Michel Foucault: "What is an Author?"
Michel Foucault is not a Freudian, a Marxist, a structuralist, a phenomenologist, a sociologist, or a historian, but his work draws on ideas and assumptions and methods from all of these areas or disciplines. Rather, think of Foucault, like Derrida and like Freud, as the founder of his own "school" of thought. He is a poststructuralist thinker, with affinities to most all the other theorists we've read so far, but he is enough unlike them that we should think of him in a category all his own.Ý
Foucault makes a list of some questions about authorship which he will not address directly. Rather, he wants to discuss the relationship between an author and a text, and the manner in which the text points to the author as a figure who is outside the text, and who precedes the text (and creates it).
To Barthes