ABSTRACT
The coming into being of the notion of “author” constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences. . . .
I shall not offer here a sociohistorical analysis of the author’s persona. Certainly it would be worth examining how the author became individualized in a culture like ours, what status he has been given, at what moment studies of authenticity and attribution began, in what kind of system of valorization the author was involved, at what point we began to recount the lives of authors rather than of heroes, and how this fundamental category of “the-man-and-his-work criticism” began. For the moment, however, I want to deal solely with the relationship between text and author and with the manner in which the text points to this “figure” that, at least in appearance, is outside it and antecedes it.
