monsters, notes on the session on June 16: does the author ever die?

Dear all, as I have unfortunately fallen ill, I won’t make it to campus today, hoping to recover soon this week.

I had planned a session on “The Problem of Time — Does the Author Ever Die?” (not necessarily monster-focussed but it obviously has to do with our topic), where we would actually read Barthes’ text on the death of the author (and think through Foucault’s
notes on the function of the author”, so if you come to campus anyways or find yourselves with fellow students, read the 5 pages by Barthes and think about the following question first:

Is Barthes describing something that happens — or something he thinks should happen? Is the essay descriptive or is it a wish?

As a case study, please read “Identity Card” by Mahmoud Darwish (1964), you can find it here: https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/darwish/1964/identity-card.htm

It is written in first person, explicitly from the position of a Palestinian Arab being stopped by an Israeli officer and asked for papers. The author’s identity may not be background to the poem; it is the poem’s claim. Or think about Frida Kahlo — the p
aintings literally depict her own body, her own surgeries, her own pain. Or think about memoirs/autobiographies like Frederick Douglass’s Narrative – the argument of the text is that this person existed and this happened to him.

Question: Barthes says the author’s identity is irrelevant to meaning. But in these cases the author’s identity is what the text is about. Are these just edge cases? If yes/no, why? Does his argument require us to read these works as if their authors coul
d have been anyone – and what exactly do we lose if we do?

And on a second note: Copyright law keeps the author (and thus a monster?) very much alive – economically, legally, institutionally. We pay royalties to living authors and to estates of dead ones. We prosecute plagiarism. AI-generated art has no author in
 the traditional sense and therefore no copyright – courts are still fighting about this. Banksy is anonymous by choice: the absence of an identifiable author produces not liberation but a different kind of mystique, arguably a stronger one.

Question: If the author is dead in Barthes’s sense, why is the author so legally and economically alive? What does that contradiction tell you about what Barthes’s argument is actually doing – and who it serves?

I will write a note on Foucault’s point of view on the blog later this week, to further think about.

See you next week, best wishes, VM.

Victoria Mummelthei

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