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

criticism and broad intellectual culture. This breach is marked by a 'politics' of theory which seems
to have very little to do with politics in anything like a 'real world'. The death of the author marks a
significant point in this melancholy retreat. Looking back, it seems that an institutional affair of
self-regulation (impersonalist reading) was all along masquerading as a dark truth of textual
ontology (the death of the author). When one also takes into account the sheer
incomprehensibility of 'the death of the author' to even the finest minds outside the institution, it is
clear that the concept functioned to keep the non-academic at bay: thereby, one more obstacle to
the re-emergence of a culture of letters was put in place. It was from an impatience with this
insularity that The Death and Return of the Author emerged. Attentive readers of the subtext of
this work will also notice that this impatience is not turned toward the three 'subjects' of this book
—strong poets of the age as they are—but against an Anglo-American critical institution which
has needed arguments from authority in the deconstruction of authority.
A reviewer has noted that this is an impersonal work. Perhaps there is some inconsistency here,
but a personal defence of authorship would not be taken seriously—particularly coming from one
who is not an author.
In the realm of acknowledgements, where the personal is permissible, if not the political, I would
like to record the history of my debts in writing this work.
The first edition was conceived, researched and written between 1986 and 1989, with certain
rewritings and additions in 1991. For two years, I was the recipient of a British Academy State
Studentship for which I remain very grateful.
Circumstances dictated that I wrote this work in almost complete academic isolation, and so I
count myself very lucky to have been in regular contact with Cairns Craig. The insight and
intelligence which he showed in supervising this work continue to surprise me today. Also, I
should like to thank Randall Stevenson, Faith Pullin, Alistair Fowler and Sandra Kemp. From my
home town, it gives me pleasure to acknowledge Tim Petersen, my brother Kevin, my sister
Tracey and friends at the Gower Hotel, Cardiff. I would also like to thank Tíiona Carey, Aisling
Roche, John Carter, Patrick Maguire and Timothy Parry. Most of all, I want to acknowledge the
unstinting support I received from my parents, John and June Burke.
With regard to this second edition, I would like to thank Robin Dix, Michael O'Neill, Bert Nutter,
Fabio Cleto, Charles Martindale and especially C. J. Rowe, and—in what feels like an act of
second nature - Patricia Waugh whose grace and intelligence also brighten worlds far beyond the
Academy.
Prologue: The Deaths of Paul de Man
I am not given to retrospective self-examination and mercifully forget what I have written with the
same alacrity I forget bad movies—although as with bad movies, certain scenes or phrases return
at times to embarrass and haunt me like a guilty conscience. When one imagines to have felt the
exhilaration of renewal one is certainly the last to know whether such a change actually took
place or whether one is just restating, in a slightly different mode, earlier and unresolved
obsessions . . . Thus seeing a distant segment of one's past resurrected gives one a slightly
uncanny feeling of repetition.
Paul de Man, New Haven, 1983 1
Late in 1987, a short article run by the New York Times under the title 'Yale Scholar's Articles
Found in Nazi Paper' set in motion a process of re-evaluation not only of Paul de Man's career as
a theorist but of the deconstructive movement in whose name he worked, and of the ethics of
detaching the text from its writer. At a time when critical theory thought to have dispensed with
the idea of authorship, the posthumous revelation of de Man's wartime writings brought the author
back to centre stage. For critical theorists themselves, all of whom owe a debt of influence to de
Man and some the debt of friendship, the entire affair has unfolded like a nightmare. And the
nightmare in this case, as so often, is history, a history in which, between 1940 and 1942, a
young intellectual published 170 articles in the collaborationist Belgian newspaper Le Soir, a
certain number of which articles express anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi sentiments.2 It is also the
history of the most appalling events, events in which Paul de Man himself played no active role
beyond his journalistic collaborationism, and of a radical movement in literary studies to which the
breadth of his bequeathment has yet to be assessed.