Today, Vulture profiled a real vulture 🫥🤢😵💫. Some words from The Death of the Author might help cleanse the palate, bleach your brain, and keep writing & reading & breathing.
…writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.
No doubt it has always been so: once a fact is recounted-for intransitive purposes, and no longer to act directly upon reality, i.e., exclusive of any function except that exercise of the symbol itself-this gap appears, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins. However, the affect of this phenomenon has been variable; in ethnographic societies, narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman, or reciter, whose "performance" (i.e., his mastery of the narrative code) can be admired, but never his "genius."
We know now that a text consists not of a line of words, releasing a single "theological" meaning (the "message" of the Author-God), but of a multi-dimensional space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which is original: the text is a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture.
…we know that in order to restore writing to its future, we must reverse the myth: the birth of the reader must be requited by the death of the Author.
Barthes, Roland. (1977). The Death of the Author (1968) (Trans. S. Heath). In Image Music Text (pp. 142-148). Fontana Press.
Alternately, there’s Judith.
https://www.art-theoria.com/painting-of-the-month/judith-and-her-maidservant/
