Exogenetics designates any writing process devoted to research, selection, and incorporation, focused on information stemming from a source exterior to the writing. Handwritten or not, any documentary notes or copies, any quoted or intertextual matter, any results of inquiries or observations, any evidence of iconographic matter (that gives rise to a written transposition), and generally any written or text-image documentation, belongs by nature to the exogenetic category. Comments on things seen, on overheard or reported speech, sketches and drawings made of the subject in hand, friends’ letters giving useful information or anecdotes, reading notes, investigatory notebooks, newspaper cuttings, typescripts of interviews or conversations, printed textual fragments and marginalia, bibliographical references, confessions, essays and reports, and so on. The exogenetic empire knows almost no bounds, unless they could be said to be the limits that, in good methodological faith, ought to confine it to what is written and depicted (when what is depicted gives rise to a written transposition).