"What is an Author?" by Michel Foucault is a text which aims at questioning the notion of the author (as seen in the title). I enjoyed this text, the style is simple (which is greatly appreciated on my part). Foucault goes through the different approaches to what an "author" is. "Author" can be seen as the writer of a certain text (many of us view authors in this way) but a text can also be anonymous and without an author (literary anonymity- as certain texts did in the past). He also explores many notions related to the author, for example, the fact that the author's name isn't just a proper noun but rather "a certain mode of being of discourse"(107). Here he brings up a large part of his argument, which relates the idea of authorship to being not just an element of discourse but rather a mode of discourse (so outside of just being a subject or object or being replaces by a pronoun).
At the end, after his summary, Foucault says that the idea of the author is something that is related to its historical time-period (postmodern, yes?) and that one day we may get beyond this, when he states "it does not seem necessary that the author function remain constant in form, complexity, and even in existence" (119). However, even though the author function may operate in another mode, Foucault mentions that this will still be within a system of constraint, so it is not something that is absolutely freeing. He concludes with the sentence "What difference does it make who is speaking?" (120). This to me seems to be saying that the author isn't what is important but rather the importance lies in what the text itself is saying. This makes me think of Roland Barthes "Death of the Author" in the sense that in both it is not the author which is of importance (because in Barthes' text the author is an agglomeration of all texts and ideas written beforehand- nothing is original and everything is intertextuality). Foucault also seems to be alluding to Barthes in page 102 when he states that writing is "a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears", hence implying the 'death' of the author that Barthes spoke of.
This blog automatically caught my attention by the title since I wrote this same quote down in my notes. With this, I agree with you on the concept that the text can speak for itself and there doesn't always have to be an author connected to it, even though someone created it. And once again, Barthes' notion can work here where the author is not the important piece since the text has been influenced by already existing ideas.
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