Death of the Author: Abridged Version

From Roland Barthes' essay "The Death of the Author":

"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...

It is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality, to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs,' and not 'me'...

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning, but a multi-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...the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never oringal. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them...

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...In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered...writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it...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...

Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual 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."