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

104. See Jacques Derrida, 'Otobiographies: Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name' in
Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other. Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Texts and
Discussions with Jacques Derrida trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell (New York: Schocken
Books, 1986) pp. 1–38. See also Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, op. cit., pp. 257–409, for
Derrida's interpretation of Freud. One of the main concerns in this latter work is to address the
following question: 'how can an autobiographical writing, in the abyss of an unterminated selfanalysis,
give to a worldwide institution its birth?' Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, op. cit., p. 305.
On the significance of Freud's proper name see 'Freud's Legacy ibid., pp. 292–37. Elucidating his
nomocentric interpretation, Derrida later said: 'In writing Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud is
writing a textual testament not only as regards his own name and his own family, but as regards
the analytic movement which he also constructed in a certain fashion, that is, as a great
inheritance, a great institution bearing his name. The history of the analytic movement has to deal
with that. It is an institution that can't get along without Freud's name, a practical and theoretical
science which must for once come to terms and explain itself with its founder's name.
Mathematics, physics, et cetera, might on occasion celebrate the name of a great physicist or a
great mathematician, but the proper name is not a structural part of the corpus of the science or
the scientific institution. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, has been inherited from Freud and
accounts for itself with the structure of this inheritance. I think that one must finally decipher his
text by means of these questions: the questions of the inheritance, of the proper name, of the
fort/da infinitely exceeding the limits of the text.' Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other, op. cit., p.
71. Derrida's rereading of Freud will be discussed in the conclusion.
105. See Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other, op. cit., especially pp. 4–19.
106. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other, op. cit., p. 30.
107. Indeed, the worst dreams of Platonism are recurring in this context of the ethically
overdetermined scene of Nietzsche's reception history. We witness here writing's inability to sow
its 'seeds in suitable soil', (Phaedrus, 276b) its failure to 'address the right people, and not
address the wrong', (275e) its proclivity for being 'ill-treated and unfairly abused' (275e) its
availability to 'those who have no business with it'. (275e)
108. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, op. cit., back cover.
109. Christopher Norris, for instance, writes: 'it is pointless to ask who is speaking in any given
part of this text, whether Hegel, Genet, Derrida ipse or some other ghostly intertextual 'presence'.
For there is no last word, no metalanguage, or voice of authorial control that would ultimately
serve to adjudicate the matter.' Christopher Norris, Derrida, op. cit., p. 64.
110. Jacques Derrida, in an interview with Inne Salusinszky, in Irme Salusinszky, ed., Criticism in
Society (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 7–24: pp. 22–3.
111. Michel Foucault, 'Postscript: an Interview with Michel Foucault by Charles Raus', in Michel
Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, trans. Charles Raus
(London: Athlone Press, 1987), p. 186.
112. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, op. cit., p. 194.
113. Jacques Derrida, Mémoires: For Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler and
Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 3.
Conclusion: Critic And Author
1. Sigmund Freud, Art and Literature, vol. 14 of the Pelican Freud Library, ed. Albert Dickson
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 60.
2. See Plato, The Republic, trans. H.P. D Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), pp. 370–86. A
similar contradiction is also encountered in the Platonic repudiation of the poets and the
discourses of the death of the author since, just as Plato was himself obliged to use poetic
devices in the elaboration of a pure philosophy, so too have theorists fallen back into subjective
categories even and especially as they pronounce subjectivity dead.
3. For de Man's reading of Rousseau, see Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language
in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 133–
301.
4. As Paul de Man argues in his work during the 1960s. See Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight:
Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, second edition, revised and enlarged, ed. Wlad
Godzich (London: Methuen, 1983), passim.
5. Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, trans. K.P. Keuneman (London: Athlone Press, 1987), p.