Foucault on being an author.

from The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, Penguin, 1984.

p. 119

"I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear ...


All discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur. 

We would no longer hear the questions that have been rehashed for so long: Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse? 

Instead, there would be other questions, like these: What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions? 

And behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: What does it matter who is speaking?"

https://monoskop.org/images/f/f6/Rabinow_Paul_ed_The_Foucault_Reader_1984.pdf