What Is an Author?

1969 lecture given by Michel Foucault

"What Is an Author?" (French: Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?) is one of the most important lectures given at the Société Française de Philosophie on 22 February 1969 by French philosopher, sociologist and historian Michel Foucault.^[1]

The Author is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes and chooses: ... The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.

For many, Foucault's lecture responds to Roland Barthes' essay "The Death of the Author".

References

^ Bouchard, Donald F. ed., Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault (Cornell University Press, 1980), 113.

External links

(in French) Michel Foucault et la fonction-auteur dans "Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?"
'What is an Author?'

Michel Foucault

Books

Mental Illness and Psychology (1954)
Madness and Civilization (1961)
The Birth of the Clinic (1963)
Death and the Labyrinth (1963)
The Order of Things (1966)
This Is Not a Pipe (1968)
The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)
Discipline and Punish (1975)
The History of Sexuality (1976–2018)

Essays, lectures,
dialogues and
anthologies

Introduction to Kant's Anthropology (1964)
"What Is an Author?" (1969)
Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France
I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister and My Brother (1973)
Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (1977)
Herculine Barbin (1978)
Power/Knowledge (1980)
Remarks on Marx (1980)
Le Désordre des familles (1982)
The Foucault Reader (1984)
"What Is Enlightenment?" (1984)
Politics, Philosophy, Culture (1988)
Foucault Live (1996)
The Politics of Truth (1997)
Society Must Be Defended (1997)
Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (Essential Works Volume 1) (1997)
Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology (Essential Works Volume 2) (1998)
Abnormal (1999)
Power (Essential Works Volume 3) (2000)
Fearless Speech (2001)
The Hermeneutics of the Subject (2001)
The Essential Foucault (2003)
Psychiatric Power (2003)
Security, Territory, Population (2004)
The Birth of Biopolitics (2004)
The Government of Self and Others (2008)
The Courage of Truth (2009)
Lectures on the Will to Know (2011)
On the Government of the Living (2012)
Subjectivity and Truth (2012)
Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling (2013)
On the Punitive Society (2015)