The Death Of The Author In Foucault's What Is An Author

Foucault 's essay “What is an author” explores the relationship between author, text, and reader. Foucaults essay seems to be an implicit response to Barthes 's famous essay "The Death of the Author." as Foucault argues that the issue of the disappearance or death of the author has not been developed sufficiently, and needs further consideration, beginning with the clarification of what constitutes a “work.” Foucault wants to discuss the relationship between an author and a text, and the manner in which the text points to the author as a figure who is outside the text, and who precedes it. Foucault draws upon the function of the author to provide a discourse of the difference between an author and a writer, and whether or not such a characterisation

115) Foucault indicates that the indifference in the question is actually an indicator that the identity of the author is a principle of concern embedded in our way of speaking and writing. If we accept the author as the solitary producer of meaning within a work, perhaps we can define and understand the piece more completely.Foucault establishes the idea that to understand a text, the study of the relationship between itself and its author, or lack of, is necessary, and although he discusses opposing concepts and calls for a culture without the necessity of authorship. Foucault longs for the day when a work’s importance is governed by its content, not by who is speaking, and although he contemplates the moment that he believes will one day come, where the author function will disappear, his piece arguably does not dispel the need for

The writer has the role of the dead person involved in a game of writing.

Second, the relationship between writing and death. Traditionally, death was a guarantee to immortality (e.g. the Greek narratives where by death, the hero gains immortality. Contemporarily, this notion has been altered, and writing is now linked to sacrifice. The narrator is used to forestall death. Where work had the duty of creating immortality, it now had the right to kill its author. After writing, the author is dead, but through the text, the author lives. The author becomes a victim of his own writing, and through his absence, his presence is guaranteed.

Furthermore, Foucault raises an important issue regarding the authenticity and role of that individual. More than that, he introduces a theoretical and technical problem concerning the constitution of a work itself. “even when an individual is accepted as an author, we must still ask whether everything that he wrote, said, or left behind is part of his