His work, between philosophy, history and literature, is difficult to locate. Traditional disciplines are struggling to contain it. His chair at the Collège de France was entitled "History of thought systems". He himself never ceased to reread Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, but he cited the classics of philosophy less than obscure treatises, regulations or manuals kept in archival funds, the kingdoms of historians. “Professional” historians of his time Foucault also shares the ambition: to open up history to new objects. The fact remains that these are philosophical issues that are renewed by his "stories" (of madness, of sexuality), his "archeologies" (human sciences, knowledge), his stories of "birth" (of the clinic, of the prison). "And I however much I say that I am not a philosopher, if it is all the same that I am concerned with the truth, I am nevertheless a philosopher ». Philosopher "in spite of everything", Foucault invented a new way of doing philosophy. He did not add another stone to the compartmentalized edifice of thought: by knocking down the partitions, he overturned its architecture. It made the disciplines communicating. Some specialists have not failed to blame him. What about literature? His books are learned. They bear witness to astounding scholarship. Still it is necessary to give form to the formless of the archive. The quotes, the mesh of references, the staging of historical episodes, everything, at Foucault's, is unfolded, exposed in a writing that is alternately baroque and rigorous, austere and splendid, excessive and classic. In the library, he feels carried by the words of others. Their intensity feeds his writing. "Reading is prolonged, strengthened, reactivated by writing, writing which is also an exercise, also an element of meditation". The material of the historians and the horizon drawn by the philosophers increase for him a literary requirement learned from Flaubert, Blanchot, Beckett. To call him a "stylist" would be reductive. Foucault, who called himself an artisan, is a writer. In addition to a choice of short texts, articles, prefaces or conferences, this edition brings together all of his personal books. Their influence is immense. But their meeting is not intended to form an intellectual autobiography. "I don't want anything that might give the impression of gathering what I did in a kind of unity that would characterize and justify me ”. Let us rather see in it what Foucault said of the History of madness in 1975: "I saw this book as a kind of truly material breath, and I continue to dream it like that, a kind of breath bursting doors and Windows".