Roland Barthes - The Death of the Author (1967)

How has this not been recorded yet? Published in Aspen, 5/6 (Fall-Winter, 1967), trans. Richard Howard.
Featuring Balzac, Baudelaire, Van Gogh, Tchaikovsky, Mallarmé, Valéry, Proust, Montesquieu, Flaubert, de Quincey, Jean-Pierre Vernant.

[@OsirusHandle]

Is the author not themselves a reader? And subsequently "To Author" is "To Read", as in, to read in the stars their message, to "decipher" not the hidden fancies of that which wrote them, but of the words themselves? Perhaps this "death of the author" is infact the surrealist "death of the message"; no message is given, none is looked for, only unending traces and textures, signs that point not nowhere but "somewhere, I guess". "Real" feelings, real in the sense that they aren't feelings at all...
I see a common theme, but perhaps I am but a reactionary: liberty brings forth a new world, and in doing so murders not "the old world", but the very subject of liberty itself. What is the "subject of the liberated"? Is it worth it, and if not, is there a different path?

[@moscamuerta]

i dont understand, what's the problem? doesn't the birth of the reader bring freedom?

[@mastermiracle4144]

I always say that the author is reborn in the text after his metaphorical death as a spirit that haunts the writing
there is a piece of the writer left behind in the lines they write
and that piece becomes part of the text
what is it and what does it mean is irrelevant it just floats there

[@OsirusHandle]

@@moscamuerta The issue is already in freedom: It appears to me that freedom is self destructive, you free yourself only to find yourself "free" of the very field you tried to "free" your access to. Certainly a good thing in its political dimension, until one runs out of political dimensions entirely. What is the utopia of Freedom? How can one have liberty from both death AND life, and from liberty itself?