The philosophy of modernity since Descartes, since the Enlightenment, since Kant has been put into question as such a practice of violence insofar as the concept and the demeanour of construction (for instance, of systems) and of erection (of a transcendental subject) are invariably combined with the authority of self-empowerment and a certain will to power. It is thinking itself that elevates itself to this self-authorization in order to give a structure to the superfluity of the manifold real which refers to the order of concepts itself. The human being becomes the starting-point of all knowledge and it appears simultaneously as its proper object. “This ambiguous situation”, Michel Foucault says, “characterized the anthropological, humanistic thinking of the nineteenth century, as it could be called. It seems to me that today this thinking is in a state of dissolution and is decomposing before our eyes. And the reason for this has a great deal to do with the development of structuralism. Since we have discovered that all human knowledge, all human existence, the whole of human life and perhaps even the biological inheritance of humankind are tied into structures, that is, into a formal set of elements among which relations exist that can be described by anyone, the human being ceases, so to speak, to be its own subject for itself, that is, it is subject and object at the same time. … This reduction of the human being to structures into which it is integrated seems to me to be characteristic for today’s thinking. The ambiguous position of the human being as subject and object therefore, in my opinion, is not a fertile hypothesis today, not an area of fertile research anymore.” In this interview from 1967, Foucault leaves no doubt about what is actually at stake in this reduction of the human being to structures. Instead of being a simple problem in the history of science in the narrow sense, in the structural revolution, if one can speak of such a thing, the “sovereignty of the subject or of consciousness” is at issue. That is the great theme of the disappearance of the human which dominates the analyses in The Order of Things. A certain kind of human being begins to dissolve. It loses its authority, authorization and power of persuasion at the threshold of the investigation of anonymous, blind structures undertaken by the structuralism of the 1950s and 1960s. The violence of representation, of the transcendental subject, of universalism which represent the thinking of modernity must give way to another violence which could be called the violence of signs and structures. At least, as Foucault will emphasize, it is a matter of bracketing off or obscuring the cogito for methodological reasons in order to learn more about the structures of knowledge than seems to be possible from within the schema of subject and object. Philosophy must take leave of the tendency toward totality in order to go along the path of contingencies which this totality denies, with the aim of grasping their structure. Following Nietzsche, it is a matter of opening up new areas of phenomena and knowledge which have been neglected by the main paths of traditional philosophy. Archaeology and genealogy take the place of the metaphysical investigation of meaning and origin. One power represses the other. Philosophy only exists as the history of repression. Who or what, if it is not a subject, can assume responsibility for this?