What is an Author?

"To be authentic literally means to be your own author." -- Dan
Millman

The coming into being of the notion of ‘author’ constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy and the sciences” (101). First of all, writing has freed itself from expression. It is an interplay of signs arranged according to the nature of the signifier. It is thus that the writer is reduced to nothing more than the “singularity of his absence” (102 ). It is the task of the critic to analyze a work through its structure, its architecture, its intrinsic form, and the play of its internal relationships. The very notion of writing has prevented us from taking full measure of the author’s disappearance. The notion of writing transposes the characteristics of the author into a “transcendental anonymity” (104). The problem of the author’s name is discussed: it is not simply an element in a discourse, rather it performs a role with regard to narrative discourse, allowing one to group together a certain number of texts, differentiating them from others. Limiting remarks to the author of a book, three different characteristics arise: first, discourses are objects of appropriation; second, the author function does not affect all discourses in a universal and constant way; third, it does not develop spontaneously as the attribution of a discourse to an individidual. The author provides the “basis for explaining not only the presence of certain events in a work, but also their transformations, distortions, and diverse modifications” (111). The author is the principle of a “unity of writing, linked to the juridical and institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the uninverse of discourses; it does not affect all discourses in the same way at all times and in all types of civilization; it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a discourse to its producer; it does not refer purely and simply to a true individual” (113). An analysis made in the direction laid out by Foucault might provide for an approach to a typology of discourse: “The author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; he does not precede his works; he is a functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses” (119).