Beginning amidst the tombs of the 'dead' God, and the crematoria at Auschwitz, this book confronts Nietzsche's legacy through the lens of Plato. The key question is how authors can protect against the possible 'deviant readings' of future readers and assess 'the risk of writing'. Burke recommends an ethic of 'discursive containment'.The ethical question is the question of our times. Within critical theory, it has focused on the act of reading. This study reverses the terms of inquiry to analyse the ethical composition of the act of writing. What responsibility does an author bear for his...

For the late twentieth century, the death of the author assumed a significance analogous to the death of God one hundred years previously. In this now classic study, Sean Burke both provides the first detailed explanation of anti-authorialism and shows how, even taken on its own terms, the attempt to abolish the author is philosophically untenable. Rather than developing a traditionally humanist defence, Burke effectively out-theorises theory through rigorous readings which demonstrate that the concept of the author remained profoundly active even and especially as its disappearance was being...