Filozofska istraživanja, Vol. 31 No. 1, 2011.
Review article
In Absence of the Father: Authorial Position of Michel Foucault in “The Order of Discourse”
Tomica Vrbanc
orcid.org/0000-0001-6288-9886
; National and University Library, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The intention of this text is an attempt to deny Foucault’s thesis on death of the author, an attempt using method of commenting one of his texts (“The Order of Discourse”), rather than analyzing all relevant texts and giving arguments against this thesis. By using this method of commenting, I am trying (in Foucault’s own words from the foreword to The Birth of the Clinic) to “question discourse” by examining if and how this discourse alone denies thesis on death of the author. Other way of “questioning discourse” is the way in which Foucault’s personal biography influences his work; this direction opens by uncovering the “nameless voice” from the beginning of this text. It is Foucault himself who admits influence of biographical facts on his work, and he recognizes that his whole work is founded on the elements of his own experience. Final course of analysis goes in direction of revealing the paternalistic web of relationships in this Foucault’s text.
Keywords
Michel Foucault; “the death of the author”; concepts of authorship; autobiographic elements; rhetorical conventions; paternalistic position; speech vs. writing; death and writing
Hrčak ID:
72746
URI
Publication date:
25.7.2011.
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