Michel Foucault
WHAT IS AN AUTHOR?
Obviously, I must provide some justification for the subject I
have chosen: ..What is an author?"
First, I have decided to treat this slightly unusual question because I
want to make a critical reassessment of something I wrote some time ago and
to return to a number of imprudent mistakes I have made. In
The Order of
Things,
I tried to analyze texts lacking the usual unities of book, oeuvre, and
author. I spoke in general of "narural history," or of the "analysis of
wealth," or of' 'political economy," but not ofworks or of writers. However,
throughout that study, I made naive (that is to say crude) use of authors'
names . I spoke of Buffon, of de Cuvier, of Ricardo with an embarrassing
ambiguity. So much so that two kinds of objections were legitimately raised. I
was told: . 'You do not describe Buffon in the right way, nor the totality of his
work, and what you say of Marx is ridiculously insufficient in relation to his
thought." These objections were evidently based on fact, but I do not think
that they were completely relevant to what I was doing. For me, the problem
was not to describe Buffon or Marx, nor to reconstruct what they said or
meant : I was simply trying to find the rules by which they had formulated the
concepts and theories encountered in their texts . Another objection was also
made : "You create," I was told, "unlikely juxtapositions, you bring to–
gether names so obviously opposed to each other as those of Buffon and
Linnaeus, you put Cuvier beside Darwin, and this in opposition to the most
recognizable affinities and natural resemblances ." Here again, I would say
that the objection does not seem appropriate because I never sought to con–
struct a genealogical table of intellectual originality, and I never wanted to
compose an intellectual portrait of the scientist or the naturalist of the seven–
teenth and eighteenth centuries; nor did I want to construct any family,
either holy or unholy . I was simply trying something more modest-to ex–
amine certain discursive practices.
"Then," you ask me, "why use the names of authors in
The Order of
Things?
Either don't use any, or define the way in which you make use of
NOTE: "What is an Author" was originally presented before La Societe Fransaise de
Philosophie and appears here in a slightly abridged form .
