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

everything we do, and that we cannot master our own discourses. Lacan's mastery of Freud is
merely local, however, revealing the work of the unconscious.'—Julian Wolfreys, 'Premature
Obituaries', Radical Philosophy 67 (Summer 1994), pp. 57–8: p. 57. However, as I trust my
argument makes clear, Lacan's recourse to Freud takes the form of deference to, rather than
mastery of, the founder of psychoanalysis. Lacan would sooner be mastered by Freud than
confront the authority implicit in his own theoretical stance. The problems raised by the claim that
Lacan is merely 'revealing the work of the unconscious' are dealt with below.
76. Jean Michel Palmier, quoted in Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca Cornell University Press,
1985), p. 40. Gallop forwards an interesting discussion of Lacan's implicit mastery of language,
but admits a similar susceptibility to the auctoritas of his text.
77. Catherine Clément, The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 31.
78. Ibid., p. 201.
79. This is not to suggest that Lacan is free of any defensive anxieties of influence but that such
anxieties do not take Freud as their object. For a glimpse of Lacan agonistes concerning Hegel
see Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan
(Harmondsworch: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 215.
80. Ibid., p. 232.
81. Jacques Lacan, quoted in Karlis Racevskis, Michel Foucault and the Subversion of Intellect
op. cit., pp. 34–5.
82. Julia Kristeva, 'The System and the Speaking Subject', The Times Literary Supplement, 12
October 1973, pp. 1249–50: p. 1249.
83. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness
(London: Roudedge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 5.641, p. 58.
84. Indeed when Foucault was pressed on this issue he replied by saying that the death of man
and the question of the author are not to be hastily consociated. See Michel Foucault, 'Qu'est-ce
qu'un auteur?', op. cit., p. 102.
85. There are of course strategic reasons why Foucault should wish to keep the issues of author
and man at a certain distance. Not least among these is the fact that Foucault had said that the
author was constituted in the era of representation: 'The artist was able to emerge from the ageold
anonymity of epic singers only by usurping the power and the meaning of the same epic
values. The heroic dimension passed from the hero to the one whose task it had been to
represent him at a time when Western culture itself became a world of representations.'—Michel
Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, op. cit., p. 73. There could then be no question
of associating the deaths of author and man on the basis of the epistemic economy of The Order
of Things.
86. Jean-Marie Benoist, The Structural Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978.), p.
13.
87. Stephen Heath, 'Comment on "The idea of authorship" ', in John Caughie, ed., Theories of
Authorship: A Reader (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 214–20: p. 216.
88. Martin Jay, 'Should Intellectual History Take a Linguistic Turn'?, in Dominick LaCapra and
Steven L. Caplan, eds, Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New
Perspectives (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 86–110: p. 89.
89. Charles C. Lemert, and Garth Gillan, Michel Foucault: Social Theory and Transgression (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 136. For another example of the over-hasty
identification of authorial, transcendental and divine subjects see Pierre Macherey, A Theory of
Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), especially
pp. 66–8.
90. Immanuel Kant, A Critique of Pure Reason, op. cit., B 404, p. 331.
91. Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. William P. Alston and George
Nakhrukian (Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), p. xviii–xix.
92. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, op. cit., pp. 31–2.
93. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism,
second edition, revised and enlarged, ed. Wlad Godzich (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 49.
94. Ibid., p. 38.
95. E. D. Hirsch Jr, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 32.