Author´s crisis. From his death to indifference

Abstract

This article retakes the problem of the author from The Death of the Author by R. Barthes and from What is an author? by M. Foucault. Although both texts can be read within the general framework of the authorship crisis, we are interested in highlighting the different tones that the problem acquires in each of them. As a reading hypothesis, we argue that sentencing the death of the author and from there affirming the impossibility of recognizing the face of the writer, as Barthes did, submits to a different approach than the one adopted by Foucault. Unlike Barthes, Foucault does not question the possibility or impossibility of knowing the face of the speaker; instead, he asks: “What is an author?”, and opens an exploration of the different forms of the author function. Accordingly, the article recovers the arguments presented in both texts in order to consider the particularities inscribed in the death sentence and in its displacement towards indifference.

Keywords

• autor
• muerte del autor
• función autor
• indiferencia