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

authorial will is a necessary epistemological condition of the existence of objective meaning. The
author thus constituted is neither a locus of forces nor a psychobiographical site, but a metaphor
for the text operating at the most consistent and plausible level of interpretation, a purely formal
principle of the determinacy of textual knowledge. Intention is not here a vivid or agonistic
struggle of an author with his material, but rather the ultimate tribunal at which criticisms vie, lay
claim to their truths, and consent to be judged. The place of the author is therefore above and
beyond the level at which textual meanings conflict and contest, and it is through his omnified
agency that these conflicts can be neutralised in the interests of a higher, self-verifying 'truth', or
determinate meaning.
Such a depiction can be said to be transcendental both in the sense that it is consistently nonempirical,
and in that it asserts the authorial will as an absolute standard of authentification. It is
to this aspect of the author-function, and the circularity implicit in its operation, that the movement
against the author takes its strongest and most justified exception. As Barthes complains, the
discovery of the author's intentions is all too often used to close rather than open the
interpretation of a text. 98 For Foucault, too, the greatest reductions reside here: 'The author is
the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.'99 Yet, whilst these objections warrant
considerable respect, to affirm the counter-ideal of impersonality is to fall back into the very
transcendental suppositions that Barthes and Foucault wish to evade. To repeat what was said
above: there is no question of a transcendental author without the total abjuration of the
psychobiographical signified. It is for this reason that the transcendental and the impersonal will
always find a common purpose, a common absence. Despite their antithetical starting-points,
both positions resolve in a shared ascetism. In Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
Stephen Dedalus explains to Cranly:
The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent
narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak . . . The artist,
like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible,
refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.100
It is easy to see how readily the 'author-God' and the absence of the author meet one another,
easy to see how this transcendental depiction could equally describe the disappearance of the
poet-speaker in Mallarmé, the impersonalities of Eliot and Valéry. Similarly, but conversely, it is
apparent how the doctrine of impersonality might imply the idea of a transcendentally remote
author. Foucault himself warns against the transcendental idealism recrudescent in the concept
of écriture: 'the notion of writing seems to transpose the empirical characteristics of the author
into a transcendental anonymity'.101 Indeed, with the impersonalist text, it is impossible to
determine whether what arises is the transcendence of language or the transcendence of its
author. 'Nearly every time you use the word language, I could replace it by the word thought
almost without incongruity',102 the phenomenologist Georges Poulet could say to Barthes,
precisely because phenomenological subjectivity is conceived as an omnipresence of intentional
consciousness which is superimposed upon the text like an invisible and perfectly isomorphic
map onto the contours of a country. An ideal subject is posited in both cases, one under the
auspices of a putative presence, the other as a no less artificial absence. From the point of view
of interpretation, it matters little whether the author disappears into a transcendental annex or into
the void: the text to be read is one in which the personality of the author is nowhere figured. It
would be the truest of truisms to say that impersonalist and biographicist conceptions of the text
stand in resolute opposition. Yet given the proximity in which the impersonal and the
transcendental must find themselves, it follows that not only are the biographical and the
transcendental thoroughly distinct, but that these conceptions will also court a similar
incompatibility. To constitute a biographical subject, or a subject of desire within a text which
posits the transcendental uninvolvement of its author disrupts not only his sovereign detachment,
but the very truth claims and objectivity that such detachment reinforces. As we have said, it is
Foucault's failure to inscribe himself within the history he recounts which leads to the constitution
of a transcendental subjectivity within The Order of Things. As we also remarked, the implication
of authorial transcendence is all the more pronounced within texts whose aims are specifically
constative. This is particularly true of philosophical discourse wherein impersonality tends to be a
coefficient of the truth value of a system or critique. However, certain philosophers such as
Montaigne, Descartes, and, to a lesser extent, Hume have attempted to narrow this distance by