Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel

Structuralist Roland Barthes’s essay on The Death of the Author raises a number of important issues that have vital implications for biblical exegesis. While his ideas bear similarity to Derrida’s, Barthes goes one step further. He insists that after the death of the author, nobody can lay claim or authority over a text:

The death of the Author means that nobody has authority over the meaning of the text, and that there is no hidden, ultimate, stable meaning to be deciphered: Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author (or his hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is “explained” – victory to the critic. . . . In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; . . . the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning.[1]

In short, if there is no reality behind the text, then the Author of the text is irrelevant. Theologically speaking, if the Author (God) is “dead” and is no longer accessible, does this diminish the importance of the Bible as a Divine work? Does the “death of the Author” imply that there is no longer any source for meaning to be discovered from the Author’s work, and that all meaning is relatively imposed unto the text? The hermeneutical theologian Anthony Thiselton explains, “If, as we suggest, that the Bible is a love letter from the heart of God, to read the words, ‘I love you’ as the words of a dead or an anonymous lover, would destroy this act of love, and transpose it into a tragedy.”[2] Barthes writes that the refusal to assign a fixed meaning either to the world or to texts “liberates an activity we may call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to halt meaning is finally to refuse God.” However, from the biblical perspective, the biblical writers affirm just the opposite: God is the ultimate Author and Source of meaning and object of reference.

One literary scholar, Nike Kocijancic Pokorn, responds to Barthes’s critique by referring to a well-known medieval classic that was written anonymously known as “The Cloud of Unknowing.” This work was written by someone from a monastic order that had the practice of leaving his text unsigned. Although this practice might seem to be in harmony with the postmodern view that the author is dispensable, Pokom points out that this was not the case with this celebrated mystical classic. Whereas Barthes’s argument only pertains to an actual known author; it does not pertain to an anonymous author:

The author of the Cloud was convinced that his text did not remain open to endless interpretation, if his intended message was accessible only to those who shared with him a sincere wish for the experience of mystical union. And finally, the Cloud author expressed his belief in the existence of the final, transcendental truth, which ensures the meaning of the text. The “right” understanding of the message of the text is thus guaranteed by the faith shared by the author and his readers, by their common faith in the hyper-essential God, who revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ. And if in the poststructuralist world “the absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely,” in the world of our fourteenth-century mystic the presence of the Transcendental God, of the divine auctor[3], the source of auctoritas, ensures the meaning, if the author and the reader of the text share the same horizon of understanding and faith.

The reasons for the authorial disappearance are then essentially different in the two cases; while Roland Barthes proclaims the death of the author because he wants to announce the birth of the reader and above all that of the critic with his/her own interpretation of the text, the medieval author of the Cloud conceals his name because he thinks that his authority is not needed, and that the shared experience with the reader of his book will grant access to the divine transcendental authority, which bestows meaning on the text.[4]

One could similarly argue that the absence of an author’s name in the biblical books indicates that the writer’s identity is not what is really important: but the message certainly is. By sharing the stories of faith in the Tanakh, one can arrive at the same shared experience by those who live by the prophetical values of these seers and moral teachers.

That being said, Barthes’s premise may have a basis in Aggadic and Midrashic thought, which frequently describes what may be termed as “an absence of God.” Kabbalistic thought especially crystallizes this concept in the tsimtsum where God relinquishes some of His power, in order for human beings to make their own decisions pertaining to right and wrong—without any coercion from Above. For this goal to occur, God “withdraws” from the world, and this “absence” allows for human free will to define a pattern of religious and moral behavior, as the Sages say, “All is in the hands of Heaven—except the fear of Heaven.”

An important antecedent to the doctrine of the tsimtsum can be seen in the following Talmudic account, where Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus debates the Sages over the ritual status of a certain type of newly designed oven that could be disassembled. “Could such an oven become ritually impure? The Sages ruled that it could be ritually defiled, but Rabbi Eliezer differed. Despite attempts to persuade his colleagues, Rabbi Eliezer does not succeed. After resorting to several miraculous interventions to prove his point, R. Eliezer saves his greatest proof for last:

Then R. Eliezer raised his voice and said, “Let Heaven itself attest that the law is in accordance with my opinion!” Suddenly, a Heavenly Voice declared, “Why do you disagree with R. Eliezer? Do you not realize that law is always in accordance with his opinion?”

R. Joshua arose from his place and declared to God, “Is it not written that, ‘The Torah is not in Heaven?” R. Jeremiah said, “This means that we do not adjudicate law on the basis of a Heavenly Voice, for the Torah was already given to humankind at Mt. Sinai.” R. Joshua continued his speech, “We do not listen to a Heavenly Voice because You God already wrote in the Torah at Sinai, ‘The matter shall be decided according to the majority” (Exod. 23:2). Later, one of the Sages, R. Nathan, had a dream where he encounters Elijah the Prophet. He asks him, “What did God say after this argument?” Elijah replies, “God was laughing and proudly said, “My children defeated me, My children defeated me!” [5]

The Aggadic passage intimates that God’s displacement to the Heavenly world after Sinai is a necessary and critical act in order to allow others to reinterpret on their own what was given to them at Mt. Sinai. Some Sages express the thought in different terms, “From the day the Temple was destroyed, the only thing the Holy Blessed One has in His world is the four cubits of the Halacha.”[6] This rabbinic teaching does not mean that God necessarily abandons the world for other creative pursuits, but rather God’s Presence is triangulated and present whenever people of like mind come together to discuss His Law. To the Jew who studies the Torah, the process of revelation never ceases. Even liturgically, God is still considered the “Giver of the Torah.” For when a people live by the Torah’s teachings, the Author remains forever alive—despite Barthes’s theological claim to the contrary.

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Notes:

[1] Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” printed in Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 146-147.

[2] Anthony C. Thiselton, Thiselton on Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids: MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 206.

[3] The word “author” derives from the Middle English auctour, from Old French autor, from Latin auctor (“creator”) deriving from auctus, and the past participle of augēre, to “to originate, increase” from which the English verb augment comes from.

[4]Nike Kocijancic Pokorn, The Cloud of Unknowing in Dialogue with Post-modernism, http://www.kud-logos.si/knjiznica-religija/nike-cloud.htm

[5] BT Bava Metzia 59b.

[6] BT Berakhot 8a.