What is an Author? Author-Function (Foucault)

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What is an Author?

In 1969, French philosopher Michel Foucault delivered a lecture titled, “What is an Author?” This lecture can be taken as a response to the notion of the death of the author, made famous by Roland Barthes. Foucault states his idea of the author as a timeless irreducible category, one in which he calls, the Author-function. In this video, I discuss what he describes as the Author-function, and what it is Foucault saw as filling the empty void that the death of the author left.

The four characteristic traits of the author-function:

1) the author function is linked to the juridical and institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses;
2) it does not affect all discourses in the same way at all times and in all types of civilizations.
3) it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a discourse to its producer, but rather by a series of specific and complex operations.
4) it does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects—positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals”

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