Philosopher Merold Westphal:

According to familiar versions of theism, God is Creator, and the world has all and only those features that God (intended to) put there; if there is a certain indeterminacy due to creaturely freedom, that is only because God (intended to) put creaturely freedom in the world. Similarly, according to the view our trio [Roland Barthes, Michael Foucault, Jacques Derrida] wishes to dispute, the author is Creator of the text; it has all and only those meanings that the author (intended to) put there. In other words, it is a very particular kind of human author whose death is being announced, namely, one who never existed in the first place. Real authors do not create meaning in the way God created the world. They are neither the Alpha (pure, unconditioned origin) of meaning nor the Omega (ultimate goal) of interpretation. For this reason interpretation cannot be understood as deciphering, for in deciphering the meaning is already there, fixed and final (author as Alpha), though disguised by code, and the task is to discover and reproduce the author’s meaning (author as Omega).

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. . . the author banished is only the (fictitious) author who is owner of language, the author who in godlike sovereignty is the creator of language but is not conditioned by the language(s) that have always preceded, made possible, and limited the work of the author.

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. . . the finitude of the author will be mirrored in the finitude of the reader, who will be no pure origin of meaning but will be conditioned by prior meanings, including those that stem from the author as well as those that stem from the reader’s own grammatical-historical location.

Here the author and reader are cocreators of textual meaning. This is a genuine threat to hermeneutical objectivism, for there are many readers (including the same reader at different times and in different circumstances) and many traditions of reading, so the notion of the meaning of the text becomes highly problematic. When the text is understood as giving rise to meaning at the site of conversation between author and reader, there will be different meanings because there will be different conversations.

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Having let the reader get a camel-like nose in the tent, let us now ask if we are on a slippery slope to a relativism where “anything goes” and where the text becomes a wax nose that can mean anything to anyone. Undoubtedly so, if that is the only alternative to allowing the author to be Absolute Monarch of Meaning or Divine Dispenser of Determinacy. But we have already learned in Logic 101 not to infer authorial irrelevance from the denial of authorial sovereignty. Or, to use a political analogy, the president of the United States does not rule by divine right with unconditioned authority. He is under constraints by Congress and the courts. But only a muddle-headed monarchist would complain that as president he has been banished to utter irrelevance and plays no significant role in the enactment and enforcement of laws in the United States.

Hermeneutically this means that the death of the absolute author is not the absolute death of the author. Authorial meaning is still important. Although interpretation is not deciphering as the mere reproduction of a prior, fixed, encoded meaning, there will be a reproductive aspect to interpretation. . . . “Not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a text goes beyond its author. That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well” [Hans-Georg Gadamer].

– Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church