Authoring Revisited

Unit: Cultural Identities in Texts 212 - Implications of Modernity
Final Journal, 250 words (due to class-wide abysmal marks, we are now submitting one journal on the reading of our choice, in an effort to concentrate our understanding)

Michel Foucault – What Is An Author?

In this article, Foucault argues that an author's individuality is “killed” by the unity he shares with his work. An author's name comes to signify not only the individual, but also the works attributed to that name.

Foucault states that writing is culturally understood as a device to ward against death. However, the idea of sacrifice has become voluntary by a writer's existence – in writing, an author destroys his own sense of individuality by distancing himself from his work, resulting in his absence in writing.

The critique of a work also removes the author from his position as creator. If work is only to be criticised through “its structure, its architecture” (103) then the author's relationship becomes no longer important. As such, the author's recognition as an authoritative individual disappears.

Traditionally, an author may be recognised as an individual of authority, placing in his work “an inexhaustible world of significations.” (118) In order to allow the work to function as its own discourse, this traditional idea of an author must be reversed. Thus the authoritative figure that the author once represented is forgotten in favour of the significations of the reader. As such, the death of the author is the birth of the reader.

In creating a work, an author's name ceases to signify the individual. The meaning of an author's name is created by what constitutes his work – if his works change, so too does the meaning and implication of his name. However, changes to the individual person, such as appearance, do not have an impact on the meaning of the name. Thus his individuality is killed by his relationship to his work.

Rabinow, Paul (ed.) The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Book. 1984.