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

asis for The Order of Things' most audacious and most memorable proposition, that of the death
of man.
On Foucault's account, man only came into being as the subject of knowledge in 1800, and this
opening is marked by Kant who introduced the anthropological question to philosophical
reflection. 4 However, the centrality accorded to man in the new arrangement of knowledge
established not the unity of the subject but his division. Indeed this division arises as soon as the
Kantian question 'What is man?' is asked, for both an interrogated and an interrogating subject
are immediately and inherently posited. The subjects occupy, respectively, the roles of the
empirical object of knowledge, and the elevated subject who is the house or the condition of
possibility for that knowledge. Within the phrase 'subject of knowledge' the genitive is therefore
double but contradictory such that man becomes 'a strange empirico-transcendental doublet . . .
a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible'. (318)
This conflict between the transcendental and the intraworldly is also reflected in man's precarious
relationship with the unthought, for the further modern consciousness has probed the underlying
reality of things, the more it has unearthed of its other in the forms of the in-itself, social
determinations, and the unconscious. Through its advances, the sovereign cogito serves to
illumine ever greater reaches of the darkness within which it is engulfed.5 As Foucault puts it, in a
sublime formula: 'modern thought is advancing towards that region where man's Other must
become the Same as himself. (328) But Foucault does not actually argue the end of man on the
basis of these intrinsic contradictions in the anthropological arrangement: rather such
contradictions are held to be inaugurally constitutive of the era of man. The argument for the
death of man is to proceed on quite different lines. Simple lines, which run as follows. If man was
only constituted in 1800, if he is a 'recent invention' contemporaneous with the modern episteme,
then (archaeologically) it must be that once the modern episteme is over, man will disappear
every bit as surely as did the Classical theory of representation at the end of the eighteenth
century. In the 'Preface' this is stated directly:
Strangely enough, man—the study of whom is supposed by the naive to be the oldest
investigation since Socrates—is probably no more than a kind of rift in the order of things, or, in
any case, a configuration whose outlines are determined by the new position he has so recently
taken up in the field of knowledge. Whence all the chimeras of the new humanisms, all the facile
solutions of an 'anthropology' understood as a universal reflection on man, half-empirical, halfphilosophical.
It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a
recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he
will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form. (xxiii)
However, this proleptic summary fails to register the force of implication in Foucault's text, its
consistently subtle and guarded hints that this disappearance is in the offing. Even as he writes,
signs are abroad (the unification of language in structural analyses against its dispersion in
subjectivity, together with more arcane portents such as the irruption of desire in discourse) that
another epistemic cataclysm is brewing, that the ground is once more stirring under our feet. If
this is so—and Foucault does everything to suggest that it is—then man will be lost to knowledge
in a movement not only inevitable but expeditious. Indeed at one point the text is moved so far as
to say that: 'It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man's
disappearance.' (342) The thought of the 1960s thus finds itself at the crossing, poised in
prospect of the end of anthropocentrism and the beginning of a counterhumanist age. It is at this
point that the story of The Order of Things ends, and its writing begins.
The idea of man as the author of his own works is hereby prey to a double assault. In the first
place, the role of individuals in the production of discourse is considered negligible in respect of
the immanent rules of formation which govern the parameters and systematicity of the entire
archive of a given historical period. For the second, the recently constituted episteme in which
man is figured as the subject of his knowledge, of his writing, of his actions and their history, is
seen to be coming to a close: 'Man', conceived of as subject or object, is 'in the process of
perishing'. (386) Our concern will be with these two deaths—those of author and man—and later
with the question as to whether they are one and the same death. Initially, though, we will be
concerned to follow the transindividual precept as it functions within The Order of Things, and
then to chart a re-entry of the author into this text. Two archaeological operations involving the
author are thereby postulated, those of exclusion and inclusion, operations which we will mark by