ABSTRACT
In this article we intend to establish a comparison between Foucault’s writings on literature, specially his book Raymond Roussel, and other texts which were consecrated by the critical readings as founders of genealogy, specially Nietzsche, genealogy and history. The comparison is organized through the repetition of the use of two figures: the proliferation of masks as a process of disidentification, and a non-foundational experience of finitude. We sustain that the recurrence of the multiplication of masks in order to erase the face, as well as the intimate relation between language and death, which in the article on Nietzsche, results in the genealogical sacrifice of the subject of knowledge, is a sign that Foucault would be appropriating some elements of the literary thought which interested him at the 1960’s decade. However, this second appropriation occurs through certain changes, especially by the displacement from a thought directed to the being of language in modernity, to a historical genealogy. Finally, we describe a third and last appropriation in his late writings. It goes through a limit attitude which is part of an historical and critical ontology of ourselves.
Keywords
Foucault; literature; genealogy; language