Cinnabar and Alabaster

125. who's speaking in the fictional narrative balzac penned? "we shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing"; "as soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively...outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins"; in "ethnogragic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman...whose 'performence'...may possibly be admired but never his 'genius.' the author is a modern figure."
126. "it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality...to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs,' and not 'me.'"
127. "the removal of the Author...is not merely an historical fact or an act of writing; it utterly transforms the modern text (or--which is the same thing--the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent). the temporality is different. the Author...is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after. the Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers...is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. in complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate...every text is eternally written here and now."
128. "we now know that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture" & "once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. to give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to
129. furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing." criticism loves this; it suits its purposes. "in the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, 'run' (like the thread of a stocking) at every ptoin...but there is nothing beneath" & thus this "liberates what may be called an antitheological activity" (the criticism that's left?) "that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases--reason, science, law"; in greek tragedies, each character hears something different--fatally--& that thing only; only the audience hears both meanings & sees what's coming, & "thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made from 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...the author. the reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. yes this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader...is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted."
130. thus "to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author."