The purpose of The Archaeology of Knowledge consists of establishing a homogeneous theoretical-conceptual basis for the historicalphilosophical research that had preceded it: an Archaeology of perception, in the History of Madness; an archaeology of the medical gaze, in The Birth of the Clinic; and an archaeology of the human sciences, in The Order of Things. However, what is effectively at stake is a frontal refusal of the anthropological primacy in the field of history, philosophy and the studies that deal with the formation of the concept of man. And that is precisely because Foucault attributes to words an ontological dimension.
