> To conclude this somewhat rambling response to your post, if everything
> between _A Course in General Linguistics_ and Foucault were miraculously
> expunged, the intellectual world would be a better and a more coherent
> place.
"Between" in what sense, I wonder? I imagine a spectrum, or range, with the
_Course_ somewhere in the moderate/conservative trough, and Foucault at the
very limit of pitch and elevation: Foucault-the-pale,
Derrida-beyond-the-pale...
This carping about "Derrida's elevation of the written over the spoken" is
mistaken, tho'. The point is that the anxieties a philosophy which always
returns to the voice as a source of authority and reassurance has about
writing and inscription speak volumes, so to speak, about the anxieties it
has over its own predicament.
I would say "the author's predicament" rather than "the author['s]
function", because I think that insofar as authoriality is made to
correspond to an assigned function, a determined place of emission - let's
say of authority, or authenticity - it is made the subject of regulations
which seek to quell the very *anxiety* that is proper to authorship, to the
effort to bring a body and a self into discourse, into language.
Foucault's attempt to define what "the author function" was for a
particularly milieu is fairly convincing, but it doesn't dispose of the
anxieties that this milieu sought to regulate by assigning such a function
to authoriality, and it certainly doesn't abolish the *problem* of
authorship in our own age.
Dom
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