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Authors Dead and Resurrected

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Authors Dead and Resurrected Introduction Authors Dead and Resurrected Clarissa Breu Sometimes, the special occasion arrives for you to meet the author of your favorite book, to attend an interview with the director after a movie, to read about a composer’s conception of the piece she composed. Sometimes, these and other situations are great experiences, but often they are disappointing. Maybe you had elaborate thoughts on a certain detail in a book. You ask the author what he meant, and the author looks at you with astonishment, stating that he did not think about this detail at all. He destroys your interpretation with his “No, I didn’t mean to say that.” Maybe you imagined how the director of your favorite movie might be in real life. Then you learn about her bad hab- its, drug addiction or racism, and suddenly her film does not seem that great anymore. Sometimes, meeting the author destroys your previous experiences with his work of art. A dead author makes that easier. You cannot ask him about the “real meaning” of his artwork anymore. His “No, I didn’t mean to say that” remains unsaid and unheard. This is what Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” is suggesting: “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.”1 In order to exhaust the endless number of possible readings in a text, the reader must be freed from the authorial claim to know the “real mean- ing.” Roland Barthes is one among many: William Wimsatt/Monroe Beardsley, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari, Julia Kristeva and others question the importance of the author in the process of meaning-making. They slightly differ in their approaches, but they share the assumptions of the linguistic turn. Since the linguistic turn, language has come to be seen as a system of its own that creates reality and meaning. An author is only part of this system that antecedes and exceeds her; she is an effect of language, not its origin. The au- thor is thus not the origin of a text but rather the language system that enables her to write and also constrains her up to a certain point. The importance of 1 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 148. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004379558_002 2 Breu language calls into question the accessibility of authorial intention and there- fore also the importance of this category in interpretation. Different theorists have expressed this insight in different ways. It is there- fore too easy to simply state a “death of the author” and proclaim his “resurrec- tion,” just because he is still a category in interpretation processes. The notion “death of the author” can refer to many different kinds of dying, to many dif- ferent kinds of authors. But it never meant that the category of “author” should play no role at all in textual interpretation. It is not even entirely clear whether Roland Barthes expressed a new vision or promulgated an already existing re- ality. Also, an author’s resurrection – or, as Gregory Peter Fewster expresses it in this volume, “haunting” – is not excluded by the notion of “death of the author.” In Michel Foucault’s theory, for example, the author is resurrected as part of a discourse, as an author-function. But I do not want to anticipate all of the theoretical details presented in the different chapters. Instead, I would like to point to the question as to why a volume about authorship after all of the “death-and-resurrection-debates” can still add to the discourse of biblical studies. First, the variety of approaches in this volume shows that biblical studies could make use of much more differentiated views on the author than are pre- dominantly presumed within the discipline. Particularly exegetical commen- taries tend to reconstruct details about the historical person behind the text and hardly ever debate the category of “author” and its role in the process of interpretation. Second, a new focus on the category of “author” would not only affect views on the author but the whole practice of exegesis. Questions of authorship in- termingle with questions of authority, textual agency, right and wrong inter- pretations, actualization of texts, the Bible as God’s Word, verbum externum, the process of meaning-making, the role of biblical studies within interdisci- plinary exchange, etc. All in all, the academic role of biblical studies depends on the importance and place it attributes to the author. To consider the author on the basis of literary theory is therefore a fruitful addition to the discipline’s self-reflexive practice and to interdisciplinary exchange. This volume is an effect of interdisciplinarity. All of the papers deal with philosophical/literary/psychological theories. Sandra Heinen and Peter Clar contribute to the volume two different approaches from the point of view of literary studies, which had a fruitful impact on other contributions. Hannah Strømmen offers a theoretical basis for the interdisciplinary orientation of bib- lical studies. Due to the interdisciplinarity and variety of approaches discussed, no two of the chapters deal with the same approach: Some discuss the same biblical .
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