There is no better way to summarize the breadth and depth of the questions posed by Michel Foucault in his lecture "What is an Author?" (1969) than by the summary he himself provided, to highlight the indifference towards the subject of writing as a necessary condition for inscribing critique as a historicization of social relations:

1) The name of the author: addressing it as a defined description is impossible; we are also unable to approach it as a typical proper name.

2) The relationship of appropriation: the author does not exactly have ownership of their texts nor responsibility for them; they are neither their producer nor their inventor. What is the nature of the speech-act that allows us to say that a work exists?

3) The relationship of attribution: the author is undoubtedly the one to whom we can attribute what was said and what was written. But attribution—even when it concerns a well-known author—is the result of complex critical processes, rarely justified. The uncertainty of the opus.

4) The position of the author: the position of the author within the book (use of "transformers," functions of prefaces, likenesses of the scribe, the reciter, the trusted listener, the memoir writer) [...].

(From the presentation on the back cover of the book)