Rewriting the Death of the Author with Jacques Rancière

I was pleased to hear this week that a piece I’ve written on the death of the author has been accepted by Philosophy and Literature. The article is entitled ‘Rewriting the Death of the Author: Rancièrian Reflections’ and it re-thinks the death of the author in the light of Jacques Rancière’s little essay ‘Auteur mort ou artiste trop vivant?’: ‘The death of the author or the life of the artist?’ in Chronicles of Consensual Times (London: Continuum, 2010) pp. 101-105. This reading of the death of the author will eventually provide part of the groundwork for the project on humanisms (including post- and anti-humanism) in contemporary French thought.

Here is the abstract:

For decades critics of the death of the author have worked themselves up about a paradox which supposedly undermines Barthes’ and Foucault’s work on the theme: these theorists cannot banish the authorial voice from their own writing. Taking a lead from Jacques Rancière this article tells a different story of the death of the author, one that makes better sense of this supposed case of double standards, refutes the paradox thesis and uses Nietzsche’s ideas on authorship to show that Barthes and Foucault are doing something much more powerful and interesting than simply contradicting themselves.