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

historical and ethnological circumstances in which Barthes, Foucault and Derrida promulgated
extreme anti-subjectivism have not been taken into account, and the discourse of the death of the
author has been imported into the Anglo-Amenican critical programme without essential
modifications, without having been translated in the broader sense of that term. As such, the
death of the author has revealed itself as another casualty of the stammered and asymmetrical
exchange between continental and Anglo-American thought.
The death of the author—as argued above—is inseparable from the massive reaction in France
against the resuscitation of the Cartesian cogito in Husserlian phenomenology, it being only as a
particularly vigorous form of anti-phenomenologism that French structuralism and
poststructuralism can be properly understood. However, the situation in the Anglo-American
tradition during the 1960s could not have been more different. While Derrida, Foucault, Lacan
and others sensed the exhaustion of phenomenological categories, and whilst Barthes was
urging the necessity of breaking the traditionally strong institutional hold of the author in the
French academies, anti-subjectivism was somewhat etiolated in Anglo-American scholarship due
to the long ascendancy of the New Criticism. For the younger generation of critics eager to move
beyond the, by then, rather tired ideas of the intentional fallacy, the aesthetic monad, words on
the page and so forth, phenomenology had a completely different aspect: exotic, juvenescent,
systematically intentional and oeuvre-centred, it represented the most challenging outroute from
formalism. Largely through the mediative figure of Georges Poulet, the avant-garde at Yale was
introduced to a philosophically based criticism of consciousness, centred upon an all-inaugurating
authorial cogito, a methodology which in the sharpest contradiction to New Critical objectivity,
chose to 'annihilate . . . the objective contents of the work, and to elevate itself to the
apprehension of a subjectivity without objectivity'. 17 Nowadays it might be difficult to imagine the
exciting promise of a phenomenological criticism, but for a tradition which had worked under the
influence of Eliotism for more than thirty years, it was received in the manner of a liberation.
Under the tutelage of Poulet, two of the most influential critics in the recent history of American
criticism—Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller—began the movement out of the formalist impasse and
toward the apprehension of a transcendental subjectivity conceived, in Poulet's words, as ideally
'anterior and posterior to any object'.18
Paul de Man, whose links with continental philosophy were obviously well developed, devoted
much of his work in the 1960s to arguing against the New Criticism from a phenomenological
perspective. Chief amongst de Man's contentions are the neglect of the self in formalism and its
refusal to allow for the determining role of intention in the literary act. The New Criticism only
succeeded in treating the poem qua object through ruling intentionality out of court: the 'partial
failure of American formalism, which has not produced works of major magnitude, is due to its
lack of awareness of the intentional structure of literary form'.19 For de Man, intentionality, like
subjectivity, is transcendental: ,the concept of intentionality is neither physical nor psychological
in its nature, but structural, involving the activity of a subject regardless of its empirical concerns,
except as far as they relate to the intentionality of the structure'. 20 In direct opposition to the New
Criticism, the intentionality of a transcendental consciousness is proposed as the question of
literature. Through establishing the distinction between an empirical and an onto-logical self,
phenomenological criticism, de Man claims, 'participates in some of the most audacious and
advanced forms of contemporary thought'.21 Even the formalist doctrine of impersonality is to be
read in phenomenological terms as another expression of this purging from the self of all
empirical content in the constitution of a purely ontological literary selfhood.22
The phenomenological orientation of Hillis Miller's work during this period is no less explicit. Over
the course of a few years, he shifted from fledgling New Critic to critic of consciousness, and
produced interesting studies of Dickens and Hardy in terms of the most thoroughgoing
transcendental auteurism. Literature is defined as 'a form of consciousness, and literary criticism
is the analysis of this form in all its varieties.'23 The role of the critic, Miller declared, is to
penetrate the authorial cogito as profoundly as possible, to mould his consciousness in the
likeness of that of the author. The 'genius' of the critic resides in the 'extreme inner plasticity'
whereby he can 'duplicate within himself the affective quality of the mind of each of his
authors'.24 The author, conceived as a 'naked presence of consciousness to itself, becomes the
'true beginning . . . the ground or foundation of everything else',25 the critic a self-effacing figure
entirely in thrall to this primary cogito. Reading, at its best, can aspire to