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

characters . . . Lastly, to go no further than this prehistory, of modernity, Surrealism . . .
contributed to the desacralisation of the image of the Author by ceaselessly recommending the
abrupt disappointment expectations of meaning . . . by entrusting the hand with the task of
writing as quickly as possible what the head itself is unaware of (automatic writing), by accepting
the principle and the experience of several people writing together.'—Roland Barthes, 'The Death
of the Author' in Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath (London:
Fontana, 1977), pp. 142–8: pp. 143–4.
2. As one counter example to Barthes's depiction of Valéry: 'The object of art and the principle of
its artifice is precisely to communicate the impression of an ideal state in which the man who
should possess it will be able to produce spontaneously, effortlessly and indefatigably a
magnificent and marvellously ordered expression of his nature and of our destinies.'—Paul
Valéry, 'Remarks on Poetry' in T. G. West trans. and ed., Symbolism: An Anthology (London:
Methuen, 1980), pp. 43–60: pp. 59–60.
3. See 'Kafka and his Precursors' in Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1970), pp. 234–6.
4. Stephane Mallarmé, 'Crisis in Verse' in T. G. West trans. and ed., Symbolism: An Anthology,
op. cit., pp. 1–12: pp. 8–9.
5. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan
Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1970), pp. 305–6.
6. The differences between impersonalist and modern anti-authorial positions will be developed at
various points throughout this work. For the moment it is sufficient to remark that, firstly,
impersonalist ideas have been generally mooted by artists as aesthetic rather than theoretical
statements; and secondly, the impersonalist aesthetic itself—as worked through by Flaubert, Eliot
and Joyce amongst others—has usually assigned the highest degree of control to the writer, that
of a creator presiding over the whole of his creation whilst not appearing anywhere within it.
7. Jacques Derrida, quoted in Christopher Norris, Derrida (London: Fontana, 1987), p. 240.
8. Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1972), p. 24. This quotation comes from one of Barthes's early essays 'Littérature
objective' (Paris, 1954).
9. See Jacques Derrida, 'Speech and Phenomena' and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of
Signs [1967], trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
10. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques [1955], trans. John Russell (London: Hutchinson,
1966); Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection [1966], trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock,
1977), pp. 146–78.
11. See Ferdinand de Saussure, A Course in General Linguistics [1915], trans. W. Baskin
(London: Fontana, 1974).
12. The linguist Roman Jakobson provides the link here in that his work carries through from his
early association with the Moscow Linguistic Circle (he was amongst its co-founders in 1915) to
Prague Structuralism, and was later a seminal influence on Lévi-Strauss and Lacan. In fact, had
Lévi-Strauss not become Visiting Professor at the New School for Social Research in New York
(1941–5), where he worked with Jakobson, the development of critical theory may have taken
significantly different routes. Jakobson's ideas on metaphor and metonymy—which form the
cornerstone of Lacan's rereading of Freud—are perhaps best accessible in Roman Jakobson,
'Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics' in Thomas A. Sebeok, ed., Style in Language
(Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1960).
13. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell,
John Richard von Sturmer and Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969); Claude Lévi-
Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoept (London:
Allen Lane, 1967), pp. 33–99.
14. For Lacan's continual unfolding of the linguisticality of the unconscious, see Écrits, op. cit.
15. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, op. cit., p. 33. Lévi-Strauss is here taking
his lead from Nikolai Troubetzkoy whose paper 'La phonologie actuèlle' (Paris, 1933), along with
Saussure's Cours and the texts of Lévi-Strauss, belongs to the classic and inceptionary phase of
structuralist analysis. Troubetzkoy's work in phonology is most readily accessible in Nikolai
Troubetzkoy, Principles of Phonology, trans. Christiane A.M. Baltaxe (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1969).