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

Christopher Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology (London:
Routledge, 1998), pp. 189–90. There is at least one more form of possible response, that of a
radical anti-authorialism which would affirm that 'Paul de Man' signifies nothing, and that
consequently there is no oeuvre. To the best of my knowledge, however—and for all the
theoretical insistence on the death of the author—no-one has risked this particular line of
argument.
9. One reviewer of the first edition of this book has noted: 'Such an emotive and controversial
issue forestalls thinking'—Julian Wolfreys, 'Premature Obituaries', Radical Philosophy 67
(Summer 1994), pp. 57–8: p. 58. This may well be the case, but the fact of controversy itself
opens attention to the procedures by which thought (good or bad) about the affair of de Man
could occur. A signatory contract has always been in place, one which is raised to extreme
visibility by the moment of controversy. As the very different cases of Heidegger and Rushdie
also attest, questions of authorship are the first to be raised when a text finds itself at the centre
of a cultural crisis. Tribunals are constituted with the primary mission of evaluating the discursive
act in terms of its res gestae: close attention is given to the circumstances of writing, the
placement of the writer relative to the historical moment, the contextualising effect of other
writings within the oeuvre, local pressures to which the writing was subjected, the grounds for
attributing a clear intention from text to writer, and so on. The necessity of holding an author to
account is asserted in direct proportion to the perceived gravity of the issues raised by the text,
but the signature has already preprogrammed channels of ethical recall to the still-living author,
the heirs of the dead author (in the form of family, institutions associated with the author's name),
the field described by an author's life and work. A signature or act of authorship is thus addressed
to an ethical future in which the still-living, dead or departed subject may be recalled to his or her
text. This threadwork is woven in the gap between subject and sign, the space of formerly present
absence which a signature marks; it describes nothing more and nothing less that the ethical
contract on whose basis the institution of authorship is established. To sign is to accept, even to
anticipate the possibility of resummons. What judgements are subsequently made between text,
author and history are made independently of the act of signing but can only take place on its
basis. In this sense, the authorial signature functions both as ethical prospect and as an ethical
supplement of mortality. For a full elaboration of this argument see Seán Burke, 'The Textual
Estate: Plato and the Ethics of Signature', History of the Human Sciences, vol. 9, no. 1 (February
1996), pp. 59–72.
10. De Man's theme of autobiography as a form of self-cancellation rather than self-expression is
clearly stated in Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1984), pp. 67–91.
11. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, op.
cit., p. 49.
12. Jacques Derrida, 'Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War', op. cit.,
p. 593.
13. It may be objected that the case of de Man is unrepresentative, that one could scarcely
expect theorists to maintain their belief in the absence of the author when confronted with so
grievous a situation: but my point is that it required such a grotesque scenario to force theory to
recognise that the principle of the author has always been operative, that the author had never
disappeared. The concept of the author could not have forced itself upon critical attention in this
situation had it not always and everywhere—de facto and de jure—been active and resistant to
theoretical repression.
Introduction: A Prehistory Of The Death Of The Author
1. In France, Mallarméwas doubtless the first to see and foresee in its full extent the necessity to
substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. For
him, for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite
impersonality . . . to reach that point where only language acts, ''performs", and not "me" . . .
Valéry . . . never stopped calling into question and deriding the Author: he stressed the linguistic
and, as it were, 'hazardous' nature of his activity, and throughout his prose works he militated in
favour of the essentially verbal condition of literature, in the face of which all recourse to the
interiority of the writer seemed to him pure superstition. Proust . . . was visibly concerned with
the task of inexorably blurring, by an extreme subtilisation, the relation between the writer and his