The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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the sense that “it is language which speaks” and not the author (Barthes 1977, 142). As such, to write is to “perform” language rather than to transcribe into a material form one’s own intentions. Thus, to call for the death of the author is to call for the realization that writing must not be constrained in meaning by the imposition of an author.

“What Is an Author?” begins with Foucault outlining the “two themes” of modern literary theory to which he is generally sympathetic: (1) that writing, conceptually, has been freed from “the theme of expression” (EEW2, 206) and (2) that writing is no longer conceived of as a kind of immortality for the writer, but rather a “voluntary self-effacement” (EEW2, 206). As regards the irst, Foucault adopts the general insight from Saussure that language can be understood as a system without reference to a speaking individual. Foucault writes that “Referring only to itself, but without being restricted to the conines of its interiority, writing is identiied with its own unfolded exteriority” (EEW2, 206). Since language does not require a speaking individual for its own internal coherence, writing can no longer be thought of as the “expression” of the intentions of the writing subject. The second theme, the author’s self-effacement, is linked to the irst. If writing can be understood free of the idea that it is originally tied to the writer’s expression, then the act of writing itself must, as Barthes puts it, “reach that point where only language acts” (Barthes 1977, 143). Indeed, Foucault tells us that the writer “must assume the role of the dead person in the game of writing” (EEW2, 207).

However, although Foucault adopts the idea of writing, he argues that it is much too quick to claim, as Barthes does in “The Death of the Author,” that the death of the author has been achieved. To this end, Foucault shows how two contemporary ideas about how we are to understand the absence of the author in fact presuppose the very entity that they deny. The irst notion that is supposed to make sense of the author’s absence is that of the work (œuvre). As Foucault understands it, the notion of the work determines the relationships between texts in terms of an overall structure that can be explicated in such a way that, supposedly, does not rely on any notion of the author. Yet, on closer inspection, the structure of a work exists only in reference to an individual that has been labeled as an author. The question is: how does one actually delimit the sphere of texts accepted as the work? What constitutes, for instance, Nietzsche’s work? By what criteria does one choose to accept or reject a grocery receipt as part of a work? Indeed, Foucault asks, “How can one deine a work amid the millions of traces left by someone after his death” (EEW2, 207)? The work can only be deined through some reference to those texts that are produced through some kind of presupposed authorial intent. The second notion that is supposed to account for the absence of the author is Derrida’s notion of writing (écriture) (EEW2, 208). Using language similar to his critique of phenomenology in The Order of Things, Foucault argues that this notion of writing “seems to transpose the empirical characteristics of the author into the transcendental” by keeping alive

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“those representations that formed a particular image of the author” (EEW2, 208– 209). Speciically, the idea of writing as absence “seems to be a simple repetition, in transcendental terms, of both the religious principle of inalterable and yet never fulilled tradition, and the aesthetic principle of the work’s survival, its perpetuation beyond the author’s death, and its enigmatic excess in relation to him” (EEW2, 208). In other words, the idea that meaning is given through absence seems to take the empirical guarantor of meaning (the author) and, through effacing it, transforms it into the form of a transcendental absence, which is the new guarantor of meaning. As an absence, the author still haunts writing. For Foucault, both attempts to understand the absence of the author therefore fail.

So, what is an author, for Foucault? Foucault claims that the author should be understood not as an element within a discourse but rather as a role that plays a classiicatory function (EEW2, 210). That the notion of the author is a role rather than an element of discourse can be seen through the various problems that arise if we try to equate the role of the author with the element of the proper name. For instance, a proper name is one of simple reference, in the sense that it designates some individual. However, when used in the role of an author, the relation of reference of the name changes. As an author, the name “Aristotle” does not point simply to some individual. Rather, it is descriptive: the name “Aristotle” indicates “the author of the Analytics” or “the founder of ontology” (EEW2, 209). Furthermore, imagine if we were to ind out that all of Plato’s texts were actually written by Aristotle. The relationship of reference between the proper name “Aristotle” and the individual would not change – but the relationship between Aristotle as an author, his texts, and their interrelationships would change.

As such, the term “author” does not simply designate the reference between a proper name and a group of texts. Rather, it is a kind of role that a name can assume, or more speciically a discursive space that may be occupied by a subject, which serves two functions: (1) to “manifest the appearance of a certain discursive set” and

(2) to manifest “the status of this discourse within a society or culture” (EEW2, 211). First, the author’s name serves to delimit a number of texts and the internal relationship between them (EEW2, 210). For example, “Aristotle” refers to a group of texts that were written by him and the relationships among them such as their chronological order. Second, for Foucault, the name of the author gives a kind of status to the speech of the particular discourse: “it is a speech that must be received in a certain mode and that, in a given culture, must receive a certain status” (EEW2, 211). Thus, the notion of the author must be understood not as an element but rather as a function – speciically, the author-function.

The author-function, in its role of indicating a discursive set and its privileged speech, has four characteristics. First, the author-function is tied to systems of ownership, and it is through these systems of ownership that the author-function is able to set a limit on writing (EEW2, 211). For Foucault, writing is transgressive because

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it has become bound up with “rules concerning author’s rights, author-publisher relations, [and] rights of reproductions” (EEW2, 212). Second, the author-func- tion will vary within a discourse, and across discourses and times (ibid.). That is, this function is not a universal constant. For instance, the valence between author and text in terms of literary and scientiic text changed within the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (ibid.). Previously, literary texts with anonymous authors were accepted on their own terms, whereas the truth of a scientiic text was linked to the name of the author. Then, an inversion or chiasm between author and text occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The truth of scientiic texts became tied to the content of the text itself rather than the name of the author, and literary texts only became accepted when assigned a proper name. If an anonymous literary text is found, Foucault writes, “the game becomes one of rediscovering the author” (EEW2, 213). Third, the author-function does not spontaneously develop but is instead the result of a long and complex operation (ibid.). To illustrate this characteristic, Foucault argues that the way in which contemporary literary criticism constructs the author is derived from the authentication of texts within the Christian tradition (EEW2, 214). For instance, Saint Jerome wrote that a number of methods must be used to classify texts in accordance with the saintliness of the author, one of which was that if any text contradicted the main thesis of the group of texts, then it was to be rejected. Similarly, Foucault argues that in literary criticism, at a very basic level, there is still the attempt to resolve contradictions within an author’s work (EEW2, 215). Finally, the author-function refers to “positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals” rather than the simple reference to some real individual (EEW2, 216). This can be seen through the examination of the personal pronouns within a mathematical text. As Foucault points out, the author of the preface indicates the writer of the text who “completed a certain task” (EEW2, 216). However, the demonstrations within the text itself do not refer to this same individual author. The demonstrations push the idea of the author into a kind of anonymity, as it is the demonstrations themselves that guarantee the truth of the text, such that anyone could have written it.

The notion of the author is not limited solely to the author of a literary text. In fact, for Foucault, we can understand the founders of various discourses as endowed with the author-function, but in a way that is fundamentally different from the author-function within a literary text, painting, or piece of music (EEW2, 217). The difference lies in the way that the founder of a discourse has “produced something else: the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts” (ibid.). This is not to be understood as the possibility of duplication, such as within the founding of the gothic novel. The gothic novel has a certain set of requirements, and for any novel to be gothic, it must it these requirements. However, the founding of psychoanalysis is much different. The name “Freud” does not designate a series of conditions for the duplication of his texts. Rather, it indicates a set of possibilities and rules

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for further texts. In addition, unlike a scientiic text, the author of a discourse does not participate within the texts that follow the institution of the discourse. For example, the truth of a text in physics is not related back to the work of Galileo, Newton, or Einstein. In Foucault’s account, truth in psychoanalysis is always referred back to the work of Freud, its founder. This foundational relation always necessitates, again in language similar to the chapter “Man and His Doubles” in The Order of Things, a “return to the origin” within a discourse, in which the modiication of a discourse is always related to the work of its founders. Furthermore, by referring the modiication of a discourse back to its origin, the author-function guarantees the continuity of a discourse, as this reference back does not allow for modiication outside the relation itself.

We have now seen how the author-function operates, its various characteristics, and that it operates not only within literary texts but within the founding of discourses as such. Yet, we have not adequately examined the way in which the author-function is a principle of constraint or limitation, and thus the reversal of the traditional notion of the author. For Foucault, we traditionally understand the author as a source of creative expression, “the genial creator of a work,” or a “perpetual surging of invention” (EEW2, 221). However, if we understand the author instead as a kind of discursive position, the assignment of an author to a group of texts does not designate a source of creative invention but rather functions as a limit on how texts can be arranged and understood. Foucault writes,

The author is not an indeinite source of signiications that ill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of iction. (EEW2, 221)

Although here Foucault is discussing iction, the idea that the author is a principle of limitation can also be seen within the founding of a discourse, speciically as regards Foucault’s notion of the “return to the origin.” If the modiications of a discourse must always be referred back to its origin (i.e., its founder), then there is no possibility for the discourse to change completely, and thus meaning is constrained.That is, if psychoanalysis is always referred back to Freud, it can never be anything but Freudian. Thus, any proliferation of meaning within psychoanalysis must always be related back to Freud, and through this relation some meanings are accepted whereas others are rejected.

Since the notion of the author is tied to discourse, the author cannot be said to have died or disappeared until our modern discursive formation changes into a new one. That is, our current discourse cannot simply drop the author-function. Its shape must change completely, and in such a way that it does not institute the authorfunction. In this regard, Foucault writes,

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I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that iction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint – one that will no longer be the author but will have to be determined, or, perhaps, experienced. (EEW2, 222)

As such, for Foucault, when our discursive formation changes into a new one, it is not that the author will die but that it will disappear completely.

The notion of the author can also be understood in terms of Foucault’s larger project during the “archaeological period” of his career. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault argues that the analysis of the ields of discourse within history requires that “we must rid ourselves of a whole mass of notions, each of which, in its own way, diversiies the theme of continuity” (EAK, 21). When historians analyze historical events, they make use of a set of presuppositions that allow them to constitute continuity. They presuppose a picture of the subject as the source of all meaning, and historical events then become organized in terms of a historical progression, along the lines of the development of rationality. As such, in order to describe historical events in terms of, for instance, rupture and chance, one must rid oneself of all the notions that are related to this picture of the subject. Although Foucault does not explicitly name the author in this discussion, he discusses a number of notions that relate to the discussion of the author in his work “What Is an Author?” Speciically, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, the notions of the book and the œuvre (work) must be jettisoned. Furthermore, Foucault argues that we must also rid ourselves of two “linked, but opposite themes”: (1) the secret origin and (2) the already-said (EAK, 25). In a discussion reminiscent of the “return to the origin” in “What Is an Author?” Foucault argues that historians treat history as a kind of “quest for and the repetition of an origin that eludes all historical determination,” since the origin can never be made present (EAK, 36, 25). Furthermore, this secret origin possesses an “already-said,” in the sense that the origin has a meaning itself that can never be made manifest, and it is thus the historian’s job to unearth and interpret the already-said of history. Both of these themes serve to guarantee the continuity of discourse by relating the understanding of history back to an immutable origin, which, since we can never have its original present to us, requires constant reinterpretation. The origin has the function of guaranteeing continuity, as does the notion of the author in terms of the founder of a discourse. As such, we can see a repetition of this limiting function within his overall project.

We are now in a position to understand the role of the notion of the author within Foucault’s “archaeological” period. The author is best understood as a kind of function, which, through a variety of operations, guarantees the continuity of a discourse and its progression into the igure through the limitation of the proliferation of meaning within a given discourse. That is, the author “allows a limitation

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of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of signiications within a world where one is thrifty not only with one’s resources and riches but also with one’s discourses and their signiications” (EEW2, 221). The notion of the author in Foucault is one of a mass of notions whose function is to guarantee the continuity of discourse, thus disallowing the rupture or change of a given discourse into a new one.

Harry A. Nethery IV

See Also

Archaeology

Language

Literature

Suggested Reading

Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

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them are important [Rufié’s analyses], since what are so clearly formulated here are the questions of both a ‘biohistory’ that is no longer the unitary and mythological history of the human species over time, and a ‘biopolitics’ that is not a matter of divisions, conservations and hierarchies but rather of communication and polymorphism” (FDE3, 97). Here he is suggesting that Rufié’s analyses allow us to conceptualize humanity not as a conglomeration of races but as a statistical spectrum of populations all of which are engaged in genetic exchange. Quoting Mayr approvingly, Foucault wrote: “Humanity is ‘a pool of intercommunicating genes’” (ibid.). That same year, he used the term in the last chapter of the Introduction to the History of Sexuality, where he wrote: “If one can apply the term biohistory to the pressures through which the movements of life and the process of history interfere with one another, one would have to speak of biopower to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life” (EHS1, 143). Biohistory thus names both a new conception of the human, as living being, which is now the target and object of political intervention, and also a new conception of life, of the living as such. Up through the middle of the eighteenth century, humans were conceived along Aristotelian lines, namely as animals that had the additional capacity for political existence. Now, however, “modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (ibid.). Modern humanity’s placing into question its “living being” has two dimensions: what does it mean for the human being to be a living being, and what is the living, what is life? Biohistory therefore names both the trace, or the history of the deliberate, calculated, concerted intervention of powerknowledge into the very biological makeup of humans, and also the history of the different conceptions of the “living” that have been mobilized, deployed, conceptualized, and conjured up to serve the political technologies that aimed to intervene at the level of biological existence. It becomes immediately evident, then, that in order to understand the novelty of biohistory, we have to turn to Foucault’s contributions to the history of natural history, the life sciences, and biology. The novelty of the term “biohistory” can only be appreciated against the background of Foucault’s sustained and unceasing thinking about the biological sciences and the “living.” Insofar as Foucault’s theoretical project can be thought of as a “critical history of thought” (EEW2, 459), we must understand “biohistory” as a critical concept in the critical history of the political technologies that have intervened in the biological structure of the human being.

Although it may be argued that the term “biohistory” remains underdeined and undertheorized, to then seemingly dissolve or disappear in the concept of governmentality and the hermeneutics of the subject, it should be noted that Michel Foucault’s entire oeuvre is dominated by the question of what it means to be human, to which biohistory is another chapter. This preoccupation appears already in

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Foucault’s complementary dissertation, and more speciically in the introduction to his translation into French of Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Standpoint (EIKA). This text was published in 1964, although the translation and research for the translation had been carried out between 1959 and 1960. This introduction, which anticipates the central theses of The Order of Things (FMC), focuses on the relationship between Kant’s critical philosophy, more speciically the Critique of Pure Reason, and the Anthropology, as this relationship is encapsulated in the synthesis of Kant’s three questions (What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?) into one question: What is Man? This relationship, however, is paradoxical, for the Anthropology makes no reference to the Critique, whereas the latter announces and makes space for the former: “The Anthropology rests on the Critique but is not rooted in it. It inclines spontaneously toward that which must serve as its foundation: not critical, but transcendental philosophy itself. It is there that we will discover the structure and the function of its empiricity” (EIKA, 87–88). This means that man is what Foucault will call in The Order of Things the “empirico-transcendental doublet”

(EOT, 318). Man is the type of being “such that knowledge will be attained in him that renders all knowledge possible” (ibid.). Man is the being that is both the condition of possibility of all knowledge and the object of knowledge that renders those conditions evident. Man is both object and subject. It knows only as it knows itself. In The Birth of the Clinic (EBC), this empiricity or empirico-transcendental doublet appears as the biologization of the study of humans through their being subjected to the “medical gaze” that operates in tandem with the drawing up of a “medical topography”: “If the sciences of man appeared as an extension of the sciences of life, it is because it was medically, as well as biologically, based: by transference, importation, and, often, metaphor, the sciences of man no doubt used concepts formed by biologists” (EBC, 36, italics in original). This medicalization and biologization of man renders him both subject and object of knowledge, implying an inversion of the way initude was accounted for through the classical period. Whereas for classical thought initude (death) had no other function than the negation of the ininite, for modern thought, at least since the eighteenth century, initude has acquired a positive dimension. Finitude as death now takes on a generative function: “The living night is dissipated in the brightness of death” (EBC, 146). Here is revealed the paradoxical nature of the human sciences: man as living entity at the disposal of social medicine is both the founding origin and limit of knowledge (EBC, 197).

Biohistory cannot be properly understood without a consideration of Foucault’s “archaeology of the human science” as it was developed in The Order of Things. At the center of this archaeology is an analysis of the shifts and caesuras in the episteme from the Renaissance, through the classical age, to the modern age. Some of the epistemic breaks Foucault tracks there are those between natural history, the life sciences, and modern biology. The classical episteme allowed the study of living entities