Missa pro defunctis. Mort et résurrection de l'auteur en droit français

Matthieu Forlodou, Université de Nantes

Abstract

This short essay deals, in a legal point of view, with the question of the author's death, as raised by Michel Foucault and other french theorists. After a careful examination of Foucault's suggestion that the author is the very form of the "modern subject", we try to investigate further in the field of the law on the implication of the post-modern claim to the imminent death of the author.

Firstly, we find out that the word auteur in french law shows a more wide meaning than its usual significance. Despite its extended meaning in law, the term refers to the efficient cause, as Aristotle identified it, that is that from which the change first starts. The term auteur is another way to refer to the modern legal subject.

Secondly, assuming that the death of the author can be understood, by metonymy, as the death of the modern legal subject, we try to grasp the implications of the post-modern assertion. The death of the author is not only the end of the modern conception of the literary process, but also the ruin of the individual sovereignty. Therefore, the individual is no longer vested with the attributes regarded by the modern legal theory as belonging to every man. In the end, the individual is rather a produce of the normative system than a moral agent. The death of the author raises a more dificult question: can the death of the author, as an aesthetic and moral agent, be understood as the death of the legal system that produces this author. Is it the prelude to the ruin of the humanist tradition?