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

its failure to circumvent subjectivity at the level of its readings. What follows then, under the rubric
of the death of the author, is at one and the same time a statement of the return of the author, a
return that takes place in accordance with the guiding principle of this analysis—that the concept
of the author is never more alive than when pronounced dead. Introduction:
A Prehistory of the Death of the Author
When looking at the history of modern thought it is all too easy to be seduced by linear patterns of
development constructed after the event. One such path is cleared by Roland Barthes when he
describes the origins of modern anti-authorialism as stretching from Mallarmé, through Valéry,
Proust and the Surrealists. 1 Beguiling and fastidious as it may be, this lineage is palpably false.
Of the examples cited, Proust, though he opposed conventional biographicist criticism, never
declared anything remotely resembling the death of the author, Valéry as often as not militated in
favour of authorial control over and against the romantic notion of inspiration, and Surrealism,
whilst it may have persuaded a few writers to experiment with automatic writing, has never had a
clear and unmediated impact upon critical theory.2 Every writer, as Jorge Luis Borges says,
creates his own precursors (an elegant way of saying, amongst other things, that all intellectual
history is post factum), and in this case Barthes is quite simply covering over a history of more
humble predecessors with an august line of Gallic influences.3 Indeed, of the predecessors cited,
only Mallarmé has any place as a harbinger of authorial demise.
Not only Barthes, but Foucault and Derrida have also shown themselves eager to accept
Mallarmé as a precursor, and if we look at the poet's most famous remarks on compositional
aesthetics, it is easy to see how he prefigures some of the central themes evoked by antiauthorial
discourses:
The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet-speaker who yields the initiative to words
animated by the inequality revealed in their collision with one another; they illuminate one another
and pass like a trail of fire over precious stones, replacing the audible breathing of earlier lyrical
verse or the exalted person
ality which directed the phrase.
The structure of a book of verse must arise throughout from internal necessity—in this way both
chance and the author will be excluded . . . some symmetry, which will arise from the relation of
lines within the poem and poems within the volume, will reach out beyond the volume to other
poets who will themselves inscribe on spiritual space the expanding paraph of genius,
anonymous and perfect like a work of art. 4
The disappearance of the writer, the autonomy of writing, the beginning of écriture in an act of
textual dispossession, the power of language to organise and orchestrate itself without any
subjective intervention whatsoever, the notion of the intertextualising of all literature—all these
proto-theoretical themes are laid out in the sparest form by this passage. With Mallarmé, the
sublime origin of literature which the romantics sought alternately in imagination, or in the Muse,
is now discovered within language itself. The doctrine of inspiration departs from the sublimity of
divine origin and adopts its counter-sublime: the anonymous unravelling of words on the purity of
a page, words written in the absence of Gods, Muses and mortals. Little wonder, then, that
Barthes should establish Mallarmé as chief among the heresiarchs, or that Foucault should say:
The Nietzschean question: 'Who is speaking?', Mallarmé replies . . . by saying that what is
speaking is, in its solitude, in its fragile vibration, in its nothingness, the word itself . . . Mallarmé
was constantly effacing himself from his own language, to the point of not wishing to figure in it
except as an executant in a pure ceremony of the Book in which the discourse would compose
itself. It is quite possible that all the questions now confronting our curiosity . . . are presented
today in the distance that was never crossed between Nietzsche's question and Mallarmé's
reply.5
As Foucault himself knows as well as anyone, however, no historical problematic can be
contained within such delicate frames. Beyond the obvious contradiction of establishing Mallarmé
as the author, as it were, of the author's disappearance—a founding father of the death of the
father—historicising of this kind is at best mythopoeic, and at worst, perverse. For eloquent and
concise as such a picture is, it is also mystificatory in that the theoretical bases of the movement
against the subject of writing are obscured and displaced. Mallarmé's discourse does not situate
itself at the opening of literary theory as we know it, but represents a tenebrous culmination of the
romantic doctrine of inspiration. Furthermore, Mallarmé is not tendering a theoretical or even