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

this onslaught collapse all senses of the subject as some will say? Is the concept of the author
only tenable if a transcendental subjectivity is thereby designated? Or, to ask the logically prior
and unasked question: how is the concept of the author distributed on the basis of a
transcendental subjectivity?
First and foremost, any criticism which sees the author as a specification of the transcendental
subject must detach the author as an empirical agency from the author as the purely ontological
principle of the text. To be conceived in transcendental terms the author must be emptied out of
all psychological and biographical content: a personalised, psychobiographically constituted
transcendental subject is unthinkable. The classic formulations of transcendental subjectivity
insist upon this from the outset. The subject of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is transcendental
apperception, the a priori unity of consciousness, a purely formal guarantee of objective
knowledge: 'We can assign no other basis . . . than the simple, and in itself completely empty,
representation "I"; and we cannot even say that this is a concept, but only that it is a bare
consciousness which accompanies all concepts. Through this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks,
nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of thoughts = X.' 90 The 'I' makes no
claim to existence in the phenomenal world: it is a purely logical subject. Likewise the subject of
transcendental phenomenology can have no empirical or psychological content, and is located
outside of space and time. It must be extraworldly in order to be a transcendental subjectivity:
Psychical subjectivity, the 'I' and 'we' of everyday intent, may be as it is in itself under the
phenomenological-psychological reduction, and being eidetically treated, may establish a
phenomenological psychology. But the transcendental subjectivity which for want of language we
can only call again, 'I myself, 'we ourselves', cannot be found under the attitude of psychological
or natural science, being no part at all of the objective world, but that subjective conscious life,
itself wherein the world and all its content is made for 'us', for 'me'.91
A transcendental phenomenology is, therefore, to be distinguished from all psychologism: 'It
would be much too great a mistake . . . to make psychological descriptions based on purely
internal experience . . . a great mistake because a purely descriptive psychology of
consciousness is not itself transcendental phenomenology as we have defined the latter, in terms
of the transcendental phenomenological reduction.'92
Of course, as it has been translated onto the plane of literary criticism, phenomenological method
has often failed to maintain the rigorous and austere purity of the transpersonal Husserlian
subject, and has drifted into precisely the kind of psychologism that Husserl warned against. As
Paul de Man says, in his earlier work: 'Some of the difficulties of contemporary criticism can be
traced back to a tendency to forsake the barren world of ontological reduction for the wealth of
lived experience.'93 De Man urged a greater austerity among critics, a concerted vigilance
against the 'almost irresistible tendency to relapse unwittingly into the concerns of the self as they
exist in the empirical world'.94 It is, however, possible to discern the influence of the Kantian and
Husserlian subjects in certain operations to which the author is put, as a purely formal principle, in
the verification of textual meaning. The work of E. D. Hirsch is instructive here. Faithfull to
Husserl, Hirsch firmly opposes that scion of phenomenological criticism which 'mistakenly
identifies meaning with mental processes rather than with an object of those processes', and sets
about constructing a defence of the author which eludes a subjectivist psychologism. 95 For
Hirsch, the author is a normative principle which ensures the objectivity of meaning. Along a
somewhat circular path, Hirsch argues that since verbal meaning is determinate and
determinable, then the postulate of a determining will is necessarily required, for in the absence
of any such will there would be no distinction between what is meant, and what might be meant
by a word sequence: 'meaning', he says, 'is an affair of consciousness', and there is no verbal
meaning which is not 'a willed type'.96 Consequently, the author is necessary to the grounding of
textual meaning in principles of validation, to the establishment of objective criteria in the work of
interpretation: 'The determinacy and sharability of verbal meaning resides in its being a type. The
particular type that it is resides in the author's determining will.'97
Kant and Husserl both found the postulate of a transcendental ego necessary to guarantee the
objectivity of our knowledge about the world; only through such a postulate could individual
knowledge be reconciled to the universal. It is easy to see how, in minuscule, Hirsch's use of
authorial will as the ultimate principle of textual validation repeats this logic. Given the
indeterminacy of textual meaning in the absence of any adjudicating norm, the premise of