The Death of the Author
gap and endlessly “elaborate” his form; for him, on the contrary, his hand, detached
from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a
field without origin — or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, that
is, the very thing which ceaselessly questions any origin.
—
We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theologi-
cal” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions,
in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is ori-
ginal: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.
Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and
whose profound absurdity precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can
annaabi.ee 
