Dom wrote:
"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."
In Madness and Civilization, Foucault sheds some timely light on the nature
of identity - cyber or otherwise - as Recognition by Mirror:
"Three insane persons, each of whom believed himself to be a king, and each
of whom took the title Louis XVI, quarelled one day over the prerogatives of
royalty, and defended them somewhat too energetically. The keeper
approached one of them, and drawing him aside, asked: 'Why do you argue with
these men who are evidently mad? Doesn't everyone know that you should be
recognised as Louis XVI?' Flattered by this homage, the madman immediately
withdrew, glancing at the others with a disdainful hautuer. The same trick
worked with the second patient. And thus in an instant there no longer
remained any trace of an argument."
In many ways, however, the past few days have put me more in mind of Brant's
Ship of Fools!!
maria
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