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

the property of the family name 'Freud':
Just as Ernst, in recalling the object (mother, thing, whatever) to himself, immediately comes
himself to recall himself, in an immediately supplementary operation, so the speculating
grandfather, in describing or recalling this or that, recalls himself. And thereby makes what is
called his text, enters into a contract with himself in order to hold onto all the strings/sons [fils] of
the descendance. No less than of the ascendance. An incontestable ascendance. 48
Reinscribed with its subject, the text becomes mysterious, overloaded, oneiric: vivified by the
name and biography of Freud, by the children of whom he has such dreams, by his dreams of a
familial destiny of the analytic movement generally, by the grandfather of the grandchild, by the
jealous grand-father of psychoanalysis, Beyond the Pleasure Principle becomes a rebus in which
nothing remains simply constative, theoretical, in which what we think of as a work and a life lose
the identity of their separateness, in which the force of desire, the Freudian conatus, unsettles
any objectivity. The entry of the author, and the author's biography into the text multi-determines
the scene of its writing, dissolves any putative assumptions that an author's life does not belong
with his work, or belongs to it only improperly. Reading biographically is not a neutralising,
simplifying activity. So far from functioning as an ideal figure, from figuring as a function of
Cartesian certitude, the author operates as a principle of uncertainty in the text, like the
Heisenbergian scientist whose presence invariably disrupts the scientificity of the observation.
More than any rhetorical solicitation, the re-entry of the subject into the writing disrupts its claims
to objectivity, allows energies and forces that exceed and elude its reading in programmatic or
linguistic terms. 'A 'domain" is opened', Derrida writes, 'in which the inscription . . . of a subject in
his text . . . is also the condition for the pertinence and performance of a text . . . The notion of
truth is quite incapable of accounting for this performance.'49
Critical theory, as we say, has shown itself no more capable of accounting for authorial
performance, of negotiating the overlap of work and life, since all theory is finally predicated upon
an idea of order and systematicity, a reduction of the idea of text to a clear uncluttered field, to a
given whose genealogy is suspended. Though criticism can in practice read a text in terms of its
tropes, aporias, rhetorics, words on the page, and also read in terms of biography, psychological
dynamics, authorial inscription, and do so without obvious contradiction, the propagation of a
theory of reading and of writing which takes stock of all these determinants is awesomely difficult
to conceive. The question of the author tends to vary from reading to reading, author to author.
There are greater and lesser degrees of authorial inscription, certain authors occupy vastly more
significant positions than others in the history of influence, the attraction of the biographical
referent varies from author to author, text to text, textual moment to textual moment. Each new
act of reading itself presupposes a different or modified philosophy of the author. A theory of the
author, or of the absence of the author, cannot withstand the practice of reading, for there is not
an absolute cogito of which individual authors are the subalternant mani-festations, but authors,
many authors, and the differences (in gender, history, class, ethnology, in the nature of scientific,
philosophical, and literary authorship, in the degree of authorship itself) that exist between
authors—within authorship—defy reduction to any universalising aesthetic. 50
Yet the promulgation of a textual theory can no more elude the question of the author than
contain it. As we have seen, the essential problem posed by the author is that whilst authorial
subjectivity is theoretically unassimilable, it cannot be practically circumvented. The processes of
intention, influence and revision, the interfertility of life and work, autobiography and the
autobiographical, author-functions, signature effects, the proper name in general, the author-ity
and creativity of the critic, all these are points at which the question of the author exerts its
pressure on the textual enclosure. Notions such as the Dead Author, the over-prosecuted
fallacies of intention, personalism and genesis, function as little more than defensive strategies
against the essentially overdetermined nature of the text, an overdetermination which lies outside
the compass of any extant theoretical programme or charter. Indeed a concerted programme of
authorial reinscription may well be inconceivable under the banner of literary theory; it could even
be that since theory became possible with the exclusion of the author, the author signals the
impossibility of theory. This is a conclusion to be resisted, and one that can only be resisted by
theorists themselves, for the question of the author poses itself ever more urgently, not as a
question within theory but as the question of theory, of its domains and their limits, of its
adequacy to the study of texts themselves, to the genealogy and modes of their existence. And it