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

iographer, but through discrete images, a love of cats and flowers, a liking for particular cakes,
watery eyes like Ignatius of Loyola. And those images, sufficient to themselves, are also images
that (in the words of Yeats), 'fresh images beget'; they refer or expand to other images not by
syntagmatic structuring but by association, invocatively.
For Barthes, never far from Proust, the biographeme reverberates with the pathos of lost time,
and yet participates in its recovery. Barthes makes this clear in Camera Lucida: 'I like certain
features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these
features "blographemes"; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has
to biography.' 45 Like the photograph of his mother so beautifully described later in that text, the
biographeme is all that endures once a life has run its course: those moments that can be stilled,
pictured—a bloated eunuch in a prison cell, a man dead among his flowerpots, a white muff worn
on a night in 1768. What is modestly adumbrated here is a revaluation of biography, a new form
of its writing which does not lie against time but accepts its conditions in a spirit of melancholy
defiance. Where the death of the author had addressed itself to the timeless 'Author-God', the
return of the biographical author is a return to transcience, mortality.
Following upon S/Z, which sought to work through and beyond structuralist categories, Sade
Fourier Loyola makes the decisive break with the scientism Barthes practised in the 1960s, and
along with The Pleasure of the Text makes a theoretical clearing for Roland Barthes by Roland
Barthes, A Lover's Discourse and Camera Lucida. 46 A reworked conception of the author is the
first move in this direction. To reintroduce the author and the author's life is to create a thaw in the
cold dream of structuralist objectivity. Indeed, as the eudaemonist aesthetic comes to supplant
the structural categories, the cohabitance of author and reader in the text becomes not only part
of the text's pleasure but its 'index':
Nothing is more depressing than to imagine the Text as an intellectual object (for reflection,
analysis, comparison, mirroring, etc.). The text is an object of pleasure. The bliss of the text is
often only stylistic: there are expressive felicities, and neither Sade nor Fourier lacks them.
However, at times the pleasure of the Text is achieved more deeply (and then is when we can
truly say there is a Text): whenever the 'literary' Text (the Book) transmigrates into our life,
whenever another writing (the Other's writing) succeeds in writing fragments of our own daily
lives, in short, whenever a co-existence occurs. The index of the pleasure of the Text, then, is
when we are able to live with Fourier, with Sade. To live with an author does not necessarily
mean to achieve in our life the program that the author has traced in his books . . . to live with
Sade is, at times, to speak Sadian, to live with Fourier is to speak in Fourier . . . (7–8)
Much indeed is staked on the return of the author to this stage. With the founder of language, the
acceptance of the author's life and corpus, 'The Death of the Author' seems almost to belong to a
different era. Yet, of course, it does not. In many respects they are contemporaries.47 It is
perhaps because of the disruptions that these two texts work upon each other that they rarely if
ever meet in readings of Barthes. Little in fact tends to be written about Sade Fourier Loyola.
Commentators have generally been happy to move from S/Z to The Pleasure of the Text, thereby
sidestepping the reopening of the authorship question that this text beseeches. Few, if any, of
Barthes's critics will simultaneously countenance 'The Death of the Author' and Sade Fourier
Loyola for to do so would seem to risk running into aporia or incoherence.48. There is an
unwillingness here to accept the very antilogism that is so lauded in Barthes, an unwillingness to
relinquish the idea of order in his discourse. A discourse which, let it be remembered, could quite
conceivably be grounded in uncertainty, in the confusion of a mind before the contradictory
possibilities that its unbridled intelligence has opened up. Little heed is thus taken of that maxim
of André Gide's which Barthes claimed has governed his own writing life—'incoherence is
preferable to a distorting order'. 49 There is, though, one very important sense in which the
logothetic description is faithful to everything Barthes has written, a sense in which we might
discover what is meant by the death of the author and his precipitous return.
Mimesis And The Author
Barthes allows the logothetes privileges that extent far beyond those granted the author in
traditional man-and-the-work criticism. What Barthes will not allow to his founders, however, is
any representational significance in their discourses, any content: Sade without evil, Fourier
without socialism, Loyola without God, these are the postulates upon which the study
commences. In this we might find an explanation of Barthes's seemingly insurmountable