WHAT IS AN AUTHOR?

Edited by

JAMES D. FAUBION

 Translated by

ROBERT HURLEY AND OTHERS

ESSENTIAL WORKS OF

FOUCAULT 

1954 - 1984 

譯者：李康 張旭

校者：王倪

参考：王岳川主编《后现代主义文化与美学》

WHAT IS AN AUTHOR?

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  The coming into being of the notion of "author" constitues the previleged moment of individualization in the history of idea, knowledge, literature, phililosophy, and the science. Even today, when we reconstruct the history of a concept, literary genre, or school of philosophy, such categories seem relatively weak, secondary, and superimposed scansions in comparison with the solid and fundamental unit of the author and the work.

  “作者”观念的出现造就了理念、知识、文学、哲学和科学史上”个人化”的特权时期。即使在今天，当我们重构某一观念、文学体裁或者哲学流派的历史时，这些范畴较之更为坚实而根本的“作者”和“作品”的观念来说，也显得相对弱小，并且是次一级的。

  I shall not offer here a sociohistorical analysis of the author's persona. Certainly, it would be worth examing how the author became indivualized in a culture like ours, what status he has been given, at what moment studies of authenticity and attribution began, in what kind of system of valorization the author was involved, and what point we began to recount the lives of authors rather than heroes, and how this fundamental category of "the-man-and-his-work criticism" began. For the moment, however, I want to deal solely with the relationship between text and author and with the manner in which the text points to this "figure" that, at least in appreance, is outside it and antecedes it. 

  我在这里并不打算提供一个关于“作者”的社会历史分析图景。确实，下列问题是值得考察的：“作者”在我们这样的一种文化中是如何被个人化的，它被给予了何种地位，关于作者真实性和作品归属权的研究是在何时开始的，作者被置入怎样的一种评价体系中，从什么时候起我们开始描述作者的生活而非主人公的生活，以及这种根本的“人与其作品”批评模式是如何开始的。但是现在，我仅仅想要处理文本和作者之间的关系，即文本是通过何种方式指向这个身处文本之外且先于文本存在-----至少表面看起来如此------的人物（即作者）的。

  Beckett nicely formulates the theme with I would like to begin: " 'What does it matter who speaking,' someone said, 'what does it matter who is speaking,' '' In this indifference appeas one of the fundamental enthical principles of contempary writing [ecriture]. I say "ethical" because this indifference is not really a trait characterizing the manner in which one speaks and writes, but rather a kind of immanent rule, taken up over and over again, never fully applied, not designating writing as a something completed, but dominating it as a practice. Since it is too familiar to require a lengthy analysis, this immanent rule can be adequately illustrated here by tracing two of its major themes. 

  贝克特曾经很好地阐述过这个主题，我想就从这里开始。他说：”谁在说话，这无关紧要”，有一个人在说，至于是谁在说话，这不重要”。在这种漠然之下，当代写作的一个根本伦理原则开始显现出来。我称其是“伦理的”，是因为这种漠然并不是我们说话和写作方式的标志性特征，而是一种内在的规则，它从未被完全施行，但却一再地被采纳；它并不将写作视为一种完成事件，而是将其视为在这一规则主导之下所进行的实践活动。我们对此太过熟悉了，毋须长长的分析，仅仅通过追踪这一内在规则的两个基本主题，我们便可以很好地阐明这一规则。

  First of all, we can say that today's writing has freed itself from the dimension of expression. Referring only to itself, but without being restricted to the confines of its interiority, writing is identified with its own unfold exteriority. This means that it is an interplay of signs arranged less according to its signified content than according to the very nature of the signifier. Writing unfolds like a game [jeu] that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is rather a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disapears. 

  首先，我们可以说今天的写作早已经逃逸出了“表达”的范围。现在的写作仅仅指涉自身，并且不受自身内部性的制约，而以其显露的外部性作为其标志。这意味着写作变成符号之间的相互嬉戏，更多地以能指本身而非其所指的内容为依据。写作显露为一种游戏，一再地跳出自身的规约，越出它原有的边界。写作的关键点不在于对写作这一行为进行表现或者崇高化，也不在于要将某一主体嵌入语言；它更像是一种空间创造问题，让写作主体在这一空间中一再地不断地失踪。

The second theme, writing's relationship with death, is even more familiar. This link subverts an old tradition exemplified by the Greek epic, which was intended to perpetuate the immortality of the hero: if he was willing to die young, it was so that his life, consecrated and magnified by death, might pass into immortality; the narrative then redeemed this accepted death. In another way, the motivation, as well as the theme and the pretext of Arabian narratives - such as The Thousand and One Nights - was also the eluding of death; one spoke, telling stories into the early morning, in order to forestall death, to postpone the day of reckoning that would silence the narrator. Scheherazade's narrative is an effort, renewed each night, to keep death outside the circle of life. 

 第二个主题我们就更熟悉了，是写作与死亡的关系。这一联系破坏了以希腊史诗为典范、意在确保英雄不朽的古老传统：在希腊史诗里，如果一个英雄志愿英年早逝，他的生命将会因死亡而受到祭奠和放大，从而进入不朽；叙事补偿了这种自愿领受的死亡。而在阿拉伯叙事里，比如《一千零一夜》，其表现出的动机、主题以及托辞，也是为了逃避死亡：一个人说话，讲故事直到清晨，是为了阻止死亡，推迟那会让叙述者永远沉默的那一天的到来。山鲁佐德（Scheherazade）的叙述是一种努力，通过不断的叙事更新，以便将死亡阻挡在生命的轮回之外。

 Our culture has metamorphosed this idea of narrative, or writing, as something designed to ward off death. Writing has become linked to sacrifice, even to the sacrifice of life: it is now a voluntary effacement which does not need to be represented in books, since it is brought about in the writer's very existence. The work, which once had the duty of providing immortality, now processes the right to kill, to be its author's murderer, as in the case of Flaubert, Proust, and Kafka. That is not all, however: this relationship between writing and death is also manifested in effacement of the writing subject's individual characteristics. Using all the contrivances that he sets up between himself and what he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular individuality. As a result, the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence: he must assume that role of the dead man in the game of writing. 

  我们的文化完全逆转了这种视写作为对死亡之反抗的叙事或写作观念。写作开始和献祭、甚至和牺牲生命相联系：它现在是代表一种自愿的毁灭，自我已经不需要再现在书中了，因为它已经被带入了作者的存在之中。曾经一度被认为有创造不朽之责的作品，现在却拥有了杀戮的权力，成为自己作者的谋杀犯。福楼拜、普鲁斯特和卡夫卡都是此中例证。同时，书写和死亡的关系也显现在写作主体个人特征被消抹的过程之中。通过设置在他本人和他所写的东西之间的机关，写作主体去除了文本中所有可以显示其个性的标记。结果便是，作者的特征被化约到空无一物，只能以“作者缺席”这样的特性作为“作者”的特性了。作者必须扮演书写游戏中死去的那个人的角色。

  None of this is recent; criticism and philosophy took note of the disappearance - or death - of the author some time ago. But the consequences of their discovery of it have not been sufficiently examined, nor has its import been accurately measured. A certain number of notions that are intended to replace the privileged position of the author actually seem to preserve that privilege and suppress the real meaning of his disappearance. I shall examine two of these notions, both of great importance today.

  所有这些都不是晚近的产物；文学批评和哲学在早前就已经注意到了作者的失踪或者说死亡。但这一现象的后果并未得到充分的考察，它的意义也没有得到精确地估量。“作者”的特权地位事实上已经被许多有意取代其地位的概念所占据，后者同时遮蔽了作者失踪所具有的真正意义。我将考察其中的两个概念，它们在今天都显得非常重要。

  The first is the idea of the work. It is a very familiar thesis that the task of criticism is not to bring out the work's relationship with the author, not to reconstruct through the text a thought or experience, but rather, to analyze the work through its structure, its architecture, its intrinsic form, and the play of its internal relationships. At this point, however, a problem arises: "What is a work? What is this curious unity which we designate as a work? Of what element is it composed? Is it not what an author has written?" Difficulties appear immediately. If an individual were not an author, could we say that what he wrote, said, left behind in his papers, or what has been collected of his remarks, could be called a "work"? When Sade was not considered an author, what was the status of his papers? Were they simply rolls of paper onto which he ceaselessly uncoiled his fantasies during his imprisonment?

  第一个概念是作品。有一种我们非常熟悉的论调认为，文学批评的任务不在于呈现作品和作者之间的关系，也不是为了重构文本中的某种思想和经验，相反，其任务应该是分析作品的结构、布局、内在固有形式，以及其内部关系间的互动。就这一观点来说，问题便产生了：”什么是一部作品？这个我们指称为作品的令人好奇的整体是什么？或者它包含什么要素？它是不是写作者写的那个东西？“困难立即出现了。如果一个个体不是作者，我们能够将他所写所说的，以及纸上留下的、笔记中所收集的东西称之为”作品”吗？当萨德被认为不是一个作者的时候，他留下的那些纸该如何定位？难道它们只是他在羁押期间用来随手写下他的狂想的一堆废纸吗？

  Even when an individual has been accepted as an author, we must still as whether everything that he wrote, said, or left behind is part of his work. The problem is both theorectical and technical. When undertaking the publication of Nietzsche's works, for example, where should one stop? Surely everything must be published, but what is 'everything'? Everything that Nietzsche himself published, certainly. And what about the rough drafts for his works? Obviously. The plans for his aphorisms? Yes. The deleted passages and the notes at the bottom of the page? Yes. What if, within a workbook filled with aphorisums, one finds a reference, the notation of a meeting or of an address, or a laundry list: is it a work, or not? Why not? And so on, ad infinitum, How can one define a work amid the millions of trace left by someone after his death? A theory of the work does not exist, and the empirical taks of those who naively undertake the editing of the works often suffers in the absence of such a theory. 

  即使一个个体已经被认可为作者，我们依然要问，是不是所有他所写所说所留下的东西都将是他的作品的一部分。这个问题既是理论问题也是实践问题。比如，在着手出版尼采的作品的时候，我们应该将界限划在哪里？当然，所有的东西都应该被出版，但什么是”所有东西”呢？当然，要有所有尼采自己出版过的东西。那么他的作品的草稿呢？当然要有。他的格言写作计划？当然要有。那些删除页和页底的批注呢？当然要有。如果我们在一本满是格言的书中发现的一条参考书目、一个会议记录或者一个地址、一个洗衣单呢？它是不是作品？为什么不是？诸如此类，无穷无尽。我们该如何从一个人死后所留下的百万条线索出发定义他的作品呢？可惜我们并没有一个作品理论，那些不知深浅地从事编辑工作的人们总是深受这种缺乏理论之苦。

 We could go even further: does The Thousand and One Nights consistue a work? What about Clement of Alexandria's Miscellanies or Diogenes Laertius' Lives? A multitude of questions arises with regard to this notion of the work. Consequently, it is not enough to declare that we should do without the writer (the author) and study the work in itself. The word "work" and the unity that it designates are probably as problematic as the status of the author's individuality. 

  我们甚至可以走得更远一点：《一千零一夜》是不是构成了一部作品？亚历山大里亚的克莱门的《杂记》[Miscellanies]或第欧根尼•拉尔修的《名哲言行录》呢？当涉及到“作品”概念时，大量问题涌现出来。因此，对我们来说，抛却作者仅仅研究作品本身是不够的，“作品”这个词以及它所构成的整体如同作者的个人特性一样满是问题。

  Another notion which has hindered us from taking full measure of the author's disappearance, blurring and concealing the moment of this effacement and subtly preserving the author's existence, is the notion of writnig [ecriture]. When rigorously applied, this notion should allow us not only to circumvent references to the author, but also to situate his recent absence. The notion of writing, as currently employed, is concerned with neither the act of writing nor the indication - be it symptom or sign - of a meaning which someone might have wanted to express. We try, with great effort, to imagine the general condition of each text, the condition of both the space in which it is dispersed and the time in which it unfolds.

  另一个会对我们全面评估作者失踪的努力形成阻碍的概念是[书写]，这一概念混淆和掩盖对作者的消抹、同时又微妙地维持着它的生存。 粗略地使用这一概念，我们不仅可以规避与作者的联系，而且能够定位作者当前的缺席。在目前的使用语境中，“书写”的概念既不牵涉写作行为，也不是对一个人想要表达的意义的指示（indication），不论这一指示是作为表征（symptom，symptôme）还是符号（sign，signe）。相反，它代表一种极大的努力，试图去想象每一个文本的总体环境，这一环境既包括让文本赖以在其中播散的空间，也包括让文本在其中得以显露的时间。

   In current usage, however, the notion of writing seems to transpose the empirical characteristics of the author into a transcendental anonymity. We are content to efface the more visible marks of the author's empiricity by playing off, one against the other, two ways of characterizing writng, namely, the critical and religious approaches. Giving writing a primal status seems to be a way of retranslating, in transcendental terms, both the theological affirmation of its sacred character and the critical affirmation of its creative character. To admit that writing is, because of the very history that it made possible, subject to the test of obliviion and repression, seems to represent, in transendental terms, the religious principle of the hidden meaning (which requies interpretation) and the critical principle of implicit significations, silent determinations, and obscured contents (which give rises to commentary). To imagine writing as absence seems to be a simple repetition, in transcendental terms, of both religious principle of inalterable and yet never fulfilled tradition, and the aesthetic principle of the work's survival, its perpetuation beyond the author's death, and its enigmatic excess in relation to him. 

  在目前的使用范围中，“书写”的观念似乎将作者的经验特征转化为一种先验的匿名性。我们满足于通过使用两种时而彼此对立时而并行不悖的方式-----即批评模式和宗教化模式-----来处理上述经验特征，将作者经验性中的那些可见标记去除。其实，赋予书写以一种原初性的地位，从先验角度出发，难道不是一种重译方式吗？一方面，这是对书写的神圣性的意识形态确认，同时，又是对书写的创造性的批判性确认。承认书写就其所促成的特定历史的角度来讲，很容易陷入被遗忘和被压制之中，这不是从先验意义上再现了针对隐匿意义和宗教原则（诠释的必要性），以及针对暗含意味、沉默意志和费解内容的批评原则（评论的必要性）吗？将书写想象为一种不在场，难道不是对这种一成不变但却未曾实现过的传统所秉持的宗教原则的简单重复吗？难道不也是对坚称作品存活，坚信作品可以在作者生后永存、且相信作品与作者之间存在隐秘联系的美学原则的简单重复吗？

  This usage of notion of writing runs the risk of maintaining the author's privileges under the protection of writing's a priori status: it keeps alive, in the grey light of neutralization, the interplay of those representations that formed a particular image of the author. The author's disapperance, which, since Mallarme, has been a constantly recurring event, is subject to a series of transcendental barries. There seems to be an important dividing line between those who believve that they can still locate today's discontinuities [reptures] in the historico-transcendental trandition of the nineteenth century, and those who try to free themselves once and for all from that tradtion. 

  “书写”这一概念有可能通过维护其推论地位而据有“作者”的特权：“作者”始终存活在中立的暧昧光影下，文本再现（representations）之间的互动造成了某种特定的作者形象。从马拉美开始，作者的失踪已经成为一种一再重现的事件，这是由一系列先验性质的障碍所导致的。难道我们没有必要划分出两种人吗？那些相信他们依然可以将今天的非延续性纳入到19世纪的历史-先验传统中去的人，以及那些试图将自己一劳永逸地从这一传统中解脱出来的人，在这两类人之间，存在着重要的区分。

 It is not enough, however, to repeat the empty affirmation that the author has disappeared. For the same reason, it is not enough to keep repeating (after Nietzsche) that God and man have died a common death. Instead, we must locate the space left empty by the author's disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings that this disappearance uncovers. 

  然而，仅仅重复那种作者消失了的空洞论调，还是不够的。同样，一再重复（在尼采以后）上帝和人类已经共同死亡也是不够的。相反，我们必须定位那在作者失踪之后空出来的空间，追踪这一空间的边界和缺口的分布，留意随着作者的消失所释放出来的那些功能。

  First, we need to clarify briefly the problems arising from the usge of the author's name. What is an author's name? How does it function? Far from offering a solution, I shall only indicate some of the difficulties that it presents. 

首先，我们需要对随着作者名字的使用所产生的问题进行阐明。什么是一个作者的名字？它是如何发生作用的？我还不能够给出答案，而只是想指出回答这个问题时可能出现的一些困难。

  The author's name is a proper name, and therefore it raises the problem common to all proper names. (Here I refer to Searle's analyses, among others.2) Obviously, one cannot turn a proper name into a pure and simple reference. It has other than indicative functions: more than an indication, a gesture, a finger pointed at someone, it is the equivalent of a description. When one says "Aristotle," one employs a word that is the equivalent of one, or a series of, definite description, such as "the author of Analytics," "the founder of ontology," and so forth. One cannot stop there, however, because a propoer names does no have just one significaiton. When we discover that Rimbaud did not write La Chasse sipirituelle, we cannot pretend that the meaning of this proper name, or that of the author, has been altered.The proper name and the author's name are situated between the two poles of description and designation: they must have a certain link with what they name, but one that is neither entirely in the mode of designation nor in that description; it must be a specific link. However - and it is here that the particular difficulties of the author's name arise - the link between the proper name and the individual named and between the author's name and what it names are not isomorphic and do not function in the same way. There are several differences. 

  作者的名字是一个专名，因此，它将面对所有专名共同存在的问题。（这里，我特别引用的是searle的分析。）很明显，我们不能将专名转变为一个简单的指涉。它所具有的不止表征功能：它不仅是表征，一个姿势，一个指向某人的手指，它还是一种描述的对等物。当我们说“亚里士多德”，我们所使用的这个名词是一种或者一系列的明确描述的对等物，如“分析篇的作者”、“本体论的创立者”等等等等。但我们不能停留于此，因为专名不不止一种含义。当我们发现《灵光篇》并非兰波（Rimbaud）所写的时候，我们不能错以为”灵光篇”这个专名的意义、或者这个作者名字的意义改变了。这个作品名和作者名居于描述（description）和指称（designation）的两极之间：它们肯定和它们所由以命名的对象之间具有一种确定的连结，但这一连结既不完全在指称模式之下，也不在描述模式之中，它是一种特殊的连结。但是，正是在这里，作者名身上的特定困难出现了-----专名和单个被命名对象之间的关系，以及在作者名字和被命名的那个个体之间的关系，这两种关系并不完全等同，它们不能以同样的方式发生作用，二者之间存在几点差异。

  If, for example, Pierre Dupont does not have blue eyes, or was not born in Paris, or is not a doctor, the name Pierre Dupont will still always refer to the same person;; such things do not modify the link of designation. The problems raised by the author's name are much more complex, however. If I discover that Shakespeare was not born in the house that we visit today, that is a modification which, obviously, will not alter the functioning of the author's name. But if we proved that Shakespeare did not write those sonnets which pass for his, that would constitute a significant change and affect the manner in wehich the author's name functions. If we proved that Shakespeare wrote Bacon's Organon by showing that the same author wrote both the works of Bacon and those of Shakespeare, that would be a third type of change which would entirely modify the functioning of the author's name. The author's name is not, therefore, just a proper name like the rest. 

举例来说，假如皮埃尔•杜邦不是蓝眼睛，或者不是出生在巴黎，或者不是一位医生，皮埃尔•杜邦这个名字仍将指向同一个人：上述那些事情的改变并不会改变原有的指称连结。由作者名所造成的问题却要比这复杂多了。假如我发现莎士比亚不是出生在我们如今所参观的那座房子里的话，很明显，这是一个对该作者名的运作并不会造成改变的变化。但是假如我们证明莎士比亚并没有写过那些以他的名义流传下来的十四行诗的话，那将是一个重大改变，并将影响该作者名起作用的方式。假设我们通过展示培根的作品和莎士比亚的作品是同一个人所写，从而证明莎士比亚写了署名培根的《新工具》的话，那这将是第三种类型的改变，这一改变将完全改变莎士比亚这个作者名起作用的方式。因此，作者名并不是像其他专名那样仅仅是个专名。

  Many other facts point out the paradoxical singularity of the author's name. To say that Pierre Dupont does not exist at all is not the same as saying that Homer or Hermes Trismegistus did not exist. In the first case, it means that no one has the name Pierre Dupoint; in the second, it means that several people were mixed together under one name, or that the true author had none of the traits traditionally ascribed to the personae of Homer or Hermes. To say that X's real name is acutally Jacques Durand istead of Pierre Dupont is not the same as saying that Stendhal's name was Henri Beyle. One could also question the meaning and functioning of the propositions like "Bourbake is so-and-so, so-and-so, etc." and "Victor Eremita, Climacus, Anticlimacus, Frater Taciturnus, Constantine Constantius, all of these are Kierkegaard."

  有许多其他事实都指出了作者名的独特性。说皮埃尔•杜邦不存在和说荷马或者赫耳墨斯•特里斯墨吉斯忒斯不存在完全不是一回事。在前一个例子中，是说没有人叫皮埃尔•杜邦这个名字；在第二个例子中，则意味着有几个人被归入同一个名下，或者说那个真正的作者并不具有传统上赋予荷马或者赫尔墨斯这两个人物的特点。说X的真正名字是雅克•杜兰德而非皮埃尔•杜邦，和说斯丹达尔的名字是亨利•贝尔，二者同样不是一个意思。我们还可以探究像“布尔巴基是XXX” 和“Victor Eremita，Climacus，Anticlimacus，Frater Taciturnus，Constantin Constantius，所有这些名字都是克尔凯廓尔”这样的命题的意义和功能。

  These differences may result from the act that an author's name is not simply an element in discourse (capable of being either subject or object, of being replaced by pronoun, and the like); it performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function. Such a name permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others. In addition, it establishes a relationship among the texts. Hermes Trisemegistus did not exit, or did Hippocrates - in the sense that Balizac existed - but the fact that several texts have been placed under the same name indicates that there has been established among them a relationship of homogeneity, filiation, authentification of some texts by the use of others, reciprocal explication, or concomitant utilization. The author's name serves to characterize a certain mode of being of discourse: the fact that the discourse has an author's name, that one can say "this is written by so-and-so" or "so-and-so is its author," shows that the discourse is not ordinary everyday speech that merely comes and goes, not something that is immediately consumable. On the contrary, it is a speech that must be received in a certain mode and that, in a given culcure, must receive a certain status. 

这些差异可能来自这样一个事实，那就是一个作者名在话语中并不是简单地作为单个要素存在（作为主语或是宾语，可以被一个代词或者类似的词置换），它在叙事话语中扮演着特定的角色，发挥一种分类功能------这样一个名字使得我们能将大量文本组织起来，限定它们，将它们与其他文本相区分，和其他文本形成对立。另外，一个名字还确立了文本之间的相互关系。就有巴尔扎克这个人存在的意义上而言，赫耳墨斯•特里斯墨吉斯忒斯不存在，希波克拉底也不存在；但几个文本已经在统一名字之下被组织起来的这一事实表明，在这些文本之间已经建立了关系：同源（homogeneity）关系、派生关系（filiation，derivation）、互证关系（用别的文本证明就该文本真实性）、双向解释关系，互利关系。最后，作者的名字被用以标志某种特定的话语存在方式：话语具有作者名、可以说“这是XXX写的”或是“XXX是它的作者”这一事实，表明这一话语不是随生随灭的普通日常话语，不是那种会被立即消耗的东西。相反，它是以某种特定模式接收、并且需要在某种给定文化中被给予特定地位的一种话语。

  It would seem that the author's name, unlike othe proper names, does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it; instead, the name seems always to be present, marking off the edge of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being. The author's name manifests the apperance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse withina society and a culture. It has no legal status, nor is it located in the fiction of the work; rather, it is located in the break that founds a certain discursive construct and its very particular mode of being. As a result, we could say that in a civilization like our own there are a certain number of discourses that are endowed with the "author-function," while others are deprived of it. A private letter may well have a signer - it does not have an author; a contract may well have a gaurantor - it does not have an author. An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has a writer - but not an author. The author-function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourse within a society. 

  我们可以得出这样的结论，作者名不同于其他的专名，其他专名能从某个话语的内部移向产生这一专名的外在实际个体。相反，作者名局限于文本之内，对文本进行划分，勾勒出文本轮廓，显示文本的存在方式，或者至少显示文本的特征。作者名说明了某一话语的背景，指出了这一话语在一个社会、一种文化中的地位；它并不处在自然人的地位上，也不是存在于作品的虚构里。它处在一种裂隙中，这一裂隙造就了某种特定话语群以及它们的独特存在方式。结果便是，我们可以说，在我们文明中存在着许多被赋予“作者功能”的话语，而也有许多其他话语不具有这一功能。一封私信可能也有一个署名者-----但它并没有作者；一个合同可能有一个签约方----但它也没有作者。一份贴在墙上的匿名文本可能有个写作它的人，但也没有作者。因此，“作者功能”标志着一个社会里某些话语的存在方式、流通方式以及运作方式。

  Let us anlyze this "author-function" as we have just described it. In our culture, how does one characterize a discourse containing the author-function? In what way is this discourse different from other discourse? If we limit our remarks to the author of a book or a text, we can isolate four different characteristics. 

我们需要分析这种作者功能。在我们的文化中，是如何描述具有作者功能的话语的呢？这一话语以何种方式区别于其他话语？如果我们只限于讨论某本书或某个文本的作者的话，可以分辨出四种不同的特征。

First of all, discourses are objects of appropriation. The form of ownership from which they spring is of a rather particular type, one that has been condified for many years. We should note that, historically, this type of ownership has always been subsequent to what one might call penal appropriation. Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors (other than mythical, "sacralized" and "sacralizing" figures) to the extend that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive. In our culture (and doubtless in many others), discourse was not originally a product, a thing, a kind of goods; it was essentially an act - an act placed in the bipolar field of the sacred and the profane, the licit and the illicit, the religious and the blasphemous. Historically, it was a gesture fraught with risks before becoming goods caught up in a circuit of ownership. 

首先，作者是被占用的对象。它所涉及的所有权形式属于一种特殊类型，针对该类型的法律编纂工作在很多年前已经完成。从历史的角度看，我们还须注意到，这种所有权形式总是在须承担刑事责任的占用之后才出现的。文本、书籍和话语开始有了作者（而不是传说人物或被神圣化的人物），这在某种程度上意味着作者开始受制于惩罚，也就是说，某种程度上话语也有可能成为一种越界行为。在我们的文化中（无疑在其他许多文化中也是如此），话语最初并不被看做是一件产品，一个东西，一种商品；它本质上是一种行为，是在神圣与世俗、合法与非法、敬神与渎神两极之间的地带发生的一种行为。从历史角度来看，在话语被纳入财产流转的保护之前，这一行为是一种冒险的行为。

Once a system of owership for texts come into being, once strict rules concerning author's rights, author-publisher relations, right of reproduction, and related matters were enacted - at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century - the possibility of transgression attached to the act of writing took on, more and more, the form of an imperative peculiar to literature. It is as if the author, beginning with the moment at which he was placed in the system of property that the characterizes our society, compensated for the status that he thus acquired by rediscovering the old bipolar field of discourse, systematically praticing transgression and thereby restoring danger to writing which was now guaranteed the benifits of ownership. 

在十八世纪末和十九世纪初，随着文本所有权体系的成形，以及事关作者权益、作者-出版商关系、复制权利及相关事宜的严格法规的制定，写作行为的越界诱惑也越来越多地集中到了文学身上。似乎从被置入这个以财产体系为特征的社会的那一刻起，作者便开始通过重新发掘过去的话语两极地带来充实自己刚刚获得的地位，他系统地进行越界行为，将刚刚享受到所有权权益的写作行为重新置于风险之下。 

  The author-function does not affect all discouses in a universal and constant way, however. This is its second characteristic. In our civilization, it has not always been the same types of texts which have required attribution to an author. There was a time when the texts that we today call "literary" (narratives, stories, epics, tragedies, comedies) were accepted, put into circulation, and valoroized without any question about the identity of their author; their anonymity caused no difficulties since their ancientness, whether real or imagined, was regarded as a sufficient guarantee of their status. On the other hand, those texts that we now would call scientific - those dealing with cosmology and the heavens, medicine and illnesses, natural sciences and geography - were accepted in Middle Ages, and accepted as "true," only when marked with the name of their author. "Hippocrates said," "Pliny recounts," were not really formulas of an augument based on authority; they were the markers inserted in discourses that were supposed to received as statements of demonstrated truth. 

  然而，作者功能并不是以一种普遍而一贯的方式对话语施加影响。这是其第二个特点。在我们的文明里，需要有作者归属的也并不都是同样类型的文本。有一个时期我们今天称之为"文学"的文本（叙事文学，故事，史诗，悲剧，喜剧）是在丝毫不对其作者身份进行认定的情况下被接受、传播和欣赏的。它们的匿名性并没有造成任何问题，因为它们的古老性----不论这是真实的还是想象的-----足以充分保证其地位。另一方面，那些今天我们称之为“科学性”的那些在中世纪获得认可的文本（那些解决天文学问题和天堂、医学和疾病、自然科学和地理学问题的文本），它们只有在标注有作者的情况下才会被认可为是“真的”。“希波克拉底说”“普林尼说”这样的表述并不是基于权威的论点所得出的公式；它们是插入到话语中的标记，表明该表述是已得到证明的真理，可以接受。。

A reversal occured in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Scientific discouses began to be received for themselves, in the anonymity of an established or always redemonstrable truth; their membership in a systematic ensamble, and not the reference to the individual who produced them, stood as their gurantee. The author-function faded away, and the inventor's name served only to christen a theorem, propostion, a particular effect, property, body, group of elements, or pathological syndrome. By the same token, literary discourses come to be accepted only when endowed withthe author-function. We know ask of each poetic or fictional text: from where does it come, who wrote it,when, under what circumstances, or beginning with what design? The meaning ascribed to it and the status or value accorded it depend upon the manner in which we answere these questions. And if a text should be discovered in a state of anonymity - whether as a consequnece of an accident or the author's explicit wish - the game becomes one of rediscovering the author. Since literary anonymity is not torerable, we can accept it only in the guise of an enigma. As a result, the author-function today plays an important role in our view of literary works. (These are obviously generalizations that would have to be refined insofar as recent critical pracitise is concerned)

逆转发生于17世纪或者18世纪。科学话语开始在现有的或经反复论证的真理统统匿名的情况下，因其自身价值而为人接受了；作为其保证的是它们归属于一个体系的事实，而非对某个创造真理的个人的引用。作者功能逐渐消失，创造者的名字仅仅被用来为一个定理、配方、特定效应、属性、物体、要素集或者病理症状进行命名。于此同时，文学话语却开始在有作者功能的情况下才会被接受。我们现在问每一篇诗歌文本或者小说文本：它是在何处写的，是谁写的，在什么时间什么情况之下，或者是以怎样的构思开始的------这个文本的意义以及它的地位和价值，都要取决于我们回答这些问题的方式。一旦一个文本被发现处于匿名状态-----不论是由于意外还是作者有意为之-----最后我们都会陷入找寻作者的游戏。因为文学的匿名状态是不能被忍受的，我们只能将其作为一个处于重重伪装之下有待索解的谜团来接受。作者功能在我们今天看待文学作品的视角中扮演着重要的角色。当然，这一说法太过绝对，我们需要对此略加阐发。一段时间以来，文学批评已经开始根据作品的体裁和类型来处理这些作品，分析反复出现的元素背后的那个人物形象，依据作品于不变中呈现的变化而非依据写作者个人来对作品进行分析。（在数学中，作者的地位已经沦落到充其量不过是为着引用一则特定的定理或一组命题而顺便带出；而在生物学和医学中，提到一位作者或者是他做研究的日期，却有着完全不同的意涵。它不只是简单地指明资料来源的一种方式，还要证明证据的“信度”，因为它牵涉到对在给定的时间、在特定的实验室能够采用的技术和实验材料作出充分的理解。）

The third characteristic of this author-function is that it does not develop spontaneously as the attribution of a discourse to an individual. It is rather, the result of a complex opeartion which constructs a certain rational being that we call "author." Crtitics doubtless try to give this intelligible being a realistic status, by discerning, in the individual, a "deep" motive, a "creative" power, or a "design," the milieu in which writing originates. Nevertheless, these aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are onlya projection of, in more or less psychologizing terms, of the operations that we force texts to undergo, the connections that we make, the traits that we establish as pertinent, the continuities that we recognize, or the exclusions that we practice. All these operations vary according to periods and types of discourse. We do not construct a "philosophical author" as we do a "poet,", just as, in the eighteen century, one did not constuct a novelist as we do today. Still, we can find throgh the ages certain constants in the rules of author-construction.

作者功能的第三个特点是它并不随着将某个话语归属于某个个体的过程而同时生成。它毋宁说是一种复杂运作的结果，这种运作构建了我们所称的“作者”这一理性存在。批评家无疑想通过探究个体的深层动机、创造力或者“设计”------这是写作产生的社会环境-------给这种知性存在以一种现实地位。但是，所有这些我们安置到个体身上以便将其塑造为一个作者的因素，用心理学术语来说，或多或少都只是对我们自己的文本处理方式的一种投射：我们所做出的那些相似性，我们建立的那些相关特征，我们识别出的那些连续性，或者我们所做的排除工作，所有这些操作都是基于时代和话语类型的差异而变化。我们并没有像构建“诗人”一样构建出一种“哲学作者”出来，这就好像18世纪的人构建不出今天的小说作者的概念一样。

It seems, for example, that the manner in which literary criticism once defined the author - or rather constructed the figure of the author beginning with existing texts and discouses - is directly derived from the manner in which Christian tradtion authenticated (or rejected) the text at its disposal. In order to "rediscover" an author in a work, modern criticism uses methods similar to those that Christian exegesis employed when trying to provde the value of a text by its author's saintliness. In De viris illustribus, Saint Jerome explains that homonymy is not sufficient to identify legitimately authors of more than one work: different individuals could have had the same time, or one man could have, illegitimately, borrowed another's patronymic. The name as an individual trademark is not enough when one works within a textual tradition.

当然，我们依然能在不同时代的作者功能运作中看到一些特定的不变因素。比如说，文学批评过去一度用来定义作者-----或者说是从现有文本和话语出发建构出一个作为作者的人来-----的方式是直接从基督教传统下鉴定文本真伪的方式中衍化而来的。为了重新发现一个作品的作者，现代批评家所用的方式和基督教所用的方式是一致的，后者试图用作者的圣洁程度来证明某个文本的价值。在《名人论》中，圣•杰罗姆解释说几部作品的同名并不能证明它们出自同一个作者之手-----不同的个体可能拥有相同的名字，或者一个人可能非法地借用了另一个人的名字。在文本传统之中，仅仅以名字作为个性化标志是不够的。

How then can one attribute several discourses to one and the same author? How can one use the author-function to determine if one is dealing with one or several individuals? Saint Jerome proposes four criteria: (1) if among several books attributed to an author one is inferiorr to the others, it must be withdrawn from the list of the author's works (the author is therefore defined  as a constant level of value); (2) the same shoul dbe done if certain texts contradict the doctrine expounded in the author's other works (the author is thus defined as a field of conceptual or theoretical conherence); (3) one must also exclude works that are written in a different style, contaiining words and expressions not ordinarily found in the writer's production (the author is here conceived as a stylistic unity); (4) finally, passages quoting that statements that were made, or mentioning events that occured after the author's death must be regarded as interpolated texts (the author is here seen as a historical figure at the crossroads of a certain number of events).

那么几个话语如何才能被归于同一个作者名下呢？我们怎么用作者功能去确定我们究竟是在面对一个个体还是几个个体？圣•杰罗姆提出了四个标准：1、如果在几本归于同一个作者名下的书中，有一本劣于其他几本，那么这一本要从该作者的作品目录中剔除（作者因此被定义为一种稳定的价值水准）；2、当特定文本的观念与作者在其他著作中详述过的理念相矛盾时，重复第一条里的做法-----剔除（作者因此被定义为一种具备概念或理论连贯性的场域）；3、我们还必须排除那些用不同风格写作、包含作者其他作品中不常见的词语和表达的作品（作者在这里被设想为一种风格上的统一体）；4、最后，如果文章中引用或者提及作者死后才出现的说法和事件，该文本应该被认为是伪造文本（作者在这里被视为一个站在许多正在发生的历史事件的交叉点上的人物）。

Modern literary criticism, even when - as it is now customary - it is not concerned with questions of authentification, still defines the author the same way: the author provide the basis for explaining not only the presence of certain events into a work, but also their transformations, distorations, and diverse modifications (through his biography, the determination of his individual prespective, the analysis of his social position, and the revelation of his basic design). The author is also the principle of a certain unity of writing - all differences having to be resolved, at least in part, by the principles of evolution, maturation, or influence. The author also serves to neutralize the contraditions that may emerge in a series of texts: there must be - at a certain level of his thought or desire, of his consciousness or unconciousness - a point where contraditions are resolved, where incompatible elements are at last tied together or organized around a fundamental or originating contradition. Finally, the author is a particular source of expression that, in more or less completed forms, is manifested equally well, and with similar validity, in works, sketches, letters, fragments, and so on. Clearly, Saint Jerome's four critieria of authenticity (criteria which seem totally insufficient for toda's exegetes) do define the four modifications according to which modern criticism brings the author-function into play. 

现代文学批评，即使在它并不关注真实性问题的时候，仍然是以上述方式定义作者的-----这在现在很常见：“作者”不仅提供了解释作品中特定事件时所需要的基础，而且可以说明对这些事件的变形、歪曲和形形色色的改变（通过研究作者的传记，通过确定作者的个人视角，通过对其社会地位的分析，或者对其基本构思的展示）。作者同时也构成了特定写作统一体的原则------通过归因于成长、成熟或者影响等因素，作者作品中的差别至少就部分而言会被消除。此外，“作者”也被用于中和一系列文本中可能出现的矛盾：在作者的思想或欲望、意识或无意识的特定层面，必然会存在那么一点，在这一点上所有的矛盾得到解决，所有不能兼容的要素都至少被组织在一个关键或原初的矛盾点的周围。最后一点，作者还是表达的一个特定源泉。在文本中，在信件、残篇、草稿等等里，它们都能同样完好、同样有效地表现出来，只是形式上的完全程度不一而已。很清楚，圣•杰罗姆关于真实性的四个标准（对现在的注释家来说，它们相当不充分）其实是界定了现代批评使用“作者功能”时所依据的四种模式。

But the author-function is not a pure and simple reconstruction made secondhand from a text given as passive material. The text always contain a certain number of signs referring to the author. The signs, well known to grammarians, are personal pronouns, adverbs of time and place, and verb conjugation. Such elements do not play the same role in discourses provided with the author-function as in those lacking it. In the latter, such "shifters" refer to the real speaker and to the satio-temporal coordinates of his discourse (although certain modifications can occur, as in the operation of relating discouses in the first person). In the former, however, their role is more complex and variable. Everyone kowns that, in a novel narrated n the first person, neither the first  person pronoun, nor the present indicative refer exactly either to the writer or to the moment in which he writes, but rather to an alter ego whose distance from the author varies, often changing in the couse of the work. It would be just wrong to equate the author with the real writer as to equate him with the fictitious speaker; the author-function is carried out and operates in the scission itself, in this division and this distance. 

但是，“作者功能”不是从作为被动材料的文本入手所进行的一种二手的简单重构。文本总是包含着大量指涉作者的符号。语法学家很熟悉这些符号，它们中有人称代词，有表示时间地点的形容词，有不规则动词。依据话语中是否存在作者功能进行划分，这些要素在话语中扮演的角色并不相同。在没有作者功能的文本中，这些游移符号指向真实的说话者，指向其话语中的时空坐标（当然，在以第一人称做间接引语的情况下存在例外）。然而，就有作者功能的情况而言，这些符号所扮演的角色就更为复杂和多变了。我们都知道，在以第一人称叙述的小说中，无论是第一人称代词还是现在时直陈式（the present indicative）都并不确切地指向作者，也不指向他写作的时刻；它们毋宁说是指向一个与作者距离时远时近、在作品中时常变化的第二自我。将作者和真正的写作者相等同，和把作者与虚拟叙述者相等同是一个意思。作者功能是在分裂中产生和发挥作用的，它产生于两个自我间的分隔和距离。

One might object that this is a characteristics peculiar to novelistic or poetic discourse, a "game" in which only "quasi-discouses" participate. In fact, however, all discouses endowed with the author-function do posses this plurality of itself.  The self that speaks in the preface to a treatise or mathematics - and that indicates the circumstances of the treatise's composition - is identical neither in its position nor in its functioning to the self that speaksin the course of a demonstration, and that appears in the form of "I conclude" or "I suppose." In the first case, the "I" refers to an individual without an equivalent who, in a determined place and time, completed a certain task; in the second, the "I" indicates an instance and a level of demonstration which any individual could perform provided that he accept the same system of symbols, play of axioms, and set of previous demonstrations. We could also, in the same treatise, locate a third self, one that speaks to tell the work's meaning, the obstacles encountered, the results obtained, and the remaining problems; this self is situated in the field of already existing or yet-to-appear mathematical discourses. The author-function is not assumed by the first of these selves at the expense of the other two, which would then be nothing more than a fictitious splitting in two of the first one. On the contrary, in these discouses the author-function operates so as to effect the dispersion of these three simultaneous selves. 

有人可能会反对，认为上述特点只存在于小说或诗歌形式的话语中，是一种只有“准话语”才会参与的游戏。但事实上，所有被赋予作者功能的话语都常常具有这种自我的多重性“plurality”。在一篇数学论文的前言中讲话并说明论文构成情况的那个自我，和那个在证明过程中以“我的结论是XX”或者“我假设XX”腔调出现的自我，它们不论在位置还是功能上都是不同的。在前一种情况里，“我”指涉的是一个没有等同物的个体，它在特定的时间和地点，完成一项特定的课题；而在后一种情况里，“我”指示的是一个实例和一种任何个体都能进行的证明------只要你获得一套相同的符号系统，使用定理，并依照之前的证明进行操作就行。我们同样能在同一篇论文中区分出第三个自我，这个自我能够说明这项课题的意义，它所面临的阻碍、得到的结果以及仍未解决的问题；这个自我存在于既存的或即将展开的数学话语中。作者功能并不是在牺牲另外两个自我的前提下建立在第一个自我之上，这带来的结果只能是第一个自我的一分为二。相反，作者功能在这一话语中同时发挥作用，影响三个同时共存的自我的扩散。

No doubt analysis could discover still more characteristics traits of the author-function.I will limit myself to these four, however, because they seem both the most visible and the most important. They can be summarized as follows: (1) the author-function is linked to the juridical and institutional system that encompasses, deterimines, and articulate the unverise of discourses; (2) it does not affect all discourses in the same way at all times and in all types of civilizations; (3) it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a discourse to its producer, but rather by a series of specific and complex operations; (4) it does not refer purely and simply to a real individual , since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to severeal subjects - positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals. 

毫无疑问，通过分析我们将能发现作者功能的更多特点。但我将仅限于讨论上面的四个特点，因为它们是最明显也是最重要的。它们可以总结如下：1、作者功能与裁决和立法体系相联系，它们覆盖、确定并明确表述了话语的疆域；2、它并不是在所有文明、所有时间中都以同样的方式影响着所有的话语；3、它并不是由将话语归于某个话语制造者名下的归属行为所界定的，相反，它是由一系列特殊而复杂的运作所界定；4、它并不单纯且简单地指向一个真实个体，因为它可以同时产生多个自我以及多个主体，这些主体位置将被来自不同阶层的个体所占据。

Up to this point I have unjustifiably limited my subject. Certainly the author-function in painting, music, and other arts should have been discussed, but even supposing that we remain within the world of discourse, as I want to do, I seem to have given the term "author" much too narrow a meaning. I have discussed the author only in the limited sense of a person to whom the production of a text, a book, or a work can be legitimately attributed. It is easy to see that in the sphere of discourse one can be the author of much more than a book - one can be the author of a theory, tradition, or discipline in which other books and author will in their turn find a place. These authors are in a position which we shall call "transdiscursive." This is a recurring phenomenon - certainly as old as our civilization. Hormer, Aristotle, and the Church Fathers, as well as the first mathematicians and the originators of the Hippocratic tradition, all played this role. 

截至目前，我已经毫无理由地限制了我的主题。当然，我们也应该讨论在绘画、音乐和其他艺术中存在的作者功能，但我还是想把我们的讨论限制在话语的范围内，所以我赋予了“作者”这个术语更狭窄的意义。我只是在有限的意义上谈论作者，将其作为可以将某个文本、某本书或者某部作品合法地归于自己名下的一个人。很容易看出，在话语的范围里，一个人不仅仅可以作为一本书的作者，他也可以成为一个理论、一种传统或某个学科的作者，其他书籍和作者又可以反过来在这里找到属于自己的位置。这些作者处在我们称之为“超话语”的位置上。这是一种重复出现的现象，如同我们的文明一样古老。荷马、亚里士多德以及教会的教父们，还包括第一个数学家和希波克拉底传统的开创者，他们所扮演的都是这个角色。

Furthermore, in the course of the nineteenth century, there appeared in Europe another, more uncommon, kind of author, whom one should confuse with neither the "great" literary authors, nor the authors of religious texts, nor the founders of science. In a somewhat arbitrary way we shall call those who belong in this last group "founders of discursivity." They are unique in that we are not just the authors of their own works. They have produced something else: the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts. In this sense, they are very different, for example, from a novelist, who is, in fact, nothing more than the author of his own text. Freud is not just the author of The Interpretation of Dreams or Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconcious; Marx is not just the author of the Communist Manifesto or Capital: they both have established an endless possibility of discourse. 

另外，19世纪时欧洲出现了另外一种更不寻常的作者，他们既不是伟大的文学作者，也不是宗教文本的作者，也不是科学的开创者。以一种多少有点武断的方式，我们将这些属于这最后一个阵营的人称之为“话语的开创者”。他们的独特之处在于，他们不仅创造了自己的著作，还创造了其他东西------其他文本赖以形成的可能性和规则。就此意义而言，他们和-----比如说-----一个小说家非常不同，后者事实上除了创造他自己的文本之外无所创造。弗洛伊德不仅仅是《梦的解析》或《玩笑及其与无意识的关系》的作者，马克思也不仅仅是《共产党宣言》或《资本论》的作者----他们都建立了话语的无尽可能性。

Obviously, it is easy to object. One might say that it is not true that the author of a novel is the only the author of its own text; in a sense, he also, provided that he acquires some "importance," governs and commands more than that. To take a very simple example, one should say that Ann Radcilffe not only wrot the Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne and several other novels, but also made possible the appearance of the Gothic horor novel at the beginning of the nineteeth century; in that respect, her author-function exceeds her own work. But I think there is an answer to this object. These founders of discursivity (I use Marx and Freud as examples, because I believe them to be both the first and the most important cases) make possible something altogether different from what a novelist makes possible. Ann Radcliffe's text opened the way for a certain number of resemblances and analogies which have their model or principle in her work. The latter contains characteristics signs, figures, relationships, and structures which could be reused by others. In other words, to say that Ann Radcliffe founded the Gothic horror novelmeans that in the nineteenth-century gothic novel one will find, as in Ann Rdcliffe's work, the theme of the heroine caught in the trap of her own innocence, the hidden castle, the character of the black, cursed hero devoted to making the word expiate the evil done to thim, and all the rest of it. 

当然，这一点很容易反驳。有人会说一个小说家并不只是他自己的文本的作者；在某种意义上，他所掌控和要求的也要超过这些------如果他是有那么一点重要性的作者的话。举一个简单的例子，有人会说安•拉德克里夫不仅写了XXX和其他几部小说，而且还促成了哥特式恐怖小说在19世纪初的产生。从这一方面来说，她的作者功能越出了她自己的作品。但我觉得我们有办法很好地回应这种意见。这些话语的开创者（我以马克思和弗洛伊德为例，因为我相信他们都是最初和最重要的例子）让一些不同于小说家使之可能的东西的东西变得可能。安•拉德克里夫的文本促成了许多同类同质文本的产生，这些文本的模式或原则都可以在她的作品中发现，包括可以被其他人重复利用的特征符号、人物、关系和结构。换句话说，说拉德克里夫开创了哥特式恐怖小说，意味着一个人可以在19世纪的哥特式小说中，像在拉德克里夫的小说中一样，发现因为自己的单纯而陷入困境的女主人公、隐藏的城堡、黑暗人物以及立志要报复这个世界的被诅咒的男主人公这样的主题。

On the other hand, when I speak of Marx or Freud as founders of discursivity, I mean that they made possible not only a certain number of analogies, but also  (and equally important) a certain number of differences. They have created a possibility for something other than their discourses, yet something belonging to what they founded. To say that Freud founded psychoanalysis does not  (simply) mean that we find the concept of the libido or the technique of dream analysis in the works of Karl Abraham or Malanie Klein; it means that Freud made possible a certain number of divergences - with respect to his own texts, concepts, and hypotheses - that all arise from the psychoanlytical discourse itself. 

而另一方面，当我说马克思或弗洛伊德是话语的开创者时，我的意思是他们不仅使大量的类比成为可能，而且他们使大量的差异（它们和类比同样重要）也成为可能。他们不仅为他们自己的话语提供了可能性，而且也为由这些话语所开创的话语提供了可能性。当我们说弗洛伊德开创了精神分析学派时，并不是简单地意味着我们在卡尔•亚伯拉罕或者梅兰妮•克莱因的著作中找到了力比多或者梦的解析技术；它意味着弗洛伊德为精神分析话语里大量差异的产生提供了可能性，这些差异参考了弗洛伊德的文本、概念和假设。

This would seem to present a new difficulty, however: is the above not true, after all, of any founder of a science, or of any author who has introduced some important transformation into a science? After all, Galileo made possible not only those discourses that repeated the laws that he had formulated, but also the statements very different from what he himself had said. If Cuvier is the founder of biology or Saussure the founder of linguistics, it is not becaue they were imitated, nor because people have since taken up again the concept of organism or sign; it is because Cuvier made possible, to a certain extend, a theory of evolution diametrically opposed to his own fixism; it is because Saussure made possible a generative grammer radically different from his structural analyses. Superficially, then, the initiation of discursive practices appears similar to the founding of any scientific endeavor. 

然而，这似乎将会造成新的问题：难道对于任何一门科学的开创者、或者将重大变革引入科学的人来说情况不也是如此吗？毕竟，伽利略不仅使得那些重复他业已发现的规律公式的话语成为可能，而且使得那些和他的说法大相径庭的论调也成为可能。如果居维叶是生物学的开创者或者索绪尔是语言学的开创者，这并不是因为他们被模仿了，也不是因为自此人们开始使用有机体或者符号这样的概念，而是因为居维叶-----在一定程度上而言-----创立了一种和自己的固定论截然相反的辨证进化论，因为索绪尔创造了一种不同于他的结构分析的批判性的生成语法。就表面来看，话语实践的开启和任何科学活动的开展是相似的。

Still, there is a difference, and a notable one. In the case of a science, the act that founds it is on an equal footing with its future transformation; this act becomes in some respects part of the set of modifications that it makes possible. Of course, this belonging can take several forms. In the future development of a science, the founding act may appear as little more than a particular instance of a more general phenomonon which unveils itself in this process. It can also trun out to be marred by instuition and empirical bias; one must then reformulate it, making it the object of a certain number of supplementary theoretical operations which establish it more rigorously, etc. Finally, it can seem to be a hasty generalization which must be limited, and whose restricted domain of validity must be retraced. In other words, the founding act of a science can always be reintroduced within the machinery of those transformations that derive from it. 

但是，它们二者之间依旧存在一种很显著的差别。在科学活动的例子中，科学开创行为和其未来的嬗变居于同等地位，这一行为本身，就某些方面来说，会成为它使之成为可能的嬗变的一部分。当然，这种从属关系可以具有不同的形式。在一门科学的未来发展中，开创行为会显得和为说明某种在开创过程中显露的宽泛现象而举的某个特定例子一样，没有什么区别。这种开创行为也有可能被发现受到直觉和经验误差的影响，在这种情况下我们必须重新规划这一行为，对其进行大量的补充性理论运作，以使其更为严密。最后，科学开创行为似乎是一种粗率完成的需要对其进行限定的概括化活动，我们需要重新审视其有效性。换句话说，科学开创行为总是可以被再次引入由它所引发的那些嬗变机制中去的。

In contrast, the initiation of a discursive practice is heterogeneous to it subsequent transformations. To expand a type of discursivity, such as psychoanalysis as founded by Freud, is not to give it a formal generality that it would not permitted at the outset, but rather to open it up to a certain number of possible applications. To limit psychoanalysis as a type of discursivity is, in reality, to try to isolate in the founding act an eventually restricted number of propositions or statements to which, alone, one grants a founding value, and in relation to which certain concepts or theories accepted by Freud might be considered as derived, secondary, and accessory. In addition, one does not declar certain propositions in the work of these founders to be false: instead, when trying to seize the act of founding, one sets aside those statements that are not pertinent, either becaue they are deemed inessential, or because they ar considered "prehistoric" and derived from an other type of discursivity. In other words, unlike the founding of a science, the initiation of a discursive practice does not participate in its later transformations. 

与之相反，一种话语实践和它其后的嬗变是异质的。扩展一种话语------如弗洛伊德所建立的精神分析话语------不是给予它一种从一开始就不会得到认可的形式上的概括，而是要将其打开，面向更多可能的应用。对作为一种话语类型的精神分析进行限制，事实上是试图在开创行为中最终分离出有限的几个命题或表述来；人们赋予这些命题或表述以开创性价值，而且在与这些命题或表述所建立的关系中，有些为弗洛伊德所接受的特定概念或理论可能会被视为是派生的、第二性的和附属性质的。此外，不会有人提出这些开创者著作中的某些表述是错误的------相反，当人们试图把握这一开创行为时，他们会将那些不相关的表述置之一边，或者是因为他们认为这些表述不重要，或者是他们认为这些表述是”史前”性质的，是从其他类型的话语中衍生而来。换言之，一个话语实践的开启是不同于一门科学的开创的，话语实践的开启行为并不参与到它后来的嬗变中，【elle demeure nécessairement en retrait ou en surplomb】。

As a result, one defines a proposition's theoretical validity in relation to the work of the founders - while, in the case of Galileo and Newton, it is in relation to what physics or cosmology is (in its intrinsic structure and "normativity") that one affirms the validity of any propositions that those men may have put forth. To phrase it very schematically: the work of initiators of discursivity is not situated in the space that science defines: rather, it is the science or the discursivity which refers back to their work as primary coordiatnes.

因此，在话语实践里，我们通过参照开创者的著作来确定一个命题的理论效度-------然而，在伽利略和牛顿的例子中，我们所依据的却是物理学或天文学确立的结构的或内在的规范，我们通过它们来确认该命题的有效性。简而言之就是：话语开启者的著作并不处在与某种科学的关联中，也不处在它自己所确定的空间之内，相反，是这种科学或者这种话语主动回溯他们的著作，将其视为重要的参照点。

In this way, we can understand the inevitable necessity, within these fields of discursivity, for a "return to the origin," This return, which is part of the discursive field itself, never stops modifying it. The return is not a historical supplement which would be added to the discursivity, or merely an ornament; on the contrary, it constitues an effective and necessary task of transforming the discursive practice itself. Re-examination of Galileo's text may well change our knowledge of the history of mechanics, but will never be able to change mechanics itself. One the other hand, re-examining Freud's text modifies psychoanalysis itself just as a re-examination of Marx's would modify Marxism. 

这样，我们就可以理解为什么在这些话语场域内不可避免地存在着“回归源头”的必要性。这种回归是话语场域自身的一部分，它从不停止修正自己的脚步。这一回归不是对话语本身所做的与话语相适应的一种历史性补充，也不是一种非本质的强化和装饰；相反，它担负了一种有效和必要的变革话语实践本身的任务。重新审视伽利略的文本可能也会改变我们关于力学历史的知识，但它绝不能改变力学本身。但是另一方面，重新审视弗洛伊德的著作却可以修正精神分析学，正如重新审视马克思有助于修正马克思主义一样。

What I have just outlined regarding the initiation of discursive practices is, of course, very schematic; this is true, in particular, of the opposition that I have tried to draw between discursive initiation and scientific founding. It is not always easy to distinguish between the two: moreover, nothing proves that they are two mutually exclusive procedures. I have attempted the distinction for only one reason: to show that the author-function, which is complex enough when one tries to situate it at the level of a book or a series of texts that carry a given signature, involves still more determinng factors when one tries to analyze it in larger units, such as groups of works or entire displines. 

我刚刚勾勒出的关于话语实践开启的内容当然是非常概括化的；尤其在我试图描绘的话语开启和科学开创之间的对立时更是如此。要在二者之间进行区分并不容易，而且，没有证据证明这两个过程之间是相互排斥的。我试图对它们进行区分的理由只有一个：说明当试图在更大的单元中------比如作品集或者完整的学科-------分析其作者功能时，作者功能的决定因素会变得更多。尽管当有人试图在有署名的一本书或者一系列文本中对作者功能进行定位时，它已经显得足够复杂了。

To conclude, I would like to review the reasons why I attach a certain importance to what I have said. 

作为总结，我将重新回顾我给出的那些用以证明我所说的东西的重要性的理由。

First, there are theoretical reasons. On the one hand, an analysis in the direction that I have outlined might provide for an approach to a typology of discourse. It seems to me, at least at first glance, that such a typology cannot be constructed, solely from the grammatical features, formal structures, and objects of discourse: more likely there exist properties or relationships peculiar to discourse (not reducible to the rules of grammer and logic), and one must use these to distinguish the major categories of discourse. The relationship (or nonrelationship) with an author, and the different forms this relationship takes, constitutes - in a quite visible manner - one of these discursive properties. 

首先，这里存在理论上的理由。一方面，这种依循我已经勾勒出的方向所进行的分析可以为我们提供通向一种话语类型学的进路。对于我来说-----至少在初看之下----这样一种类型学是不能仅仅依靠话语的语法特征、形式结构和对象进行构建的；更有可能的情况是，在话语中存在对该话语而言具有独特性的属性或者关系（它们不能被归纳为语法或者逻辑上的规则），我们可以利用这些属性或关系去识别话语的主要范畴。与一个作者的关联（或者无关联），以及这些关联各自所具有的不同形式，以一种可见的方式构成了这些话语属性的其中一种。

On the other hand, I believe that one could find an introduction to the historical analysis of discourse. Perhaps it is time to study discourses not only in terms of their expressive value or formal transformations, but according to their modes of existence. The modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation of discourses vary with each culture and are modified within each. The manner in which they are articulated according to social relationships can be more readily understood.  I believe, in the activity of the author-function and in its modifications, than in the themes or concepts that discourses set in motion. 

另一方面，我相信人们可以在这里发现对于话语的历史分析的引入。现在该研究的不仅是话语的表达价值和形式转型，而且还包括话语的存在方式，即在某一文化中，话语的流通、评价、归属和占用的方式所发生的种种转化与变异。以社会关系为依据，我们可以更好地理解这些话语的表述方式。我相信，话语是在作者功能的活动及其自身的修正中运行的，而非在主题或者概念之中。

It would seem that one coulld also, beginning with analyses of this type, re-examine the priviledges of the subject. I realize that in undertaking the internal and architectonic analysis of a work (be in a literary text, philosophical system, or scientific work), in setting aside biographicial and psychological references, one has already called back into question the absolute character and founding role of the subject. Still, perhaps one must return to this question, not in order to re-establish the theme of an orginating subject, but to grasp the subject's points of insertion, modes of functioning, and system of dependencies. Doing so means overtuning the traditional problem, no longer raising the questions "How can a free subject penetrate the substance of things and give it meaning? How can it activate the rules of a language from within and thus give rise to the designs which are properly its own?" Instead, these questions will be raised: "How, under what conditions, and in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse? What place can it occupy in each type of discourse, what functions can it assume, and by obeying what rules?" In short, it is a matter of depriving the subject (or its substitue) of its role as originator, and of analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse. 

我们也可以从该类型的分析开始，重新审视主体所拥有的特权。我意识到当我们在对一部作品（它可以是文学文本，哲学体系或者科学著作）进行内在构造分析时，我们会将传记资料和心理学资料弃置一边，直接开始叩问那些绝对特征，并建立主体的角色。或许，人们回到这些问题并不是为了重新确立一个本源性主体的主题，而是为了抓住主体的切入点、运作模式和关联系统。这么做意味着对传统问题的反转，不再提问“为什么一个自由主体可以介入到事物的实体中去，并赋予它们意义？它是如何从内部调动一种语言的规则创造出一种确乎属于它自己的设计？“相反，我们会提这些问题：”主体这样的东西会以何种方式、在何种情况下、以何种形式出现在话语序列中？它在不同类型的话语中各自占据什么位置？它可以承担什么功能，以及它需要遵从什么规则？“简而言之，这是要剥夺主体作为一个原初者角色的主体性（或者它的属性），将主体作为话语中的一个变量和复杂功能进行分析。

Second, there are reasons dealing with the "ideological“ status of the author. The question then becomes: How can one reduce the great peril, the great danger with which fiction threatens our world? The answer is: One can reduce it with the author. The author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one's resources and riches, but also with one's discourses and their significations. The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning. As a result, we must entirely reverse the traditional idea of the author. We are accustomed, as we have seen earlier, to say that the author is the genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, an inexhaustible world of significations. We are used to thinking that the author is so different from all other man, and so transcendent with regard to all langagues that, as soon as he speaks, meaning begins to proliferate, to proliferate indefinitely. 

但是，依然存在处理作者的意识形态地位的理由。问题因此就变成了：我们如何减少小说给世界所带来的极大风险？答案是：用作者减少它。作者可以对某个世界中意义的灾难性增殖进行限制，在这一世界中人们不仅节约自己拥有的资源和财富，而且也很节约自己的话语及其意义。作者是意义增殖中的节俭原则。因此，我们不能完全颠覆传统的作者概念。如同我们之前看到的那样，我们习惯于说作者是一部作品的创造者，在这一世界中他用自己无穷的财富和慷慨，展示了一个无穷无尽的意义世界。我们常常认为作者与其他人是如此不同，是如此先验于所有的语言，以至于当他说话时意义便开始增殖，无限地增殖。

The author is quite the contracy: the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the work, he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. In fact, if we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite fashion. One say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. (When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inverts it, one has an ideological production.) The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning. 

然而真相与此相反。作者并不是塞满一部作品的那些意义的无尽来源；作者并不先行于作品，它是我们文化中用以进行限制、排斥和选择的一种特定功能原则。简而言之，通过这一原则，我们可以阻止对小说的自由传播、自由复制、自由建构、分解和重构。事实上，如果我们习惯于将作者呈现为一个天才，一个永恒的创造力的源泉，那是因为事实上我们在让它以恰好相反的方式发挥作用。我们可以说作者是一种意识形态的产物，因为我们将其重现为其历史真实功能的反面。（当一个历史既定功能被以反转的形式重现时，我们说它具有意识形态功能。）因此，作者是一种意识形态形象，通过它我们可以标记自己对意义增殖的恐惧。

In saying this, I seem to call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author. I would be pure romanticism, however, to imagine a culture in which the fictive would be put at the disposal of everyone and would develop without passing through something like a necessary or constraining figure. Although, since the eighteenth century, the author has played the role of the regulator of the fictive, a role quite characteristic of our era of industrial and bourgeois society, of individualism and private property, still, given the historical modfications that are taking place, it does not seem necessary that the author-function remain constant in form, complexity, and even in existence. I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is the process of changing, the author-function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemic texts will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint - one which will no longer be the author, but which will have to be a demtermined or perhaps, experienced. 

我这样说似乎是在呼唤一种文化形式，小说于其中将不再会受到作者这一角色的限制。然而，想象一种文化，在这种文化中虚构能以一种完全自由的状态运作，小说将在每一个人的掌控之下，并且小说可以自由发展，不用经过一个必要的或约束性的人物，这是一种纯粹的浪漫主义。尽管从18世纪起，作者就已经开始扮演虚构行为的调节者角色，这一角色是我们这个商业化、追求物质享受的时代的特征，也是个人主义和财产私有的特征；但是，假定发生了历史性的变化，作者功能便没有必要保持其形式、构成方面的稳定性了，甚至其存在也是不必要的了。我认为，随着社会的变化，在变化进程中的某一特定时刻，作者功能将会消失，在这一情形下小说和它的多义文本将依据另一种模式进行运作，但这一运作仍要在一个制约系统之下进行-------这一制约系统将不再是作者，而是另外一种需要被确定或经验的东西。

  All discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur. We would no longer hear the questions that have been rehashed for so long: "Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he experess in his discourse?" Instead, there would be other questions, like these: "What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject-functions?" And behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: "What difference does it make who is speaking?"

一切的话语，无论其地位、形式、价值，无论其受制于何种境遇，将会在一种絮语的匿名状态中展开。我们已经不复能听到那些长期以来被反复谈论的问题了：

“究竟是谁在说话？真的是他而不是其他什么人吗？具有什么样的真实性和原创性？他在他的话语中表达了他最深层的自我中的哪些部分？”

相反，我们能听到下面的问题：

“这一话语的存在方式是什么？它被用于什么地方？它是如何传播的？谁可以占用它？它留给可能的主体的空间是什么？谁可以承担这些多样化的主体功能？”

在所有这些问题之后，我们几乎什么都听不到了，除了能听到一个漠然声音的咕哝：

“究竟是谁在说话有什么分别？