from . The word itself illustrates Derrida s point that writing doesn t copy speech. Thus meaning is continuously and endlessly postponed as each word leads us on to yet another word in the system of signification. So, Derrida sees a text as an endless sequence of signifiers, which has no ultimate signifier.
2.2 Roland Barthes - The Death of the Author
Barthes was a prominent post-structuralist who believed that there are two orders of signification: iconic and connotative. According to him, the idea of ​​second-order signification is a myth. In myth there are two semiological systems, one of which is staggered in relation to the other: a linguistic system, the language, which Barthes calls language-object, because it is the language which myth gets hold of in order to build its own system ; and myth itself, which Barthes calls metalanguage, because it is a second language in which one speaks about the first. When he reflects on a metalanguage, the semiologist no longer needs to ask himself questions about the composition of the language-object, he no longer has to take into account the details of the linguistic schema; he will only need to know its total term, or global sign, and only as this term lends itself to myth. This is why the semiologist is entitled to treat in the same way writing and pictures: what he retains from them is the fact that they are both signs and they constitute a language-object. He believes that a sign has a signifier and a signified which are related to each other through an unending chain of signifiers because there is not one signifier for a signified but many.1968 Barthes wrote what is largely considered to be his best-known work, the essay The Death of the Author . Barthes saw the notion of the author, or authorial authority, in the criticism of literary text as the forced projection of an ultimate meaning of the text. By imagining an ultimate intended meaning of a piece of literature one could infer an ultimate explanation for it. But Barthes points out that the great proliferation of meaning in language and the unknowable state of the author s mind makes any such ultimate realization impossible [11]. His essay, Barthes criticizes the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author's identity - his or her political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes - to distill meaning from the author's work. In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive explanation of the text. Readers must thus separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny. Each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings. In a well-known quotation, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a text is a tissue (or fabric) of quotations , drawn from innumerable centers of culture , rather than from one, individual experience. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the passions or tastes of the writer; a text's unity lies not in its origins, or its creator, but in its destination, or its audience [2]., in his essay, The Death of The Author , states: ... writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body of writing [8, p. 120]. all the post-structuralists and the Deconstructionists, Barthes gives importance to the context of which the text is a product. At the end of his essay, The Death of The Author , he says: ... it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author [8, p.123]. Author is always in the past of the text; whereas the Writer is simultaneous with it. Writing always occurs now, in the act of reading it, enunciating it, unpacking its structure. There is no single theological meaning but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings blen...
