The Death of the Author

“[T]o write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs,’ and not ‘me.’”

Barthes ends the last clause with the wrong personal pronoun—”me,” where it should be “I.” The intentionally awkward phrasing is a way of emphasizing that there is no personal agent who writes. The writer is the passive object of writing, not its agent. To say that an “author writes” would be as incorrect as saying “me writes.”

“Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a ‘subject,’ not a ‘person,’ and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language ‘hold together,’ suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it.”

A periodic sentence is typically a very long and complicated sentence that postpones the most important element, often a verb, for the very end. Classical Latin periodic sentences could sometimes run for pages. Barthes’s are shorter, but he does write very long sentences that are often periodic. In the above example, the final verb “exhaust” literally exhausts the sentence (which may have exhausted the reader), draining it of any promise that we might find some entity called the “author” behind writing.

“Having buried the Author, the modem scriptor can thus no longer believe, as according to the pathetic view of his predecessors, that this hand is too slow for his thought or passion and that consequently, making a law of necessity, he must emphasize this delay and indefinitely ‘polish’ his form.”

This sentence describes the Author’s romantic, egoistic belief that he must laboriously express himself; it is appropriate that Barthes expresses this in a halting and laborious manner. The reader is thus compelled to engage in the illusion that Barthes is trying to eradicate.

“In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying’ out a systematic exemption of meaning.”

This sentence reflects Barthes’s idea, expressed in other writings (see The Pleasure of the Text, 1973), that writing and reading involve a reciprocal eroticism. Here he uses the metaphor of a run in a stocking to describe the writer’s tracing of language, and there is a tactile sense to this, as if in reading the sentence one is tracing a finger along that run. Then the stocking is removed completely, and “there is nothing beneath.” To follow the metaphor, the text stands naked before the reader, as if in anticipation of an erotic encounter.