solitary flight

§48 Suicide is authorial as the death of the author

Suicide is the authorial as the death of the author.

On the authority of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, for whatever that’s worth, the author is historical, a mere notion, a mere mixer, a mere scriptor, his labor a mere instance of writing, a pure gesture of inscription. the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing.

And as the author enters his own death, writing begins. It is writing that erases its own labor. It is the ethical principle and immanent rule: what does it matter who speaks? It is writing liberated from the author who no longer is because he never really was. The author is dead, long live the text, long live the reader.

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Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text.
Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in The Foucault Reader.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology.