Michel Foucault finished *Les Mots et les Choses* in Tunis in the spring of 1966 and published it the same year with Gallimard. The book had unexpected success in France — it sold 'like a novel of the season' and turned Foucault into the most influential figure of late-1960s Continental philosophy.

The book's thesis is this: knowledge is historically organised within distinct 'epistemes' — silent infrastructures that determine what can be known in a given period, what questions can be asked, and what counts as evidence. Foucault examines three: the Renaissance (knowledge built on 'resemblance' — everything can resemble everything, the world a web of hidden signs), the Classical age (17th-18th centuries, knowledge built on 'representation' and 'order' — Linnaeus's classification, the Port-Royal grammar), and the Modern (from the 19th century, knowledge built on 'history' and 'depth' — biology, economics, linguistics).

The book's most striking claim is that the concept of 'man' as an object of knowledge appears at exactly the same moment as the modern episteme. In the Classical age there was no category called the 'sciences of man'; there was 'general grammar', 'natural history', 'the analysis of wealth'. The modern age replaces them with 'biology', 'economics', 'linguistics' — and in each, 'man' appears as both subject and object.

The book ends with its famous passage: 'Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end — like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.' This sentence was read as the thesis of 'the death of man'; it became one of the opening slogans of post-structuralism and post-humanist theory.

Foucault later extended his 'archaeological' method to a 'genealogical' one (borrowed from Nietzsche); in *Discipline and Punish* (1975) and *The History of Sexuality* (1976-84) he investigated the relation between power and subjectivity. He is a foundational reference for the modern social sciences, cultural studies, and post-colonial theory.