In this text, Michel Foucault proposes a philosophical extension of contemporary inquiries into the relationship between language and speaking subject. Language is no longer the space of truth, interiority, or subjectivity. It reveals its naked essence as the subject disappears within it, leaving behind a nonexistence where language permeates. And within this gap between subject and language, experience, the reflection of the outside, is located. It is not a decisive theology of language or a new mysticism, but a language that digs so deeply into itself that it encounters its own limits, gets lost in the surrounding void, and questions its own existence. Such a perception of language ultimately undermines the self-evident nature of human being, the one that centuries of reflective thought have tried to secure. Once again, Foucault will illustrate his thought through literature and art: once it was Velázquez, Borges, and now Maurice Blanchot: a privileged "witness" to the "thought of being." His challenging and provocative work, at the intersection of fiction and reflection, will be illuminated through a series of diagrams proposed by the book.

"Thus, language is liberated from all the old myths with which our consciousness has been shaped regarding words, discourse, and literature. For a long time, there was the perception that language reigns over time, that it functions both as the future commitment of promise and as memory and narrative; there was the perception that it was prophecy and history; they also believed that with its sovereign power, it would illuminate the eternal and visible body of truth; they believed that its essence lies in the form of words or in the breath that makes them flourish. However, it is nothing but a shapeless hum, a formless flow, and its power lies in concealment. That is why it is one with the erosion of time; it is forgetfulness without depth and the transparent void of anticipation" (Michel Foucault).