The Death of the Author

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The Death
oI the Author
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Roland Barthes
Source: UbuWeb , UbuWeb Papers
the death oI the author / roland barthes
The Death of the Author
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The Death of the Author
In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking oI a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this
sentence: 'It was Woman, with her sudden Iears, her irrational whims, her instinctive
Iears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy oI Ieeling Who
is speaking in this way? Is it the story`s hero, concerned to ignore the castrato con-
cealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience
with a philosophy oI Woman? Is it the author Balzac, proIessing certain 'literary
ideas oI Iemininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology? It will always
be impossible to know, Ior the good reason that all writing is itselI this special voice,
consisting oI several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention
oI this voice, to which we cannot assign a specifc origin: literature is that neuter, that
composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is
lost, beginning with the very identity oI the body that writes.

Probably this has always been the case: once an action is recounted, Ior intransitive
ends, and no longer in order to act directly upon reality that is, fnally external to
any Iunction but the very exercise oI the symbol this disjunction occurs, the voice
loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins. Nevertheless, the
Ieeling about this phenomenon has been variable; in primitive societies, narrative is
never undertaken by a person, but by a mediator, shaman or speaker, whose 'perIor-
mance may be admired (that is, his mastery oI the narrative code), but not his 'ge-
nius The author is a modern fgure, produced no doubt by our society insoIar as, at
the end oI the middle ages, with English empiricism, French rationalism and the per-
sonal Iaith oI the ReIormation, it discovered the prestige oI the individual, or, to put it
more nobly, oI the 'human person Hence it is logical that with regard to literature it
should be positivism, resume and the result oI capitalist ideology, which has accorded
the greatest importance to the author`s 'person The author still rules in manuals oI
literary history, in biographies oI writers, in magazine interviews, and even in the
awareness oI literary men, anxious to unite, by their private journals, their person and
their work; the image oI literature to be Iound in contemporary culture is tyrannically
centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; criticism still
consists, most oI the time, in saying that Baudelaire`s work is the Iailure oI the man
Baudelaire, Van Gogh`s work his madness, Tchaikovsky`s his vice: the explanation oI
the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as iI, through the more or
less transparent allegory oI fction, it was always fnally the voice oI one and the same
person, the author, which delivered his 'confdence.

The Death of the Author

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Though the Author`s empire is still very powerIul (recent criticism has oIten merely
consolidated it), it is evident that Ior a long time now certain writers have attempted to
topple it. In France, Mallarme was doubtless the frst to see and Ioresee in its Iull extent
the necessity oI substituting language itselI Ior the man who hitherto was supposed to
own it; Ior Mallarme, as Ior us, it is language which speaks, not the author: to write is to
reach, through a preexisting impersonality never to be conIused with the castrating
objectivity oI the realistic novelist that point where language alone acts, 'perIorms,
and not 'oneselI: Mallarme`s entire poetics consists in suppressing the author Ior the
sake oI the writing (which is, as we shall see, to restore the status oI the reader.) Valery,
encumbered with a psychology oI the SelI, greatly edulcorated Mallarme`s theory, but,
turning in a preIerence Ior classicism to the lessons oI rhetoric, he unceasingly questio-
ned and mocked the Author, emphasized the linguistic and almost 'chance nature oI
his activity, and throughout his prose works championed the essentially verbal condition
oI literature, in the Iace oI which any recourse to the writer`s inIeriority seemed to him
pure superstition. It is clear that Proust himselI, despite the apparent psychological cha-
racter oI what is called his analyses, undertook the responsibility oI inexorably blurring,
by an extreme subtilization, the relation oI the writer and his characters: by making the
narrator not the person who has seen or Ielt, nor even the person who writes, but the
person who will write (the young man oI the novel but, in Iact, how old is he, and
who is he? wants to write but cannot, and the novel ends when at last the writing
becomes possible), Proust has given modern writing its epic: by a radical reversal, ins-
tead oI putting his liIe into his novel, as we say so oIten, he makes his very liIe into a
work Ior which his own book was in a sense the model, so that it is quite obvious to us
that it is not Charlus who imitates Montesquiou, but that Montesquiou in his anecdo-
tal, historical reality is merely a secondary Iragment, derived Irom Charlus. Surrealism
lastly to remain on the level oI this prehistory oI modernity surrealism doubtless
could not accord language a sovereign place, since language is a system and since what
the movement sought was, romantically, a direct subversion oI all codes an illusory
subversion, moreover, Ior a code cannot be destroyed, it can only be 'played with;
but by abruptly violating expected meanings (this was the Iamous surrealist 'jolt),
by entrusting to the hand the responsibility oI writing as Iast as possible what the head
itselI ignores (this was automatic writing), by accepting the principle and the experience
oI a collective writing, surrealism helped secularize the image oI the Author. Finally,
outside oI literature itselI (actually, these distinctions are being superseded), linguistics
has just Iurnished the destruction oI the Author with a precious analytic instrument by
showing that utterance in its entirety is a void process, which Iunctions perIectly without
requiring to be flled by the person oI the interlocutors: linguistically, the author is never
anything more than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I:
language knows a 'subject, not a 'person, end this subject, void outside oI the very
utterance which defnes it, suIfces to make language 'work, that is, to exhaust it.
The Death of the Author
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The Death of the Author

The absence oI the Author (with Brecht, we might speak here oI a real 'alienation:`
the Author diminishing like a tiny fgure at the Iar end oI the literary stage) is not only
a historical Iact or an act oI writing: it utterly transIorms the modern text (or what
is the same thing the text is henceIorth written and read so that in it, on every le-
vel, the Author absents himselI). Time, frst oI all, is no longer the same. The Author,
when we believe in him, is always conceived as the past oI his own book: the book
and the author take their places oI their own accord on the same line, cast as a beIore
and an aIter: the Author is supposed to Ieed the book that is, he pre-exists it, thinks,
suIIers, lives Ior it; he maintains with his work the same relation oI antecedence a
Iather maintains with his child. Quite the contrary, the modern writer (scriptor) is born
simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or
transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject oI which his book is the predicate;
there is no other time than that oI the utterance, and every text is eternally written here
and now. This is because (or: it Iollows that) to write can no longer designate an ope-
ration oI recording, oI observing, oI representing, oI 'painting (as the Classic writers
put it), but rather what the linguisticians, Iollowing the vocabulary oI the OxIord
school, call a perIormative, a rare verbal Iorm (exclusively given to the frst person
and to the present), in which utterance has no other content than the act by which it is
uttered: something like the / Command oI kings or the I Sing oI the early bards; the
modern writer, having buried the Author, can thereIore no longer believe, according
to the 'pathos oI his predecessors, that his hand is too slow Ior his thought or his pas-
sion, and that in consequence, making a law out oI necessity, he must accentuate this
gap and endlessly 'elaborate his Iorm; Ior him, on the contrary, his hand, detached
Irom any voice, borne by a pure gesture oI inscription (and not oI expression), traces a
feld without origin or which, at least, has no other origin than language itselI, that
is, the very thing which ceaselessly questions any origin.

We know that a text does not consist oI a line oI words, releasing a single 'theologi-
cal meaning (the 'message oI the Author-God), but is a space oI many dimensions,
in which are wedded and contested various kinds oI writing, no one oI which is ori-
ginal: the text is a tissue oI citations, resulting Irom the thousand sources oI culture.
Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and
whose proIound absurdity precisely designates the truth oI writing, the writer can
only imitate a gesture Iorever anterior, never original; his only power is to combine
the diIIerent kinds oI writing, to oppose some by others, so as never to sustain himselI
by just one oI them; iI he wants to express himselI, at least he should know that the
The Death of the Author
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internal 'thing he claims to 'translate is itselI only a readymade dictionary whose
words can be explained (defned) only by other words, and so on ad infnitum: an ex-
perience which occurred in an exemplary Iashion to the young De Quincey, so giIted
in Greek that in order to translate into that dead language certain absolutely modern
ideas and images, Baudelaire tells us, 'he created Ior it a standing dictionary much
more complex and extensive than the one which results Irom the vulgar patience oI
purely literary themes (Paradis Artifciels). succeeding the Author, the writer no lon-
ger contains within himselI passions, humors, sentiments, impressions, but that enor-
mous dictionary, Irom which he derives a writing which can know no end or halt: liIe
can only imitate the book, and the book itselI is only a tissue oI signs, a lost, infnitely
remote imitation.

Once the Author is gone, the claim to 'decipher a text becomes quite useless. To give
an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to Iurnish it with a fnal
signifcation, to close the writing. This conception perIectly suits criticism, which
can then take as its major task the discovery oI the Author (or his hypostases: society,
history, the psyche, Ireedom) beneath the work: once the Author is discovered, the
text is 'explained:` the critic has conquered; hence it is scarcely surprising not only
that, historically, the reign oI the Author should also have been that oI the Critic, but
that criticism (even 'new criticism) should be overthrown along with the Author. In
a multiple writing, indeed, everything is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered;
structure can be Iollowed, 'threaded (like a stocking that has run) in all its recurren-
ces and all its stages, but there is no underlying ground; the space oI the writing is to
be traversed, not penetrated: writing ceaselessly posits meaning but always in order
to evaporate it: it proceeds to a systematic exemption oI meaning. Thus literature (it
would be better, henceIorth, to say writing), by reIusing to assign to the text (and to
the world as text) a 'secret:` that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which
we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, Ior to reIuse to arrest mea-
ning is fnally to reIuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.

Let us return to Balzac`s sentence: no one (that is, no 'person) utters it: its source,
its voice is not to be located; and yet it is perIectly read; this is because the true locus
oI writing is reading. Another very specifc example can make this understood: recent
investigations (J. P. Vernant) have shed light upon the constitutively ambiguous nature
oI Greek tragedy, the text oI which is woven with words that have double meanings,
each character understanding them unilaterally (this perpetual misunderstanding is
The Death of the Author
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The Death of the Author
precisely what is meant by 'the tragic); yet there is someone who understands each
word in its duplicity, and understands Iurther, one might say, the very deaIness oI
the characters speaking in Iront oI him: this someone is precisely the reader (or here
the spectator). In this way is revealed the whole being oI writing: a text consists oI
multiple writings, issuing Irom several cultures and entering into dialogue with each
other, into parody, into contestation; but there is one place where this multiplicity is
collected, united, and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was, but
the reader: the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost,
all the citations a writing consists oI; the unity oI a text is not in its origin, it is in its
destination; but this destination can no longer be personal: the reader is a man without
history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds
gathered into a single feld all the paths oI which the text is constituted. This is why it
is absurd to hear the new writing condemned in the name oI a humanism which hypo-
critically appoints itselI the champion oI the reader`s rights. The reader has never been
the concern oI classical criticism; Ior it, there is no other man in literature but the one
who writes. We are now beginning to be the dupes no longer oI such antiphrases, by
which our society proudly champions precisely what it dismisses, ignores, smothers
or destroys; we know that to restore to writing its Iuture, we must reverse its myth: the
birth oI the reader must be ransomed by the death oI the Author.
translated bv Richard Howard