The literary plagiarism as ethically and aesthetically inferior modality of the intertextuality; it is the thesis supported in this article, thesis supported by a historiographical analysis of the concept of plagiarism and its evolution through some great classics: Montaigne, Cervantes, Lautréamont, Valéry, Borgès, etc. Intertext, one of the new modalities of narrative literature made possible by the invention of electronic writing and the advent of the Internet, makes literary plagiarism superfluous and useless.