ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault's beautiful and disturbing final words in Les Mots et les choses appear at first to represent no more than a simple movement of obliteration. His image combines solidity and insubstantiality, eternity and transience, the natural and the unnatural, the human and the non-human. A face traced in sand is depicted being wiped out by powerful and enduring natural forces. Oceanic symbolism conjures up ideas of permanence, of eternity. Nature reveals the insubstantiality of the attempt to sustain and solidify the concept of 'man'. Even as it is washed away, the face drawn in sand remains a symbol of the continued capacity to conceptualize and consciously create that distinguishes 'man' from the rest of nature. Foucault's own words invite new discourses and commentaries. Foucault's own underlying morality at times provides a point of contrast with utopianism, and so reveals the limits of 'extremity'.
