is more than a simple extension or development of earlier literary-critical
opposition to the author. Whilst the New Critical and Russian Formalist projects sought to remove
the author in the interests of exclusively literary concerns, the refusal amongst structuralists and
poststructuralists to strictly demarcate modes of writing, their anti-formalist insistence on a broad
field of intertextuality which the discourses of literature, philosophy, and science traverse on an
equal footing, means that the removal of the authorial subject is no longer to be retained simply
as a point of intradisciplinary methodology. Furthermore, as enounced by Barthes, Foucault and
Derrida, the removal of the author is not to be seen as a strategy, a means toward an end, but as
a primary claim in itself. Within Russian Formalism and the New Criticism, anti-authorialism
appeared as a reaction to biographical positivism. In order to establish a coherent field of critical
study, it was necessary to extricate the literary object from the mass of biographical and