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

evaluation of all values, as Nietzsche conceived it, was to deconstruct the duality mind-body, to
assert the biological as the source of all thought, of all values and judgements. In asserting the
body as the source of value, in mooting (with The Pleasure of the Text) a 'materialist theory of the
subject', Barthes would seem to be continuing this aspect of the Nietzschean revaluation.
Yet, even on this point, Barthes is thoroughly inconsistent. Within The Pleasure of the Text, he
maintains the opposition between mind and body which no materialism can suffer: 'The pleasure
of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the
same ideas I do',88 an idea that is perpetuated in various ways in Roland Barthes. One of
Barthes's commentators, Roland Champagne, suggests that the insistence upon the body is an
attempt to reverse the traditional privileging of consciousness over unconscious determinations in
literature, as indeed we might expect it to be.89 However, again nothing is to be that simple, for,
of all contemporary theorists, Barthes is peculiarly uninterested in the unconscious, his concerns
being rather with the surface play of signification rather than the depths from which it may have
emerged. Furthermore, the body in his works dictates conscious scenarios, the fantasy rather
than the dream. Champagne, though, also says that 'Barthes came to realise that writing is an
attempt by the writer to make his body perpetual in time', and this is far more persuasive,
particularly since Roland Barthes is the epic fulfilment of Sade Fourier Loyola's desire: 'were I a
writer, and dead, how I would love it if my life, through the pains of some friendly and detached
biographer, were to reduce itself to a few details, a few preferences, a few inflections, let us say:
to "biographemes" whose distinction and mobility might go beyond any fate and come to touch,
like Epicurean atoms, some future body, destined to the same dispersion.'90
We notice that the return of the author came to be associated with the mortality of the author, just
as 'The Death of the Author' never took account of the author as anything other than a strange
deist abstraction inimical to high poststructuralism. In attempting to conjoin the body of writing to
the body writing—'The corpus: what a splendid idea! Provided one was willing to read the body in
the corpus.' (161)—Roland Barthes, for an instant, brings together those parts of the author that
are destined to the most irrevocable sundering. Yet sunder they will—for an author's corpus
outlives his body and its corpse—as they did in the case of Roland Barthes. Were we friendly,
detached and painstaking enough, and were we to have written a 'Life of Barthes', we might at
some point have said:
His body: subject of inscriptions, of desire, of discourse, 'mana-word'; this body expired a few
weeks after being run down by a laundry truck on a pedestrian crossing outside the Sorbonne.
Barthes's corpus is as alive and as well as that of any post-war writer, as is his biography. The
theorist of the author's death became a celebrity in France, an enthusiastic interviewee on
television, the radio, for newspapers; he went on to write two confidently autobiographical works,
texts which were not autobiographies but autobiographical, books of feeling, impressions, of the
self; he talked, we know, of writing a novel, a 'Proustian novel'. 91 Upon his death he became the
subject of many obituaries, most gracefully those written by Susan Sontag who described his
later work as 'the most elegant, the most subtle and gallant of autobiographical projects'.92
Sontag, too, who had twelve years earlier declared that 'only if the ideal of criticism is enlarged to
take in a wide variety of discourse, both theoretical and descriptive, about culture, language and
contemporary consciousness, can Barthes be plausibly called a critic.'93 Balzac did not die as a
result of S/Z. He is as alive now as he ever has been since his death in 1850, yet—through S/Z—
the idea of the reader as producer of the text was born. Harold Bloom may or may not be right
when he says that personality 'cannot be voided except by personality, it being an oddity
(perhaps) that Eliot and Barthes matter as critics because they are indeed critical
personalities',94 just as Oscar Wilde may or may not have been right when he proposed that
criticism is the only civilised form of autobiography.95 Yet might we not venture that the birth of
the reader is not achieved at the cost of the death of the author, but rather at that of showing how
the critic too becomes an author?
2
The Author and the Death of Man
Critical positions which argue the irrelevance of the author will invariably propose determinist
theories if they are concerned to discover alternative models of the constitution of discourse. The
work of Michel Foucault is no exception. Within his prodigious text, The Order of Things (1966),