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

seeking here to withdraw entirely from the precursor's work, there to discover ways in which this
work might be continued in an original or deviant manner. Caught within an essentially Oedipal,
psychopoetic pattern of enthralment and denegation, affirmation and denial, the ephebe will at
some stage attempt the symbolic, ritual slaying of the Father in an attempt to carve out a space of
authentic self-expression. But as with all gestures of this kind, the rejection of the precursor
serves only to reconfirm the influence of the precursor. The only outroute for the ephebe is to
reach a stage of poetic maturity in which the influence of the poetic father can be harnessed and
mastered through the rewriting of the primal work in such a powerfully revisionist fashion that it
comes to seem the ephebe's own. Thereafter, and only thereafter, the agon abates, the
newcomer becomes a poet in his own right, a strong poet.
It is not difficult to see how Bloom's theory maps every bit as comfortably—if not more so—onto
the relationship between critic and author such as it has been played out in recent times. We
have seen that the death of the author is promulgated in agonistic terms, in the form of
usurpation, as we have seen also that it is inseparable from a strong act of rewriting by all these
critics: Barthes rewriting Balzac, Foucault making literally what he will of four hundred years of
philosophical thought, Derrida rewriting Rousseau. The seizure, from the author, of the right to
produce the text is the motivating thrust behind all these extirpations. Yet in all these cases—that
of Barthes in S/Z most immediately—once the act of rewriting has been achieved, the desire to
eradicate the authorial subject recedes, the author is returned. So far from consolidating antiauthorialism,
this rewriting leads in its turn to a certain distancing of these critics from the critical
field itself. Barthes more or less abandons reading to produce his own forms of autobiographical
fictions, Derrida departs from philosophical criticism to interscribe autobiography with Joycean
tapestries on writers such as Hegel, Genet, Ponge. Having rewritten the canonical text, the critic
goes on to produce texts of his own.
This development from strong reader to rewriter to writer has led many poststructuralists to
suggest that criticism itself has become a primary discourse. And this notion commands a certain
respect, for the weakening of the boundaries between creative and critical is not only a
development within criticism, but also a powerful and necessary extension of modernism in
general. As the literary text becomes more self-reflexive, as its artifices and narratological
structures come to dominate the foreground, as the work of fiction becomes autocritical,
autodeconstructive even, it is entirely concinnous that the critical text should become increasingly
creative, interpretable, and like the work of Wilde and Mallarmé, a realm with charms, mazes, and
mysteries of its own. 9 However, what has opened up as the space of a possible convergence
between literature and the most innovative forms of literary criticism has been pushed to the limit
by some theorists who see, in Derrida's work especially, evidence that criticism, whatever its cast
or quality, can be no longer demarcated from primary discourses, that it can no longer be
constrained within a passive, handmaidenly capacity, that source and commentary, origin and
supplement, traverse the discursive field on an equal footing. The boundary is no longer
operative; the secondary becomes primary, the supplement is at the origin; criticism finds itself
within literature.
Yet, whilst acknowledging the force and enticements of such an idea, when turned against the
author this line of argument becomes entirely self-defeating. Barthes, Foucault and Derrida have
not problematised the distinction between primary and secondary discourses by diminishing the
primary text to a state of servile dependence. Quite the contrary. If anything, their readings
restore to us the adventure of reading these source texts. Barthes on Sade, Derrida on Husserl,
open and revivify the text, uncover layers of significance, draw forth possibilities of reading and
rereading that a more humble criticism would surely bypass. But more importantly still, in this
context, it is only by elevating their own work to a pitch of creativity with language that they
resisted—and continue to resist—domestication as secondary writers. They created oeuvres of
great resonance, scope and variety. They became more than critics: a vast body of secondary
literature has grown up around their work, one which generally has sought not to contest or
deconstruct what they say, but rather has re-enacted precisely the predominance of source over
supplement, master over disciple, primary over secondary. They have been accorded all the
privileges traditionally bestowed upon the great author. No contemporary author can lay claim to
anything approaching the authority that their texts have enjoyed over the critical establishment in
the last twenty years or so. Indeed, were we in search of the most flagrant abuses of critical