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

16. The concept of the dissolution of man is promulgated in direct opposition to the Sartrian
notions of individuality and dialectical history by Lévi-Strauss in Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage
Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966).
17. For perhaps the first statement of poststructural intent, and a vigorous testament to this
historical turning-point, see Jacques Derrida, 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of
the Human Sciences' in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981) pp. 278–93.
18. Roland Barthes, Sade Fourier Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (London: Cape, 1977), p. 8.
19. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, op. cit., p.
386.
20. This early twentieth-century exclusion of the author was certainly a gesture no more drastic
than the critical circumstances by which it was provoked. As the Russian Formalist Osip Brik
lamented, Russian literary criticism of the time was riddled with 'maniacs . . . passionately
seeking the answer to the question ''did Pushkin smoke?" ' Osip Brik, 'The so-called formal
method' in L.M. O'Toole and Ann Shukman, eds, Russian Poetics in Translation, 4 (Colchester:
University of Essex Press, 1977), pp. 90–1: p. 90.
21. Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', op. cit., p. 142.
22. Michel Foucault, 'What is an Author?', trans. Josué V. Harari, in Josué V. Harari, ed., Textual
Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979),
pp. 141–60: p. 143.
23. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (London: Cape, 1975), p. 140.
24. Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', op. cit., pp. 144–5.
25. Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1985), p. 58.
26. In its more radical forms, this resistance produces statements of the order that anti-authorial
discourse is 'a confused and entangled body of material which, at its most extreme, enters the
realm of dementia . . . 'Cedric Watts, 'Bottom's Children: The Fallacies of Structuralist, Poststructuralist
and Deconstructionist Literary Theory' in Lawrence Lerner, ed., Reconstructing
Literature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), pp. 20–35: p. 22. Naturally, there are exceptions to this
pattern of resistance, particularly in the phenomenological movement within which the conception
of the subject differs significantly from traditional humanist conceptions of authorship.
Phenomenological positions will be discussed below in the second chapter and conclusion.
27. See Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, 'Against Theory', in W.J.T. Mitchell, ed.,
Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1985), pp. 11–30. Knapp and Michaels' article was originally published in Critical Inquiry vol. 8 no.
4 (Summer 1982), pp. 732–42, and the long-running debate it prompted is collected in W.J.T.
Mitchell, ed., Against Theory, op. cit. Knapp and Michaels' ideas on intention will be discussed
below in the sections 'Doubling the Text' and 'Misreceptions'.
28. Despite many divergences of opinion on other matters, all pragmatists characterise
themselves as opposed to theory in one way or another.
29. As it is, the refusal to debate or contest the arguments of theory is upheld as a point of
principle by many pragmatists. Stanley Fish, for example, writes that: 'Arguments against theory
will only keep it alive, by marking it as a sight of general concern . . . theory's day is dying . . .
and, I think, not a moment too scion.' Stanley Fish, 'Consequences', in W.J.T. Mitchell, ed.,
Against Theory, op. cit., pp. 106–31: p. 128. Fish doubtless has in mind here Paul de Man's
statement of the inescapably theoretical nature of pragmatist opposition to critical theory—see
Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
Such a non-combatant position avoids the de Manian counterargument that theory is itself its own
resistance, but only at the potential cost of implicating pragmatism in a Wittgensteinian silence on
the texts and methods of theory.
30. It may seem, at a certain level, that the arrangement of these discourses in chapters which
deal with individual theorists begs the question somewhat. However, virtually all theorists follow
this convention and often in texts which uphold the disappearance of the author. Hopefully, in an
argument which seeks to argue for rather than against the author, this procedure will at least
attain a greater consistency. The relationship of author and oeuvre will be discussed passim, as
well as that of author and critic/theorist. Chapter One: The Birth Of The Reader