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

Josipovici, 'The Balzac of M. Barthes and the Balzac of M. de Guermantes' in Lawrence Lerner,
ed., Reconstructing Literature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), pp. 81–105.
92. Susan Sontag, in her introduction to Roland Barthes, A Barthes Reader,, ed. Susan Sontag
(London: Cape, 1982), p. xxxvin. See also, Susan Sontag, 'Remembering Barthes', in Under the
Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1980), pp. 169–77.
93. Susan Sontag, quoted in Philip Thody, Roland Barthes: A Conservative Estimate (London:
Macmillan, 1977), p. 142.
94. Harold Bloom, Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (New York and London: Oxford
University Press, 1982), p. 48.
95. See Oscar Wilde, 'The Critic as Artist', Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London and
Glasgow: Collins, 1948), pp. 1009–59.
Chapter Two: The Author And The Death Of Man
1. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan
Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1970). Originally published as Les mots et les choses: un
archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). Page references are made
parenthetically within the text.
2. See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason,
trans. Richard Howard (London: Tavistock, 1967).
3. 'Thought' here is used—as it is Foucault's text—to denote the thought of the human sciences,
and of the humanities in general. Foucault occasionally draws the science of mathematics and
physics into his discussion of the Classical era, though, within his account of modernity, he is
obviously not suggesting that the hard sciences partake of the epistemic (i.e. anthropomorphic)
configuration.
4. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, op. cit., pp. 340–1. The Order of Things began as
an introduction to Kant's Anthropology, and this might explain in part why Foucault puts .such
undue emphasis on the anthropological in Kant's work. The anthropological concern is not to be
found elsewhere in the Kantian philosophy. Indeed Kant is concerned to stress that this, his last
work, is of a marginal and occasional nature, and to be regarded as quite distinct from
transcendental idealism. See Immanuel Kant, Anthropology From A Pragmatic Point of View,
trans. Mary J. Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974).
5. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, op. cit., pp. 318–35. For a clear account of the
anthropological doubles see Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 34–43
6. James M. Edie, 'Sartre as Phenomenologist and as Existentialist Psychoanalyst', in Edward N.
Lee and Maurice Mandelbaum, eds, Phenomenology and Existentialism, (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1967), pp. 139–78: p. 142.
7. Michel Foucault, The Order Things, op cit., p. xiv.
8. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, op. cit., pp. 52–6.
9. 'The relation of all knowledge to the mathesis is posited as the possibility of establishing an
ordered succession between things, even non-measurable ones. In this sense, analysis was very
quickly to acquire the value of a universal method; and the Leibnizian project of establishing a
mathematics of qualitative orders is situated at the very heart of Classical thought; its gravitational
centre. But, on the other hand, this relation to the mathesis as a general science of order does
not signify that knowledge is absorbed into mathematics, or that the latter becomes the
foundation for all possible knowledge; on the contrary, in correlation with the quest for a mathesis,
we perceive the appearance of a certain number of empirical fields now being formed and defined
for the very first time. In none of these, or almost none, is it possible to find any trace of
mechanism or mathematicisation; and yet they all rely for their foundation upon a possible
science of order. Although they were all dependent upon analysis in general, their particular
instrument was not the algebraic method but the system of signs.' Michel Foucault, The Order of
Things, op. cit., p. 57.
10. No account is taken of the consideration that the formularies—Cartesian or Newtonian—for a
science of order might be transposed onto the planes of general grammar, natural history, and
the analysis of wealth, or at least, that the promptings toward such an order might derive in part
from the Cartesian rationalism. While Foucault is unquestionably correct in saying that 'this
relation to the mathesis in general does not signify that knowledge is absorbed into mathematics'