The Death of the Author

The Death of the Author

In this text we can notice that Sarrasine Balzac describes a castrato disguised as a woman. He writes the following sentence : " This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings and her delicious sensibility" from where we can observe features of a castrato hidden beneath a woman. There is a question about Balzac's experience who is using a philosophy of woman or ideas on feminity, but we don't know if writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing appears here as a neutral, compo 12212x234m site oblique space where our subject slips away and the identity of the body writing is lost in a negative way.

Writing begins as soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view on reality but intransitively, that is to say outside of any function, the disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin and the author enters into his own death. The meaning of this phenomenon has varied the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a meditor or relator whose "performance" may be admired but never his "genius".

I have to specify that the author is a modern figure, a product of our society or a "human person" which is the greatest importance of the author. The author reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews magazines, diaries and memoirs where the author told us his story. The image of literature is found as a ordinary culture which is centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions while criticism consists in saying that Baudelaire's work is a failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh's mandness, Tchaikovsky's vice.

The domination or the sway of the author remains powerful. For instance, in France, Mallarme was the first to see in its full extent the necessiy to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. Mallarme 's entire poetics consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing but Valery diluted Mallarme's theory because in his taste for classicism he never stopped calling into question and deriding the author and he militated in favour of the essentially verbal condition of literature. Proust despite his analyses was concerned with the task of blurring by an extreme subtilization and he gave modern writing its epic, leaving aside literature itself.

Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing because the language knows a subject not a person.

The removal of the author is not an act of writing and it transforms the modern text in such way that at all its levels the author is absent.The temporality is different too, because the author is always conceived of as the past of his own book. It's important to say that the author is thought to nourish the book,which means that he exists before it, thinks, suffers and lives for it, but a modern scriptor is born with the text, is equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate. Writing can no longer be an operation of recording, notation, representation, 'depiction', but it designates a performative, which is a rare verbal form of enunciation and it contains no other proposition than the act by which is uttered. Having buried the Author, the modern scriptor must emphasize this delay and 'polish' his form. On the contrary the hand cut off from any voice traces a field without origin or which has no other origin than language itself, because language calls all origins.

It is sure that a text is not a line of words but a multi-dimensional space in which blend and clash a variety of writings, none of them original. The writer can imitate a gesture, never original because the text is a tissue of quotations. The writer can only mix writings and to counter the ones with the others.

We don't know exactly how the writer wanted to express himself because the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humorous, feelings but rather this huge dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no stopping.

After this removal of the Author, it's quite difficult to decipher a text. We can discover the Author beneath the work, so that the text his understood or well explained and this can be a victory to the critic. We have to mention that the reign of the Author has been that of the Critic. Everything is disentangled, nothing deciphered, so that the structure can be followed at every point and at every level. Writing ceaselessly posits mining ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic meaning. The literature liberates what is called anti- theological activity, an activity which is revolutionary.

According to Balzac's sentence, no person says it: its source, its voice, is not the true place of the writing, which is reading. A recent research has demonstrated the ambiguous nature of Greek tragedy where the texts had double meanings that each character can understand, but there is someone who understands each word and hears the very deafness of the characters speaking in front of him and this someone is the reader or the listener.

I have to mention that a text is made of multiple writings, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and this is the reader.

So, what is a reader? A reader is a space where oll the quotations are inscribed without any of them being lost. A reader has no history, biography or psychology.

In the end of the text is mentioned the fact that classic criticism has never paid attention to the reader. We all know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of death of the Author.