Gary Gutting

Foucault concludes that we should, strictly, not speak of the ‘author’

but of the ‘author function’. To be an author is not merely to have a certain factual relation to a text (for example, to have causally 11

produced it); it is, rather, to fulfil a certain socially and culturally defined role in relation to the text. Authorship is a social construction, not a natural kind, and it will vary over cultures and over time.

Accordingly, when authors write, much of what they say is a product not of their distinctive insight or ability but the result of the language they are employing. For much of the text it is just language that is speaking. Authors can react to this fact in different ways. One standard (romantic) idea sees the author as straining against the 13

structures of language to express unique individual insights.

But it remains clear that, for Foucault, language can and must take us beyond the mode of subjective or even inter-subjective expression.

In this world, God is dead, which means that there are no objectively defined limits of thought or action against which we can hurl ourselves. ‘Profanation in a world that no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred – is this not more or less what we may call transgression?’

Foucault, however, emphasizes that even in these cases the writer’s achievement is never literally that of a madman. ‘Madness’, he reminds us, ‘is precisely the absence of the work of art’ (MC, 287).