among other things — like the fact that very few of the people who throw around the phrase “death of the author” (whether or not they “support” it, whatever that means) have actually read Barthes — it’s worth keeping in mind that “La mort de l’auteur” / “The Death of the Author” is clearly a polemic: parts of it are overstated/hyperbolic because it’s intended as a provocation against mid-century literary-critical practices grounded in authorial intention and biography — even New Criticism, Barthes says, often only served to “consolidate” (consolider) “the empire of the Author” (l’empire de l’Auteur), an empire that we’re clearly still living in now. the point is to make visible the importance of actual reading (which is, of course, historically situated, but which is also endlessly open because endlessly repeatable) — as so many people after Barthes have said, texts only have meaning when people read them. the point is to reject the imposition of “an ultimate meaning” (un sens ultime) on texts in order to
lib[é]re[r] une activité que l’on pourrait appeler contre-théologique, proprement révolutionnaire, car refuser d’arrêter le sens, c’est finalement refuser Dieu et ses hypostases, la raison, la science, la loi.
[liberate an activity that we could call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for refusing to put a stop to meaning is ultimately to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, law.]
beyond that, if you’re not distinguishing between “the Author” and “the author” you’ve missed Barthes’s point. the Author is a social position that confers a specific interpretive authority on the person who occupies it such that their life, statements, interpretations, ideas, etc. serve as the grounding for the (singular and literally authorized “meaning of the text”. the author — lowercase — is nothing more or less than “the one who writes” (celui qui écrit). the Author precedes the text such that the text is only a vehicle for “the ‘message’ of the Author-God” (le «message» de l’Auteur-Dieu). the author, in contrast, only exists insofar as a text exists (because there’s no author without the actual act of writing) — “author” is a statement of a factual relationship between author and text, nothing more.
Barthes’s sensitivity to historical context elsewhere in his work (the essays collected in Mythologies, for example) should signal to us precisely that this isn’t an absolute rejection of the author, but rather an affirmation that the author is not the guarantor of meaning in the way the Author is. once we’ve separated ourselves from the idea that authorial intention provides the (sole) meaning of the text, the author and “authorial intention” can become what they are — part of the context in which meaning is created through reading, the process through which the reader “holds” (tient) all the different pieces (of language, of other literature, of history, of society) that make up the experience of reading a text (which, Barthes argues, is all a text is, after all).
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