...The Death of a Plagiarist

The Death of the Author as Only an Attempted Murder [1]

Has a text indeed, as Barthes and Foucault assert, attained “the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author”? Or are/were postmodernists such as Barthes and Foucault seeking for themselves this supposed right to kill and to murder? And if so, should they in fact be tried for murder? Or only attempted murder?

The Deaths of the Authors M. Foucault and R. Barthes: A "Fateful Encounter" with a Laundry Truck--And a Similar Encounter With AIDS [2]

Unfortunately, if any trial of the most famous would-be-Author-killers should be held at all, such a trial must be conducted posthumously, for the deaths of these revered, would-be-Author-killers have already occurred. Roland Barthes died from injuries sustained in a Paris traffic accident near the Sorbonne in 1980, run down by a laundry truck, an inebriated driver speeding through his daily routine of picking up the Parisians' dirty laundry.[3] What a brutal way to go for such a reknowned language theorist/semiotician! The irony of Barthes' demise has provided fodder for many critics, including bloggers at transom.org who asked in superb poststructuralist, semiotic form,

Did the curious circumstances surrounding Roland Barthes' death influence your manner of reading the world around you?

 

The response from another poster, Ira Glass:

You mean was I more careful crossing the street? Absolutely!

 

And the wisecrack of another poster chiming in

So...

You don't look at laundry trucks differently?

 

Do not send and ask,
For whom the laundry trucks troll
They troll for you.

~ J.P. Lesko

In Bruce Sterling's Zeitgeist (2000), Zeta's conversation with her father is another example of the profound ways in which the "curious circumstances surrounding Roland Barthes' death [have] influence[d] . . . [people's] manner of reading the world around [them]":

" . . . You see: the deeper reality is made out of language."

 

Zeta said nothing.

 

"People don't understand this . . . there is no such thing as 'truth'. There's only language. There's no such thing as a 'fact.' There is no truth or falsehood, just dominant processes by which reality is socially constructed. In a world made out of language, nothing else is even possible . . . There is no objective reality. [2] There might be a world that has true reality. A world with genuine physics . . . We can never reach any bedrock reality. The only direction we can move is into different flavors of the dominant social discourse, or across the grain of the consensus narrative, or--and this is the worst part--into the Wittgenstein empty spaces where things can't be said, can't be spoken, can't even be thought . . . . Don't even go there, okay? You can never come out of there. It's a black hole."

 

"How come you know so much of this stuff, Dad?"

"I didn't use to know any of it. I was just living my life . . . I don't know all that much, really. There are just a few people in the world who understand how reality works. Most of them don't speak English. They speak French. Because they're all language theorists. Semioticians, mostly, with some, uh, you know, structuralists and poststructuralists . . . . Luce Iragaray . . . Roland Barthes . . . Julia Kristeva . . . Louis Althusser . . . These are the wisest people in the world, the only people with a real clue." Starlitz laughed morosely. "And does it help them? Hell, no! The poor bastards, they strangle their wives, they get run over by laundry trucks . . . " [emphasis added] (Bruce Sterling, Zeitgeist: 151-152)

Consider also Stephen Bayley's take on that fateful encounter with a camion de la blanchisserie:

Barthes was France’s most successful intellectual . . . Barthes interrogated the everyday world, moving from formal literary criticism to writing brilliantly on steak and chips, Arcimboldo and the Tour de France. It is a happy accident of homophonics that the most endearing champions of popular culture, in theory and practice, are each pronounced Bart - the professor would have enjoyed consanguinity with The Simpsons. Equally, it is haunting evidence of his legacy that the precise details of the fatal laundry truck still beg to be explained. Barthes had certainly written perceptively on detergents (‘dirt is no longer stripped from the surface, but expelled from its most secret cells’). Surely the camion de la blanchisserie must signify something? Was the offending vehicle a Unic a Saviem or a Berliet? Barthes would have wanted to know ("Don't have a vache: From Barthes to Bart" The Independent).

 

Many, many, many others have also lamented the "laundry truck [that] took him [Barthes] away from us" on the rue des Écoles that day in March..

Just before his appointment with the laundry truck in March--on March 23, 1980 to be precise--Barthes enjoyed one last conversation, one last glass of wine, with François Mitterand as well as Michel Foucault, the latter being Barthes' criminal accomplice in their attempted murder of the Author. Foucault would himself succumb to AIDS in 1984 just a few years later, the "scourge of the AIDies", or "postmodern plague" as it has also been called, representing at that time a non-commutable death sentence for The History of Sexuality's noted author and acclaimed researcher of sexual "deviance". Yet another truly ironic end to a life, an end which current followers of Foucault have recently attempted to spin as a deliberate suicide--i.e. Foucault deliberately exposed himself to AIDS in the gay bath houses of San Francisco (for example, see S. McGaha's "Theorist Web Project" on Michel Foucault which refers to such speculation: "Foucault was a proponent of suicide. He believed suicide to be a great personal victory. The taking of one’s own life was an event, like a great play without an audience. Foucault first attempted suicide in 1948. His death in 1984, from a neurological infection, is believed to be AIDS related. Foucault often frequented bathhouses in the San Francisco area during the early 1980s. It has been suggested Foucault knew about the risks of contracting AIDS and this was possibly his elaborate scheme to intentionally take his own life (Maier-Katkin, 2000)". [2]

Anti-Authorialism On Trial

Some critics believe that a trial of anti-Authorialism and the would-be-Author-killers has already been successfully concluded. Sean Burke’s The Death and Return of the Author was reviewed upon publication in 1998 as a “magisterial study [that] demolishes the structuralist and deconstructive positions on authorship” (reviewer Alastair Fowler). Another critic surmised that “The author—killed in Paris, embalmed at Yale, mourned in Cambridge—makes a sly and spectral return in this marvelous book” (reviewer James Wood). Yet another critic concludes, “The whole concept of the death of the author has been finally put to rest by Sean Burke” (reviewer Brian Vickers).

Described as “fundamentally misguided and philosophically untenable”, death-of-the-Author-ideology has itself been described as a corpse, a temporarily animated zombie strolling the gutters of Paris, depending for life-support on wizened queer theorists (uncritically following in the same vein as Barthes and Foucault), wannabe postmodern fashion followers, and post-structuralist cult members (Camille Paglia, "What I hate about Foucault").

* * *

A Plagiarist's Ultimate Doom: The Laundry Truck Is On Its Way [3]

Ultimately, a Plagiarist will be found out. A Plagiarist is doomed to discovery and revelation, if not immediately, at a later date. Perhaps by the Author, perhaps by a perceptive Reader. The Plagiarist’s plagiarations will be brought to light. And the immortality he sought as a pseudo-Author will become an immortality of textual doom. In spite of the Plagiarist’s murderous intentions, the Author will make a “sly and spectral” return. For unwittingly, the Plagiarist has through his plagiary of an Author set off a countdown for the resurrection and return of that Author. At this point it is no longer a question concerning “The Death of the Author” but rather a question concerning “The Death of the Plagiarist” and the re-birth of the Author--Death in this sense being the discovery of a plagiarist's plagiaries, and The Re-birth of the Author representing the resurrection of an Author's right to be recognized as an originator/creator. After this discovery, the Plagiarist ceases to exist as the acknowledged Author of those texts which he/she has plagiarized, and the Author returns to a life which might otherwise have been extinguished by the deliberate actions of a Plagiarist.

How long until the Plagiarist is found out? How much longer until the Author resurrects to rightfully claim his work as his own? How long until the Author laughs at the Plagiarist’s surprise, consternation, and humiliation? All the while the Plagiarist believed and plagiaristically proclaimed the Author to be dead only to discover too late that the Author is still very much alive! Very alive and cognizant of the Plagiarist’s plagiaries and plagiarations. An author, the Author, is keeping track of the Plagiarist’s textual iniquities for their eventual publication, leading to the unhappy Plagiarist’s ultimate condemnation and eternally dishonorable mention:

Plagiarist, “You are a thief!”

Dude! . . . don't even ask . . .

Notes

1. For further explanation of the "Death of a Plagiarist" metaphor, see copy of correspondence on the feedback/criticism page. In asking "What is a Plagiarist?" or defining the "Death of a Plagiarist", I'm playing off of (i.e. parodying) Foucault's and Barthes' "What is an Author?" / "Death of the Author" titles which have had the sort of "disastrous" influence on American academics decried by Paglia et al. (While I agree w/ some of Paglia's critiques of Foucault, we wouldn't necessarily align much further).

2. The unfortunate, early demise of Foucault as a result of AIDS came at a time when this new disease was not yet fully understood. Giving hope amid tragedy for all victims of this disease, at least a glimmer of hope, are the anti-viral medications and ongoing research with possible vaccines along with education/prevention initiatives. Whether or not Foucault committed suicide by deliberately exposing himself to AIDS is still open to debate today. The current author thinks it more likely that Foucault's death was not a suicide. In the early 1980's, Foucault, who apparently did not believe in objective truth, was confronted with the objective reality of this new disease: AIDS kills.

3. No offense intended . . . the laundry truck trolls as well for me (the current author) as it does for you (the reader), and as it did for all who have succumbed to the "sting of death", the sorrow, the horror . . . Death is one of those uncomfortable topics with which we seem to deal with in different ways: avoidance through attempts to prolong the flicker of life for as long as possible; wry humor and wit as the grim reaper draws ever nearer; direct confrontation in an attempt to wrest control of the dying process from the cruel hands of fate (i.e. suicide/euthanasia); atheistic denial (i.e. of any divine entity, of an afterlife, of any significance of our actions beyond the physical, the here and now); agnosticism (the so-called "wait and see" approach); and, of course, spiritual/religious preparation for the inevitable according to one's beliefs and inner convictions (i.e. as in John Donne's "this bell that tells me of his affliction digs out and applies that gold to me, if by this consideration of another's dangers I take mine own into contemplation and so secure myself by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security").

The spoofs above on "for whom the bells toll" and death imagery are intended as somewhat of a lighthearted yet also quite serious philosophical foray into areas which pertain to the question of authorship. As S. Burke concludes in his insightful exhortation to "confront afresh the fact of our own mortality":

Among the manifold tragedies and blasphemies of the human is that the terms of our thought are still so explicitly theological as to allow us to grasp transcendence and absence altogether more surely than the distinctively human, that ever singular place of desire, will and history from which spring all acts of authorship. In capturing that distinctively human, we might confront afresh the fact of our own mortality. Cicero echoes the Socrates of Phaedo (67d) when he says that philosophising is preparing for death [emphasis added]. Montaigne makes of this a pedagogic imperative in saying that 'To philosophize is to learn how to die' and adds that a life is always complete when it is over . . . Authorship is the most spectacular and doomed defiance of this wisdom: it is the limit of an expressive world and the striving we make toward a beyond. If, as Wallace Stevens suggested, 'the theory of poetry is the theory of life', the theory of authorship too has its tenebrous place in our sense of human destiny and its narratives (The Death and Return of the Author, Edinburgh University Press: 205-206).

Do not send and ask,
For whom the bells toll
They toll for you.

~ John Donne

(a slightly different wording from the original Meditation XVII from Donnes' "Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions")

 

Search WWW Search famousplagiarists.com

back to top

Disclaimer: All of the famous plagiarists featured in this webspace remain “alleged plagiarists”, the documented allegations having been made by others in the professional literature and/or the popular media. Further details relating to these allegations will be forthcoming in the book edition of Famous Plagiarists. Although Dr. Lesko is a professor at Saginaw Valley State University, the Famous Plagiarists Research Project represents the individual research of John P. Lesko, plagiarologist, and SVSU accepts no responsibility for the content of these pages. Comments or questions should be directed to