The Death of the Author
In his story Sarrasine Balzac, describing a castrato disguised
as a woman, 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.' Who is speaking thus? Is it
the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the
castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is it Balzac the
individual, furnished by his personal experience with a
philosophy of Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing
'literary' ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom?
Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good
reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of
every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite,
oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative
where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity
of the body writing.
No doubt it has always been that way. As soon as a
fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on
reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any
function other than that of the very practice of the symbol
itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin,
the author enters into his own death, writing begins. The
sense of this phenomenon, however, has varied; in ethno-
graphic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never
assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator
whose 'performance' - the mastery of the narrative code -
may possibly be admired but never his 'genius'. The author
is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as,
emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism,
The Death of the Author | 143
French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reforma-
tion, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is
more nobly put, the 'human person'. It is thus logical that
in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and
culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the
greatest importance to the 'person' of the author. The
author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of
writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness.
of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their
work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature
to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on
the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while
criticism still consists for the most part in saying that
Baudelaire's work is the failure of Baudelaire the man,
Van Gogh's his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice. The
explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman
who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the
more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of
a single person, the author 'confiding' in us.
Though the sway of the Author remains powerful (the
new criticism has often done no more than consolidate it),
it goes without saying that certain writers have long since
attempted to loosen it. In France, Mallarme was doubtless
the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity
to substitute language itself for the person who until then
had been supposed to be its owner. For him, for us too, it
is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through
a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with
the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach
that point where only language acts, 'performs", and not
'me'. Mallarmé's entire poetics consists in suppressing the
author in the interests of writing (which is, as will be seen,
to restore the place of the reader). Valéry, encumbered by a
psychology of the Ego, considerably diluted Mallarmé's
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theory but, his taste for classicism leading him to turn to
the lessons of rhetoric, he never stopped calling into question
and deriding the Author; he stressed the linguistic and, as it
were, 'hazardous' nature of his activity, and throughout his
prose works he militated in favour of the essentially verbal
condition of literature, in the face of which all recourse to
the writer's interiority seemed to him pure superstition.
Proust himself, despite the apparently psychological
character of what are called his analyses, was visibly con-
cerned with the task of inexorably blurring, by an extreme
subtilization, the relation between the writer and his
characters; by making of the narrator not he who has seen
and felt nor even he who is writing, but he who is going to
write (the young man in the novel but, in fact, how old is
he and who is he? - wants to write but cannot; the novel
ends when writing at last becomes possible), Proust gave
modern writing its epic. By a radical reversal, 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; so that it is clear to us that Charlus does not
imitate Montesquiou but that Montesquiou in his anec-
dotal, historical reality is no more than a secondary
fragment, derived from Charlus. Lastly, to go no further
than this prehistory of modernity, Surrealism, though
unable to accord language a supreme place (language being
system and the aim of the movement being, romantically,
a direct subversion of codes itself moreover illusory:
a code cannot be destroyed, only 'played off'), contributed
to the desacrilization of the image of the Author by cease-
lessly recommending the abrupt disappointment of expecta-
tions of meaning (the famous surrealist 'jolt'), by entrusting
the hand with the task of writing as quickly as possible.
what the head itself is unaware of (automatic writing), by
accepting the principle and the experience of several people
writing together. Leaving aside literature itself (such dis-
The Death of the Author | 145
tinctions really becoming invalid), linguistics has recently
provided the destruction of the Author with a valuable.
analytical tool by showing that the whole of the enunciation
is an empty process, functioning perfectly without there.
being any need for it to be filled with the person of the inter-
locutors. 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.
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The removal of the Author (one could talk here with
Brecht of a veritable 'distancing', the Author diminishing
like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage) is not
merely an historical fact or an act of writing; it utterly
transforms the modern text (or which is the same thing -
the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at
all its levels the author is absent). The temporality is different.
The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the
past of his own book: book and author stand automatically
on a single line divided into a before and an after. The
Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that
he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same
relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child.
In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simul-
taneously 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; there is no other time than that of the
enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now.
The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer desig-
nate an operation of recording, notation, representation,
'depiction' (as the Classics would say); rather, it designates
exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a
performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given in the
first person and in the present tense) in which the enuncia-
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tion has no other content (contains no other proposition)
than the act by which it is uttered - something like the I
declare of kings or the I sing of very ancient poets. Having
buried the Author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer
believe, as according to the pathetic view of his predecessors,
that this hand is too slow for his thought or passion and that
consequently, making a law of necessity, he must emphasize
this delay and indefinitely 'polish' his form. For him, on
the contrary, 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.
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing
a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-
God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of
writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text
is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres
of culture. Similar to Bouvard and Pécuchet, those eternal
copyists, at once sublime and comic and whose profound
ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing,
the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior,
never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter
the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on
any one of them. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at
least to know that the inner 'thing' he thinks to 'translate"
is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only
explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely;
something experienced in exemplary fashion by the young
Thomas de Quincey, he who was so good at Greek that in
order to translate absolutely modern ideas and images into
that dead language, he had, so Baudelaire tells us (in Paradis
Artificiels), 'created for himself an unfailing dictionary,
vastly more extensive and complex than those resulting
from the ordinary patience of purely literary themes".
The Death of the Author | 147
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: life never does more than imitate the book,
and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation
that is lost, infinitely deferred.
Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text
becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose
a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to
close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very
well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of
discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history,
psyché, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has
been found, the text is 'explained' victory to the critic.
Hence there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the
reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic, nor
again in the fact that criticism (be it new) is today under-
mined along with the Author. In the multiplicity of writing,
everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the
structure can be followed, 'run' (like the thread of a stock-
ing) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing
beneath the space of writing is to be ranged over, not
pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to
evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of
meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would be better
from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a 'secret',
an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text),
liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity,
an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to
fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases
reason, science, law.
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Let us come back to the Balzac sentence. No one, no
'person', says it: its source, its voice, is not the true place of
the writing, which is reading. Another very precise -
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example will help to make this clear: recent research
(J.-P. Vernant¹) has demonstrated the constitutively ambi-
guous nature of Greek tragedy, its texts being woven from
words with double meanings that each character under-
stands unilaterally (this perpetual misunderstanding is
exactly the tragic'); there is, however, someone who
understands each word in its duplicity and who, in addition,
hears the very deafness of the characters speaking in front
of him this someone being precisely the reader (or here,
the listener). Thus is revealed the total existence of writing:
a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many
cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue,
parody, contestation, but there is one place where this
multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not,
as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space.
on which all the quotations that make up a writing are
inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies
not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination
cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history,
biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who
holds together in a single field all the traces by which the
written text is constituted. Which is why it is derisory to
condemn the new writing in the name of a humanism.
hypocritically turned champion of the reader's rights.
Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader;
for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are
now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the
arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in
favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or
destroys; we 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 the death of the Author.
1968
1. [Cf. Jean-Pierre Vernant (with Pierre Vidal-Naquet), Mythe et
tragédie en Grèce ancienne, Paris 1972, esp. pp. 19-40, 99-131.]
Musica Practica
There are two musics (at least so I have always thought):
the music one listens to, the music one plays. These two
musics are two totally different arts, each with its own history,
its own sociology, its own aesthetics, its own erotic; the
same composer can be minor if you listen to him, tre-
mendous if you play him (even badly) - such is Schumann.
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The music one plays comes from an activity that is very
little auditory, being above all manual (and thus in a way
much more sensual). It is the music which you or I can play,
alone or among friends, with no other audience than its
participants (that is, with all risk of theatre, all temptation.
of hysteria removed); a muscular music in which the part
taken by the sense of hearing is one only of ratification,
as though the body were hearing and not 'the soul';
a music which is not played 'by heart': seated at the key-
board or the music stand, the body controls, conducts,
co-ordinates, having itself to transcribe what it reads,
making sound and meaning, the body as inscriber and not
just transmitter, simple receiver. This music has disappeared;
initially the province of the idle (aristocratic) class, it
lapsed into an insipid social rite with the coming of the
democracy of the bourgeoisie (the piano, the young lady,
the drawing room, the nocturne) and then faded out al-
together (who plays the piano today?). To find practical
music in the West, one has now to look to another public,
another repertoire, another instrument (the young genera-
tion, vocal music, the guitar). Concurrently, passive, recep-
tive music, sound music, is become the music (that of concert,
festival, record, radio): playing has ceased to exist; musical