DOI:https://doi-0004.org/6812/17932986078102
1Dr. Khadidja HADJ DJELLOUL
2Prof. M’hamed BENZAYED
Faculty of Public Law, University of Saida, Dr. Moulay Taher, Algeria
1Email: khadidja.hadjdjelloul@univ-saida.dz
2Email benzayedabdelkader58@yahoo.com
Abstract:
When the term takes its true concept, the author is not dead. The present paper on the issue, “Long Live the Author” addresses the existence of the author in understanding and conceptualizing written texts. These texts, by nature, are pervious to varying interpretations. As a result, they are no more those written by their authors, but those read by their readers. However, when the author intentionally establishes a conceptual framework that profoundly conditions the meaning of the terms within the text; what happens to “Death of the Author” formulation. With the aim to answer this question in mind, the present paper touches the world of Politics, one of the main thematic areas tending to analyze specific texts that contain specific terms and thus concepts to the readership.
Keywords: Author; Intention; Political concept; Reader; Referentiality.
1. Introduction
To start with, it is worth noting to go through literature and shed some light on the ambiguity that the fragment “Long Live the Author”, which is in its origin “Death of the Author”, may entail. Barthes’ essay (1967) “Death of the Author” argues against traditional literary criticism of relying on the intentions and biography of the author and what these may have to explain the meaning of a text. He praises the work of writers who create a colourless writing, freed from all bondage to a pre-ordained state of language. In Writing Degree Zero (1953/1967), Barthes helps to see how a deliberate “loss of color” in the language helps to generate a new style freed from social codes.
The nineteenth century poet Stephane Mallarme, as Barthes had mentioned several times understood that language speaks, not the author and he equated words with gaps to emphasize the materiality of language and the nature of reading. In order to write, one must utilize languagethat Lacan (1981) asserted, “Speaks the subject”. If language speaks the subject, then there can be no pure gesture of inscription. Barthes referred to the romantic notion of the Author as the “modern scriptor”. According to Barthes the writer is not original and can only imitate what is anterior to mingle writings. Thus, the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, the same as quotations without inverted commas. He further says that all writers are copy writing inscribing a particular zone of language. They are not the real origin of their texts while the language is rather. Barthes makes the point that, “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author”. Moreover, he insists that the death of the author creates freedom for the reader to interpret the text and recreate it through connecting to its meanings.
- “The Death of the Author” Critiques
If the topic is immersed in language, then the originator of an artwork is as well. From Marx’s viewpoint, influenced by Barthes, the “author” is a contemporary creation and also a component of the enlightenment emphasis on individualism (Smith, 2021). An interpretation of artworks would be found in its creators, their preferences, their background, and their interests. Consequently, one can identify an “origin” for Romanticism and the emphasis on the importance of subjectivity.
“The Death of the Author” presents a set of concepts that are significantly more essential than the question of the Author’s “death.” This does not signify the end of the writer’s role, nor does it transfer the responsibility to the reader for deriving meanings from a text. The writer and the reader collaboratively generate a text that is fundamentally intertextual. Writing gathers plurality, not through the author, but through the reader, who ultimately creates meaning. In Roland Barthes’ view[1]; the author has already left the house to the reader, the guest, who enters the text, brings it to life, and enjoys language as an open space. The author steps back so the reader can play. That is, the author needs to perish to create room for the reader. As the matter of the fact, the text refers to production and practices, indicating that reading and writing are closely connected. The enjoyment of the text lies in its function as a social arena where languages flow, as the theory of the text can only align with a practice of reading.
Barthes’ view is not entirely wrong, but it is extreme. “The Death of the Author” has left many and main critiques. Barthes argues that literary meaning should not be controlled by the author’s intentions or biography. A major criticism is that this can go too far. An author’s historical context, political position, cultural background, and intellectual influences can be essential for understanding a text. For example, understanding colonialism and racism can significantly change a whole interpretation of a postcolonial novel. Ignoring the author’s position may remove important dimensions of meaning.
“The Death of the Author” creates a false opposition between author and reader. Barthes shifts authority from the author toward the reader, suggesting that meaning is produced through reading rather than fixed by authorial intention. The author can still influence interpretation even if his intention does not determine a text’s meaning. A critic can therefore consider authorial intention without treating it as the only correct interpretation.
Another criticism concerns ethics and politics. If a text is completely separate from its author, how should deal with texts containing racist, colonialist, or extremist ideas? The author’s position may matter when asking: Who is responsible for the ideological assumptions expressed in a literary work? Barthes’s theory can make this question more complicated because it deliberately separates the text from the individual who produced it and as such it can weaken questions of political responsibility.
Barthes focuses heavily on language and interpretation, but later critics emphasize that authors operate in a more nuanced alternative. “What Is an Author?” responds to the problem differently. Rather than simply declaring the author “dead,” Foucault (1977) examines the “author-function”. For him, the author is not merely a biological individual or the ultimate source of meaning. “Author” is also a cultural and institutional function used to classify, organize, authenticate, and control discourse. This is more nuanced than simply eliminating the author.
- “Long Live the Author”
Foucault (1998) as Barthes degrades author’s significance in the process of textual interpretation redefines his function but keeps him as a discourses’ mode of existence. He also neglects the individuality and diversity of different authors. Iser (1999) admits author’s work in writing the text and regards that meaning is realized through the act of reading. The author finishes and is gone by passing the task of realizing the written text to the coming reader who choose the meaning of the text himself. When the reader comes to the realization of the text, one meaning comes into being.
Hitherto, a number of questions appear, can one read, for instance, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, or Karl Marx Communist Manifesto in the same mode? Are they the same sorts of texts, or different? Should they be read against, together with, or in opposition to one another? Such problem often revolves around referentiality and author’s individuality that often exists within the written text produced.
- An Analysis within the Political Text
“We are all political beings in our everyday life” Bell (1975, p.10) says and adds that if politics is communication, we must study who talks to whom and what they say. Schäffner (1997) argued that political language, political discourse and political text themselves are vague terms. Instead, there is a range of subtypes determined by the particular communicative situation. What they have in common is that politicians try to get some goals in their development and the aim is to explore the ways of language, how they simplify and assist to create this function (Lakoff, 1990).
Political discourse is a study that offers more information than a first reading can do. The way of saying, the use of some adjectives in specific matters, the examples offered to explain a topic are some tools used in order to help to gain that purpose. But the first problem faced when analyzing a political discourse is either it should be taken as an example of spoken or written or both. Even in the case of the spoken political discourse, it should be regarded as written because it has been prepared beforehand, and the audience has to process that talk as being delivered. This does not matter a lot because he who analyses the speech has to conceptualize it into a written form and this is the case of the political texts discussed in this paper.
A text that calls itself political suggests that it might present, even if not always accurate, a true representation of the author’s life (existence and/or subjectivity).
Here are inspiring political texts of famous politicians and writers whereBas du formulaire although Barthes argues that the author should not be treated as the final authority over a text’s meaning, these texts deliberately restore the authors’ intentionality. In other words, Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus can be read not only as texts but also as interventions by historically situated political thinkers.
The Wretched of the Earth is fundamentally a political text, but its message goes beyond a direct condemnation of colonialism. The objective of Fanon is to uncover the ways in which colonial authority governs both the material world and the consciousness of the colonized. His description of the colonial world as a “world cut in two” reveals that colonialism is based upon a systematic division between the colonizer and the colonized (Fanon, 1961/1963). The geographical division consequently becomes a political and psychological division.
Fanon’s historical and political background becomes an important element in the interpretation of his text, as suggested by a “Long Live the Author” viewpoint. The approach focuses on Fanon’s political writing as an anti-colonial philosopher and participant in the Algerian struggle, rather than treating the text as a separate entity solely intended to convey meaning to the reader. His personal and historical position is therefore not external information but an important component of the text’s political significance.
The deeper meaning of Fanon’s argument emerges when he explains that colonialism does not merely exploit the colonized economically; it also constructs an ideological system in which the colonized are represented as inferior. The colonized subject is consequently forced to live within an identity imposed by the colonial system. His argument suggests that decolonization must therefore involve more than political independence: it must transform the consciousness and social relations produced by colonialism. His discussion on violence should therefore be understood within his historical and political context. Rather than interpreting violence simply as an abstract philosophical concept, a “Long Live the Author” approach asks why Fanon gives violence such a central position in his argument and what political reality he is responding to. The argument is rooted in a colonial system established and maintained by force.
Fanon deliberately uses theoretical and political discourse to expose colonial domination and thereby making decolonization an essential justification. The author therefore remains politically relevant because his historical stance helps uncover meanings that may otherwise be obscured by a purely formal reading.
Sartre’s Preface to The Wretched of the Earth provides an especially appropriate text for a “Long Live the Author” approach because the political identity of the writer is inseparable from the intervention he makes through the text. Sartre was not merely commenting on Fanon’s work as a detached literary critic. He was a politically engaged intellectual writing within the context of European colonialism and the Algerian War.
Though from a Barthesian perspective, the meaning of a text in Sartre’s preface should not ultimately be reduced to the intentions of its author. A “Long Live the Author” approach deliberately moves in the opposite direction: it restores attention to the author as a historically situated political subject. However, his statement that “Europe is finished” cannot be adequately understood as an isolated literary expression (Sartre, 1963, p.7). It acquires a much stronger political meaning when considered in relation to Sartre’s opposition to colonialism and his engagement with the political struggles of his period.
His rhetorical strategy is to force European readers to oppose colonial domination. He confronts European civilization itself as implicated in colonial violence. The author therefore becomes important because Sartre is deliberately using his position as a European intellectual to challenge European political consciousness. His identity and historical circumstances help explain why the text adopts such a rhetorical position. From that point, the author’s political intention, historical position, and ideological engagement should not be erased from interpretation.
The Rebel of Camus provides another example case for examining the relationship between authorial intention and political meaning. The work presents rebellion, revolution, violence, freedom, and the danger of ideological absolutism. The political significance of the text becomes clearer when Camus is considered not simply as an abstract philosophical voice but as a historically situated writer responding to the political conflicts of the twentieth century.
His idea is that rebellion emerges when an individual affirms dignity by saying “no” to intolerable form of oppression. The rebel establishes a limit to what one human being may legitimately impose upon another (Camus, 1956). Rebellion, which begins as a defense of human dignity, for Camus, may eventually become a system in which individuals are sacrificed for an abstract political future.
Again, from a Barthesian perspective and a purely reader-centered approach The Rebel could be interpreted in many different ways. A “Long Live the Author” approach, however, stems from what Camus himself is attempting to accomplish politically. His opposition to revolutionary absolutism is apparent as the text intentionally engages with discussions around revolution, political violence, and the ethical boundaries of political action. The political relevance of The Rebel is therefore seen in the conflict between revolt and domination, freedom and violence; and the author remains relevant because he deliberately constructed this tension in response to the political ideology of his time.
If the death of the author may free the text from authorial control, his return can restore the circumstances that produced the text. As exemplified in Fanon, Sartre, and Camus, “Long Live the Author” approach determines the author as a politically and historically producer of discourse. Their texts are not non-intentional; they constitute deliberate interventions in the contexts.
- When the Term takes its Political Concept
In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon has transformed many simple terms into political concepts due to the specific historical structure of colonialism. The meaning of these terms contributes particularly to the author’s political intention. Let’s take the most obvious term that Fanon (1963) uses in his political text that is “violence.”
Violence appears to mean ferocity or cruelty. By placing it within colonial context, Fanon gives it a specific political meaning. In the opening chapter “On Violence”, he famously writes: “Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon” (p.37). Here, Fanon wants to denote that violence is not always an act of aggression; he rather conceptualizes it as a response and as an instrument through which the colonized can challenge colonial oppression. Violence therefore appears as a political concept which depends heavily on Fanon’s anti-colonial argument.
Fanon also writes: “Decolonization is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature” (p.39).He does not want to mean by the term “decolonization” the formal withdrawal of the colonizer. Decolonization is conceptualized as a political confrontation between the colonizer and the colonized. It is political transformation which involves the destruction of the colonial domination and the emergence of an independent political subject.
He has also used the “Colonial world” as a compound term to explain that itis divided into: the world of the settler and the world of the native. Fanon renders the term world into a concept describing a politically and an economically divided social sphere: settler that is power, privilege and resources versus native which means dispossession, restriction and exploitation. Hence, world gets a political meaning out of the analysis that Fanon gives to colonial relations.
“Native” and “settler” are among the terms constantly used in The Wretched of the Earth. Native denotes that someone originally belongs to a particular place. Fanon, however, uses it as a colonial term to expose human beings as politically dominated subjects. According to this political piece, native carries several meanings of: dispossession, political exclusion, racial categorization, and colonial domination. Accordingly, native does not simply mean an inhabitant; it rather refers to a subject produced by colonial system. Likewise, settler in Fanon’s analysis possesses land, authority, and military protection. The term refers to political power and economic privilege within colonial society.
As a final point to Fanon’s terms analysis, it is quite important to mention that he determines the particular conceptual force they acquire in the text and this provides a strong challenge to Barthes’s claim.
Sartre (1963) in the Preface to The Wretched of the Earth does not simply use terms descriptively; he prioritizes their meaning politically. “Colonialism”, for him, is not only to occupy another territory; it is to maintain such occupation through exploitation and violence. Sartre intends to make his reader understand that colonialism is a systemic political relation. He (1964) details how the colonial relationship enriches the colonizer through the exploitation of the colonized. The term thus becomes a political structure instead of a historical condition.
In his quote: “For in the beginning he will be able to heal only by violence” (p.21), Sartre has particularly treated the term violence. He argues that the violence of the colonized has to be understood in relation to the violence imposed by the colonizer. In its elaborated text, violence is not presented as an isolated moral term. Sartre gives it a political and historical dimension. He is framing the meaning of violence politically and this is important in “Long Live the Author” argument because the reader cannot adequately understand the term without considering the political position from which the author is addressing it.
The revolutionary term “Liberation” has also taken its share in Sartre’s book. He does not point liberation as a condition of being free, or as just getting legal independence. In fact, it involves a transformation of colonial relationship that is between the colonizer and the colonized. For him, liberation is a political project to recover independence after destroying colonial domination. In the same token, Sartre has questioned the presumably universal concept of “man” while the colonial system denied full “humanity” to colonized peoples. As such, man and humanity become political dimension because the meaning itself constitutes part of the struggle over colonial power.
Sartre conceptual framework is particularly important for “Long Live the Author” view because his Preface gives an excellent theoretical bridge between authorial intention and political meaning. Several terms such as violence do not have a single fixed meaning detached from discourse. Sartre deliberately places it within a particular political dimension.
Similarly to Fanon and Sartre, Camus (1956) has also struggled with terms in his landmark philosophical essay, The Rebel, to show his political intention. Many plain terms he uses become apparently political concepts because he places them within their real dimension.
For “Long Live the Author” argument, The Rebel is particularly useful because Camus deliberately redefines political terms according to his philosophical position. For instance, he begins with the term “Rebellion” as something more than human disobedience. Camus moves the term from an individual act of refusal to a collective political affirmation of human dignity. The Rebel says that there is a limit beyond which the human act is not legitimate and cannot go. So, “Rebel” is not merely that person who says “no” or who refuses to obey. This term is championed through Camus’ philosophical argument to become a kind of political subject whose rejection of unacceptable form of domination is based on recognizing the own limits of power. His statement: “I rebel—therefore we exist”(p.22).
Camus draws an important distinction between Rebellion which is initially a defense of limits or values and “Revolution” that is an absolute ideology for the world reorganization and an attempt to force human into an abstract, ideological mold.Hemakes a sharp contrast between both concepts as the former is spontaneous and the latter is structured. Camus uses another term, Political Violence, which he rigorously condemns andargues that revolution is inherently based on Political Violence and inevitably militarizes it.
He examines “Murder” through the question: If rebellion is justified, can the rebel also justify killing? He was critical against revolutionary ideologies that can transform murder from a crime into historical necessity and political legitimacy. Camus’ target is to challenge this transformation where the political meaning of the term is inseparable from authorial position against the politically justified violence in the name of historical necessity.
Camus shows that terms are not mere dictionary entries. He rather intentionally transforms them into political concepts whose significance stems not only from the literal meaning they bear but from the conceptual framework through which the author employs them. This again challenges Barthes’ formulation that the author is completely disregarded.
- Conclusion
When a writer deliberately uses terms as means of expressing political position, his intention becomes important to understand the text. In The Wretched of the Earth, author’s political intervention is deeply embedded in the terms of the text. The reader can certainly produce new interpretations, but ignoring the author totally risks depriving terms such as “violence”, “decolonization”, “colonial world”, “native”, and “settler” from the political meanings they carry. Likewise, in Preface to The Wretched of the Earth, meanings of terms such as “colonialism,” “violence,” “liberation,” “man”, and “humanity” cannot be completely detached from authorial intention. They acquire their significance through author’s political positioning. This is a again counterpoint to the readership production of meanings. In the same way, The Rebel transforms ordinary terms such as “rebellion,” “rebel,” “revolution,” and “murder” into politically charged concepts. Their significance emerges from the political intention the writer gives them. It is true that the reader can generate new meanings, but this can partial without the author’s conceptual framework that deeply puts the meaning of terms within the text.
In a nutshell, while Barthes’s theory emphasizes the active role of the reader in producing meaning; “Long Live the Author” reasserts the importance of the author’s presence in the text interpretation. Nevertheless, the political meaning is not necessarily imposed on the reader. Therefore, “Long Live the Author” does not constitute a complete rejection of Barthes’s view; it offers a corrective implication instead. That is, textual meaning stems from an interaction between authorial intention and reader interpretation. In this regard, a balanced position would be: the author is by no means the unquestionable source of meaning, but neither should the author be regarded as irrelevant when the term takes its political concept.
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[1] The quote reflects Roland Barthes’ post-structuralist view in The Pleasure of the Text.