As enciclopédias de Michel Foucault

Encyclopedia is not among the most know terms of Michel Foucault. However, something appears to a careful reader when he/she looks to some occurrences of this term in his work, with a special emphasis in 60’s and 70’s of 20th century. The goal of this paper is to discern encyclopedia into foucauldian vocabulary, showing its double face. If, in one side, Foucault refers technically to Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopedia; in the other, he appeals to the same term to suggest another practice which is not simply elaborate a memorial of our “savoirs”, but surpass this frontier in a direction of heterotopias, as he suggests. In the first moment of this work, the critical approach show how he scrutinizes the limits of the encyclopedical project, as well the practical consequences to politics of memory and forgetfulness which it implies. In the second, visiting important sources as Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, Foucault allows us to comprehend better the possibilities of a new turning into the history of interpretation techniques, seeking a particular ressignification of encyclopedia.