MICHEL FOUCAULT
605
narrator forever. Scheherazade's recitation is the stubborn opposite of mur–
der-it is the attempt made every night to keep death outside the circle of
existence. This theme of story-telling or writing which conjures away death
has been transformed by our culture . Writing is now tied to sacrifice, even
to
the sacrifice of life; a voluntary obliteration which has not been represented in
the books , because it is accomplished in the very life of the writer. The work,
which originally had the task of conferring immortaliry, has now the right to
kill , to be the murderer of its author. Thus, Flaubert, Proust, Kafka. More–
over, the affinity ofwriting for death also manifests itselfin the obliteration of
the character of the writer. All this is well known, and it is about time that
criticism and philosophy acknowledged the disappearance or the death of
the author .
I am not sure, however, that we have rigorously drawn all the conclusions
implied by this death , nor that we have assessed the full import of this event.
More precisely , it seems
to
me that a number of notions obstruct this process
and avoid what must be clarified. I will simply treat two of them .
First , the notion of the work . It is said (and it is still a very familiar thesis)
that the proper role ofcriticism is not to untangle the connection between the
work and the author, nor to try to reconstruct a thought or an experience
through the text. Rather, criticism must analyze the work in its structure, in its
architecture , in its intrinsic form, and in the interaction of its internal rela–
tions . But , a problem must be raised: What is a work? What is that curious
unity which one designates under the name of the work? Of what elements is
it composed? Is not a work something that has been wrinen by someone who is
an author? One perceives the increasing difficulties. If an individual is not an
author , can one say that what he has written, or said, what he has left behind
in his papers , what one can recount of his remarks, could be called a work?
Inasmuch as Sade was not an author, what are the rolls of paper upon which he
poured out his endless fantasies during his days in prison?
But let us suppose that one is dealing with an author: Is everything that
he wrote or said , everything that he left behind him, to be regarded as part of
his oeuvre? It is both a theoretical and a technical problem. For example ,
when one undertakes the publication of Nietzsche's complete works, where
must one stop? One must publish everything , of course, but what is meant by
everything? All that Nietzsche himself published , of course . The rough drafts
of his works ? Obviously . The Aphoristic projects? Yes . The crossings out?
Also . But, when in the middle of a notebook filled with aphorisms one finds a
reference , the notation of a rendezvous or an address, a laundry stub : oeuvre
or not? But why not? And so on, ad infinitum. Among the millions of trails
left behind by someone after his death, how can one define the work? The
