That's because it's late and I used a word with exactly the opposite meaning I was reaching for. The sentiment I was trying to get at was the author's emphasis on debt as it impacts a doctoral candidate, (as opposed to, say, a blue collar worker who has to moonlight in a petrol station to cover their loan repayments), does not bode well for the idea of divorcing an author's personal opinions and circumstances from the interpretations of their work.
The way my friend has always described Death of the Author (we lived together at University, so I've been treated to this for a while) suggests he has been subject to a much, much stronger form than the one you describe, in which an author's motives, intentions and circumstances should be completely disregarded when interpreting their work.
(I recall he once wrote a poem which, in a pleasantly Godelian fashion, described his own motives and intentions while writing it. He hoped one day to become famous enough as a poet that English undergrads would be forced to try and analyse it without reference to his motives and intentions for the piece. There's a reason we've remained friends for so long.)
Coming at it from an information theoretic perspective, Moby Dick is clearly not talking about the Soviet Union's occupation of post-war East Germany. Part of my certainty in that statement involves facts about the knowledge and history of the author (most saliently that he wrote the book, and died, in the 19th Century). Any implementation of Death of the Author strong enough to say "that doesn't matter: Ahab is totally Stalin" is not an implementation I can really get behind.
A month or so ago I stumbled across this. It's a blog piece by one Robert Lanza M.D., a legitimate, respected biologist who has made important contributions to tissue engineering, cloning and stem cell research. In his spare time, he is a crackpot.
I know I shouldn't give any of my time to an online pop-psychology magazine which has "Find a Therapist" as the second option on its navigation bar, but the piece in question could have been *designed* to antagonise a LessWrong reader: horrible misapplication of quantum physics, worshipful treatment of the mysterious, making a big deal over easily dissolvable questions, bold and unsubstantiated claims about physics and consciousness... the list goes on. I'm generally past the point in my life where ranting at people who are wrong on the internet holds any appeal, but this particular item got my goat to the point where I had to go and get my goat back.
If reading LW all these years has done anything, it's trained me to take apart that post without even thinking, so (and I'm not proud of this), I wrote a short seven-point response in the comments lucidly explaining its most obvious problems, and signed it Summer Glau. It got removed, and I learned a valuable lesson about productively channeling my anger.
But this started me thinking about how certain things (either subjects or people) antagonise what I now think of as my LessWrong Parts, or more generally cause me distress on an epistemic level, and what my subjective experience of that distress is like so I can recognise and deal with it in future.
I've seen a few other people make comments describing this kind of distress, (this description of "being forced to use your nicely sharpened tools on a task that would destroy them" seems particularly accurate). Common culprits seem to be critical theory, postmodernism and bad philosophy. I've also noticed some people distress me in this fashion, in a way I'm still struggling to characterise.
Who else has this experience? Do you have any choice examples? What hurts you in your LessWrong Parts?