Puterea auctorialității: de la funcția-de-text la poziția-contextuală
The Power of Authorship. From Text-Function to Context-Position
It seems that 50 years after Roland Barthes published his famous essay concerning “The Death of the Author”, Michel Foucault’s equally notorious intervention, “What is an Author?”, remains the only significant (i.e. critical) reaction to this day. This debate is extremely important because, on the one hand, it outlines the power struggles between the old literary history and la nouvelle critique, while also prefiguring the paths of leaving French Theory behind (the passage from structuralism to poststructuralism and beyond), on the other. Using Jérôme Meizoz’s concept of posture, my intervention will examine how and why Foucault positioned himself as such in the cultural sphere, while also looking at the strategies he engaged in order to show that authorship is not only a function of the text, but a struggle of participants where both aesthetic and extra-literary criteria are equally involved.
Keywords: authorship, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, posture, power
