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

must become the Same as himself with a different eye, as the messianic mission of the
Foucauldian project.114 Certainly, from the vantage of any future humanism, Foucault's analyses
of psychiatric, political, sexual and carceral modes of subjection, his genealogical sciences of the
self—along with the thought of the 'antihumanist' movement in general—will seem of
immeasurably greater value than the summary 'humanist' objections with which they have been
confronted. There may be a certain irony in the fact that antihumanist discourse has provided the
most significant directions in the theory of the subject, but there is not paradox: for the thought of
the death of man cannot but be—in the most insistent, engaged form—the thinking of man about
man.
3
Misread Intentions
Structuralism attempted to rescue language from the oblivion to which Western metaphysics had
consigned it, but failed to pose the question of writing. For Jacques Derrida this omission was not
just a simple over-sight, but the last and latest reinforcement of a metaphysics of presence (as
old as Plato) which has always and everywhere repressed the written sign and modelled
language according to metaphors of self-presence and vocalisation. In order to uncover and
contest this repression, Derrida devoted himself during the 1960s to profoundly intrinsic readings
of philosophers such as Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, Husserl and Lévi-Strauss, destined to show that
every attempt to subordinate writing to the immediate expressiveness and full self-presence of
speech was obliged to presuppose a prior system of graphicity entirely at odds with the declared
intent. In each of these readings, Derrida's method was to remain painstakingly faithful to the
letter of the text, and the result was invariably a highly technical, inward analysis within which the
relationship of these texts to the general history of metaphysics was constantly implied, but never
stated in any systematic fashion.
In Of Grammatology (1967), however, Derrida locates his readings of Saussure, Lévi-Strauss and
Rousseau within a historical and structural thematic of the metaphysical privilege accorded to
speech over writing. 1 Within this text, and because of its concern with broad historical structures,
the question of the author becomes most visible within the classic deconstructive period.2
Naturally, if we are even to approach the philosophical context in which the author problematic is
here inserted, then we will need to depart initially from specifically literary-critical issues.
Moreover, it is only against the background of the deconstruction of metaphysics that Derrida's
opposition to the author in Of Grammatology can be clearly appraised. In this expository phase, it
will also be necessary to bypass numerous reservations and detours, in particular the issue of
whether the deconstruction of metaphysics is not itself the most radical continuation of
metaphysics, the last metaphysician always finding his work continued by the latest.
Authors Of Absence
The movement against metaphysics is by no means new with Derrida. Indeed, it has been a
recurrent theme in modern philosophy. Derrida does not, however, take his lead from the
philosophers of the Vienna Circle who sought to dispel metaphysical questions on account of
their unintelligibility, but from Nietzsche and Heidegger whose work directly engaged with
metaphysical thought in order to disturb its very foundations. Derrida himself insists that his
project is to be understood as a continuation of their critiques, particularly so in the case of
Heidegger whose rereading of the history of philosophy functions as a continually invoked pretext
for the Derridean deconstruction. Following upon Nietzsche's identification of all metaphysical
systems with the theological question, Heidegger came to conceive of metaphysics as ontotheology,
the determination of being as presence. From Parmenides and Plato onward, says
Heidegger, being has been conceived as a simple unity, a fully self-present origin and ground. 3
Heidegger accordingly saw the task of deconstructing metaphysics as a relentless interrogation of
the notion of being such as it had been rendered by onto-theology, and the pursuit of a grounding
of being more primordial than that of unitary and indivisible self-presence.
In his work subsequent to Being and Time, Heidegger explicitly sought this prior (and
ungrounding) ground of being in what he called the ontological difference, or the difference
between being and beings.4 What the thought of being as presence neglects is that being in the
abstract is not the same as the things-that-are, that existence is not one and the same as
existents. Being is something toward which beings maintain a relationship, onto whose promise