> I would agree, with this qualification: A Dante, a Marx, a Pound wants
> readers BUT he/she can't let that shape his/her writing! It's a desire
> which exists before and after the act of writing, but is put in brackets
> or repressed _during_ the act.
How do they do that, write for an audience and not write for them at the same time? And how does the act of writing attain this state of detachment from the world? Sounds still a little heroic and mystical and like bourgeois individualism to me. Actually, the question as being discussed here, no matter which "side" you choose, is trapped inside individualism. Foucault talked about the author-function to try to avoid this question, and the false choice it offers. Deleuze also displaced the question; he said that "great" works like those by Dante, Marx, and Pound don't reach out to an already formed reader but create their own audiences, their own readers.