ROLAND BARTHES

Roland Barthes is a key figure in international intellectual life. He is one of the most
important intellectual figures to have emerged in postwar France and his writings continue
to have an influence on critical debates today. When he died in 1981, he left a body of
major work but, as many of his friends and his admirers claimed, with still more important
work to come. I cant possible hope to do justice to the diversity of his various writings
here - I can only point you in the direction of Culler (1983), Moriarty (1991) and Rylance
(1994) where you will find good accounts of his career - so I will plunge straightaway into a
discussion of Mythologies, which is one of his earliest and most widely-read works.
Mythologies is one of Barthess most popular works because in it we see the intellectual as
humourist, satirist, master stylist and debunker of the myths that surround us all in our
daily lives.
Moartea Autorului
n nuvela sa, Sarrasine, Balzac referindu-se la un castrat travestit n femeie a scris
aceast fraz : Era femeia ns si, cu temerile ei subite, cu capriciile ei nemotivate, cu
nelinistile ei instinctive, ndr znelile f r pricin , bravadele si ncnt toarea subtilitate a
sentimentelor. Cine vorbeste astfel? Eroul nuvelei, interesat s ignore castratul ascuns
n spatele femeii? nsul Balzac, a c rui experien personal l nzestreaz cu o filosofie
a femeii? Autorul Balzac, profesnd idei literare asupra feminit ii? n elepciunea
universal ? Psihologia romantic ? Va fi imposibil s afl m vreodat , pentru motivul
ntemeiat c scriitura este distrugere a oric rei voci, a oric rei origini. Scriitura este acest
neutru, acest compozit, acest oblic prin care subiectul nostru alunec , alb-negru n care
se pierde orice identitate, ncepnd chiar cu aceea a corpului care scrie.
Probabil a fost dintotdeauna astfel: ndat ce un fapt este povestit, n scopuri intrazitive
si nu ca s ac ioneze n mod direct asupra realului, adic f r nici o alt func ie dect
nsusi exerci iul simbolului, se produce acest decrosaj, vocea si pierde originea, autorul
p trunde n propria sa moarte, scriitura ncepe. Cu toate acestea, constiin a acestui
fenomen a fost variabil ; n societ ile primitive, povestirea [le recit] nu este niciodat
asumat de o persoan anume, ci de un mediator, saman sau recitator, c ruia i se
poate admira, la rigoare, performan a (adic st pnirea codului narativ), dar niciodat
geniul. Autorul este un personaj modern, produs, probabil, de societatea noastr n
m sura n care, la finele Evului Mediu, odat cu empirismul englez, ra ionalismul francez
si credin a personalizat a Reformei, a descoperit prestigiul individului sau, cu o
formulare mai nobil , al persoanei umane.
Este logic, asadar, ca, n materie de literatur , pozitivismul rezumat si culme a
ideologiei capitaliste s fie acela care s fi acordat cea mai mare importan
persoanei autorului. Autorul domneste nc n manualele de istorie literar , n
biografiile scriitorilor, n interviurile din reviste si chiar n constiin a literatorilor, preocupa i
s -si asocieze, gra ie jurnalelor intime, persoana si opera; imaginea literaturii, asa cum o
putem afla n cultura curent , este centrat tiranic asupra autorului, a persoanei, istoriei,
gusturilor, pasiunilor sale; critica mai const nc , de cele mai multe ori, n a spune c
opera lui Baudelaire este esecul omului Baudelaire, cea a lui Van Gogh nebunia lui,
cea a lui Ceaikovski viciul s u: explica ia operei este c utat ntotdeauna n cel care a
produs-o, ca si cum, prin intermediul alegoriei mai mult sau mai pu in transparente a
fic iunii, cea care si-ar face auzit m rturisirea ar fi mereu, n ultim instan , vocea
unei unice si ideatice persoane, Autorul.
Desi domnia Autorului este nc destul de puternic (noua critic n-a f cut adeseori
dect s-o consolideze), se n elege de la sine c anumi i scriitori au ncercat de mult
vreme s-o submineze. n Fran a, Mallarme a fost f r ndoial cel dinti care a v zut si
care a prev zut toat amploarea sa, necesitatea de a substitui limbajul nsusi aceluia
care pn atunci era inut s -i fie proprietar; pentru el, ca si pentru noi, limbajul este cel
care vorbeste, nu autoruI; a scrie nseamn a atinge printr-o impersonalizare
prealabil pe care nu o putem confunda sub nici o form cu obiectivitatea castratoare
a romancierului realist acel punct n care singur limbajul ac ioneaz , performeaz , si
nu eu; ntreaga poetic a lui Mallarme const n a suprima autorul n favoarea scriiturii
(ceea ce presupune, vom vedea, a-i reda cititorului locul s u). Valery, incomodat de o
psihologie a Eului, a ndulcit mult teoria mallarmean , dar ntorcndu-se ntr-o
apeten clasicist , la lec iile retoricii n-a ncetat s transforme Autorul n obiect de
ndoial si deriziune, a accentuat natura lingvistic si parc accidental [hasardeuse] a
activit ii sale si a militat pe tot parcursul c r ilor sale de proz n favoare condi iei
esen ialmente verbale a literaturii, fa de care orice recurs la interioritatea scriitorului i
se p rea pur supersti ie.
Proust nsusi, n ciuda carcaterului aparent psihologic a ceea ce numim analizele sale,
si-a fixat n mod vizibil drept sarcin distrugerea inexorabil printr-o rafinare
[subtilisation] extrem a raportului dintre scriitor si personajele lui, desemnndu-l drept
narator nu pe cel care a v zut sau a sim it, nici m car pe cel care scrie, ci pe cel care va
scrie (tn rul din roman dar, de fapt, ce vrst are el si cine este? doreste s scrie,
dar nu poate, iar romanul se ncheie cnd scriitura devine n sfrsit posibil ). Proust i-a
dat scriiturii moderne epopeea ei: printr-o r sturnare radical , n loc s -si pun via a n
roman, cum se spune destul de des, a f cut din chiar via a lui o oper pentru care
propria sa carte i-a servit ntr-un fel drept model, nct ni se pare evident c nu Charlus l
imit pe Montesquieu, c c Montesquieu, n realitatea sa anecdotic , istoric , nu este
dect un fragment secundar, derivat al lui Charlus.
n fine, Suprarealismul, ca s r mnem la aceast preistorie a modernit ii, nu putea,
desigur, s -i atribuie limbajului o pozi ie suveran , n m sura n care limbajul este
sistem, iar ceea ce se viza prin aceast miscare era, pe filier romantic , o subversiune
direct a codurilor de altfel, iluzorie, c ci un cod nu se poate distruge, putem doar s
juc m mpotriva lui; dar, recomandnd f r ncetare contrarierea brusc a sensurilor
asteptate (faimoasa sacad suprarealist ), ncredin nd minii grija de a scrie ct de
repede posibil ceea ce criteriul nsusi ignor (dicteul automat), acceptnd princpiul drept
experien a unei scriituri plurale [a plsieurs], Suprarealismul a contribuit la desacralizarea
imaginii Autorului, n fine, n afara literaturii nsesi (la drept vorbind, aceste distinc ii
devin perimate), lingvistica furnizeaz un instrument analitic pre ios pentru distrugerea
Autorului, ar tnd c enun area n ansamblul ei este un proces vid, care func ioneaz
perfect f r a fi necesar s -l umplem cu persoana interlocutorilor: din punct de vedere
lingvistic, autorul nu este niciodat nimic mai mult dect cel care scrie, la fel cum eu nu
este altceva dect cel care spune eu; limbajul cunoaste un ,subiect, nu o persoan ,
si acest subiect, vid n afara nsesi enun rii care l defineste, este suficient pentru a face
limbajul s se , in , adic pentru a-l epuiza.
ndep rtarea Autorului (o dat cu Brecht, am putea vorbi aici de o veritabil ,distan are,
Autorul micsorndu-se ca figur n fundalul scenei literare) nu este numai un fapt istoric
sau un act de scriitur ; ea transform textul modern de la un cap t la altul (sau ceea
ce este acelasi lucru textul este, de acum nainte, creat si citit astfel nct, la toate
nivelele, autorul este absent din el). Timpul, n primul rnd, nu mai este acelasi. Autorul,
atunci cnd se crede n el, este conceput ntotdeauna ca fiind trecutul propriei sale c r i;
cartea si autorul se plaseaz de la sine pe aceeasi dreapt , segmentat ca un nainte si
un dup ; Autorul este inut a nutri [nourrir] cartea, prin urmare, exist naintea ei,
gndeste, sufer pentru ea; ntre ine cu opera lui acelasi raport de anteceden ca un
tat cu fiul s u. Dimpotriv , scriitorul modern se naste n acelasi timp cu textul lui; el nu
este nicidecum nzeatrat cu o fiin care i-ar preceda sau exceda scriitura, nu este ntru
nimic subiectul al c rui predicat ar fi cartea sa; nu exist alt timp dect cel al enun rii si
orice text este scris aici si acum. nseamn c (sau rezult c ) a scrie nu mai poate
desemna o opera ie de nregistrare, de constatare, de reprezentare, de zugr vire (cum
spuneau clasicii), ci ceea ce lingvistii, n succesiunea filosofiei oxfordiene, denumesc un
performativ, form verbal rar (rezervat exclusiv persoanei nti si prezentului), n
care enun area nu are alt con inut (alt enun ) dect actul prin care se emite; ceva
asem n tor cu acel Eu declar al regilor sau Eu cnt al poe ilor str vechi; scriptorul
modern, dup ce l-a ngropat pe Autor, nu mai poate asadar crede, conform viziunii
patetice a predecesorilor s i, c mna i este prea nceat fa de gndire sau pasiune
si c , prin urmare, f cnd din necesitate o lege, trebuie s accentueze aceast
ntrziere si s -i slefuiasc la nesfrsit forma; pentru el, din contr , mna, desprins de
orice voce, purtat de un gest pur de inscrip ionare (si nu de exprimare), traseaz un
cmp f r origine sau, cel pu in, care nu are alt origine dect limbajul nsusi, adic
tocmai acel lucru care pune nentrerupt sub semnul ntreb rii orice origine.
Stim acum c un text nu este compus dintr-un sir de cuvinte degajnd un sens unic,
cumva teologic (care ar reprezenta mesajul Autorului-Dumnezeu), ci un spa iu cu
dimensiuni multiple, unde se mbin si se contest scriituri variate, dintre care nici una
nu este original ; textul este o es tur de citate, provenite din mii de focare de cultur .
Asemeni lui Bouvard si Pecuchet, acesti eterni copisti, n acelasi timp sublimi si comici,
si al c ror ridicol profund indic exact adev rul scriiturii, scriitorul nu poate dect s imite
un gest mereu anterior, niciodat original; singura sa putere este s amestece
scriiturile, s le contrarieze pe unele prin celelalte, astfel nct s nu se sprijine niciodat
pe vreuna dintre ele; dac ar vrea s se exprime, ar trebui cel pu in s stie c acel ceva
interior pe care pretinde c -l traduce nu este, el nsusi, dect un dic ionar gata ntocmit,
ale c rui cuvinte se pot explica doar prin alte cuvinte, si asta la nesfrsit; aventur prin
care a trecut n mod exemplar tn rul Thomas de Quincey, att de bun cunosc tor al
elinei nct, pentru a traduce n aceast limb moart de idei si imagini absolut moderne,
si crease ne spune Baudelaire un dic ionar mereu la ndemn , n alt fel complex si
extins dect acela care rezult din acribia vulgar a temelor pur latine (Paradisurile
artificiale); succedndu-i Autorului, scriptorul nu mai are n el pasiuni, umori,
sentimente, impresii, ci acest imens dic ionar din care extrage o scriitur ce nu cunoaste
nici o opreliste; via a nu face niciodat dect s imite cartea si aceast carte ns si nu
este dect o es tur de semne, imita ie pierdut , infinit ndep rtat [reculee].
Autorul o dat ndep rtat, preten ia de a descifra un text devine complet inutil . S -i dai
unui text un Autor nseamn s -i impui acestui text o limit , s -i conferi un semnificat
ultim, s nchizi scriitura. Aceast concep ie convine de minune criticii, care vrea atunci
s -si dea drept sarcin esen ial descoperirea Autorului (sau a ipostazelor sale:
societatea, istoria, psihismul, libertatea) dincolo de oper ; Autorul o dat aflat, textul este
explicat, criticul a nvins; nu este deci nimic surprinz tor n faptul c , din punct de
vedere istoric, domnia Autorului a fost si aceea a criticului, dar si critica (fie ea si nou )
este destabilizat mpreun cu Autorul. n scriitura multipl , ntr-adev r, totul trebuie
descurcat [demeler], dar nimic descifrat [dechiffrer]; structura poate fi urm rit ,
[sur]filat (asa cum se spune despre un ochi dus la ciorap) n toate etapele si la toate
nivelele sale, dar nu exist n fond; spa iul scriiturii este de parcurs, nu de str puns;
scriitura aduce mereu sens, dar ntotdeauna pentru a-l evapora; ea se dedic unei
suprim ri (exemption) sistematice a sensului. Prin chiar acest fapt, literatura (ar fi mai
bine s spunem, de acum ncolo, Scriitura), refuznd s -i ncredin eze textului (si lumii
ca text) vreun secret, adic un sens ultim, elibereaz o activitate pe care am putea-o
numi contra-teologic , cu adev rat revolu ionar , c ci a refuza s limitezi sensul
nseamn , pn la urm , a-l refuza pe Dumnezeu si ipostazele sale: ra iunea, stiin a,
legea.
S revenim la fraza lui Balzac. Nimeni (adic nici o persoan ) nu rosteste; sursa ei,
vocea ei nu este locul real al scriiturii, ci este lectura. Un alt exemplu foarte precis ar
putea l muri acest lucru: cercet ri recente (J-P vernant) au pus n lumin natura
constitutiv ambigu a tragediei grecesti; textul ei este esut din cuvinte cu dublu sens, pe
care fiecare personaj le n elege n mod unilateral (tocmai aceast perpetu n elegere
constituie tragicul); exist totusi cineva care n elege fiecare cuvnt n duplicitatea sa si
n elege mai mult, dac putem spune asa, ns si surditatea personajelor care vorbesc n
fa a lui; acest cineva este chiar cititorul (sau, n cazul de fa , auditorul). Astfel se
dezv luie fiin a total a scriiturii: un text este alc tuit din scriituri multiple, provenite din
mai multe culturi si care intr unele cu altele n dialog, se pardoiaz , se contest ; dar
exist un loc n care aceast multiplicitate se unific [se rassemble] si acest loc nu este
autorul, cum s-a spus pn acum, este cititorul; cititorul este chiar spa iul n care se
nscriu, f r ca vreunul s se piard , toate citatele din care este alc tuit o scriitur ;
unitatea unui text nu se afI n originea, ci n destina ia Iui, dar aceast destina ie nu
mai poate fi personal ; cititorul este un om f r istorie, f r biografie, f r psihologic;
este doar acest Cineva care ine laolalt n acelasi cmp toate urmele din care este
alc tuit scrisul. at de ce este derizoriu s condamni noua scriitur n numele unui
umanism care se d n mod ipocrit drept ap r torul drepturilor cititorului. Critica clasic
nu s-a ocupat niciodat de cititor; pentru ea, nu exista n literatur un alt om dect cel
care scrie. ncepem acum s nu ne mai l s m nsela i de asemenea antifraze, prin care
lumea bun militeaz cu superbie tocmai n favoarea acelor lucruri pe care le
ndep rteaz , le ignor , le n bus sau le distruge; stim c , pentru a asigura scriiturii un
viitor, trebuie s -i invers m mitul: pre uI nasterii cititoruIui este moartea AutoruIui.
"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
following 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 woman? Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal
experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing literary ideas
on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? 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, has 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 and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige
of the individual, of, as it is more 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 the 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 person and their work through
diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is
tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while
criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaires work is the failure of
Baudelaire the man, Van Goghs his madness, Tchaikovskys his vice. 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.

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 loosen it. In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to see and to foresee
in its full extent the necessity 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 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. Mallarmes entire poetics consists in suppressing the
author in the interests of writing (which is, as will be seen, to restore the place of the
reader). Valery, encumbered by a psychology of the Ego, considerably diluted
Mallarmes 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 essentially verbal condition of literature, in the face of
which all recourse to the writers interiority seemed 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 extreme subtilization,
the relation between the writer and his characters; by making of the narrator not 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 novel ends when writing at last becomes possible), Proust gave modern
writing its epic. By a radical reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as is so
often maintained, he made of his very life a work for which his own book was the model;
so that it is clear to us that Charlus does not imitate 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 modernity, Surrealism,
though unable to accord language a supreme place (language being system and the aim
of the movement being, romantically, a direct subversion of codesitself moreover
illusory: 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 meaning (the famous surrealist jolt), by entrusting the hand with the
task of writing as quickly as possible what the head itself is unaware of (automatic
writing), by accepting the principle and the experience of several people writing together.
Leaving aside literature itself (such distinctions really becoming 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 without there being
any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutors. 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.
The removal of the Author (one could talk here with Brecht of a veritable distancing, the
Author 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 text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the
author is absent). The temporality 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 Author 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
preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is
no other time 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 Oxford philosophy, call a performative a
rare verbal form (exclusively given in the first person and in the present tense) in which
the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by
which it is utteredsomething like the I declare of kings or the I sing of very ancient
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 that consequently, making a law of necessity, he must
emphasize this delay and indefinitely polish his form. For him, on the contrary, the
hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of
expression), traces a field without originor which, at least, has no other origin than
language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning
(the message of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of
writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn
from the innumerable centres of culture. Similar to Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal
copyists, at once sublime and comic and whose profound ridiculousness indicates
precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior,
never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in
such a way as never to rest on any one of them. Did he wish to express himself, he
ought at least to know that the inner thing he thinks to translate is itself only a ready-
formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely;
something experienced in exemplary fashion by the young Thomas de Quincey, he who
was so good at Greek that in order to translate absolutely modern ideas and images into
that dead language, he had, so Baudelaire tells us (in Paradis Artificiels), created for
himself an unfailing dictionary, vastly more extensive and complex than those resulting
from the ordinary patience of purely literary themes. Succeeding the Author, the scriptor
no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this
immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does
more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs imitation that is
lost, infinitely deferred.

Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a
text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close
the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the
important task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche,
liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is explained
victory to the critic. Hence there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the
Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism (be it new) is
today undermined, along with the Author. 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. In precisely this way
literature (it would bebetter from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a secret,
an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called
an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix
meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostasesreason, science, law.

Let us come back to the Balzac sentence. No one, no person, says it: its source, its
voice, is not the true place of the writing, which is reading. Anothervery precise
example will help to make this clear: recent research (J.-P. Vernant) 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 himthis 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 one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not,
as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that
make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a texts unity lies not in its
origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the
reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds
together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. Which is
why it is derisory to condemn the new writing in the name of a humanism hypocritically
turned champion of the readers rights. Classic criticism has never paid any attention to
the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let
ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good
society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know
that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader
must be at the cost of the death of the Author.