MICHEL FOUCAULT
611
vidual can occupy provided that he has accepted the same symbols, the same
axioms. But one could also locate a third ego in the same treatise; the one
which explains the meaning of the work, the obstacles encountered, the
results obtained, the problems which remain, and this ego is situated in the
field of mathematical discourses which already exist or which are to come . In
certain discourses, however, the author plays a role which occasions the release
of the three egos simultaneously.
*
*
*
I am aware that I have limited my theme. Certainly, one should also
mention the role of the author in painting, in music, in technology. However,
even supposing that one keeps
to
the world ofdiscourse, as I have wanted
to,
I
think that I have given the term author much too narrow a meaning. I have
limited myself to the author understood as the author of a text, a book, or a
work whose production one can legitimately attribute to him. But it is easy to
see that one can be the author of more than a book-of a theory, of a tradi–
tion, ofa discipline within which other books or authors are going
to
take their
places. I would say that these authors find themselves, in a word, in a "trans–
discursive" position .
This is a recurrent phenomenon-certainly as old as our civilization .
Homer, Aristotle, the Church Fathers, all played this role; but so did the first
mathematicians, and those who established the Hippocratic tradition . But it
seems to me that we have witnessed during the course of the nineteenth cen–
tury the appearance of quite unique authors who cannot be identified with
the great literary authors, nor with the founders of the sciences. Let us call
these, in a somewhat arbitrary fashion, the founders of discursivity .
These authors have this peculiarity; they are not solely the authors of
works, of books . They have produced something more : the possibilities and
the rules for the formation of other texts . In this sense, they are very different,
for example, from the author of novels who is never, in the end, anything
other than the author of his own text. Freud is not simply the author of
The
Interpretation a/Dreams
or of
Wit and the Unconscious.
Marx is not simply
the author of "The Communist Manifesto" or
Capital.
Both Freud and Marx
have established a possibility for further discourse. Obviously, it is easy to raise
an objection.
It
is not true that the author of a novel is nothing more than the
author of his own text; in a sense, he, too, regulates and controls more than
that. To take a simple example, one can say that Ann Radcliffe not only wrote
The Castle a/the Pyrenees
and a number of other novels, but that she made
possible the gothic novel at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and to
that extent her function as an author exceeded her own work. But the possi-
