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

appear that if Lacan did repudiate this status, he did so only in the manner of the Zen adept who
seeks to achieve mastery through its renunciation.
The sublimest thing, Wilde once remarked, is to set another before you, and Lacan told his
disciples on at least one occasion that, whilst they might be Lacanians, he himself was a
Freudian. Foucault, as we saw, attempted to mask his own author-ity by the introduction of a
prosopopoeic Nietzsche, and Lacan's insistent recourse to Freud offers similar tactical refuge
from the problem of assuming responsibility for his own text. By far and away the most radical
rereading of Freud ever proposed, the Lacanian project displays the very reverse of any
defensive anxiety of influence.79 Rather it insists, time and again, that the work of structural
psychoanalysis be inscribed entirely within the parameters of the founder's oeuvre. As he
declares in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, in terms that foreshadow
Foucault's idea of the founder of discursivity:
no psycho-analyst can claim to represent, in however slight a way, a corpus of absolute
knowledge. That is why, in a sense, it can be said that if there is someone to whom one can
apply, there can only be one such person. This one was Freud . . . He was not only the subject
who was supposed to know. He did know, and he gave us this knowledge in terms that may be
said to be indestructible, in as much as, since they were first communicated, they support an
interrogation which, up to the present day, has never been exhausted. No progress has been
made, however small, that has not deviated whenever one of the terms around which Freud
ordered . . . the paths of the unconscious, has been neglected. This shows us clearly enough
what the function of the subject who is supposed to know is all about.80
It would of course be absurd to contest the inestimable debt borne by Lacan to Freud (all the
more pronounced because Lacan, better than anyone, knew how to push the Freudian discovery
within sight of its limits) but such recourse, legitimate as it is, serves the strategic purpose of
allowing Lacan to speak as a master of language without accepting that mastery in name. Such in
its more deceptive aspect is 'the function of the subject who is supposed to know'. From this
subject, Lacan appeals for licence to discourse as master whilst simultaneously sheltering under
the mantle of an ardent discipleship. Lacan can thereby propound freely and authoritatively whilst
redirecting the problems of authorisation to the father of psychoanalysis.
The mask however can only be worn for so long, and this strategy, this leurre delivers Lacan no
further from the problem of subjectivity per se. A mastery of the unconscious remains an implicit
postulate; a transdiscursive, meta-authorial status needs be conferred somewhere within this
anti-subjectivist text. A subjectivity is always at stake, then, be it that of Lacan or Freud and, in
the latter case, structural psychoanalysis will always be left to explain how Freud could have so
thoroughly defied the law of the signifier—an issue on which Lacan is conspicuously silent. And
what is more, it matters but little whether Lacan is speaking in propria persona (and therefore in
an improper persona) or in the name of the psychoanalytic father for in either case the Lacanian
text has still authorised itself—whether through Freud or not—to opine from a position
transcendent to the universal discursive conditions it describes. Nor indeed can any strategy
divert attention from the fact that Lacan did speak, that he spoke to modernity with an authentic,
strange and Orphic sonance about the unconscious and the contemporary crisis of subjectivity.
Lacan found himself caught within the same threadwork of transcendental lures that Foucault
encountered in The Order of Things. The aphanisis of the subject could only be articulated in both
its constative and performative aspects through the deliquescence of his own discourse, through
his testimony of the muted subject losing itself in the very mutedness it describes. Like Foucault,
Lacan could therefore only continue to announce the disappearance of the subject as a truth of
discourse by staking his own subjectivity against the entire history of discourse. Which is again to
say, that his text unravels not in the field of an abolished subjectivity but within the space of an
uncertainty as to the nature and status of subjectivity, in particular that of the anti-subjectivist
himself. Such indeed is the abyss awaiting any author of the death of man. The subject who
announces the disappearance of subjectivity does so only at the risk of becoming—inferentially at
least—the sole subject, the Last and Absolute Subject, left to face his subjecthood in the face an
otherwise subjectless terrain, ever captive to a mirror of solipsism.
Confronted with this enigma whereby the discourse of the death of man either necessitates
transcending its tenets or falls prey to its own thanatography, it is scarcely surprising that the antisubjectivist
has everywhere abandoned the choice and taken his place as one writing subject