Foucault's "What is an Author?"

Foucault begins his lecture entitled “What is an Author?” by stating outright that he has no intention whatsoever of answering his posed question: “Far from offering a solution”, he writes, “I will attempt to indicate some of the difficulties related to these questions”.


Foucault’s treatise addresses the issue of “authorship”, a reaction against Barthes’ and Derrida’s theses on the same subject. He immediately demonstrates his argument that authorship is a classification or description, rather than a pronoun, when he casually alludes to Nietzsche; “God and man died a common death”. An immediately recognizable reworking of Nietzsche’s widely-quoted statement, “God is dead” [The Gay Science, 1882], Foucault equates our lost concept of an author with the “death” of Christianity and its values. Moreover, he introduces “author function” – that is, what fuels our insistent interest in the “author” and the subsequent assumptions we make about a text based on its ‘author’ – in referencing the iconic quote and iconic author. “Nietzsche”, just like “Plato”, “Descartes”, or indeed “Foucault”, are not just names, but descriptions of a text’s validity and significance. We attribute an immediate sense of authority and gravitas to their words, a point Foucault conveys acutely.

He then discusses the differences of “author function” between the arts and sciences, and highlights an inevitable truth in comparing the spheres of learning; while scientific writings can have a valid claim to “truth”, or the objective nature of the world, the arts can have no such black-and-while objectivity, and thus ‘authorship’ [which – and this article prompted me to look into it – shares the same etymological root as ‘authority’] will always attract more focus.


It was difficult not to notice Foucault’s bias towards “thinkers” such as himself like Freud and Marx, as opposed to novelists. Comparing Marx and Freud with nineteenth-century writer Ann Radcliffe seems rather unjust. Pitting Radcliffe and her Gothic-Romance novels against the likes of Freud and Marx is hardly a fair contrast, but the example illustrates his attitudes regarding the difference between the author of a literary, fictional text with founders of a discipline/discourse. Radcliffe’s novels influence the genre of nineteenth century Gothic fiction, “various characteristic signs, figures, relationships, and structures that could be integrated into other books”. While the novelist’s function as an author goes beyond her written work (i.e. by developing a certain genre), the “initiators of discursive practices” (and Foucault uses Freud as a paradigmatic example and the subsequent field of psychoanalysis) create a space in which new, different ideas can be introduced, rather than writers following a particular convention; they establish “endless possibility of discourse”. Foucault’s point is convincing and compelling, but I still think its success relies on the examples he chooses. Substituting, say, Ovid, or Shakespeare, or the great Romantic poets for Ann Radcliffe, Foucault would have a more difficult time arguing that writers of literature have not completely revolutionised not only the way we write, but the way we think, and shaped our collective social psyche, just as much as Marx or Freud, with influences which extend far beyond their genres.

All in all, Foucault hopes for a time when our romanticised and overrated focus on “the author” can give way to more insightful questions about literature and discourse. Foucault’s paper is certainly a sophisticated argument, taking the reader through the way we use the most basic language (pronouns and names) and thereby exemplifying how an author is something quite different and abstract. But it may make one wonder whether the benefits of anonymity he preaches are perhaps making a virtue out of necessity. Some of our most canonical “authors” have their authorship or identity in doubt, such as Shakespeare and Homer. While their influences are incontestable, we may never know the truth of their texts’ much debated “authorship”. For such cases, perhaps it would be best to, pragmatically, turn to Foucault’s solution.

And as for his final question, “What matter who’s speaking?” Well, what should we think of this controversial thesis if it weren‘t Foucault’s name atop the page? Being against the idea doesn’t save Foucault from the inevitable fate of authorship.