Foucault: What is an Author?
It is a very familiar thesis that the task of criticism is not to bring out the work’s relationships with the author, nor to reconstruct through the text a thought or experience, but rather to analyze the work through its structure, its architecture, its intrinsic form, and the play of its
internal relationships... If an individual were not an author, could we say that what he wrote, said, left
behind in his papers, or what has been collected of his remarks, could be called
a “work”?.. Such a name permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others. In addition, it establishes a relationship among the texts.