What Is An Author?

“The coming into being of the notion of the “author” constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences” (978).

“writing is identified with its own unfolded exteriority” (979).

“Our culture has metamorphosed this idea of narrative, or writing, as something designed to ward off death” (979).

“Giving writing a primal status seems to be a way of retranslating, in transcendental terms, both the theological affirmation of its sacred character and the critical affirmation of its creative character” (980).

“To admit that writing is, because of the very history that it made possible, subject to the test of oblivion and repression, seems to represent, in transcendental terms, the religious principle of the hidden meaning (which requires interpretation) and the critical principle of implicit significations, silent determinations, and obscured contents (which gives rise to commentary) (980).

“To imagine writing as absence seems to be a simple repetition, in transcendental terms, of both the religious principle of inalterable and yet never fulfilled tradition, and the aesthetic principle of the work’s survival, its perpetuation beyond the author’s death, and its enigmatic excess in relation to him” (980).

“we must locate the space left empty by the author’s disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings that this disappearance uncovers” (981).

“Such a name [the author’s] permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others. In addition, it establishes a relationship among the texts” (981).

“the fact that several texts have been placed under the same name indicates that there has been established among them a relationship of homogeneity, filiation, authentification of some texts by the use of others, reciprocal explication, or concomitant utilization” (982).

“The author’s name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture” (982).

“discourse was not originally a product, a thing, a kind of goods; it was essentially an act—an act placed in the bipolar field of the sacred and the profane, the licit and the illicit, the religious and the blasphemous” (982).

“these aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only a projection, in more or less psychologizing terms, of the operations that we force texts to undergo, the connections that we make, the traits that we establish as pertinent, the continuities that we recognize, or the exclusions that we practice” (983).

The author-function according to St. Jerome (983-84):

1. “a constant level of value”
2. “a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence”
3. “a stylistic unity”
4. “a historical figure”

Characteristic traits of the author-function (985):

1. “juridicial and institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses”
2. “does not affect all discourses in the same way”
3. “a series of specific and complex operations”
4. “does not refer purely and simply to a real individual”

Types of author (985):

1. Authors of literature
2. Authors of tradition (transdiscursive; that is, Homer, Aristotle, Church Fathers)
3. Authors of discourse (Freud with Psychoanalysis, Marx with Marxism)

“the initiation of a discursive practice is heterogenous to its subsequent transformations” (986).

“unlike the founding of a science, the initiation of a discursive practice does not participate in its later transformations” (986).

“Reexamination of Galileo’s text may well change our knowledge of the history of mechanics, but it will never be able to change mechanics itself. On the other hand, reexamining Freud texts modifies psychoanalysis itself just as reexamination of Marx’s would modify Marxism” (986).

“the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works, he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction” (988).

“the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. . . . The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning” (988).