ABSTRACT

Ever since Barthes and Foucault, the "authority" of the "author" has been called into question. Toward the end of his essay, "What is an Author," Foucault sketches a Utopian future in which he envisions not only the death of the author but also the demise of the "author-function" as an ideological construct. In this paper, I propose to stage a feminist intervention in Foucault's "meta-fantasy" by calling into question the necessity of doing away with the author-functions, as Foucault envisions it. This paper asks, in other words, Barthes and Foucault one fundamental question pertaining to the act of reading: does the birth of the reader have to be at the cost of the death of the author? I will thus attempt to disentahgle authorship from authority by uncovering the multi-layered codes with which each concept is marked and thus expose the imprisoning dichotomy that the Barthesian and Foucaldian debate over the author as either subject of or subject to, still suffers, whether consciously or unconsciously. The authorities that the text exercises derive as much from the author, the reader/critic, as from the linguistic, generic, cultural, and symbolic traditions both the author and the reader sanction and uphold. As liberating as Foucault's theory seemingly is, it still has blindspots requiring our caution, whether we are feminists or not.