Gary Gutting

As he said not long before his death: ‘The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning’ (‘Truth, Power, Self’, 9).

Foucault himself was content with this omission: ‘I would go so far as to say that [ Raymond Roussel] doesn’t have a place in the sequence of my books . . . No one has paid much attention to this book, and I’m glad; it’s my secret affair’ (RR, interview, 185).

But as in Foucault’s literary study, the concern with space (as opposed to time) and with language (as an autonomous system) reflects a mode of thought that removes subjectivity from its usual central position and subordinates it to structural systems.