Notes on reading: First page example is perfect:

'This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries,

her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.'

This essay is about one central word: Authorship

His main argument is introduced at the very start: Writing is a neutral, oblique space

where the author and all his knowledge coalesce on paper, but is it the result of the writer's

choices or the result of his knowledge alone that the words before him appear on the paper? Is

an author a vessel for his knowledge, or does he have his own voice?

Class discussion 1: What does the following phrase mean?

'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'

(Perhaps compare this idea to method acting? It's not the same but might exemplify some

things for the students)

Ethnographic - Relating to the scientific description of peoples and cultures with their customs, habits,

and mutual differences.

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':

Next important point: The 'author' is a modern

invention.

- Therefore we should not assume him to exist as we do nowadays: There is less

historical precedent for the existence of the author than you might instinctively believe

to be true: You could even say that the author is a capitalist invention.

Class discussion 2: Is there 'necessarily' a relationship of some kind between an author

as a person and his writings?

The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it

were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice

of a single person, the author 'confiding' in us.

Next important point: Language leads its own life,

independent of our will or thought.

Class discussion 3: Well do you agree with this?

-People are bound to say 'no' here, but I would counter that argument by providing

sociolinguistic evidence to the contrary: Your spelling, choice of vocabulary, the language

you use, is AS A MATTER OF FACT for a large part decided by factors outside of your

control.
'Recent research (J.-P. Vernant1 ) has demonstrated the constitutively ambiguous nature of

Greek tragedy, its texts being woven from words with double meanings that each character

understands unilaterally (this perpetual misunderstanding is exactly the 'tragic'); there is,

however, someone who understands each word in its duplicity and who, in addition, hears the

very deafness of the characters speaking in front of him - this someone being precisely the

reader (or here, the listener). Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of

multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue,

parody, contestation, but there is tane place where this multiplicity is focused and that place

is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author'

'A text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination'

'The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.'

A metaphor that might explain this more clearly is the following: Words are like a flu of the

mind in that they have the property to spread to others and infect their minds as well. The flu

propagates on its own, independent of those who speak the words, or to continue with my flu

metaphor, cough. Only the end result, namely the infection, is what really matters.

In a sense this means that only interpretation matters: The author has no influence over a

work once it is finished. It has a meaning that is independent of what its author means with it.