Death of the Author

Roland Barthes, 1968

 Introduction
• Reference to Sarrasine
(Balzac, 1830)
• Unable to determine the voice
of the text:
– “Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero…? Is it Balzac the
individual…? Is it Balzac the Author…? … We shall never
know.”

• Implies that writing

“[destroys] every voice, … and
every point of origin.”
 History of the Author
• Ethnographic societies –
responsibility of narrative
assumed by “mediator”
• The Author is “a product of “Shaman” by Leonard Paul

our society”
– English Empiricism
– French Rationalism
– Capitalist ideology
• “prestige of the Individual”
“I think, therefore I am.”
– Descartes
 History of the Author
• Explanation of a work is
sought in the person who
produced the work
– Baudelaire his failure
– Van Gogh his madness Tchaikovsky

– Tchaikovsky his vice

Charles Pierre Baudelaire Vincent van Gogh

 History of the Author
• Ways of Seeing (John Berger, 1972, p. 27):
– “This is a landscape of a cornfield with
birds flying out of it.”

Wheatfield with Crows

Vincent van Gogh, 1890
 History of the Author
• Ways of Seeing (John Berger, 1972, p. 28):
– “This is the last picture van Gogh painted
before he killed himself.”

Wheatfield with Crows

Vincent van Gogh, 1890
 Desacrilization of the Author
• Writers and artists have
attempted to loosen the
sway of the Author:
– Mallarme
– Valery
– Proust
– Surrealism
– Linguistics
 Desacrilization of the Author
• Stephane Mallarme
– “suppresses” one’s own authority to set the
definitive meaning of the work

– “restores the place of the reader”

– Use of deliberately ambiguous meanings
(e.g. same-sounding words)
 Desacrilization of the Author
• Rhythm 0 (1974)
• 72 items (grapes, scissors,
etc.) placed on a table
• A sign informs the audience
to use any of the objects on
Abramovic
• A gun and a bullet were
among the items
Rhythm 0
Marina Abramovic, 1974
 Desacrilization of the Author
• Surrealism
– The “surrealist jolt” – abrupt disappointment
of expectation

– E.g. Salvador Dali’s

“Slave Market with the Apparition of the

Invisible Bust of Voltaire”, 1940

Desacrilization of the Author

Salvador Dali
Slave Market with the Apparition of the Invisible Bust of Voltaire
1940
 Desacrilization of the Author
• Surrealism
– “Automatic painting/writing”
– Creating the work from one’s
subconscious

– E.g. Jackson Pollock’s Drip Paintings

Lavender Mist
Jackson Pollock, 1950
 Removal of the Author
• Author  Scriptor
• Traditionally, authorship is based on two
metaphors: temporal and paternal
– “The Author, …, is always conceived as the past of his own book…”
– “The Author is thought to nourish the book, …, in the same relation of antecedence
to his work as a father to his child.”
 Removal of the Author
• Author  Scriptor
• For the modern scriptor,
“every text is eternally
written here and now.”
• Writing cannot depict or
represent
• Writing has no other content
other than the act of
enunciating it
 Removal of the Author
• “pure gesture of inscription
(and not of expression)”
• Formalism “Art for Art's Sake”
– Cezanne's still-lifes are focused on the formal aspects of Paul Cezanne
Still Life with Fruit Basket, 1895
the work, rather than its content

– Pollock's action painting draws attention to the act of

painting

www.artnet.com
 The Scriptor
• The “gesture of inscription”
• The scriptor merely
assembles the text from a
“ready-formed dictionary”
– “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of
writings, none of them original, blend and clash.”

– “his only power is to mix writings”

 Death of Meaning
• Obliteration of a stable,
critical interpretation
– No “single, theological meaning...”

– Meaning is undermined together with the

Author

Tchaikovsky

Charles Pierre Baudelaire Vincent van Gogh

 Death of Meaning
• Suggests that we should read the
text itself, rather than finding
clues to guarantee the
correctness of our interpretation
– “the structure can be followed, 'run' (like the thread of a stocking)

at every point and at every level, but there's nothing beneath”

– “the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced”

– “writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it,...”

 Conclusion
• True place of writing is in reading
– Double meanings in Greek tragedies cause each character to understand each other unilaterally

– Only the reader (listener) is able to understand each word in its duplicity

• The reader is the place where the multiplicity of a

text is focused
– “The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without

any of them lost”

• “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the

death of the Author.”