The author and authority

Seen from one angle, there are parallels that can be considered natural between what Roland Barthes calls the "death of the author" and what Nietzsche calls the "death of God." Authorship once required an authority that could almost be attributed to a God, and the work an author set before us as a text could be subjected to a process of interpretation in which its author was almost exempted from every human characteristic.

Writing ultimately requires making a decision. The famous French thinker Jacques Derrida describes the moment of writing as the audacity of "making a decision" in a situation where "no decision can be made." The moment of undecidability in fact expresses the state of lostness we are in, before the world we live in, as humans, indeed as human beings, if we do not receive a revelation or inspiration from heaven. Yet the human being makes a decision even without waiting to receive inspiration from heaven, and with the decisions he makes, even if he sometimes finds the right path, though generally he does not, he opens or forms a path for himself and for others.

By what motives and by what inferences does the human mind decide which of its countless options will be the right path? What kind of light does the mind shed on itself here, and, whether it wishes to remain within the limits of pure reason or not, what is the possibility of indicating the truth with decisions made under other motives and feelings that affect and direct it?

This is a question that continually feeds a debate as long as humanity itself. A question that confronts the human being at all times and everywhere, that seizes everyone from scratch. But it is at the same time a question that can be answered in haste, as in the times when a person feels himself to be an authority and gives ignorant answers to all questions.

Is the author more knowledgeable than any other person in the face of these and other questions? Has the author been given more knowledge, revelation, talent than has been given to other people, such that, in the face of an undecidable world reality, he can decide on a piece of writing that may also be a claim to destiny, on what is written?

The fact that the equivalent of authorship in Western languages is "author," and that authorship requires an authority, is of course no coincidence. The author is precisely making a decision in an undecidable situation, and moreover exercising an authority by binding that decision to writing in a way not everyone can. However much it may rest on evidence, knowledge, logic, every piece of writing is in fact constructed with a rhetoric, with eloquence, with a beautiful or persuasive word, with a story.

Consequently, authority also includes the privilege of being able to arrange reality within the wholeness of a story, the ability to construct it with rhetoric. But this authority based on rhetoric does not necessarily bring with it the property of speaking the truth about reality. We can only say that the ability to decide in an undecidable situation very often requires only audacity. If you have the courage, you can use the word to distort reality as you wish, to build and create the reality you want.

Whether writing or oral speech exercises authority more powerfully on this matter has been debated and is debated. We will return to this later. But authority is not a privilege obtained only through the ability to write or to speak. On the contrary, authority can be obtained in different ways, and from the moment it is obtained, one has also obtained the power and privilege of speaking. A status obtained by force, by traditional acceptance and consensus, by holding an office, or by wealth can make the most nonsensical ideas and words acceptable. Here not even rhetoric is needed; the authority one possesses brings with it the privilege of being able to say the word and make it accepted.

On this subject, an observation by someone who became rich later but is self-aware also reveals the ironic side of the matter: I used to speak before too, I said the same things in the same style, but no one listened to me or took me seriously. Now, after I have become rich, even my mother-in-law, who did not listen to me before, and my relatives have begun to take me more seriously. Even when I talk nonsense my words are taken seriously.

That the value of a word depends on the speaker does not always arise from the speaker's rhetorical power; it arises only from the exercise of authority, which has different sources.

In times when we seem to have left behind the era in which authorship required special expertise, wisdom, knowledge and authority, when everyone with a smartphone, every Twitter, WhatsApp or Facebook account holder experiences this authorial authority, are these topics still to be mentioned regarding the relationship between authorship and authority?

The death of the author that Barthes spoke of was of course something else. Perhaps today we are living through another chapter of that death. What kind of chapter this is, we must look and see.