Foucault, Michel "What Is an Author?"
From RhetorClick
In “What is an Author,” Michael Foucault works to correct a pivotal aspect he had excluded, and received criticism for, in his previous writings--the role or non-existent role of the author. He limits his discussion to “the singular relationship that holds between an author and a text” while mentioning the themes of writing’s exterior position and the relationship of writing and death. Foucault also brings up the question of, what constitutes the work of an author and what is everything he/she wrote? This has kept us from fully understanding the disappearance of the author. As has the notion of ecriture in which the idea of the signal, human author becomes a “transcendental anonymity” (182). Foucault then discusses the name of an author and its function. He concludes that the name of an author is not a proper name that does not modify despite changes in the characteristic of the named individual, but rather a name that is linked to the discourse of the author. Thus, the author’s name is functional, and its function is to “characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society” (184). Having an author as a function and speaking purely of texts with authors, the “author-function” has four features:
- “Objects of appropriation”
- “Not universal or constant in all discourse”
- “Not formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual”
- “Arises our of their scission--in the division and distance of the two” (184-188)
The latter is the division and distance of the three egos that an author depicts in his/her writings. He then makes the depiction between scientific writings and those of “initiators of discursive practices” (189). The difference being that these initiators of discursive practices “produced not only their own work, but the possibility and the rules of formation of other texts,” and that they can be returned to as opposed to rediscovered or reactivated.
