The archaeology of knowledge ; and, The discourse on language

Blurb

The Archaeology of Knowledge is a 1969 book by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. It is a methodological and historiographical treatise promoting what Foucault calls "archaeology" or the "archaeological method", an analytical method he implicitly used in his previous works Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things. It is Foucault's only explicitly methodological work.
The premise of the book is that systems of thought and knowledge are governed by rules which operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought and language use in a given domain and period.
Most prominently in its Introduction and Conclusion, the book also becomes a philosophical treatment and critique of phenomenological and dogmatic structural readings of history and philosophy, portraying continuous narratives as naïve ways of projecting our own consciousness onto the past, thus being exclusive and excluding.