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

simultaneously, indicate a reticence about taking control, about risking the proper name? The
need to approach literature through criticism, writing through reading? In an interview with Irme
Salusinszky, Derrida intimates:
since I've always been interested in literature—my deepest desire being to write literature, to write
fictions—I've the feeling that philosophy has been a detour for me to come back to literature.
Perhaps I'll never reach this point, but that was my desire even when I was very young. So, the
problematics of writing, the philosophical problematics of writing, was a detour to ask the
question, 'What is literature?' But even this question—'What is literature?'—was a mediation
towards writing literature . . . And then I had the feeling that I could write differently. Which I did,
to some extent, in writing Glas or La Carte Postale. But right now I have the feeling that I'm
always in that preliminary stage or moment, and I would like to write differently again. Differently:
that would mean in a more fictional, and a more (so to speak, in quotation marks, many quotation
marks) 'autobiographical' way.110
Are we then to see Derrida as Foucault saw Barthes: 'I do believe that in his eyes, his critical
works, his essays, were the preliminary sketches of something which would have been very
important and interesting.'?111 Unlike Barthes and Foucault, Derrida's majestic canon is not yet
closed, and we have no way of knowing if he will ever pass beyond this 'preliminary stage'. But
might not the desire to do so be interpreted as the search for a voice, for a form of
expressiveness no longer tied to the programmatics of reading, and those of reading over the
author's shoulder? In other words, is it, strictly speaking, impossible to read The Post Card
literally when it declares to its anonymous addressee: 'I have never had anything to write. You are
the only one to understand why it really was necessary that I write exactly the opposite, as
concerns axiomatics, of what I know my desire to be, in other words you: living speech, presence
itself? 112 Or to hear a lament in the opening words of Mémoires: 'I have never known how to tell
a story'?
Conclusion: Critic and Author
when what has been repressed returns, it emerges from the repressing force itself . . .
Sigmund Freud 1
Like the poets whom Plato wished to remove from the ideal city, the author lives on within and
without theory.2 The death of the author emerges as a blind-spot in the work of Barthes, Foucault
and Derrida, an absence they seek to create and explore, but one which is always already filled
with the idea of the author. A massive disjunction opens up between the theoretical statement of
authorial disappearance and the project of reading without the author. What their texts say about
the author, and what they do with the author issue at such an express level of contradiction that
the performative aspects utterly overwhelm the declaration of authorial disappearance.
Everywhere, under the auspices of its absence, the concept of the author remains active, the
notion of the return of the author being simply a belated recognition of this critical blindness. A
similar pattern of inscription under erasure could be assiduously traced in other deauthorismg
texts. The work of Lacan is entirely organised around the enigma of subjectivity even as the
subject is declared absent; Paul de Man's Allegories of Reading harbours a massively inscribed
Rousseauian subject quite against its stated anti-authorialism.3 In texts which had somehow
passed beyond the author, the death of the author would not be at issue. Direct resistance to the
author demonstrates little so much as the resistance of the author.
It may well be that the question of the author is not a special case in this regard. Every theory will
be haunted to some extent by that which it seeks to methodologically exclude.4 The question of
history will always exert signal stresses on any formalism; all historicisms will eventually have to
confront the problem of form. However, what distinguishes the death of the author as a
particularly acute form of critical blindness is that the arguments proposed for the eradication of
the author often have very little bearing on the problem of authorship per se. So much in
deauthorising discourse takes place at a remove, the death or disappearance of the author
finding its justification only in the manner of an epiphenomenal consequence of other epochal
'events'. If, so the 'argument' runs, we are witnessing the deaths of God, Man, representation,
metaphysics, the book, bourgeois humanism, then the death of the author will necessarily follow
as an inevitable result of these closures. Everything proceeds as though the author was simply
identifiable with God, Man and so on, as though authorship can only be conceived on a plane of