What to make of Heidegger’s famous phrasing
that it is language which now writes, not the author.
Language occupies a central position in Heidegger’s later thinking, from his controversial yet telling pronouncements that “language speaks” and “language is the house of being” to his insistence on thinking through the language of poets, sensitive to how our very access to things hangs on our words.
The the core of Heidegger's philosophy, there lies this nagging question: what is the link between language and being? Using a famous formulation by Heidegger as a guide (‘When we go to the well, when we go through the woods, we are always already going through the word “well”, through the word “woods”’), the analysis focuses on the connection Heidegger establishes between being (what woods and well ‘are’), understanding (something is understood ‘as’ woods or well), and temporality (human understanding of woods and well has changed since ancient Greek times.
In his story Sarrasine Balzac, describing a castrate disguised as a woman, writes the following
sentence: “This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive
worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.” Who is speaking
thus? Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the
woman? Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of
Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing “literary” ideas on femininity? Is it universal
wisdom? Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the
destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique
space where our subject slips away; the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very
identity of the body writing.
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source for the following: Source https://brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/author.php
We can easily say “of course there was an author and she knew what she was doing—look at the multiple drafts, the letters to her friends, and so forth.” But that response to the possibilities of interrogating, or problematizing, the existence of the author is probably not helpful:
Such quick dismissal overlooks the fact that critics tend to operate as if the author did not know what she was doing, even if she says that she does, and for very good reasons which need to be explored -- for instance because she could not be aware of her social or cultural ideological environment, or fully aware of how profoundly she was influenced by her own personal or cultural experiences, or of how her subconscious was seeing and constructing relationships, or of what implications the genre she was writing in had for the eventual meaning of what she had to say.
that it is language which now writes, not the author.
Language occupies a central position in Heidegger’s later thinking, from his controversial yet telling pronouncements that “language speaks” and “language is the house of being” to his insistence on thinking through the language of poets, sensitive to how our very access to things hangs on our words.
The the core of Heidegger's philosophy, there lies this nagging question: what is the link between language and being? Using a famous formulation by Heidegger as a guide (‘When we go to the well, when we go through the woods, we are always already going through the word “well”, through the word “woods”’), the analysis focuses on the connection Heidegger establishes between being (what woods and well ‘are’), understanding (something is understood ‘as’ woods or well), and temporality (human understanding of woods and well has changed since ancient Greek times.
In his story Sarrasine Balzac, describing a castrate disguised as a woman, writes the following
sentence: “This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive
worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.” Who is speaking
thus? Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the
woman? Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of
Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing “literary” ideas on femininity? Is it universal
wisdom? Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the
destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique
space where our subject slips away; the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very
identity of the body writing.
===============================================================
source for the following: Source https://brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/author.php
We can easily say “of course there was an author and she knew what she was doing—look at the multiple drafts, the letters to her friends, and so forth.” But that response to the possibilities of interrogating, or problematizing, the existence of the author is probably not helpful:
Such quick dismissal overlooks the fact that critics tend to operate as if the author did not know what she was doing, even if she says that she does, and for very good reasons which need to be explored -- for instance because she could not be aware of her social or cultural ideological environment, or fully aware of how profoundly she was influenced by her own personal or cultural experiences, or of how her subconscious was seeing and constructing relationships, or of what implications the genre she was writing in had for the eventual meaning of what she had to say.
- Following the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, the idea that meaning does not belong to words but to i) the field of meaning in which it occurs and the differences from other words in that meaning-field, so that meaning is by difference, not by identity: this is the 'paradigmatic' placement of language; and ii) to the placement of the word in the grammar of a sentence: the 'syntactic' placement of language. iii) A third placement was added, for instance by Umberto Eco, the placement of context, in that words change according to their context: this is the 'pragmatic' placement. For the purposes of the death of the author, the functionality of language which is most important is the first mentioned, the idea that meaning is created through difference, not through identity. The effect is to place any language use within a broad frame of language-use, in which language is an independent system.
- This has led to the idea, articulated by the philosopher Heidegger and others, that humans do not speak language, language speaks us. As we acquire language we enter a flow of meaning which has several at least two broad configurations: i) language as an independent system of differentiations; ii) language as as a storehouse of cultural meaning, so that Foucault can speak of stepping into the flow of meaning, Lacan of our entering, through language, into the Law of the Father, the rule of the governing conceptions of our culture. The 'intended' meanings of an 'author' are subsumed under languages' real ways of meaning, and the centrality of pre-existing fields of meaning to our very being as (inevitably, culturally-formed) 'individuals'. It can be argued that there is no such thing as 'personal' meaning (there can be personal experiences, but when we assign meaning to those experiences, that meaning is only shared, only cultural), it can be argued that any subject who enunciates is only a creation of language itself, it can be argued that meaning belongs to the play of language itself and is far beyond our control. All these things mitigate against the privileging of an 'author' in reference to a text.
To contest something is to question its common usage and to scrutinize it for its full but often obscured meanings and implications.
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