Gary Gutting

Foucault’s response to this objection will be the title of one of his best-known essays: ‘What Is an Author?’. Is being an author a matter of having an identity (a certain nature, character, personality), like, for example, being a hero, a liar, or a lover?

As Foucault suggests, even when we aim at collecting ‘everything’ by a great author such as Nietzsche, we do not include these texts. Only certain kinds of texts count as the ‘work’ of an author.

Foucault concludes that we should, strictly, not speak of the ‘author’

but of the ‘author function’. To be an author is not merely to have a certain factual relation to a text (for example, to have causally 11

produced it); it is, rather, to fulfil a certain socially and culturally defined role in relation to the text. Authorship is a social construction, not a natural kind, and it will vary over cultures and over time.