Decip me or I reveal you: the author for Foucault and Chartier

Abstract

This article seeks to tension the author's conceptions based on the reflections of Michel Foucault (1926-1984) and Roger Chartier (1945-). Therefore, it presents what we call the authorship problem, exploring the various faces of the author in a historical perspective and in the present time. From this, we follow the main concepts of Michel Foucault, for whom the notion of author plays a central role in the individualization present in the history of knowledge, since the return to the genealogy of any concept, literary genre or philosophy overvalues ​​the relationship of a subject author and his work. Then, we look at Roger Chartier's thinking about the author. About thirty years after Foucault's lecture at the French Philosophy Society, Chartier is invited by the same institution to revisit the author's theme. Chartier's (2012) return to the question is justified, according to himself, by the rectification of chronologies pointed out by Foucault (2009) and which support his argument. Finally, we conclude with the possible intersections arising from the two thinkers. It is possible to draw a parallel of what Chartier (2001) called social place with the modes of circulation of texts in the sociocultural sphere, which constitutes the author-function proposed by Foucault (2009). Only through a social place, understood as a space in which social dynamics are revealed from the values ​​of that same society, is it possible to emerge the author as a subject of speech. In this case, it is a speech symbolically valued from the same socially circulating values.