(no subject)

I'm all for death of the author, but I am puzzled by its use in defence of moral indignation over a text.

"I read this book as saying X, and so I don't like it" is of course a perfectly valid reaction. "I read this book as saying X, and so something morally wrong is going on" is... less so.

When we object to an objectionable opinion, we are generally doing something like judging the author for having it, or worrying that the expression of the opinion will cause people to agree with it. Obviously you can't judge the author for having an opinion which you are admitting you do not think the author actually has, which is what you are saying when you ignore authorial intent.

(If you're saying "well, the author didn't mean to say it, but clearly they subconsciously thought it" then you're not doing death of the author. The author is alive and well and apparently lying down in your couch telling you about their relationship with their mother)

If you say "well, people could read them as saying this bad thing, and agree, and that's bad", then I congratulate you on your consequentialism but think you are making a mistake in blame assignment. The thing about holding people responsible for the unintended consequences of their actions is that, given that the consequences were not intended, they have a hard time responding to your incentives. It's not much good to decide not to do something if it'll happen regardless of your decisions, after all.

You can decide to take fewer actions which risk the unintended consequences, of course, and that is sometimes the right thing to do, but that is I would argue almost always an overreaction if the risk is people misreading your books. The harms from people interpreting books as saying bad things are... kind of hypothetical. I'm sure it could happen, but the magnitude of any effect is, on average, pretty dang small.

From the point of view of the author, they might worry not that people will spontaneously generate bad opinions and believe them but instead that they will generate bad opinions and blame them, but this is of course the problem in the first place. You can hardly say "I am getting angry at the author to provide them the valuable information that people might get angry at them, and so help mitigate the risk of people getting angry at authors" when you can save yourself all those steps and not get angry at authors for things you don't think they believe in the first place.