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

1. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar in Shakespeare: Complete Works (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1905), pp. 824–45: p. 822.
2. 'The Death of the Author' was in fact written for publication in an American magazine, Aspen,
nos. 5 and 6 whose editor Brian Docherry was inviting contributions from various distinguished
names drawn from the French and American avant-gardes (for example Marcel Duchamp, Alain
Robbe-Grillet, John Cage, Merce Cunningham) on the theme of closing the gap between art and
low culture. Barthes's essay thus fitted into this general format in announcing the end of the elite
figure of the author and proposing in its stead a textually anonymity free from traditional
hierarchies. The Aspen issues passed by with very little notice, but a year later Barthes
republished the essay in France as 'La Mort de l'auteur', in Mantéia V (1968), whence it became
one of the classic texts of poststructuralism. On the unusual and little-known origins of Barthes's
text, see Molly Nesbit, 'What Was An Author?', Yale French Studies, 73 (1987), pp. 229–57. All
references to the essay will here be made to Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', Image-
Music-Text, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 42–8, and page
references are provided parenthetically in the text.
3. See Roland Barthes, On Racine, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Octagon Books, 1977);
Criticism and Truth, trans. K.P. Keuneman (London: Athlone Press, 1987). The terms auteurist
and auteurism derive from the French for author (auteur) and are widely used in cinema criticism
in the context of the auteur theory which asserts that the director, not the screenwriter, is the true
author of any given film. As I will use the term, auteurism denotes any theory or critisism which
centres on the author to the exclusion of other textual forces.
4. See Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (London: Cape, 1975), pp. 211–12. Originally
published as Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970).
5. For instance, without any prior or further argumentation, Toril Moi writes: 'if we are truly to
reject the model of the author as God the Father of the text, it is surely not enough to reject the
patriarchal ideology implicit in the paternal metaphor. It is equally necessary to reject the critical
practice it leads to, a critical practice that relies on the author as the transcendental signified of
his or her text. For the patriarchal critic, the author is the source, origin and meaning of the text. If
we are to undo this patriarchal practice of authority we must take one step further and proclaim
with Roland Barthes the death of the author.' Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary
Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 62–3.
6. Cedric Watts, 'Bottom's Children: The Fallacies of Structuralist, Post-structuralist and
Deconstructionist Literary Theory' in Lawrence Lerner, ed., Reconstructing Literature (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1983), pp. 20–35: p. 28.
7. Paul Taylor, 'Men on the Run and on the Make/Review of Mensonge by Malcolm Bradbury and
Saints and Sinners by Terry Eagleton', The Sunday Times, 13 September 1987, P. 59.
8. William Gass, 'The Death of the Author' in Habitations of the Word (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1985), pp. 265–88.
9. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, trans. Thomas Common (Edinburgh: Foulis,
1910), especially pp. 167–9.
10. For Derrida's ideas on the transcendental signified, see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology,
trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), passim.
11. Roland Barthes, On Racine, op. cit., p. 168.
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, op. cit., p. 276.
13. Roland Barthes, On Racine, op. cit., p. 170.
14. See Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, op. cit., p. 156.
15. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics, trans. R.W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor,
Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1973) for this conception of the dialogic author of the modern
polyphonic novel. Some of the implications of Bakhtin's work for author-theory will be considered
below.
16. Osip Brik, 'The so-called formal method' in L.M. O'Toole and Ann Shokman, eds., Russian
Poetics in Translation 4 (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1977), pp 90–1: p. 90. For a
Marxist extension of this artisanal picture of authorship see Walter Benjamin, 'The Author as
Producer' in Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: NBL, 1973),
pp. 85–101.
17. The phenomenological auteurism of Georges Poulet might be such a case in point. However,