Études françaises

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Le concept de la mort de l’auteur chez Roland Barthes
(2015-01-26) Samiky, Abdellatif; Larochelle, Marie-Helene
Barthes’s 1967 critical essay “The Death of the Author” addresses the power of the author in reading and analyzing writing, and the power of the reader and the option to ignore the work’s background and focus more on the work itself. Barthes throws the emphasis away from an all-knowing, unified, intending subject as the site of production and on to language. He argues that writing destroys every voice and point of origin. This is because it occurs within a functional process which is the practice of signification itself. Its real origin is language. A writer, therefore, does not have a special genius expressed in the text, but rather, is a kind of craftsman who is skilled in using a particular code. The text is not the product of the author, a particular unitary and discrete subject, but emerges from a particular and unrepeatable nexus within a discursive formation.