Abstract

Nishida Kitarō's account of authorship and artistic production constitutes the focus of this essay.1 Its general thesis is that Nishida's keen attention to the subjective qua objective, active qua intuitive intersection can be used to articulate a new, bidirectional account of artistic production. This essay uses this bidirectional account to engage critically with those unidirectional interpretive procedures grounded in the life or death of the Author.2 It takes up the former as it privileges the subjective conditions of production, reducing text and historical moment to a derivative of the "Author" and its life, and the latter as it privileges the objective conditions of production, subsuming text and author into...