The birth of the author

Lawrence Lipking

pp. 36-53

in: Warwick Gould, Thomas F. Staley (eds), Writing the lives of writers, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998

Abstract

The death of the Author can be dated with some precision. It happened, according to the undertaker, Roland Barthes, in 1967, and the news spread through France just in time to endorse the wild student wakes of the following year. In the United States, the Author was undoubtedly one casualty of the Vietnam War. Inside and outside universities, authority would never again command the same respect, and the letters of the name of the Author clearly fit into the script of authoritative and even authoritarian authorisations. No wonder that critics soon laid the Author to rest. He had been ailing, in fact, for almost a century, stricken by a disease inherited from his Father, the Author of all things and the Logos itself, whose death had been proclaimed by Nietzsche in 1882. The virus invaded all the cells of meaning, undermining the principle that some point of origin — Logos, first cause, God, a transcendental signified, or merely the mind of a writer — could guarantee the interpretation of a text or a world. Now, in the 1960s, a superfluity of meaningless meanings overloaded the system. And so the Author died.

Cited authors

Nietzsche Friedrich

Barthes Roland