Roland Barthes

The starting point of his essay “The Death of the Author” is that language is the one that rules over a work of art and not the author. So to assume that a text represents a meaning that can be deducted from the author’s intention is misleading, a direct connection between the author and the text does not exist because the text itself is a compilation of “unconscious quotes”: “a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional 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.”

The death of the author means death of the theory of origin. Originality is put into question: ”a field without origin-or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins”.

Because the text has no ‘intentional’ meaning it can only be perceived as an open field for research and as inter-textual within a network of texts. “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 furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”

The author becomes, should be called scriptor, all literature should be called writing and work of art becomes simply a text: “In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a 'secret', an ultimate meaning, to the text (writing), by refusing to assign a 'secret', an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases-reason, science, law“.

The claims he latter develops even further in his essay “From Work to Text” entered into the agenda of poststructuralism, such as the celebration of liberation from (pha)logocentric axioms like Father, Law, Reason; the polyphony of different language games (Lyotard); the concept of play and jouissance (Derrida, Lyotard): “text is the jubilant celebration of its uncontrollable semantic openness, which constitutes an anarch(isti)c act of subversion against any center of a structure – through history also known as God, Reason, Science, Law”.

One of his latest essays “The centre of the city –the empty centre” can be perceived as an allegory of the condition of postmodern art, as well as critique.