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

punishment. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, op.
cit., pp. 189–230.
36. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed.
Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1977), p. 33.
37. Ibid., p. 38.
38. Ibid., p. 165; p. 196.
39. The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972), p.
209
40. For Deleuze's interpretation of Foucault, see Giles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand
(London; Athlone Press, 1988).
41. See Michel Foucault, 'A Preface to Transgression', in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice,
op. cit., pp. 29–52; 'Of Other Spaces', Diacritics, vol 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986), pp. 22–7.
42. This paper was originally delivered to the Société française de Philosophie in February 1969
—see Michel Foucault, 'Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?', Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie,
63 (1969), pp. 73–104—a translation of which, by Donald Bouchard, is included in Language,
Counter-Memory, Practice, op. cit., pp. 113–38. A revised version of this paper was presented by
Foucault at a conference at SUNY-Buffalo, and has since been translated by Josué V. Harari as
'What is an Author' in Josué V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist
Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 141–60. As Harari's emphasises, the
difference between the two versions is important—see Textual Strategies, op. cit., p. 43—and all
page references made parenthetically within the text will be to Harari's translation of this
subsequent version. Recourse to the Language, Counter-Memory, Practice version will be
signalled in the notes.
43. Michel Foucault, 'What is an Author?', Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, op. cit., pp.
113–14. These remarks, which belong to Foucault's preamble to 'Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?' before
the Société française de Philosophie are omitted in the later version of the paper, and therefore
do not appear in Harari's translation.
44. See Michel Foucault, 'What is an Author?' in Textual Strategies, op. cit., pp. 159–60.
45. In locating the emergence of the founder of discursivity in the nineteenth century, however,
we cannot but suspect that insufficient time has elapsed for powerful modifications or
transformations to have occured. Time may still surrender a dialectical materialism or
psychoanalysis which encompasses and transcends the inaugural texts.
46. A certain local displacement of the author may well be at work here, for this paragraph —
which forms part of the main text of 'Qu'est-ce qu'un autcur?' as presented to the Société
française de Philosophie—appears in Textual Strategies as a particularly astute and intrusive
editor's footnote! To compare with Bouchard's translation of the paper delivered to the Société
française de Philosophie, see Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, op. cit., p.
136. Given its appearance in the original French text and in Bouchard's translation, it seems
justifiable to treat the passage as though it belongs to the body proper of 'What is an Author?'.
47. Correspondingly, Foucault's exegetes have steered well away from this essay, just as they
have passed over the presentation of a Delphic Nietzsche as though it were of no consequence
for a transindividual theory of discursive practices. Alan Sheridan makes no mention of 'What is
an Author?'; Pamela Major-Poetzl makes the solitary observation that it attests to the 'effacement,
even the destruction of the subject'—Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Western Culture: Towards
a New Science of History (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983) p. 103; Karlis Racevskis claims that
the essay has shown 'that the author is a convenient explanatory device, an a priori principle with
which we are able to domesticate a text for our own specific purposes', Michel Foucault and the
Subversion of Intellect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 39. Not surprisingly either,
when the idea of the founder of discursivity is raised, it is in the context of Foucault himself See
Paul Rabinow's introduction to The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Hamondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1984), p.26; and Edward Said, who prophesies: 'it is as the founder of a new field of
research (or a new way of knowing and doing research) that he will continue to be known and
regarded. The virtual representation and reperception of documentary and historical evidence is
done by Foucault in such an unusual way as to have created for his evidence a new mental
domain' Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University