The Death of the Author

Bouvard and Pecuchet is an unfinished novel by Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880). Flaubert intended the novel to be his masterwork. In it, two Parisian copy clerks befriend each other; when one inherits a substantial amount of money, they decide to quit their jobs and retire to the countryside. There they pass their time trying to make sense, mostly idiotically, of all the various branches of human knowledge. Time and again they fumble through ideas, buffoonishly following them to one confused and disappointing dead end after another, learning nothing. Part of what impedes them, besides their amateurish mediocrity, is a habit of confusing signs and symbols with the things they stand for.

Castrati were boy singers castrated prior to puberty to preserve their ability to perform in a higher-pitched vocal range. This barbaric practice began in 17th-century Italy, in part because of restrictions the Catholic Church placed on women performing on stage. It persisted in large part, however, because of the unique and powerful quality of the castrato voice. Many of the main female opera roles were played by castrati, especially in 18th- and 19th-century Italy, and many of them became sought-after, famous, and wealthy. The last known castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, died in 1922.

Empiricism is the idea that measurable, quantifiable data of experience is the only legitimate subject matter for science and philosophy. In referring to “English empiricism,” Barthes means the philosophy originating with late 17th- and 18th-century philosophers like John Locke, Francis Bacon, and David Hume (though Hume was Scottish). Empiricism was both a reaction against the notion that knowledge is derived from authority (particularly religious authority) and an attempt to put the philosophy of knowledge (variously known as metaphysics or epistemology) on a scientific basis. Broadly speaking, empiricists argued that knowledge can only originate with sensory experience and can only develop through operations of the mind on those sensory experiences (such as memory and association). Empiricism, which still holds sway in contemporary science, paradoxically paved the way for various forms of skepticism (which doubts the reliability of knowledge as a reflection of reality) and even nihilism (which holds that nothing is knowable).

By putting this word in quotes in Section 2, Barthes is referring to an idea central to Romanticism (an 18th-century artistic movement) that the artist possesses a uniquely individual and original talent for creating art and distilling the spirit of the culture and era into their works. For Barthes, the notion of “genius” was part of the mythology of the author—a nonexistent characteristic that critics and readers invented as part of the cult of authorship, something that should be done away with.

New Criticism, or nouvelle critique (not to be confused with American New Criticism), was an academic movement originating in 1960s France. There were many and varied adherents of the nouvelle critique—Barthes prominent among them—but generally they were united by the idea that criticism should concern itself mainly with the internal structure of the work being studied. They saw themselves in opposition to “classical criticism,” which focused on contexts like the author’s biography, the work’s place in the French literary canon, and the aesthetic appreciation of the author’s unique style. Barthes mentions “new criticism” as having made inroads toward overthrowing the dominance of the author in criticism, though he feels it has not yet gone far enough to focus exclusively on the work as an exercise in the play of language, which is to say, as writing (écriture).

Barthes refers to a movement in language philosophy and linguistics generally known as speech act theory. Shortly before the publication of Barthes’s essay, Oxford professor J. L. Austin published an influential book called How to Do Things with Words (1962). In it, Austin describes several kinds of utterances that can be distinguished from one another based on what “act” they engage in. This was in opposition to the language philosophy of his day, which mainly focused on whether and how statements can be regarded as true or false. Performative speech acts are those in which the utterance and the act are identical, for example, phrases like “I promise” or “I bet you it will be sunny tomorrow.” They cannot be evaluated as true or false, only as appropriate (or not) to their circumstances. If the circumstances fit, a performative does what it says, and says what it does.

Rhetoric is vast body of teaching, dating to the ancient Greeks and Romans, that describes how speakers and writers can most successfully persuade audiences. Barthes notes that poet Paul Valéry, whose interest in rhetoric focused on the importance of the audience, was one modern writer who understood the “death of the author” thesis. Barthes himself wrote extensively on classical rhetoric and the rhetoric of images.

In ordinary usage, “text” designates any printed document that can be read. Barthes and other cultural critics often expand the term to include nonlinguistic, nonprinted objects (e.g., paintings, photographs, films, music, physical objects) that can be interpreted according to various codes, codes being any set of signs and rules for using them. In this essay, Barthes uses “text” to designate any instance of “writing,” where “writing” (écriture) is also understood in the special sense of language or code when it is practiced for its own sake, as in a fictional narrative, poem, dramatic play, painting, or symphony. A text should be understood not as something authored by a traditional author or creator but as a case of language or code being operated as if from within, according to its own terms, rules, and conventions.

Broadly speaking, rationalism refers to any philosophy holding that reason (as opposed to sensory experience) is the true source of knowledge. In the phrase “French rationalism,” Barthes is referring mainly to the rationalistic philosophic system of René Descartes (1596-1650), who is most associated with his famous phrase “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think therefore I am”).

The Reformation was a major development in Western Christianity, mostly centered in 16th-century Europe, wherein Protestants broke with the religious and political authority of the Roman Catholic Church over a range of issues, including claimed errors in teaching and abuses in administration. The Protestant Reformation is generally dated to 1517, when Martin Luther published his “Ninety-Five Theses” critical of the catholic church, including the practice of indulgences, in which the church would forgive sins in exchange for monetary payment. For Barthes’s essay, it is important to know that Protestant reformers emphasized the individual’s ability to read and interpret the Bible without the mediation or interference of church authority.