Form's Potential Face: Rethinking Authorship and Textual Agency

Abstract: In literary studies, the death of the author has become a disciplinary truism in conflict with the imperative to listen to the voice of the other. How can the other speak when the author cannot? Recent vital materialist accounts of textual agency open a new approach to this problem, but they need to be complemented with an account of agency in terms of subjectivity, because subjectivity is inseparable from the study of aesthetic form. Agamben's concept of the relation of exception explains how the situatedness of a creating subjectivity is materially continuous with its negation in the text. As a situated subjectivity withdraws from a text, it leaves behind a form with potential subjectivity. Potential subjectivity is agentic through its potential merging with a situated reading subjectivity that can actualize it at any time. Ultimately, the author can be understood as the situated rich potential subjectivity immanent in aesthetic form.