Foucault in his essay “what IS an Author” has highlighted that traditional notion of individualisation of

the author has shifted in the contemporary world. He states that the “solid and fundamental” concept
of authorship hasn’t always existed. He explores that how the connection of writing and death is
changed from ancient times , when the term author was privileged, into the most recent idea of
authorship.Unlike the idea of Barthes i.e Author is dead,the reader is born” , Foucault presents the
relationship between writing and death that gives birth to the author. He partly implicit the idea of
Barthes and presents the displacement of author to the outskirts of the text.

Foucault is not interested in the author as a person or as an individual. He is

of the view that author remain outside of the structure of the text, therefore he cannot
govern the text but, he can not be completely absent or dead .Instead of
traditionally seeing the author simply as a person who
writes, Foucault sees authorship as a function of the
writing itself. He presents the idea that the presence of
author is nessecarry as text uses the author as a function
of itself. to denaturalize the conventional role of
“authorship He uses the term “author function” which is
more likely the set of beliefs and governing the production
and circulation of the text.

When the text in transgressive or libelous, it needs

its author to take the responsibility. Initially the text
which was in accordance with the interst of dominant
religious ideology was considered to be sacred while the others
were unsacred. However, after the 18th century, the concept of
legalizing the author came into existence and the author’s name
became an important part of the texts. e.g. Today, we might focus
on the importance of the author to copyright laws and
charges of plagiarism.

Author as a legal construction, connected to questions of

heresy, slander, and libel. Today, we might focus on the
importance of the author to copyright laws and charges of
plagiarism
Foucault is not interested in the author as a person. That
view of the author as a person would be, generally
speaking, the view of pre-critical humanism, in which the
author is credited as being “real” and as being in complete
control of the text that the author produces. (Most readers
today, despite Foucault, continue to view the author as in
this pre-critical humanist way. They care about the life of
the author, for example, and believe that the author is the
ultimate authority when it comes to determining meaning in
a given literary work.)