Barthes on Writing and Authorship: A Polemical Précis

Abstract

In this paper we will try to revisit Barthes’ brief essay ‘Authors and Writers’ by way of reopening the essay’s proximity to some of the most important theorists of our time, such as Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and most especially, Mikhail Bakhtin whose individual writings on issues of language, translation, etc., to cite a few, mesh without conceptual and analytical difficulty. Their insightful provocations are known for their shared intuitive trajectories which altogether radicalize the concept of the writing craft and its complicated relation to the traditional conception of the author. Their writings carve out a common diacritical space in which, to place the centrality of Barthes in this paper, a kind of circuitousness in writing, or rather, writing around writing, similarly, a strategy intrinsic to autobiographical work, takes the reader to an affirmation of the redemptive potential of involution, ambiguity, and paradoxicality.