Whilecriticaltheoristsmayquestionthe“prestigeofauthorship”and“allmanifes-tationsofauthor-ity”(Birkerts,1994,pp.158–159)—whichhelpsexplainthepredilectionforpostmodernistandeschatologicaltitlessuchasTheDeathoftheAuthor(Bar-thes,1977),WhatisanAuthor?(Foucault,1977),andTheDeathofLiterature(Kernan,1990)—thereislittledoubtthatboththesymbolicandmaterialconsequencesofauthor

verningthis function is the belief that there must be - at a particular levelof an author's thought, of his conscious or unconscious desire — apoint where contradictions are resolved, where the incompatibleelements can be shown to relate to one another or to cohere arounda fundamental and originating contradiction. Fin

At the same time, however, 'literary' discourse was acceptableonly if it carried an author's name; every text of poetry or fictionwas obliged to state its author and the date, place and circumstanceof its writing. The meaning and value attributed to the text de-pended on this information. If by accident or design a text waspresented anonymously, every effort was made to locate its author.Literary anonymity was of interest only as a puzzle to be solved as,in our day, literary works are totally dominated by the sovereigntyof the author. (

nsequently, we cansay that in our culture, the name of an author is a variable thataccompanies only certain texts to the exclusion of others: a privateletter may have a signatory, but it does not have an author; acontract can have an underwriter, but not an author; and, similarlyan anonymous poster attached to a wall may have a writer, buthe cannot be an author. In this sense, the function of an author isto characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certaindiscourses within a society

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

Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story's hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it the author Balzac, professing certain "literary" ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology? It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.