Reviewers who receive a paper from which the identifying marks have been removed will immediately put in place an (imagined) set of circumstances of exactly the kind they are supposedly ignoring. I

athe-matical treatise, the ego who indicates the circumstances of com-position in the preface is not identical, either in terms of his posi-tion or his function, to the T who concludes a demonstrationwithin the body of the text. The former implies a unique individualwho, at a given time and place, succeeded in completing a project,whereas the latter indicates an instance and plan of demonstrationthat anyone could perform provided the same set of axioms, pre-liminary operations, and an identical set of symbols were used. It isalso possible to locate a third ego: one who speaks of the goals of' his investigation, the obstacles encountered, its results, and theproblems yet to be solved and this T would function in a field ofexisting or future mathematical discourses. We are not dealing witha system of dependencies where a first and essential use of the Tis reduplicated, as a kind of fiction, by the other two. On thecontrary, the 'author-function' in such discourses operates so as toeffect the simultaneous dispersion of the three egos

The third point concerning this 'author-function' is that it is notformed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourseto an individual. It results from a complex operation whose pur-pose is to construct the rational entity we call an author. Un-doubtedly, this construction is assigned a 'realistic' dimension aswe speak of an individual's 'profundity' or 'creative' power, hisintentions or the original inspiration manifested in writing. Never-theless, these aspects of an individual, which we designate as anauthor (or which comprise an individual as an author), are pro-jections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way ofhandling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extractas pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we prac-tise.

We can conclude that, unlike a proper name, which moves fromthe interior of a discourse to the real person outside who producedit, the name of the author remains at the contours of texts -separating one from the other, defining their form, and character-izing their mode of existence. It points to the existence of certaingroups of discourse and refers to the status of this discourse withina society and culture. The author's name is not a function of aman's civil status, nor is it fictional; it is situated in the breach,among the discontinuities, which gives rise to new groups of dis-course and their singular mode of existence. C