The Death of the Author
vel, the Author absents himself). Time, first of all, is no longer the same. The Author,
when we believe in him, is always conceived as the past of his own book: the book
and the author take their places of their own accord on the same line, cast as a before
and an after: the Author is supposed to feed the book — that is, he pre-exists it, thinks,
suffers, lives for it; he maintains with his work the same relation of antecedence a
father 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 of which his book is the predicate;
there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here
and now. This is because (or: it follows that) to write can no longer designate an ope-
annaabi.ee 
