>>49953769>The point of Death of the author is not to cancel anyone.I never said that it was the point of it. I implied that discarding authorial intent is either useful to, or dangerous in the hands of, the people who do want to cancel someone. It's easily used as an excuse to intentionally misinterpret things freely to get whatever desired result, and enforce one's will.
>There are big problems by judging stuff based on intent. Firstly, it is impossible to really know the intent. Usually artist don't just come up and say what everything they do means, and even if they did, it is impossible to know if they are telling the truth. It is impossible to know with absolute certainty, but it is usually possible to get a close approximation based on context. It is unlikely that your interpretation will be perfect, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try, in the same way that it's impossible to totally account for or eliminate one's own biases, but you should still try. Otherwise, the logical conclusion is that we can, for example, just go ahead and throw every country's constitution in the trash while we're at it, since after all, we don't REALLY know what they meant, do we? The Geneva Convention? It's just words, dude. Who even knows what it means, man? It's just impossible to figure it out, even a little. For all we know, they could have been lying. And surprise, this is the same shit people try to pull with "well regulated" in the second amendment. Free interpretation, rather than investigating the author's probable intent by context.
>Secondly, even things that the author does not consciously think about influences their work, and you should be allowed to analyze that.Sure, but saying that is directly contrary to the idea that analyzing the author, their context, and their intention is futile. Though it's likely that the farther you dive into playing armchair psychologist for the author, especially one from another time and place, it's going to yield very rapidly diminishing returns, compared to things like cultural and historical context.
