According to Barthes--no, I must not say "according to Barthes." Moreover, I must not say "I"; or if I do, I must acknowledge that as soon as I write the pronoun, it ceases to bear any relation to the extra-textual human being who wrote it: "Writing is that . . . space . . . where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing." There is only the text. Damn! Better make the text the subject of the sentence. "The Death of the Author" states that all writing--no, writing can state nothing about writing or about anything else. The text is irrevocably cut off from that of which it attempts to speak: "the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred." Rather, writing is, as the linguists say, performative. "Call me Ishmael" indistinguishable in function from "I now pronounce you man and wife." And not only in function, but also in substance, because "the text is . . . a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash." Originality being impossible, all writings must bear essentially the same meaning. Not that anybody can know that meaning: "writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it." So there. Now put this one in your pipe and smoke it: "In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered." One might wonder how to disentangle without deciphering, since things cannot be separated from each other without first being identified as different from each other; but never mind. Far from demonstrating that the author is dead, this essay stands as a monument to the monstrous arrogance of a man whose authority derives solely from his talent for uttering absolute rubbish in a tone of vatic infallibility. "The Death of the Author" blows itself to pieces. I don't see how I can possibly be expected to summarize it. (Steve Schroer.)

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Michael Hancher

Department of English, University of Minnesota

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Created 22 May 1995

Last revised 17 September 1996