International Journal of Development in Social Sciences and Humanities

Post structuralism expels the Author from the Text: that is what Barthes means by ‘death’ of the author. Given the views of language on which structuralism and post structuralism rest, it is not possible to view authors as the masterful presences of old to be found within and without of their writings, transferring themselves whole and without loss or distortion from life into literature. The author is in fact a construct, a hypothesis, formed by a reader on the evidence of his or her reading. Whatever is known of the author is textual; they have no existence for us. The process by which authors are ‘constructed’ is circular: we abstract them from their texts and then use this abstraction to explain their texts. Barthes and Derrida after him seek to break this circle and de-originate the text, that is, originate it in language. Structuralism and post-structuralism will not accept the author as a sovereign unity regulating the semantic plane of his or her writing from within. Writing undoes the Author; he is disseminated. The replacement provided by the post - structuralists for the Author, that is, the Subject is present in the Text in a great many dispersed fragments, a presence among other presences and without any hold over them. From these dispersed fragments, the reader is free to construct some kind of a coherent figure who can be classed among the Text’s themes. If the Subject is conceived of as the author, it would be untenable, because the Author and the Subject to be discovered in Texts are not one but two. Derrida looks on efforts to authenticate texts by reference to some supposed ultimate authority absent from Texts as futile. They are a sign of the common nostalgia for the monolithic figure of the Author, or Derrida would say, for God, the ultimate law giver.