Śmierć autora i jego żywoty
The Death – and Lives – of the Author

Summary/Abstract: Writers’ biographies (written about writers by writers) constitute a genre with very longhistorical roots, which has flourished in the last twenty-five or thirty years. This isundoubtedly linked to the lifting of the post structuralist ban concerning the authoras a person, so that it became possible, at least in France, to legitimize biographicalwriting again. We date this revival to the mid-1980s, when Duras, Robbe-Grillet andSollers all published (auto)biographical texts, whose status is certainly problematic, butnonetheless worthy of careful attention. Immersed in Romantic anthropology, in various transpositions and numerous genre nostalgias, this general ambiguity appears as thekey characteristic of biographical productions of the 1980s. What we have here is a kindof a spectacle, in which the figure of the author re-enters the stage. At the same time,it is a “biographical illusion” (Bourdieu). Many contemporary biographers know thatthe ‘truth’ about the other can only be grasped through a play on forms (or on thememory of forms), if not, to evoke Lacan, in “a line of fiction”.

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