What is an
author? (French:? Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur) is the title of a lecture given by
the philosopher Michel Foucault to the French Society of Philosophy in 1969.
The lecture is an extension of the same topic that Foucault develops in his book
Archeology of Knowledge, published shortly thereafter. In the lecture, Foucault
seeks to examine what is the role of the author's function in relation to the
text, and what is its role in the way organization, classification and
evaluation of texts.
The lecture
was written in response, albeit not explicitly, to Roland Barthes’ article,
"Death of the Author" published in late 1968. Foucault criticizes
structuralist reading attempts to abandon "the author" (e.g., Barthes' declaration of "Death of the Author") and to analyze the
work itself, In terms of its structure and internal shape. Foucault
demonstrates how such a reading secretly preserves the author's existence
through the term "creation," which is an equally problematic term.
First,
Foucault shows how fragile and technically fluid the category
of "author function" is in Western culture; Who do we mean, he asks, when we
talk about an "author" like Marx, Freud or Darwin, for example? per
person? To his creation? And what is the relationship between the life story of
"authors" and their "creation"? And how do we define their
work? Is everything a person has published in his life the entirety of his
work? And what about the writings he edited but published after his death? And
what is the status of things he carried but did not publish (such as, for
example, the important text "Course in General Linguistics"
attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure, but not written by him, but edited from
notebooks of his students after his death)? And how do we categorize footnotes,
private letters and grocery lists? "Out of the millions of traces a person
leaves after death," Foucault wonders, "how can a work be
defined?"
Turning to
the author, Foucault argues, is more than turning to a private individual; The
first name must be distinguished from the name "author" because they
are located at different poles and do not function in the same way. The
author's name does not point to the actual and external person who created it,
but moves along the boundaries of the texts, aligns and defines their contours,
and characterizes their forms of existence: the author plays a unique role in
relation to the text - a classified role; It makes it possible to collect and
group together a number of texts, allows them to be delimited (for example,
"all of Freud's writings"), to extract texts from them (for example,
if it is proved that the book "My Sister and I" was not written by
Nietzsche), to produce texts between texts ("Early Shakespeare")
Compared to the late Shakespeare, "for example, or" Italian
Renaissance-style works "). Finally, the author's name functions as a
characteristic of a particular form of existence of discourse: "The
fact that a discourse has the name of an author, which can be said 'it was
written by each other' or 'it is the author of it', indicates that this
discourse is not everyday speech, negligible, speech that goes away, floats and
passes, is not immediately consumable speech, but speech. That must be absorbed
at a certain level, and entitled to a certain status in a given culture
"(What is an author?).
Here you can find a comparison of Barthes's "The Death of the Author" and Foucault's "What is an Author?"
See also: The Author as Producer by Walter Benjamin
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Foucault's Panopticism explained
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Foucault, Structuralism and post-structuralism
Truth and Power / Foucault
Michel Foucault - The Discourse on Language