Two Perspectives On The Absent Origin

Literature and Authority: Two Perspectives on the Absent Origin

Where Barthes stops at the Death of the Author and the birth of the reader he hopes it will engender, Foucault, while admitting the author’s absence raises the question of what an Author is, and what will occupy the vacuum created by his absence. “Writing” for Foucault was like “Text” for Barthes and thus, writing possesses the “right to kill” the author, to be the author’s murderer. Writing cancels out signs of particular individuality so that, ironically, the sign of the writer is the singularity of absence. The writer has the role of the dead person involved in a game of writing. But, as Foucault warned,

“It is obviously insufficient to repeat empty slogans: The author has

Instead he believes that what is necessary is a study of the life of the author, and how authorship and authority are constructed historically. Writing he points out has always been concerned with death; in the Greek epics the hero sacrificed his life early in order to gain immortality in narrative to reddem his death, in the Arabic stories, and particularly, Arabic Nights presented narrative as a way to endlessly put off the immanent death, and in this way writing could save one from death. But now the work, which once had the duty of providing immortality, now possesses the right to kill, to be its author’s murderer. The process of creating the text cancels out signs of the writers own individuality, and so ironically, the sign of the modern writer is the singularity of his absence. Most authors are fictive, they are not produced simultaneously, and are constructed to give coherence a body of disparate writings- letters, fragments, grafts etc. all of which are manifestations of an authors work and Foucault defines the “author” in terms of what it was

The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning. As a result we must entirely reverse the traditional idea of the author... 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