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

amongst others. Both Foucault and Lacan were consequently led to redefine and specify the
subject under erasure, and hence reorganised their deconstructions around a specific
instantiation of subjectivity, that of the Cartesian cogito. Doubtless with such considerations on
his agenda, Lacan came to promote a sharply focused anti-subjectivism, generous in its
exclusions:
with the term 'subject', we do not designate the living substratum necessary for the subjective
phenomenon, nor any other kind of substance, nor any being of knowledge in its primary or
secondary affectivity . . . nor even in the logos which is supposedly incarnated somewhere, but
the Cartesian subject which appears the moment when doubt recognises itself as certitude—with
this difference, that from our perspective, the foundations of this subject are seen to be much
broader, but at the same time more subservient with respect to the certitude which escapes him.
81
What such a reorientation bespeaks is that the death of man is unsustainable as a universal
statement. Distinctions between the specific forms of subjectivity under assault must be made if
an anti-humanist discourse is not to plunge headlong into aporia and inconsistency. Yet the work
of Lacan, along with that of Barthes and Foucault is largely misread on the assumption that there
is only one subject in question. The fact that—after the initial headstrong declarations had been
made—their work does more to contradict than to corroborate indiscriminate anti-subjectivism is
bypassed. Theorists continue to reiterate the idea that the concept of the subject has come to its
end, and cursorily implicate the author in the same finitude without asking who or what dies in the
death of man.
So many questions are repressed in this easy collocation of subjects. Does the death of man
necessarily imply the death of the author? Is the author simply a specific and regional
instantiation of the philosophical anthropos? Of the subject of knowledge? Of the cogito? Of the
logos? What sense of the author disappears in the death of man? Intratextual author?
Extratextual author? Psychobiographical signified? In view of the uncertainty, indeed the apparent
ingenuousness contemporary anti-humanist critics show before these questions, we might
wonder if the 'death of man' might not be an egregious neutralisation of the immense problematic
and myriad compasses of subjectivity; a simplification such as Caligula dreamt of when he asked
that his subjects have but one neck so he might dispose of them all at a single strike.
Subjectivities
The theory of meaning now stands at a cross-roads: either it will remain an attempt at formalising
meaning-systems by increasing sophistication of the logico-mathematical tools which enable it to
formulate models on the basis of a conception (already rather dated) of meaning as the act of a
transcendental ego, cut off from its body, its unconscious, and also its history; or else it will attune
itself to the theory of the speaking subject as a divided subject (conscious/unconscious) and go
on to attempt to specify the types of operation characteristic of the two sides of this split; thereby
exposing them, that is to say, on the one hand, to bio-physiological processes (themselves
already an inescapable part of signifying processes: what Freud labelled 'drives'), and, on the
other hand, to social constraints (family structures, modes of production etc.).
Julia Kristeva 82
The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which
psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world—not a part of it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein83
The death of the author has taken its place within a greater closure: that of the era of subjectivity
itself. Yet though Foucault and Lacan are seen to be exemplary in signalling this common
closure, nowhere do they directly conjoin the issues of man and the author.84 In their discourses,
as in others, the two deaths are used to casually evoke or amplify one another, but no argument
of any sort is presented as to why we should see 'Man' and the author—in their lives, in their
deaths—as one and the same subject.85
This might not seem of any particular significance in itself, but when we consider few, if any other
of the precursors of the death of man—not Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, and emphatically not
Nietzsche and Freud—make this connection, then we might urge a little reserve and inspection
before assuming that the author is always and everywhere simply a specific instance of genenic
'Man'; and all the more so since the general closure of subjectivity is so often cited to bolster antiauthorial
theory. Speaking for a revolution in thought, Jean-Marie Benoist declares: