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

If the freedom of the text is asserted against the almighty rule of the 'author-generator', and the
meaning is accepted as being simply relational, the inevitable result is a challenge to the very
notion of the subject. The subjectivity of the author becomes of minor importance in the
elucidation of the text, and the supposed subject
of the work—'what it is about'—disappears when the signifying plane is brought into the
foreground. This threat to subjectivity must however be seen outside the particular field of literary
criticism. It relates to a widespread reaction on the philosophical level against a particular
interpretation of the philosophy of Descartes. We might recognise in this modern tendency the
'end' or at least the exhaustion of the 'cogito epoch'. 86
Benoist summarises this development as well as can be expected, yet in summarising he repeats
the unreflective attitude which criticism and theory have brought to this issue. That is to say, it is
always assumed, and never in any way demonstrated that the author is a simple subaltern or
manifestation of the subject, and is therefore inscribed within the same finitude. For sure, this
would seem obvious: both the author and the philosophical subject can be seen to enforce the
primacy of human consciousness over the inhuman, the unthought; both play the role of the
primary creative force, in respect of which language and the world of the in-itself are secondary,
passive material. Furthermore, notions such as that of the omniscient author partake of the same
sovereign detachment that is the first condition of a transcendental subjectivity. Indeed, the
connection between these subjects will seem so obvious that it will be said, with the consonances
of platitude: '''man'' and "author" go hand in hand, the latter a particular instance of the former'.87
That the destinies of man and author are entwined—and that they will become all the more
inextricably so if our ideas of world and text increasingly cohere—is incontestable. What is by no
means certain is that always and everywhere they are unproblematically reducible to one
another.
The first meeting point of man and author in critical discourse is within the word 'subject'. And it is
within the peculiar properties of this term itself that the commonality of their fate can be seen to
unfold, since so much of contemporary thought seems to be directed toward restoring to the word
its etymological purity whereby subject (subjectus: sub-under; jacére-thrown) denotes the one
thrown under, the one who owes fealty to a greater power, be that power language, culture,
discourse, history. Over the course of time, the word subject has acquired the status of an
enantioseme, denoting the sovereignty of the transcendental ego of philosophies of
consciousness, whilst retaining the original sense of vassalage, subordination, and so on. We
might even say that no other word—in its plurisignificant fragility—has so enigmatically held the
crises of an era within its semantic horizons. Cogito, logos, transcendental ego, self, topic, author,
psychobiographical signified, even episteme, fall inside its compass. Correspondingly, we might
expect adjectival precautions, qualifications, refinements, specifications as to the precise
designation intended and so on, to herald its more portentous appearances in formulations of the
order that 'recent poststructuralists have systematically deconstructed all received notions of the
subject', 88 and indeed the very rare thinker will show him or herself scrupulous to alert the
reader to the meaning intended in different contexts. All too often, however, we will find that the
word has been used, over the course of a few short pages, to denote logos, cogito, and
biographical subject, and used in such a way as to argue that the attack by Derrida on the first,
and by Lacan on the second, leads to a dismissal of the third as though there has only ever been
one subject in question. What is at work in this slippage is a global confusion of the intricate
philosophical relations between self, cogito ego, transcendental ego, consciousness, knowledge,
and creativity. Some will extend this still further, saying that the subject should be placed
alongside 'God, logos, ousia, reason, being and so forth'.89 Even, however, if divinity and reason
are omitted, the amalgam is formidable. The death of the transcendental subject is
consectaneous with the death of the subject of knowledge, is in turn consectaneous with the
death of the author as a formal principle of textual meaning which is again consectaneous with
the disappearance of the psychobiographical. signified.
This chain of associations is the 'philosophical' grounding of the death of the author. What it
states, at base, is that the denial of the cogito erases all forms of subjectivity and the predicates
thereof. Certainly, it is undeniable that Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault,
have brought a concerted and epochal force to bear against the idea of an a priori subject
situated outside the play of space and time, language, history, culture and différance. But does