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

Barthes is not here concerned with specific instances, but rather with critical attitudes generally.
The phenomenological position on the author will be discussed at some length below in the
second chapter and conclusion, where it will be argued that whilst the the transcendental subject
of phenomenology is undoubtedly deist, it is more so in the manner of the deus absconditus than
that of the omnipresent author.
18. 'The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and
author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after. The Author is
thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in
the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father is to his child.' Roland Barthes, Image-
Music-Text, op. cit., p. 145.
19. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Translator's Preface to Of Grammatology' in Jacques Derrida, Of
Grammatology, op. cit., pp. ix–lxxxvii: p. lxxiv.
20. The phrase 'monster of totality' is taken from Barthes. See Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes
by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 179.
21. William Gass, The World Within the Word (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1979), p. 36.
22. See Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', op. cit., p. 144.
23. Roland Barthes, S/Z op. cit., pp. 211–12.
24. See ibid., pp. 210–11.
25. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Howard (London: Cape, 1976), p.
27.
26. Ibid.
27. Roland Barthes, Sade Fourier Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (London: Cape, 1977), pp. 8–9.
Originally published as Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1971).
28. Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, op. cit., p. 161.
29. Boris Tomaschevsky, 'Literature and Biography' in Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska,
eds, Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1971), pp. 47–55: p. 50.
30. Michel Foucault, in Michel Foucault, ed., I Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my
sister and my brother . . . : A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1975), p. 209.
31. Tzvetan Todorov, quoted in Ann Jefferson and David Robey, Modern Literary Theory: A
Comparative Introduction (London: Batsford, 1984), pp. 98–9.
32. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p.
69.
33. On the theme of the 'hospitality' of the critic see J. Hillis Miller, 'The Critic as Host' in Harold
Bloom et al., Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury, Press, 1979), pp. 217–53.
34. See Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', op. cit., p. 146.
35. Roland Barthes, Sade Fourier Loyola, op. cit. p. 3. All subsequent page references for citation
are given parenthetically within the text.
36. See ibid., pp. 87–8.
37. Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', op. cit., p. 146.
38. In a way, Sade Fourier Loyola can be seen to continue the project of écriture blanche so
hauntingly proposed in Writing Degree Zero—see Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans.
Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Cape, 1967). Barthes had here argued—pace Lukáacs
and Sartre—that writing realises its true political status through its formal and stylistic structures:
the manner rather than the content of what is written constitutes its praxis. The dream of the
écrivain is to break with the language of his time, to evolve a colourless writing devolved of
ideology, cleansed of institutional traces. Such a quest involves an absolute purgation of the
encratic bourgeois language, since to break with the values of a society is most importantly to
break with its modes of expression. However, Writing Degree Zero, so
full of promise and prospect for the future of writing finally presents the écrivain as the unhappiest
of consciousnesses, and the dream of écriture blanche as condemned in advance. Every
assertion of freedom invariably falls prey to the snares of recuperation. Impelled by History to a
commitment he cannot make, forced to choose between modes of writing that are destined to be
classicised, the modern writer is forever caught on the wrong side of both freedom and necessity.
What Sade Fourier Loyola presents, by contrast, are writers who have indeed succeeded in