2024年5月11日发(作者：读卡器的作用和使用方法)

The Death of the Author

by Roland Barthes (from Image, Music, Text, 1977)

In his story Sarrasine Balzac, describing a castrato disguised as a woman, writes the followin

g sentence: ‘This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive

worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.’ Who is speaking thus

? Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woma

n? Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? I

s it Balzac the author professing ‘literary’ ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic ps

ychology? We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice,

of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips

away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.

No doubt it has always been that way. As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to

acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than

that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin,

the author enters into his own death, writing begins. The sense of this phenomenon, however, ha

s varied; in ethnographic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person

but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose ‘performance’ — the mastery of the narrative code

—may possibly be admired but never his ‘genius’. The author is a modern figure, a product of our

society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism an

d the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is mor

e nobly put, the ‘human person’. It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the

epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to th

e ‘person’ of the author. The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers,

interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their perso

n and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in ordinary cul

ture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticis

m still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the m

an, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in t

he man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less trans

parent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us.

Though the sway of the Author remains powerful (the new criticism has often done no more

than consolidate it), it goes without saying that certain writers have long since attempted to loos

en it. In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the neces

sity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner

. For him, for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisit

e 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’. Mallarme’s entire poetics

consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing (which is, as will be seen, to restore t

he place of the reader). Valery, encumbered by a psychology of the Ego, considerably diluted Mall

arme’s theory but, his taste for classicism leading him to turn to the lessons of rhetoric, he never

stopped calling into question and deriding the Author; he stressed the linguistic and, as it were, ‘

hazardous’ nature of his activity, and throughout his prose works he militated in favour of the ess

entially verbal condition of literature, in the face of which all recourse to the writer’s interiority se

emed to him pure superstition. Proust himself, despite the apparently psychological character of

what are called his analyses, was visibly concerned with the task of inexorably blurring, by an extr

eme subtilization, the relation between the writer and his characters; by making of the narrator n

ot he who has seen and felt nor even he who is writing, but he who is going to write (the young

man in the novel — but, in fact, how old is he and who is he? — wants to write but cannot; the n

ovel ends when writing at last becomes possible), Proust gave modern writing its epic. By a radica

l reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as is so often maintained, he made of his very li

fe a work for which his own book was the model; so that it is clear to us that Charlus does not imi

tate Montesquiou but that Montesquiou — in his anecdotal, historical reality — is no more than

a secondary fragment, derived from Charlus. Lastly, to go no further than this prehistory of mode

rnity, Surrealism, though unable to accord language a supreme place (language being system and

the aim of the movement being, romantically, a direct subversion of codes—itself moreover illuso

ry: a code cannot be destroyed, only ‘played off’), contributed to the desacrilization of the image

of the Author by ceaselessly recommending the abrupt disappointment of expectations of meani

ng (the famous surrealist ‘jolt’), by entrusting the hand with the task of writing as quickly as possi

ble what the head itself is unaware of (automatic writing), by accepting the principle and the exp

erience of several people writing together. Leaving aside literature itself (such distinctions really b

ecoming invalid), linguistics has recently provided the destruction of the Author with a valuable

analytical tool by show ing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty functioning perfectly wi

thout there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors. Linguistically, th

e author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance sayin

g I: language knows a ‘subject’, not a ‘person’, and this subject, empty outside of the very enuncia

tion which defines it, suffices to make language ‘hold together’, suffices, that is to say, to exhaust

it.

The removal of the Author (one could talk here with Brecht of a veritable ‘distancing’, the Au

thor diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage) is not merely an historical fact

or an act of writing; it utterly transforms the modern text (or — which is the same thing —the tex

t is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent). The tempor

ality is different. The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book

: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after. The Aut

hor is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for

it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In complete contrast

, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being pre

ceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other ti

me than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. The fact is (or, it

follows) that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation,

‘depiction’ (as the Classics would say); rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxf

ord philosophy, call a performative a rare verbal form (exclusively given in the first person and in t

he present tense) in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) t

han the act by which it is uttered—something like the I declare of kings or the I sing of very ancie

nt poets. Having buried the Author, the modern 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