The Author Is Dead, But: A Lacanian Response to Barthes’s Return-to-the-Author Paradox

In his 1994 book Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, Peter Brooks rejects the poststructuralist shift from author-focused criticism to reader-focused criticism, claiming it amounts to little more than an analogous reproduction of the same old embarrassing problem that has always faced psychoanalytic literary critics. According to Brooks, who only reluctantly accepts the title of psychoanalytic critic in the first place,¹ this problem rests in the notion that “psychoanalysis in literary study has over and again mistaken the object of analysis . . . [for] some person, some other psycho-dynamic structure . . . [when it] can and should be textual and rhetorical.”² While the idea of a purely textual approach to literary theory or criticism no doubt signals a refreshing change of direction for critics and theorists less interested in the “dynamics of literary response” than the “dynamics of literary texts,”³ as Brooks claims to be in an interview printed in the back of the book, it proves somewhat less encouraging for those unwilling or unable to conceive of a purely textual paradigm.

Challenging the kind of approach Brooks appears to be calling for, Walter Slatoff introduces his earlier book, With Respect to Readers, by writing: “One feels a little foolish having to begin by insisting that works of literature exist, in part, at least, in order to be read, that we do in fact read them, and that it is worth thinking about what happens when we do. . . . [E]ven those who most insisted on the autonomy of literary works and the irrelevance of the readers’ responses, themselves do read books and respond to them.”⁴ Harold Bloom makes a comparable point in The Anxiety of Influence, reminding his readers that “[p]oems are written by men, and not by Splendors.”⁵ Even Roland Barthes, whose 1967 “The Death of the Author” manifesto has been transformed into something of a slogan for poststructuralism’s anti-authorial sentiments (not to mention the anti-authoritative political sentiments of the decade in which it was first published), proves unable to sustain the premise of an authorless paradigm without further qualification. Consider the apparent volte-face Barthes performs some six years after the essay’s original 1967 publication, in The Pleasure of the Text, when he declares that “lost in the midst of a text . . . there is always the other, the author.”⁶ On first glance, it is as if by passing through death that the author comes not only to resume but to improve upon his status, elevated to the object of desire par excellence.

Given how well received and widely used the erotic discourse accompanying Barthes’s desirous return to the author has been, it is surprising how few commentaries have taken exception with, or attempted to explain, the paradox that sees the author brought back from the dead without annulling the death itself. That is, as big an impact as The Pleasure of the Text has had on the way we read texts, introducing a vocabulary of jouissance previously unknown to literary theorists, it has not damaged the reputation of Barthes’s earlier essay in the least. The author remains dead, even though he has returned—or, as Barthes puts it, “the author is dead . . . but [my italics].”⁷

Seán Burke compares the Barthesian author to figures like Dionysus and Christ, suggesting that death “does not so much destroy the ‘Author-God,’ but participates in its construction”⁸ by creating a king worthy of killing, a king who “must not only be dead before he can return, but who must continue to be dead even though he has returned.”⁹ While Burke is a critic who can hardly be accused of ignoring the discrepancy in Barthes’s treatment of the author—he makes an entire thesis out of the anomaly in his book The Death and Return of the Author—he might inversely be criticized for disregarding the erotic tones Barthes uses to shade the author’s return.

As Jane Gallop notes in the introduction to her recent work, The Deaths of the Author, Burke is far more focused on...