The Reader is Dead

Barthes got it wrong and right at the same time

The present essay will surely affirm a further piece of the postmodernistic phallus of attempted metaphysical deaths.

It will be shown that the opposite is happening of what Barthes declared in .

The essence of Barthes’ treatise is the liberation of the text from the authority (implying the awful authoritarian domination) of its creator.
In the broader discourse, Barth, like a genuine postmodernist, attacks the subject, its ontological right to be asserted, or at least observed.

Since there is no tangible subject who asserts or communicates something from themselves; since at best such subject is obscure and scattered somewhere among the dimension of nothingness, the content of meaning can no longer be supposed as fixed by the author’s intentions or motives; instead, it is born in the act of reading, shaped by the reader’s interpretation.

The author “dies” so that the text can live autonomously, as a bottomless vessel, endlessly open to new fillings of meanings and perspectives.

The death of the author is, therefore, the reader’s liberation — free to explore and construct meaning without constraint, and such meaning in the postmodernist view is naturally obscure, relative, messed, proudly inconsistent, and perhaps even provocatively ugly. The reader remains empowered and indispensable, but his own qualifications do not seem to be questioned.