Trace of the author, the author as a trace

In this paper the author discusses a problem of return of the author, which has been accentuated in the contemporary humanistic thought following the 60s and 70s’ dominant theme of subject’s death; as well as various ways of understanding of this reconnection of the subject to the source text. The author focuses mainly on the problem of a widely understood trace as a form of the author’s presence in the text. Such an approach has been already adopted by Barthes in his Sade Fourier Loyola, and in Poland by Małgorzata Czermińska. Andrzej Zawadzki perceives "trace" as "weak" presence of the author (in the meaning roughly drafted by the so-called weak ontology), however this weakness is not contained in a perspective of the author’s death but may constitute such a conceptualization of the idea of text subjectivity which allows us to avoid problems of a dichotomy of the "strong" subject present in the modern theory of literature (and philosophy), i.e. a de-personifi ed subject, or a subject which is external and precedes the text and any cultural mediations