The Death of the Author
itself ignores (this was automatic writing), by accepting the principle and the experience
of a collective writing, surrealism helped secularize the image of the Author. Finally,
outside of literature itself (actually, these distinctions are being superseded), linguistics
has just furnished the destruction of the Author with a precious analytic instrument by
showing that utterance in its entirety is a void process, which functions perfectly without
requiring to be filled by the person of 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 of the very
utterance which defines it, suffices to make language “work,” that is, to exhaust it.
3
The Death of the Author
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