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

glimpse the original unity of a creative mind. For all the works of a single writer form a unity, a
unity in which a thousand paths radiate from the same center. At the heart of a writer's
successive works, revealed in glimpses through each event and image, is an impalpable
organising form, constantly presiding over the choice of words.26
Within American criticism, Miller's work seemed to represent the beginnings of a massive
upheaval, the introduction of continental philosophies of consciousness into a tradition whose
philosophy and criticism had never before seriously engaged with the idea of transcendental
subjectivity. Miller's role in this movement was ambassadorial, seeking at once to educate the
critical establishment as to how the ideas of phenomenology could be transposed onto the critical
plane, and to urge a new receptivity of American thought to continental influences. To this end,
Miller published an important essay in 1966 entitled 'The Geneva School', an accessible
introduction of the ideas of the European phenomenologists, which was eagerly ingested by
critics seeking to gain an understanding of continental philosophy and its pertinence to the study
of literature. 27 And, in the same year—1966—the opening of channels of communication
between continental and American thought was marked by an event whose effects are still being
felt today—the Johns Hopkins symposium on 'The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of
Man'.28
The event was planned as an exchange between continental and American thought, but the
influence was entirely one-way, as the vast preponderance of French speakers itself testifies.
Furthermore, the Anglo-American critical scene was completely ill-equipped for what was in store,
for not only had French theory effectively passed over into a structuralist methodology largely
unknown outside Europe, but certain of the participants—Derrida in particular—were taken up
with the necessity of moving beyond both phenomenology and structuralism. Of the very many
and startlingly varied papers delivered, it was Derrida's 'Structure, Sign, and Play' which was
destined to have the greatest impact upon subsequent American theory.29 In his paper, Derrida
managed, with an incomparable deftness, to unsettle the concept of centre both as it operated as
the anonymous mainstay of structural analyses, and as it appears in the form of an all-organising
phenomenological cogito. To a critic such as Miller, the twin themes of decentring and
interpretative freedom which 'Structure, Sign and Play' argued must have seemed an uncannily
prescient deconstruction of the tenets of authorial centre, and absolute critical fidelity to the cogito
upon which his work was consolidated. Consequently, as American criticism was taking its first
uncertain steps toward comprehending a recently arrived phenomenological criticism, it was
presented with the most powerful, well-informed and technically intimidating critique of Husserlian
phenomenology and the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss. The challenge with which
Derrida confronted the American avant-garde was to think through and beyond a
phenomenological methodology which had not yet been properly assimilated or understood, and
to do so not in the interests of passing into structural analyses, but in pursuit of that critique of
metaphysical conceptuality known to us now as deconstruction.
The effect of Derrida's arrival was massive, devastating we might almost say. Paul de Man began
to rewrite his position, claiming that the Pouletian subjectivity he had previously adhered to was
only, in reality, a metaphor for language.30 In 'The Rhetoric of Blindness' he conducted a
rearguard attack upon Derrida's reading of Rousseau in terms of a transcendental conception of
intentionality, an attack however which confirmed little so much as the growing influence of
deconstruction upon his criticism. 31 A few years later, de Man emerged as a frontline
deconstructionist, and began work on a massive reading of Rousseau according to antiintentionalist
strategies culled directly from the Grammatology.32 For Hillis Miller, Derrida's
influence was radical in the extreme. In the space of a few years, and in what must appear today
as a virtual allegory of the changing lights of American criticism, he inverted his entire itinerary.
He now emphasised a radical textuality where before he had insisted upon the utmost fidelity to
the authorial cogito. Where the author had functioned as an all-centring presence, he now posited
a vast absence, a presence lost and retreating en abîme. Where before he had declared the ideal
transparency of language to authorial intention, he now denied the ability of mind to exercise any
authoritative control whatsoever over textual effects; rather the critic puts 'the notions of mind and
of the self under the most emphatic erasure, 'and sees them as linguistic fictions, as functions in a
system of words without base in the logos of any substantial mind'.33 Absolute centre reverses
into absolute absence of centre: the text is entirely governed by centre: or it is entirely