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

exclusively fixed upon the the author or auteur. Working under a structuralist imprimatur, he had
recommended in On Racine (1963) that criticism move beyond the restrictions of man-and-thework
analyses to focus on the nature of the text in and for itself. As a rejoinder to the hostile
response this text met with amongst French scholars, Barthes reiterated his desire for a more
systematic approach to literature in Criticism and Truth (1966), declaring that a science of
discourse could only be established if literary analysis took language rather than authors as the
starting-point of its enquiry.3 As such, Barthes's opposition to the author remained within an
inductionist itinerary: the author-question is placed within parentheses so as to facilitate the
emergence of an experimental methodology. With 'The Death of the Author', however,
revolutionary impulses entirely over-whelm any scientific aims. The removal of the author is no
longer a means to an end, a strategy, but a property of discourse itself:
The removal of the author . . . is not merely an historical fact or an act of writing; it utterly
transforms the modem text (or—which is the same thing—the text is henceforth made and read in
such a way that at all levels its author is absent). (145)
The working context in which Barthes wrote this essay is also significant. At the time, he was
preparing to write a microscopic analysis of Balzac's short story 'Sarrasine'—a project that was to
emerge in 1970 as S/Z—in which the authorial perspective would be replaced by that of the
reader as producer of the text. 4 'The Death of the Author' thus forms a theoretical outline of this
undertaking and opens by offering a quote from Balzac's tale as an example of the anomie proper
to all writing. Immediately, Barthes establishes the lapidary cadences that are to characterise the
entire essay:
In his story 'Sarrasine' Balzac, describing a castrato disguised as a woman, writes the following
sentence: 'This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive
worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.' Who is speaking
thus? Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the
woman? Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of
Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing 'literary' ideas on femininity? Is it Universal Wisdom?
Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of
every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our
subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body
writing. (142)
Such radical and vatic statements have resulted in 'The Death of the Author' becoming the centre
of a controversy. What it has not become, though, is the centre of a debate or discussion. On the
one hand, its dictates have been accepted unreflectively, and recourse to Barthes will be used to
'argue' the death of the author without the arguments proposed in the seven pages of his essay
being themselves held up to any critical scrutiny.5 On the other hand, and just as unfortunately,
'The Death of the Author' has seldom provoked more than derisory dismissal from its opponents.
Critics who have passionately contested its thesis have rarely so much as disturbed its smooth
surface. Many, many readers have been convinced that—even taken on the level of its own
premises—'The Death of the Author' is quite wrong and yet have been stymied by their inability to
say quite why. Little is gained, for instance, when a critic writes: 'As Barthes makes explicit, his
attack on the author is an attack on reason itself; and it is at least consistent that his attack is
irrational.' 6 And still less is to be achieved by the argumentum ad hominem which is doubly selfdefeating
in a discussion of authorship since it implicates itself in the second fallacy of begging
the question. Nevertheless, so it is said. A review of Malcolm Bradbury's Mensonge puts the case
thus:
The comedy has its basis in one of the loonier tenets of Deconstruction—that we do not control
language: language (that impersonal, endless play of signifiers) controls us. It (rather than
writers) writes books. But, though Deconstructionists may confidently proclaim the Death of the
Author, they have never evinced much difficulty in reconciling this view with the scooping up of
advances and royalty cheques made out to them personally, not (as you might logically suppose)
to the English or French language. When it suits them, it seems, the Author turns out not to be an
absolute goner, but just someone on the critical list.7
Even William Gass is not above taking such a passing pot-shot:
Popular wisdom warns us that we frequently substitute the wish for the deed, and when, in 1968,
Roland Barthes announced the death of the author, he was actually calling for it. Nor did Roland