Reviewers who receive a paper from which the identifying marks have been removed will immediately put in place an (imagined) set of circumstances of exactly the kind they are supposedly ignoring. I

The third point concerning this 'author-function' is that it is notformed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourseto an individual. It results from a complex operation whose pur-pose is to construct the rational entity we call an author. Un-doubtedly, this construction is assigned a 'realistic' dimension aswe speak of an individual's 'profundity' or 'creative' power, hisintentions or the original inspiration manifested in writing. Never-theless, these aspects of an individual, which we designate as anauthor (or which comprise an individual as an author), are pro-jections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way ofhandling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extractas pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we prac-tise.

We can conclude that, unlike a proper name, which moves fromthe interior of a discourse to the real person outside who producedit, the name of the author remains at the contours of texts -separating one from the other, defining their form, and character-izing their mode of existence. It points to the existence of certaingroups of discourse and refers to the status of this discourse withina society and culture. The author's name is not a function of aman's civil status, nor is it fictional; it is situated in the breach,among the discontinuities, which gives rise to new groups of dis-course and their singular mode of existence. C

Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story's hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it the author Balzac, professing certain "literary" ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology? It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.