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

others miming the voice of the author it reads, whether this takes the form of a thoroughly
Husserlian refutation of Husserl, a supra-Heideggerian Heideggerianism, or Plato's
deconstructive dialogue with himself in the pharmacy.100 For deconstruction, as criticism, never
speaks in propria persona, but only with a voice borrowed from the author. Or, put differently,
finds its own voice in the hollow of an Other's.
After the arduous, and exhaustive philosophical readings of the 1960s, Derrida's work took a
distinct turn, not a break in his thought such as that which separates, say, the early from the later
Wittgenstein, but a change in mood, approach, outlook and style. His reading becomes less
inward, delving, and is happy to play around the fringes of the text, to glance off its surfaces. He
becomes preoccupied with the question of signatures.101 The philosopher of language who had
said that the 'names of authors . . . have here no substantial value' was to pen some of the most
beautiful words ever written on authorship, biography, life, its loss and legacy: 'A man's life,
unique as his death, will always be more than a paradigm and something other than a symbol.
And this is precisely what a proper name should always name.' 102 He also devotes himself
obsessively to autography, to the paraph, the signet and seal. Glas is concerned with Hegel
(eagle/aigle) and Genet (flowers/genista), Dissemination with Sollers (sun/soleil), Signsponge
with Ponge (sponge/éponge).103 He presents a lecture entitled 'Otobiographies: Nietzsche and
the Politics of the Proper Name', and in the midst of the most exorbitantly auteurist reading in the
recent history of criticism, The Post Card announces its thesis that psychoanalysis is the science
of Freud's proper name.104 In these texts, he proposes interpretations of Nietzsche and Freud in
terms of the interpenetration of work and life, and calls for deconstruction to take itself to the
enigmatic line between these corpora.105 Having asked, in 'Freud and the Scene of Writing',
'what is the scene of writing?', he answers a decade later that it is signed, sealed and delivered
as the scene of autobiography, of desire, of the subject. Without saying so, Derrida was to revisit
his reading of Plato in a finely suggestive analysis of the 'destinational structure' of the
Nietzschean discourse. Derrida argues that an absolute falsification of Nietzsche's text—or any
other—is not possible: at some level and to some extent, Nietzsche's discourse itself cannot be
distanced from the monstrous appropriations made of it by the propagandists of National
Socialism. Having demonstrated that Nietzsche did little within his texts to discourage aberrant
readings, Derrida searches for the principles of reading and writing which gave rise to an
appropriation that Nietzsche himself would surely have discountenanced in the strongest terms.
'One can imagine the following objection,' Derrida says:
Careful! Nietzsche's utterances are not the same as those of the Nazi ideologues, and not only
because the latter grossly caricaturize the former to the point of apishness. If one does more than
extract certain short sequences, if one reconstitutes the entire syntax of the system with the
subtle refinement of its articulations and its paradoxical reversals, et cetera, then one will clearly
see that what passes elsewhere for the 'same' utterance says exactly the opposite and
corresponds instead to the inverse, to the reactive inversion of the very thing it mimes. Yet it
would still be necessary to account for the possibility of this mimetic inversion and perversion. If
one refuses the distinction between unconscious and deliberate programs as an absolute
criterion, if one no longer considers only
intent—whether conscious or not—when reading a text, then the law that makes the perverting
simplification possible must lie in the structure of the text 'remaining' . . . 106
To such lucidity we can have little to add except by way of noting that we are here at precisely the
opening of the Platonic interrogation of written discourse, of Plato's objections to writing's
unauthorised dissemination, its vulnerability to serious or savage misappropriations.107 We are
also confronted, once again, with the baroque figure whereby the most telling insights on
authorial responsibility issue from authorship's hollow.
This movement in turn communicates with Derrida's increasingly explicit investment in his own
texts. He devises manifold ways of encrypting his name in the texts he writes. In Glas he inserts
fragments from his own biography between the columns; The Post Card tenders a cautiously
autobiographical 'satire of epistolary literature'.108 Indeed, in these texts, Derrida seems to hold
himself at the limit of criticism and the opening of literature. Glas, in particular, displays a
scintillating inventiveness with language, but everything must be overlaid upon, or realised
through, Hegel and Genet. As Derrida's commentators are fond of saying, this is a tactic which
prevents any one authorial voice from gaining control, as indeed it is.109 But does it not also,