The Death of the Author

Introduction: “literature is written by the overall system of writing. . . . [authors] inherit a repertoire” (83).

Text: “to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality . . . to reach that point where only language acts, “performs” and not “me”” (84).

Proust, “instead of putting his life into his novel, as is so often maintained, he made of his very life a work for which his own book was the model” (85).

“Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a “subject,” not a “person,” and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language “hold together,” suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it” (85).

“The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book. . . . is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it” (85).

“In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing,is not the subject with the book as predicate. . . . every text is eternally written here and now” (85).

“writing . . . designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a performative, a rare verbal form . . . in which the enunciation has no other content . . . than the act by which it is uttered—something like the I declare of kings or the I sing of very ancient poets” (85-86).

“the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin—or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins” (86).

“a text is not a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning . . . but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash (86).

“The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (86).

“Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt” (86).

“In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered” (86).

“a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” (87).

“to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (87).