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

a point of method rather than disguised as a description of the entire discursive field. The
absence of the subject, as Eco suggests, is true only to the extent that it is required in order that
the semiotic science may be founded and elaborated. And as Eco is well aware, the problem of
the speaking subject is not abolished by semiotic theory, but—quite to the contrary—one whose
confrontation is beyond the reach of any extant semiotic inquiry.
70. The influential fictions of the South American magical realists may seem to prima facie
contradict this general trend, but only on the basis of a concept of representation which has little if
anything in common with the ethos of traditional realism. Indeed, here and in many other literary,
artistic and cultural contexts, the current trend seems to be to attempt to create rather than
represent 'realities'.
71. See John Hospers, Meaning and Truth in the Arts, op. cit.
72. Roland Barthes, On Racine, op. cit., p. 171.
73. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, op. cit., p. 168. Originally published as Roland Barthes
par Roland Barthes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975). All subsequent page references are given
parenthetically in the text.
74. Jorge Luis Borges, 'Borges and I', Labyrinths (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), pp.
282–3: p. 282.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid., pp. 282–3.
78. Mikhail Bakhtin, quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin, op. cit., p. 52.
79. Michel de Montaigne, Essays, trans. J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1958), p.
235. For a peerless analysis of Montaigne and the autobiographical, see Erich Auerbach,
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. William R. Trask (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 285–310.
80. See Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1991).
81. See James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in Harry Levin, ed., The Essential
James Joyce (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963).
82. On the role of time and memory in the autobiographical act, see James Olney, 'Some
Versions of Memory/Some Versions of Bios: The Ontology of Autobiography', in James Olney,
ed., Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980),
pp. 236–67. As Olney well argues, the situation of the subject within a timeless present serves to
close any gap between the autobiographical subject of the utterance and the subject of the
enunciation.
83. Victor Shklovsky, 'Sterne's Tristam Shandy: Stylistic Commentary' in Lee T. Lemon and
Marion J. Reis, eds, Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, pp. 25–57: p. 57.
84. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Texts and
Discussions with Jacques Derrida, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell (New York: Schoken
Books, 1986), pp. 44–5.
85. Ibid., pp. 5–6.
86. 'Style is always a secret; but the occult aspect of its implications does not arise from the
mobile and ever-provisional nature of language; its secret is recollection locked in the body of the
writer . . . a kind of supra-literary operation which carries man to the threshold of
power and magic. By reason of its biological origin, style resides outside art, outside the pact
which binds the writer to society.' Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, op. cit., p. 18.
87. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, trans. R.J. Hollingdale
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979). On the Nietzschean philosophy of the body, see also
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, trans. R.J. Hollingdale
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), pp. 61–3. For Barthes's declaration of the Nietzschean
influence, see Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, op. cit., p. 145.
88. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, op. cat., p. 17.
89. See Roland Champagne, Literary History in the Wake of Roland Barthes, op. cit., pp. 79–101.
90. Ibid., p. 97; Roland Barthes, Sade Fourier Loyola, op. cit., p. 9.
91. Gabriel Josipovici develops the elegant thesis that Barthes sought to create a Proustian work
of art in later years, but was frustrated by his essential distrust of the world of signs. See Gabriel