ABSTRACT
The task of criticism is not to bring out the work's relationship with the author, nor to reconstruct through the text a thought or experience, but rather, to analyze the work through its structure, its architecture, its intrinsic form, and the play of its internal relationships. Even when an individual has been accepted as an author, one must still ask whether everything that he wrote, said, or left behind is part of his work. The author's name is a proper name, and therefore it raises the problems common to all proper names. It would seem that the author's name, unlike other proper names, does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it. An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has a writer— but not an author. The author-function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.
