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

of the past have somehow erased the connection between bios and graphe, as though the
possibility of work and life interpenetrating simply disappears on that account.
Needless to say, work and life are not opposed, not even in the casual manner by which night is
opposed to day. The principles of any such counterpoise are themselves impossible to imagine.
Nor either is an author's life necessarily contingent, something which can be summarily extricated
and reduced to a position of irrelevance or inferiority in the reading of a text. The grounding
assumption of theoretical objections to 'life' is that through appealing to the biographical referent,
we are importing phenomena from one realm into another wherein it is alien, improper,
incongruous. Yet, even whilst suspending reservations about this demarcation between life and
an abiotic writing, what does a pure textualism or formalism do with a text which incorporates the
(auto)-biographical as a part of its dramaturgy, a text which stages itself within a biographical
scene? A text, for instance, like Nietzsche's, which continually refuses the idea that his life can be
jettisoned into a separate sphere?
In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche insists that his whole life, his entire oeuvre to date, are indispensable
preludes to the text's unfolding. The supposed forcefield between his writing and his life is
undermined at every turn, even to the extent that his previous works—critically reviewed by the
author himself—become chapters of the Nietzschean autobiography. From the outset, the
revaluation of values is an act of self-revelation, the 'self-overcoming of morality through
truthfulness, the self-overcoming of the moralist into his opposite—into me . . . '. 42 To
understand the Nietzschean philosophy, its texts declare, is first and foremost to understand and
behold the man. Having interiorised the history of knowledge in such a profound and unsettling
way, the forces represented by Christ and Dionysus (or any other 'subjects' invoked by the text,
Voltaire for example43) are at work within the autobiographical, philosophising subject himself. By
telling the story of his life, as he has done throughout his philosophical career, Nietzsche is telling
the story of the overcoming, of the passage from idealism to affirmation, Christ to Dionysus.
There is no telling life and work, text and subject apart—'Have I been understood?—Dionysos
against the Cruicfied' 44—still less of cleaving one from the other in the interests of a more
'rigorous', 'proper' or 'textual' reading. Any reading which ignores the theatricality, the
autobiographical performance of the Nietzschean subject simply turns away from the text.
Of course it is not at all easy for a textual theory to take on the performance of a subject within his
text, not only an awesomely complex and transgressive subject such as the author of Ecce
Homo, but any subject who ardently inserts herself into her writing. It is problematic enough for
tropes, rhetorics, narrative structures, signs, and so on, to become objects of a critical science
without theory having also to confront the interplay between work and life, the shifting instabilities
of their borders, the modes of inscription by which a subject appears in her text. Once an
authorial subject is admitted into the theoretical picture of a text, that text becomes more difficult
to govern and delimit, its identity, its separation from other entities is gravely undermined. The
neat demarcations by which biography is separated from a literary or a philosophical text, or even
from a general intertextuality are immediately under threat. We see, for example, what happens
to Beyond the Pleasure Principle—a work hitherto offered only to immanent and thematic
readings—when Derrida reads Freud's dreams of legacy, his own troubled family romance into
the formulation of a meta-psychology.45
In the second chapter of this later, speculative, work, Freud recalls seeing a baby boy (in fact,
and in principle, his grandson, but this is suppressed in the text) playing a game with a wooden
reel attached to a piece of string.46 The game consists in throwing the reel out of his cot and then
retrieving it with evident pleasure and relief, actions accompanied respectively by the
exclamations fort (gone), da (there). Freud interprets this as an attempt by the child to negotiate
his mother's absences, to create the illusion of her inevitable return at his will and behest.
Throughout the account, the text adopts the neutrality of scientific description; the narrator is
simply that anonymous, disinterested spectator who observes, and ventures hypotheses on the
psycho-aetiology of the game. However, retracing, or rather reconstituting the text in terms of the
Freudian (auto)biography, Derrida discovers multiple levels of subjective inscription: 'there are at
least three instances of the same "subject", the narrator-speculator, the observer, the
grandfather'.47 And there is to emerge one further persona—founder of psychoanalysis deftly
pulling all the strings of the analytic movement in order that the science of psychoanalysis
become the legacy of his proper name, the inheritance of his daughter Anna, his grandson Ernst,