Literary critics and conventionally minded readers who seek to critically engage with the many texts that shape the canon of Western knowledge too often ask the same misleading questions. Their discourse is, according to Michel Foucault, trapped within parameters established by a dominant way of thinking that grants the “author” absolute primacy. Even the recognition of this paradigm too often produces an equally misleading question: “Who really spoke? Is it really him and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality?” (Foucault 230). These well-intentioned interrogations tragically miss the point. They are incessantly concerned with the qualities and character of the signifier which has no significant impact on the meaning of a text, but which rather serves to limit our ability to receive or disseminate knowledge. Instead of denying the relevance of the “author” or completely giving in to his reign, we should ask ourselves what exactly is meant and what the existence of the “author-function” entails. This article will explore three main areas of analysis related to this research. First of all we must investigate what is meant by the naming of an author, its origins and its immediate distinction from the simple naming of a human being. Second, we will analyze the implications of the widespread acceptance and deployment of the author-function. Finally, we will synthesize these lines of questioning in an attempt to discover the importance of discovering the ideological nature of the author and what this discovery entails for the reception and interpretation of texts. Foucault quickly advances his discussion of authorship to the implications of his theory. discoveries, certainly renouncing the vital question of origin. While Foucault would say... middle of paper... who can appropriate it? What are the places where there is space for possible subjects? Who can take on these different subjective functions? And behind all these questions we would hear nothing but the tremor of indifference: what difference does it make who speaks? (Foucault 230) Romantics and profiteers have trapped and deceived us into an almost pathological obsession with the “author”. By masquerading as a series of open-ended questions or an opportunity for productive discourse, authorship and its traps have subtly locked us into a self-defeating mode of thinking that precludes the possibility of truly free understanding. Only once we abandon our corrupt conception of knowledge will we be able to find the liberating intellectual space necessary to truly understand the multitude of meanings that collectively form our world..