The Death of the Author
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-
ration of recording, of observing, of representing, of “painting” (as the Classic writers
put it), but rather what the linguisticians, following the vocabulary of the Oxford
school, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given to the first person
and to the present), in which utterance has no other content than the act by which it is
uttered: something like the / Command of kings or the I Sing of the early bards; the
modern writer, having buried the Author, can therefore no longer believe, according
to the “pathos” of his predecessors, that his hand is too slow for his thought or his pas-
annaabi.ee 
