O autor em questão em Barthes e Foucault

Abstract

This study investigates the figure of the author from the researches conduced by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault in the late sixties and early seventies. In them we find a critique of the notion of author, which is associated with European modernity and its individualistic view. Although they were very close on these critical considerations, we intend to show that the analysis of Barthes and Foucault have different goals and achievements. By enacting the “death of the author”, Barthes is talking about the end of a kind of literary institution. On the other hand, Foucault comes to the issue from another way and turns not just on the author’s literary figure, but on the author of a discourse. Foucault’s interest is more properly philosophical, because it raises the historical conditions of possibility of discourse. The author is, in this perspective, one possible specification of the subject-function, understood as an internal procedure of control and delimitation of discourse.