In 1969, after his studies on madness, clinical medicine, and the conditions for the existence of the life sciences, language, and economics, Michel Foucault would decisively move toward the theoretical systematization of the project that inspired him, providing a precise indication of his role as a historian and philosopher.

The archaeology he proposes does not seek causal relationships and influences between events, does not consider history a gradual unfolding of rational thought that would teleologically lead to the triumph of absolute truth, nor does it rely on any definitive role that the subject's consciousness would have in it. The historical events themselves exist insofar as they constitute "things said," as they are problematized through discourses, discursive formations, and reason, thereby shaping the archive, meaning autonomous yet not independent realms of discourse, regulated, although in continuous transformation, anonymous and without subject, even as they permeate individual works.

History and its movement then acquire a different meaning. No longer the solid cognitive branches, but the laws that govern distributions, dispersion, transformations, alternations, the intervals of discourse within a field of strategic probabilities. The sense of change is not given through evolution, cohesive relationships, hidden meanings but through the enigmatic pivotal points of rupture and discontinuity.

"The description of the archive [...] deprives us of our continuities; it dissolves that temporal identity in which we like to reflect ourselves to exorcise the ruptures of history. [...] We are difference [...] our discourse is the difference of discourses, [...] our history is the difference of times, [...] our ego is the difference of masks. [...] Difference, rather than being the forgotten and concealed origin, is this dispersion that we are and that we enact." (Michel Foucault)