This article addresses the critique of the modern notion of Subject that Foucault and Agamben have led drawing from the contact with the language and its materiality. Starting from the discovery of the merely functional nature of the subject, the two authors have taken radically divergent ways to look for the possibility of crossing the boundary that the modern subject has drawn around his logical and rational realm. In his restless experimentation, Foucault has highlighted the need for an emancipated and ungovernable experience, with particular emphasis on the study of literary texts which, abandoning all expressive ambitions, allows to find out the inherent vitally of language. It will be noticed how, through several changes of direction, Foucault would later return to spread light on the ethical-esthetical evenemential breaks achieved by the engagement of the historical thickness of language. I will also deal with the study of the ontological breadth that Agamben gives to his reflection on language, with the aim of retracing, through the contact with poetry, the transcendental origin of every statement, intended as a moment in which man, taking the word, makes himself a historic being.
