Freud, apparently, did not like the telephone, however much he may have liked listening. Perhaps he felt, perhaps he foresaw that the telephone is always a cacophony, and that what it transmits is the wrong voice, the false communication . . . No doubt I try to deny separation by the telephone—as the child fearing to lose its mother keeps pulling on a string; but the telephone wire is not a good transitional object, it is not an inert string; it is charged with a meaning, which is not that of junction but that of distance. […] I’m going to leave you, the voice on the telephone cries out with each second.

—Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living

—T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

There is a sense in which the author is definitively dead: buried, we assume, by Barthes and Foucault. As Jane Gallop observes, Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author” has received even more attention than Foucault’s paper on the author function, and though the former “was just a few pages in a little-known literary quarterly, its title has become a widely familiar, world-renowned slogan” (29). We might take it, then, that for literary theory today Barthes has displaced the Platonic valuation of speech over writing, as in the Phaedrus when Socrates and the titular interlocutor speak of “the living, ensouled speech of a man of knowledge” contra the “appearance of intelligence” cultivated by mere readers (78-9).

Actually, if Barthes’ essay has any advantage (so to speak) over Plato’s dialogue it might primarily be that the two texts really must ‘speak’ to each other, but only insofar as they are read. Barthes claims that “a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author” (1325). So this present text (which you will have to read1) will attempt a virtual ‘reading’ of Plato and Barthes together: the record of a hypothetical ‘foci of multiplicity’ in the reader of both “The Death of the Author” and the Phaedrus.

What if we read Barthes with Plato and vice-versa, as if in order to simulate a dialogue between them? We will find, I think, that though we have framed our ‘reading’ (necessarily performed by readers, not auditors) of the two using Barthes’ terms, Plato will nevertheless ‘speak back’ to Barthes, even if only through the act of reading. This might finally indicate a détente of sorts between speech and writing, for this will also be our way of admitting what we have implicitly understood all along: neither Barthes nor Plato, as people who spoke and authors who wrote, ultimately privileged either writing or speech absolutely. Foucault, who brought attention to the “function” or effects of authorship as such, may be left out of the virtual symposium (at least for now).

In Plato’s dialogue Socrates and Phaedrus set out at one point to discuss “whether or not writing is desirable—what makes it acceptable and what makes it undesirable” (77). Before we consider the objections to writing raised thereafter we should briefly recall the Platonic critique—as in the final book of the Republic—of mimesis (as unreal and in conflict with true understanding), and its most common rebuttal: Plato himself is a mimetic artist. So we also should read the Phaedrus with this nagging problem foregrounded, rather than temporarily bracketed: why should Plato use the medium his dialogues seem to decisively dismiss, or more precisely, why should Plato introduce into his writings several profound criticisms of writing itself? We can observe that the effect of this has been for the writing-problem to, as it were, infect or contaminate all the other problems in the Platonic dialogues: no Platonic philosophy without writing. But then it is also the case that no Platonic philosophy can entirely ignore the problems posed by mimetic writing as the constitutive act of Platonism, and today we might say that Plato has defamiliarized writing itself by writing the case against writing.

Today we might also say that Plato was among the first to intimate what Barthes would call “the death of the author.” The dialogues are in a sense memorials of Socrates, as written representations of Socratic philosophy, but they are also demonstrations of Socrates’ authorial persistence, via Plato, after his actual death. Plato has Socrates speak an acknowledgement of the distance between a text and its author when after telling the tale of Amon and Theuth he suggests to Phaedrus: “perhaps it matters to you who the speaker is, or what country he’s from, because you are not concerned only with whether or not he is right” (79). He is reproaching Phaedrus for paying more attention to the story’s ostensible source than to its content or meaning, and especially its truth—as if to say: ‘forget the author, focus on the ideas before you.’

Of course the difference between Socrates and Barthes is that the former wants philosophers to focus on the ideas or content ‘behind’ words, not the words themselves, whereas for Barthes the reader “is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted” (1325). Nevertheless Plato’s dialogue has, in this exchange about writing, called the reader’s attention to the fact that they are reading, and raised for contemplation the possibility that neither ‘Socrates’ nor ‘Plato’ as authorial figures should lead us to accept their words as authoritative. That Socrates’ interlocutors tend to agree with him or have their dissent quickly dispatched has often been noted, but we can see how the Platonic inclusion of writing as a philosophical problem is a counterpart to that habit. The interlocutors model the tendency to receive philosophy as truth instead of understanding it to be a dialogic process; the discussions of writing-as-problem introduce a countervailing implication of the reader’s need to resist the author-ity of both Socrates and Plato if they are to read these texts philosophically. So Plato has implied, through mimetic rather than rhetorical techniques, what Barthes declares in his manifesto: “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (1326).

Now having tried to show that the idea of “the death of the author” is already in Plato, we might be tempted to conclude that Barthes has more clearly asserted what was merely implicit or even hidden in Plato. But here we ought to recognize that today Socrates’ account of what is “odd” about writing will help us to understand the difficult legacy of Barthes’ essay (79). For it is indeed as a slogan that “the death of the author” is most problematic; the idea is often received or resisted or simply disparaged as though it were a catchphrase, and not a concept extrapolated from one essay. Those who have not read “The Death of the Author” tend to either take it as axiomatic in a simplistic way (assuming that the author and their biography do not contribute to ‘readings’ of texts) or else reject it out of hand for any number of reasons, be it ‘common sense’ (what if the author isn’t actually dead and is in the habit of loudly interpreting their own texts?) or else sentiment (what if I should feel attached to certain authors as people?). As Jonathan Culler notes, Barthes’ life as an author has had certain effects on his reception, including after his actual death:

Barthes has become a cultural icon whose passage through other supposedly radical phases to the love of the French language and its subtleties makes him all the more valuable as a confirmation that culture resides essentially in the relation of the individual subject to a patrimony best represented by the mother tongue. (124)

We might be surprised to learn that Barthes has in some sense become a figure of generalized Francophilia. But it is precisely to the extent that Barthes is an “icon” of certain ‘value’ to French culture as such—along with the extent to which he is not actually read—that Barthes is most undead as an author; that is, falsely ‘alive’ after his actual death, his status as a figure of Authorship being made to exceed its natural term. We could say that the undeath of the author would follow the death, or dearth, of the author’s careful readers. Gallop does call attention to the fact that Barthes admitted the ‘return’ of the author in some of his later and less-read work, and she memorably suggests that “the author dies in an overexposed Barthes and returns in an underexposed Barthes” (30). But if the supposedly “overexposed” Barthes is the Barthes who wrote “The Death of the Author,” an essay few people seem to actually read, then we find ourselves in a rather sorry state of affairs. And to our delight or annoyance, Plato’s Socrates has foreseen precisely this co-opting or capture of Barthes’ writing:

Once any account has been written down, you find it all over the place, hobnobbing with completely inappropriate people no less than with those who understand it, and completely failing to know who it should and shouldn’t talk to. (79)

Since the elitism of this complaint is not exactly operative in our reading of Plato today (when Platonic texts are more widely available for study than ever before), we can afford to bracket elitism as a problem, and go on to consider how this passage describing the ‘oddness’ of writing might be read as a figure for literary theory’s problematic reception today. The problem is not that Barthes is read by the ‘wrong’ people today—it is that Barthes does not need to be read in order for people to speak of his work, and especially to mouth the words “death of the author” without ever stopping to think about what Barthes wrote. So we have returned to a preference for writing over speech—or more simply, for actually reading over idly talking. Both Barthes and Plato variously favour both writing and “ensouled” speech (we might go on to consider Barthes’ notion of “the grain of the voice” and, complementarily, Plato’s work with the figure of the rhapsode in the Ion); by explicitly reading them together we have begun to see how they both indicate the necessity of maintaining a productive tension between writing/speaking and author/reader.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch et al., 2nd ed., Norton, 2010, pp. 1322-26.

Culler, Jonathan. Barthes: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2002.

Gallop, Jane. The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time. Duke UP, 2011.

Plato. Excerpt from Phaedrus. Translated by Robin Waterfield. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch et al., 2nd ed., Norton, 2010, pp. 77-83.