‘Relevant to a type of art that seemed to question the notion of originality and to court an active role for the viewer.’ (Evans, D. for Craig Owens in Appropriation p.13)
"As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally 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."
"...the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author."
"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’."
"The removal of the Author [...] 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, when believed in, 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."
"there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, ‘depiction’"
"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 writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original."
"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."
"to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author."
