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.
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Somewhere along the way aporia of knowing or not knowing what something is truly and what it truly means, or the shocking and unsettling fizzing up from within at knowing you do not know, became aporia of being or not being.
We know from a dialogue of the famous philosopher’s philosopher that not to know and knowing not knowing and then knowing is not merely built on figuring out but on actually hungering to know as the not without which of going about knowing. To be shocked and unsettled meaning not to feel at home with yourself in not knowing. To fizz meaning coalescing into a quickening, a concentration, a bubbling concerto of figuring that hungers and hungering that figures. And so somewhere along the way aporia about knowing became aporia about being.
Or maybe the truth is that aporia in knowing or not knowing is really an eventual refinement and a relative luxury stemming from primordial humanness coming to question its very being. To be or not to be has always been the question with aporia as the moment of beginning to wonder.
To illustrate in a meandering way, there once was a famous thinker who lived in his mind as logic and language games to find the limits of knowing by way of words and who finds himself on the front lines of the First World War. Now the world at war is basically all that is the case and nothing else quite matters.
Yesterday was shot at, writes the philosopher in a letter back home. I was scared! I was afraid of death.
Then a few days later he describes running toward the enemy trenches through a deep fog under withering gunfire amid artillery shells crashing all around. There are screams everywhere but he can see no one behind the violence. Alone he keeps running forward into a faceless enemy because there is nothing else to do. And with every shot and every explosion, he writes, I winced with my whole being. I wanted so much to live.
For the philosopher on the Eastern Front the wince with his whole being was the case of human-being-wishing to be the case and not to not be the case — to be a live rabbit and not a dead duck beyond pictures and words immersed in the structure of the world. In itself this wince illustrates only how unremarkable the wince is since recall that we scuttle especially with the hunger to survive. The wince is understood as being wholly understandable and to be expected within the story of more and better human life, emphasis on just more that sometimes matters most. The wince is thus the absolute alert to being to begin truly to scuttle to avoid death especially when death comes calling from everywhichway and it is not clear where to stand and so you keep running — running whilst wincing and wincing and so you run. The wince is not aporia. There is no perplexion. The wince is clarity. There is absolutely no question about living. Life hungering to keep living as the not without which of its very being alive. Thus the wince and the scuttling when death kindly stops for you. I fear death, cries the ancient hero, and I roam the wilderness. I take flight across the sea. I race to find more and more life. No stopping. Lots of roaming. A lot of running.