The present reflection proposes a novel investigation method in humanities, consisting in the analysis of local phenomena as originating in the dynamic of cultural `deep structures`. My focus falls on the death of the author which I consider to be a topos and a myth of last century’s humanities. The death of the author is associated with the Hegelian eschatological philosophy of history, but may also be deciphered as a consequence of the acute manifestation, within an entire culture, of the Kantian antinomy regarding the necessary existence of a transcendent being. As transcendent to the work, the author is refuted – because, as Hugo Friedrich shows, the modern artistic conscience intuited the empty ideality of traditional metaphysical notions –. Thus, the death of the author must be inquired upon not only as a particular phenomenon within the evolution of art, but also as a symptom of certain transformations that precede the aesthetical domain, transformations that are characteristic to the late Modernity and integrant of a `multispectral` analysis (with scopes in metaphysics, archetype and myth analysis). Such a methodological exigence is based on the assumption that a cultural phenomenon ought to be integrated within the scientific paradigm it expresses and also within the ontological and cosmological models around which it is articulated. An approach such as this shall reveal that the death of the author represents and intellectual version of the death of God, further assimilated to a cultural archetype, that of the death of Meaning. Consequently, the postmodern deicide represents the imposal of negation as a form of thought, a Western thought headed, with the end of Modernity, against the metaphysical tradition (of Presence) that it stems from. I assume that the self-destruction of Western tradition is symptom of a profound crisis of identity and I interpret it as a symbolic violence meant to redeem the fault of 20th Century’s atrocities, by cleansing the guilt the Western man experiences. My approach to the analysis of myth engages the actual debate regarding the canonical fights of the last few decades while trying to shed light on the way in which the symbolic deicide of the (`secularized`) author and auctor aims at imposing a new author and a new auctor to the symbolic products of culture. Ideology is the new auctorial authority.
Barthes’ Semiotic Theory and Interpretation of Signs
