The Author (n.) is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes and chooses. The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.
The Author (n.) is a historical invention which, in contrast to the anonymous writer, acted to limit and constrain meaning, linking it in certain ways to discourses of rationality, responsibility, punishment, and transgression.
The Author (n.) is a projection, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: In the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice.
The Author (n.) is an ideological product... the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.
The Author (n.) is effectively anonymous and the author function effectively disappears in the text.
The Author (n.) is linked to a period of emergent punishment -to the extent that his discourse was considered transgressive.
The Author (n.) is neither an individual existing apart from a discursive practice, nor a subject acting within any specific practice, but what might be called a 'subjecting' function which oversees and regulates all the diverse situations in which any cultural subject can act.
The Author (n.) is not different from other men, nor a genial creator who precedes the work, but a functional principle whereby culture/society limits, excludes, and effects the discourse that the 'author' can produce.
The Author's (n.) name turns otherwise unrelated discursive practice into a coherent cultural realm over which it maintains jurisdiction.
The Author (n.) is to be contrasted with the fundamental author (like freud and marx), who, by incorporating into his own practice the otherwise separate revisionary (implicitly critical) practices discontinuous to it, in effect supplies the fundamental author's new discipline with the means of elaborating the internal differentiations vital to its continued cultural life.