1466 I ROLAND BARTHES

The Death of the Author l

In his story Sarrasine 2 Balzac, describing a castrato disguised as a woman,
writes the following sentence: 'This was woman herself, with her sudden fears,
her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fuss-
ings, and her delicious sensibility.' Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the
story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woman?
Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a phi-
losophy of Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing 'literary' ideas on fem-
ininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? We shall never know,
for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every
point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our
subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the
very identity of the body writing. ,",'

No doubt it has always been that way. As soon as a fact is narrated no

longer with a view to acting directly QlJ reality but intransitively, that is to
say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the
symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author
enters into his own death, writing begins. The sense of this phenomenon,
however, has varied; in ethnographic societies the responsibility for a nar-
rative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator
whose 'performance'-the mastery of the narrative code-may possibly be
admired but never his 'genius'. The author is a modern figure, a product of
our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiri-
cism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it dis-
covered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the 'human
person'. It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the
epitome and culmination of capit~list ideology, which has attached the
greatest importance to the 'person' of the author. The author still reigns in
histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, as in the
very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their
work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in
ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life,
his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in
saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van
Gogh's his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice. 3 The explanation of a work is
always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in
the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the
voice of a single person, the author 'confiding' in us.

Though the sway of the Author remains powerful (the new criticism 4 has
often done no more than consolidate it), it goes without saying that certain
writers have long since attempted to loosen it. In France, Mallarme 5 was

I, Translated by Stephen Heath. Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Dutch painter.

2. Short novel (1830) by Honor~ de Balzac 4. The "new criticism" in France at that time
(1799-1850), about which Barthes was In the pro- Included structuralist, thematic, phenomenologi-
cess of writing (see S IZ, 1970). cal, SOciological, Marxist, and psychoanalytic crit-
3. Pyotr Tchalkovsky (1840-1893), Russian com- icism.
poser; his uvice" is presumably homosexuality. 5. STt':PHANE MALLARMt': (1842-1898), French
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE (1821-1867), French poet. poet.
 THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR / 1467

doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to
substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed
to be its owner. For him, for us too, it is language which speaks, not the
author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be
confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that
point where only language acts, 'performs', and not 'me'. Mallarme's entire
poetics consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing (which
is, as will be seen, to restore the place of the reader). Valery,6 encumbered
by a psychology of the Ego, considerably diluted Mallarme's theory but, his
taste for classicism leading him to turn to the lessons of rhetoric, he never
stopped calling into question and deriding the Author; he stressed the lin-
guistic and, as it were, 'hazardous' nature of his activity, and throughout his
prose works he militated in favour of the essentially verbal condition of lit-
erature, in the face of which all recourse to the writer's interiority seemed
to him pure superstition. Proust? himself, despite the apparently psycholog-
ical character of what al'e called his analyses, was ,isibly concerned with the
task of inexorably blurring, by an extreme subtilization, the relation between
the writer and his characters; by making of the narrator not he who has seen
and felt nor even he who is writing, but he who is going to write (the young
man in the novel-but, in fact, how old is he and who is he'?-wants to write
but cannot; the novel ends when writing at last becomes possible), Proust
gave modern writing its epic. By a radical reversal, instead of putting his life
into his novel, as is so often maintained, he made of his very life a work for
which his own book was the model; so that it is clear to us that Charlus 8
does not imitate Montesquiou but that Montesquiou-in his anecdotal, his-
torical reality-is no more than a secondary fragment, derived from Charlus.
Lastly, to go no further than this prehistory of modernity, Surrealism, though
unable to accord language a supreme place (language being system and the
aim of the movement being, romantically, a direct subversion of codes-
itself moreover illusory: a code cannot be destroyed, only 'played off'), con-
tributed to the desacralization of the image of the Author by ceaselessly
recommending the abrupt disappointment of expectations of meaning (the
famous surrealist 'jolt'), by entrusting the hand ~ith the task of writing as
quickly as possible what the head itself is unaware of (automatic writing),
by accepting the principle and the experience of several people writing,
together. Leaving aside literature itself (such distinctions really becoming
invalid), linguistics has recently prOvided the destruction of the Author with
a valuable analytical tool by showing that the whole of the enunciation is an
empty process, functioning perfectly without there being any need for it to
be filled with the person of the interlocutors, Linguistically, the author is
never more than the instance writing. just as I is nothing other than the
instance saying I: language knows a 'subject', not a 'person', and this subject,
empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make
language 'hold together', suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it.
The removal of the Author (one could talk here with Brecht9 of a veritable
'distancing', the Author diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the Iit-
6, P'lUl Valery (1871 -I 945), French poet and de Montesquiou-Fezensac (1855-1921).
critil:. 9. Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), German poet and
7, Marcel Proust (1871-1922), F,'ench novelist. dramatist, whose "epic theater" was intended to
8. Le baron de Charlus, a character in Proust's distance and alienate the audience from traditional
Relllembrance of Things Past (1913-2';'), said to theatrical illusion.
hm:e been modeled on the aesthete Robert. comte
1468 I ROLAND BARTHES

erary stage) is not merely an historical fact or an act of writing; it utterly

transforms the modern text (or-which is the same thing-the text is hence-
forth made and read in such a way that at all its ievels the author is absent).
The temporality is different. The Author; when believed in, is always con-
ceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically
on a shigle line divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to
nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives
for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his
child. In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with
the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or. exceeding the
writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time
than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now.
The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer designate an operation
of recording, notation, representation, 'depiction' (as the Classics would say);
rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy,'
call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given in the first person
and in the present tense) in which the enunciation has no other content
(contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered-some-
thing like the I declare of kings or the I sing of very ancient poets. Having
buried the Author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe, as accord-
ing to the pathetic view of his predecessors, that this hand is too slow for his
thought or passion and that consequently, making a law of necessity, he must
emphasize this delay and indefinitely 'polish' his form. For him, on the con-
trary, the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription
(and not of expression), traces a field without orlgln-or which, at lealt, has
no other origin than language itself. language which ceaselessly calls into
question all origins.

We know now that a text is nota line of words releasing a single 'theolog-
ical' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a n;tulti-dimensional
space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.
The text is a tissue of quotations· drawn from the innumerable centres of
culture. Similar to IJouvard and Pecuchet,2. those eternal copyists, at once
sublime and comic and whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely
the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always
anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings; to counter the
ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on anyone of them.' Did
he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner 'thing' he
"thinks to 'translate' is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only
explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely; something experi-
enced in exemplary fashion by the young Thomas de Quincey,3 he who was
so good at Greek that in order to translate absolutely, modern ideas and
images into that dead language, he had, so Baudelaire tells· us (in Paradis
Artificiels), 4 'created for himself an unfailing dictionary, vastly more extensive
and complex than those resulting from the ordinary patience of purely lit-
erary themes'. Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within
him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense

1. That is, philosophy of language; see especially who leave their jobs as copyists and unsuccessfully
J. L. AUST.N, How to Do Thing. with Words 0962). attempt to master all knowledge •.
2. The title characters in Gustave Flaubert's 3. English essayist and critic (1785-1859).
unfinished novel Bouvard and Prlcuchet (1881), 4. Artificial Paradises (1869).
 THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR I 1469

dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never
does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs,
an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.

Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite
futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it
with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism
very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the
Author (or its hypostases:' society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work:
when the Author has been found, the text ·is 'explained'-victory to the critic.
Hence there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the
Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism
(be it new) is today undermined along with the Author. In the multiplicity
of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure
can be followed, 'run' (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at
every level, bu·t there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged
over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate
it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way
literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to
assign a 'secret', an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text),
liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is
truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God
and his hypostases-reason, science, law.

Let us come back to the Balzac sentence. No one, no 'person', lays it: its
source, its voice, is not the true place of the writing, which is reading.
Another-very precise-example will helpto make this clear: recent research
a.-p. Vernant)6 has demonstrated the constitutively ambiguous nature of
Greek tragedy, its texts being woven from words with double meanings that
each character understands unilaterally (this perpetual misunderstanding is
exactly the 'tragic'); there is, however, someone who understands each word
in its duplicity and who, in addition, hears the very deafness of the characters
speaking in ftOnt of him-this someone being precisely the reader (or here;
the listener). Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made
of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mut~·
relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this
multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said,
the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make
up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies
not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer
be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply
that someone who holds together in a single field all the ·traces by which the
written text is constituted. Which is why it is derisory to condemn the new
writing in the name of a humanism hypocritically turned champion of the
reader's rights. Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader;
for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let
ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrasticaJ7 recriminations

5. Stand-Ins (the concrete forms of ahstractions). note]. Vernant (b. 1914), French scholar of
6. Cf. Jean-Pierre Vernant (with Pierre Vldal- ancient Greece.
NU'Iuet), My the et tragddie en. (]r~ce ancienne 7. Characterized by USing· a word to Intend Its
(Puris. 1972), e.p. pp. 19-40,99-131 [translator's opposite.
1470 I ROLAND BARTHES

of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or
destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow
the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the
Author.
1968

From Work to Text I

It is a fact that over the last few years a certain change has taken place (or
is taking place) in our conception of language and, consequently, of the
literary work which owes at least its phenomenal existence to this same lan-
guage. The change is clearly connected with the current development of
(amongst other disciplines) linguistics, anthtbpology, Marxism and psycho-
analysis (the term 'connection' is used here in a deliberately neutral way: one
does not decide a determination, be it multiple and dialectical). What is new
and which affects the idea of the work co~,js not necessarily from the inter-
nal recasting of each of these disciplines, but rather from their encounter in
relation to an object which traditionally is the province of none of them. It
is indeed as though the interdisciplinarity which is today held up as a prime
value in research cannot be accomplished by the simple confrontation of
specialist branches of knowledge. Interdisciplinarity is not the calm of an
easy security; it begins effectively (as opposed to the mere expression of a
pious wish) when the solidarity of the o.ld disciplines breaks down-perhaps
even violently, via the jolts of fashion-in the interests of a new object and
a new language neither of which has a place in the field of the sciences that
were to be brought peacefully together, this unease in classification being
precisely the point from which it is pos~Jble to diagnose a certain mutation.
The mutation in which the idea of work seems to be gripped must not, how-
ever. be over-estimated: it is more in the nature of an epistemological slide
than of a real break. The break, as is' frequently stressed, is seen to have
taken place in the last century with the appearance of Marxism and Freu-
dianism;2 since then there has been no further break~ so that in a way it can
be said that for the last hundred years we have been living in repetition.
What History, our History, allows us today is merely to slide, to vary, to
exceed, to repudiate. Just as Einsteinian science 3 demands that the relativity
of the frames of reference be included in the object studiE!d, so the combined
action of Marxism, Freudianism and structuralism demands, in literature,
the relativization of the relations of writer, reader and observer (critic). Over
against the traditional notion of the work, for long-and still-conceived of
in a, so to speak, Newtonian way, there is now the requirement of a new
object, obtained by the sliding or overturning of former categories. That
object is the Text. I know the word is fashionable (I am myself often led to
use it) and therefore regarded by some with suspicion, but that is exactly

I. Translated by Stephen Heath. oped by A1bert Einstein (1879-1955), which

2. On the economic and political theorist KARL explains what the mechanical worldvlew as.oei-
MARX (1818-1883) and the founder of psycho· ated with Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) could
analysis SIGMUND FREUD (1856-1939), see above. not: the Interactions of radiation and matter
3. That is, the theory of special relativity devel- viewed from different Inertial &ames of reference.