Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author

The French literary theorist Roland Barthes cuts an interesting figure. In his early scholarly activities he was a conventional scholar, very much committed to the humanistic universal grammatical project of Ferdinand de Saussure. But in his latter years he was an iconoclastic figure who who questioned the entire legitimacy of secular humanism.

The French poststructuralists often make the quasi-formalist claim that there is no 'hors de texte.' But whereas the New Critic does so in order to seek to establish literature as a legitimate field of academic study in an academy which is elsewhere disputing the objectivity of moral and aesthetic judgments, for the French poststructuralists the claim is made because of a quasi-nominalist view of language. Words refer only to other words, not to any thing, let alone a transcendental signifier.

And whereas Jacques Derrida could be very much be seen at war with the word, in the sense that the focus of his work was in demonstrating how language undermines its own claims of certitude, Barthes takes this self-referential view of language to dispute whether we can even establish the personhood of the author. After all, it lies outside the text. In so doing, he announces that the nineteenth century's tendency to announce the 'death of God' has now come closer to home, announcing the death of humanity.

Henceforward, we can note an anti-humanistic tendency to all postmodern literary theory, with a particular focus on the Christian category of the human person.

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