The dangers of authorship

In Foucault’s "What is an Author," he is discussing exactly what the title suggests: the implications of becoming an author. He states in his second paragraph, "For the moment, however, I want to deal solely with the relationships between text and author and with the manner in which the text points to this 'figure', that, at least in appearance, is outside it and antecedes it."

Foucault is exploring the ways in which we see texts not just for themselves but for who created them. The text and the ideas that it implies takes on a life of its own and in a sense, murders its author. When we begin to see Foucault not just for who Foucault was but for his responsibility in bringing to the light the theory of panoptic power, everything we read is tainted by these notions and Foucault himself is tainted with his own notions.

When I became interested in doing a creative writing thesis I was a little overwhelmed with the idea of becoming a "serious writer", as my advisor put it, but as a writer, I am constantly writing so it's not difficult to see myself as a writer. But the struggle to become an author is much more difficult, and now I'm realizing, much more dangerous.

So what's Foucault’s solution to his own ideas murdering him? I think he would say that the ideas are worth killing himself otherwise he would not have become an author himself. And as we are coming to an end of our major rhetorical figure presentations, we are beginning to see that an author is much more than his or her work and the ideas he or she has left behind, but as time passes after the end of this course, all we will be left with are the ideas that our figures have left behind and their effects on why and how we study composition today. It's easy to see the correlations between history and an author's life and the work they're producing, but, as Foucault says, we tend to see writing as a practice rather than something completed. So keep practicing.