Gary Gutting

His 1966 book, Les mots et les choses, was an academic bestseller that made him the leading candidate to succeed Sartre as the French ‘master-thinker’. A few years later, he won election to the super-elite Collège de France 1

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).