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

stepping out of the languages of their times, anchorite figures who have defended their texts
against the incursion of the language of the other. Unlike écriture (as understood by Writing
Degree Zero) logothesis is not obliged to use the language of social reality against society; rather,
like the language of madness, it rejects the sociolect, it becomes sui generis.
39. It might be maintained that the logothete stays within language, and that it is only the
transgressive power of his reconfigurations and 'theatricalising' of the pre-existent system that
gives to his text the appearance of a new language. But Sade Fourier Loyola does not say this:
nothing of the earlier position can be recuperated from this depiction. If Sade, Fourier and Loyola
remain within language as inscribed subjects then they do so at its outermost limit: the logothete
will not deign to speak any language not uniquely his own. He does what 'The Death of the
Author' claimed no writer could do—that is, to exorcise the anterior language and stage an
entirely hermetic and idiorhythmic scene of writing.
40. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, op. cit., p. 25.
41. Ibid., p. 16. Also in 'From Work to Text' Batches wrote: 'How do you classify a writer like
Georges Bataille? Novelist, poet, essayist, economist, philosopher, mystic? The answer is so
difficult that the literary manuals generally prefer to forget about Bataille who, in fact, wrote texts,
perhaps continuously one single text'.—Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, op. cit., p. 157.
Barthes himself, like Bataille, like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, is the most protean of writers, yet
nevertheless—or perhaps because of this—he attracts more oeuvre-centred readings than any
other post-war European writer. Steven Ungar in Roland Barthes: the Professor of Desire
(Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1983) introduces Barthes's adolescent
pastiche on Socrates to the canon, and sees in it the first step on the long road to Barthes's last
works. Roland Champagne too will utilise this piece of juvenilia, and argue that the 'new
humanism' outlined in Writing Degree Zero is the ground traversed in the quarter-century that
separates it from Barthes's inaugural address to the College of France in 1977—see Roland
Champagne, Literary History in the Wake of Roland Barthes: Re-defining the Myths of Reality
(Alabama: Summa Publications Inc., 1984). For Annette Lavers there is a Barthesian 'voyage'—
see Annette Lavers, Roland Barthes: Structuralism and After (London: Methuen, 1982). Tim
Clark, reviewing Lavers's book in an article called 'Roland Barthes: Dead and Alive', challenges
the notion of the Barthesian oeuvre. Unfortunately, as with most (perhaps all) responses of this
sort, he flits about between Barthes's texts establishing what amounts to the oeuvre's objection to
the notion of the oeuvre, a procedure in which the greater consistency remains on Lavers's side.
See Tim Clark, 'Roland Barthes: Dead and Alive', Oxford Literary Review, vol. 6, no. 1 (1983), pp.
97–107.
42. Roland Barthes, Michelet, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 3.
43. See Boris Tomaschevsky, 'Literacure and Biography', op. cit., p. 55.
44. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Philosophy of Nietzsche, ed. John Clive (New York: Mentor, 1965),
p. 142.
45. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard
(London: Cape, 1982), p. 30.
46. S/Z, though it certainly marks the movement toward a poststructuralist or deconstructive
approach, is still caught within certain structuralist presuppositions, viz its insistence that the
literary text can be exhaustively reconstituted via the five organising codes.
47. 'Sade I' was in fact published in the same year that 'The Death of the Author' was written. It
appeared in Tel Quel, 28 (Winter 1967) under the title 'L' Arbre du crime'.
48. Those who do alight here do so only briefly, and often pass over the idea of the logothete
completely. And when the idea of the logothete is addressed (as here under the imperatives of a
review article) a distinguished theorist can proclaim, in the face of all that Sade Fourier
Loyola says and does: 'The author is no more than a mythic narrator to whom we attribute the
meanings that successive generations have found in his text.' Michael Riffaterre, 'Sade or Text as
Fantasy?', Diacritics, vol. 2, no. 3 (1971), pp. 2–9: p. 3. And the sole basis for this in the text? A
footnote in which Barthes makes the commonplace observation that Sade cannot be held
responsible for the effects his texts have had since he could not divine their destiny. (34, n. 21)
Contrariwise, on the few occasions when logothesis is given a fair hearing, 'The Death of the
Author' is nowhere to be found. Roland Champagne gives some space to the logothete, but only
at the price of utterly suppressing 'The Death of the Author'. Roland Champagne, Literary History