Furtive silhouette, the Baudelaire of Foucault

Abstract

Furtive silhouette, the Baudelaire of Foucault has a short and remarkable life at the same time. Short, because a unique text in 1984 offers him a consequent space of expression. Remarkable, because this text is the occasion of an important shift in the philosophical pressupositions of Foucault about the relationships between subjectivity and history. Against a division of history in radically heterogeneous periods, such as exposed for example in "The Order of Things" in 1966, the silhouette of Baudelaire draws the possibility of remanence, through distinct cultural eras, of the same subjective attitude – proof that the history of subjectivity does not know the same breaks as the history of powers and knowledge.