What Is an Author?

"What Is an Author?" (French: Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?) is one of the most important lectures given at the Société Française de Philosophie on 22 February 1969 by French philosopher, sociologist and historian Michel Foucault.^[1]

The Author is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes and chooses: ... The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.

For many, Foucault's lecture responds to Roland Barthes' essay "The Death of the Author".

In The Post-war Novel and the Death of the Author (2020), Arya Aryan offers a thorough analysis of the article. As he points out, Foucault contends that the concept of the author has not remained a unified entity, but has evolved over time, assuming various functions in response to the dominant discourses of different historical periods. As Aryan puts it, "[r]ather than being looked upon as a coherent concept, the author has been given multiple functionalities in the course of history."^[2] He adds that:

Foucault draws attention to the fact that the author had not always been living but came into being at a specific moment, a 'privileged moment' which he calls 'individualization' (Foucault 2008, 174), by which is meant the time when humans begin to attribute the work to an individual authority...In other words, by historicising the concept of the author, Foucault proposes that the whole notion of the author, which is of course not a unified coherent concept, is a construct that has a historical origin and proceeded through, and took, multiple signifieds in each particular era of history."^[3]