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

Press, 1975), p. 191.
48. See Michel Foucault, 'What is an Author?', Textual Strategies, op. cit., p. 145.
49. See Michel Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Marx, Freud' in Nietzsche, Proceedings of the Seventh
International Philosophical Colloquium of the Cahiers de Royaumont, 4–8 July, 1964 (Paris:
Éditions de Minuit, 1967), pp. 183–200.
50. See Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie, 1969, p. 101.
51. Of course, it is of not of any material significance, in this context, whether or not Nietzsche is
strictly speaking a founder of discursivity or a transdiscursive author, or whether he is to be
located somewhere between the two—the fact remains that he will be there or thereabouts and
consequently has every place within a discussion of this sort. Indeed, given Foucault's period of
withdrawal from discourse at this time and his re-emergence as a Nietzschean revisionist in his
genealogical period, the relationship between Foucault and Nietzsche conforms neatly to Harold
Bloom's figure of affirmation-negation in the ephebe's anxious history of influence.
52. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, trans. R.J. Holtingdale
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 88.
53. Michel Foucault, 'Postscript: An Interview with Michel Foucault by Charles Raus', Death and
the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, trans. Charles Raus (London: Athlone Press,
1987), p. 184.
54. Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories: 1933–1969, trans. N. Di Giovanni (New
York: Bantam Books, 1971), p. 180.
55. Michel Foucault, 'Prison Talk', Radical Philosophy, no. 16 (Spring, 1977), p. 33.
56. Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, op. cit.,.pp. 76–100.
57. 'Truly I advise you: go away from me and guard yourselves against Zarathustra! . . . One
repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil. And why, then, should you not pluck at my
laurels?'—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, op. cit., p. 103. Nietzsche will say this
many times, and in many different ways: 'The philosopher believes that the value of his
philosophy lies in the whole, in the building: posterity discovers it in the bricks with which he built,
and which are then often used for better building . . . ' Friedrich Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader,
selected and trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 33. 58. 'We have
to remember . . . that the ancient conception of authorship was widely different from our
own . . . A writer might even go so far as to assume the name of a great teacher in order to gain
a reading for his book . . . ' . Arthur S. Peake, Peake's Commentary on the Bible (London:
Nelson, 1919), p. 902.
59. As Jacques Derrida says:'The thinking of the end of man . . . is always already prescribed in
metaphysics, in the thinking of the truth of man.' Jacques Derrida, 'The Ends of Man', Margins—of
Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 109–36: p. 121.
60. It is perhaps partly for this reason that Foucault maintains a scrupulous uncertainty as to
whether we are still (at the time of writing) within the Age of Man, or are instead dazzled by the
unaccustomed light of the coming episteme. This space between epistemi is the ideal point from
which the archaeologist might speak for it frees him front the specific determinations of any
particular configuration of knowledge and forms so to speak, a lyrical intermezzo between rigid,
prescriptive systems. Foucault's elusiveness on the epistemic stationing of the archaeological
discourse has led Pamela Major-Poetzl to postulate a fourth and contemporary episteme
commencing in 1950, though she does so with no direct authorisation from the text. See Pamela
Major-Poetzl, Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Western Culture, op. cit., pp. 158–9; 191–5.
61. And Foucault's style does everything to confirm the transcendental status of the
archaeological author. He writes with an omniscient assurance, in tones peremptory and
portentous; with what Roland Barthes would call the voice of God. Indeed, Edward Said makes
the point that Foucault's voice is undoubtedly the 'voice of an Author', though he sees no
particular contradiction in an authorful and authoritarian discourse which recommends the
anonymity of discourse. See Edward Said, 'An Ethics of Language', Diacritics, vol. 4, no. 2
(Summer 1974), pp. 28–37: p. 28.
62. On Nietzsche's perspectivism see Arthur C. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 68–99.
63. And it is surely due in large measure to the Cartesian tradition that phenomenology should
have exerted its greatest influence not in its native Germany but in France.