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

elements, but closed and oblivious to anything outside of itself. Indeed this closure has been
affirmed not only of the outcasts Sade, Fourier and Loyola, but as the condition of all writing: 'All
modes of writing have in common the fact of being "closed" . . . writing is a hardened language
which is self-contained.'40 If indeed the logothetic language is closed—and Sade Fourier Loyola
cannot work without this premise—then the possibility of its establishing a broad intertext is
precluded, and it is perforce located firmly within the space of the oeuvre. For logothesis to make
any sense at all, 'text' in Sade Fourier Loyola must mean oeuvre.
Of course, faith in the oeuvre is nothing less than faith in the author, or in his signature at least,
and the constants and correspondences thereby contracted. In absolutely minimalist terms, the
author is that principle which unites the objects—whether collusive or discrete—that gather under
his proper name. And indeed a certain suspicion of the oeuvre is to be found in many forms of
traditional criticism. Propositions of the order, 'the Ludwig Wittgenstein who wrote the Tractatus is
not the Ludwig Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations' are commonplace amongst
commentators who otherwise have no particular hostility to the institution of the author. Yet
Barthes, author of the author's death, has evinced considerable faith in the oeuvre, not only in the
special cases of Sade, Fourier and Loyola, but at many points within his own oeuvre, and often
with supreme indifference to disparities of content, ideas, positions. In Writing Degree Zero, style
is proposed as the etymon, the silver thread which both unites a writer's work, and sets it off
against that of others: a 'self sufficient language' which 'has its roots only in the depths of the
author's personal and secret mythology, that subnature of expression where the first coition of
words and things takes place, where once and for all the great verbal themes of his existence
come to be installed'. 41 Michelet set out to 'restore to this man his coherence',42 while On
Racine, although reluctant to ground the oeuvre in the creativity and cohesion of the individual
subject, nevertheless sought for structural and thematic unity within the Racinian tragedies. Even
S/Z quite freely accepts Balzac's oeuvre and devotes a section to describing the pleasures of
moving between various Balzacian characters and locales.
With Sade Fourier Loyola, however, Barthes subjects the notion of the oeuvre to a certain
revaluation which had always been implicit in his earlier work. This revaluation consists in
releasing the life's work from the wearisome and laborious chronological considerations of
conventional oeuvre criticism. Barthes treats the oeuvre as an everpresent intertext, a space to
be ranged forwards and backwards without progressional responsibilities. Oeuvre-reading is thus
relieved of the programmatics of anteriority, development: the general organicist and teleological
rationales which have formerly stood its surety are displaced by a fecund space, a space of
coherencies and constellations, but not of syntagmatic order. Likewise, the flattening out of
apparent contradictions, or the synthetic process of their assimilation into a greater whole have
no place in this form of oeuvre-reading. No longer a forward march from fledgling texts to mature
thought, the oeuvre becomes an arena or ellipse in which everything is rhapsodic, nothing
sequential, in which themes, passages, ideas twist round upon each other in the manner of
leitmotivs. When reading Sade, there is no call, say, to begin with the first version of Justine and
to end with the last surviving work at Charenton, nor to take account of the two decades of
revolution and counterrevolution that intervened between their composition: his texts belong to a
common self-identical site, the site of their own recursive and idiorhythmic language which eludes
the regimens of the linear, the temporal. What is augured here is (by an interesting reversal which
combines concepts traditionally set at odds with each other) an intertextualising of the oeuvre, a
freedom to traffic between an author's works that is perversely delimited by the narrative
conventions of customary oeuvre-reading. Under the heading 'Rhapsody', Barthes writes of the
'Sadian novel':
To recount, here, does not consist in developing a story and then untangling it, adhering to an
infinitely organic model (to be born, to live, to die), i.e., to subject the series of episodes to a
natural (or logical) order, which becomes the meaning imposed by 'Fate' on every life, every
journey, but in purely and simply juxtaposing iterative and mobile fragments: then the continuum
is merely a series of bits and pieces, a baroque fabric of odds and ends . . . This construction
frustrates the paradigmatic structure of the narrative (in which each episode has its
'correspondent' somewhere further on which counterbalances or rectifies it) and thereby, eluding
the structuralist reading of the narration, it constitutes an outrage of meaning: the rhapsodic
(Sadian) novel has no meaning or direction, nothing compels it to progress, develop, end. (140)