If the word man is a conceptual figure grafted upon a blind metaphor, then the referential status of the discourse about man … claims to refer to an entity (man), but this entity turns out to be the substitution of a definitional for what was only a hypothetical knowledge, an epistemological metaphor substituting certitude for ignorance.

everything is ‘outside’ everything else; there are nothing but outside differences and no integration is possible.

As such, history is not human, because it pertains strictly to the order of language; it is not natural, for the same reason; it is not phenomenal, in the sense that no cognition, no knowledge about man, can be derived from a history which as such is purely a linguistic complication; and it is not really temporal either, because the structure that animates it is not a temporal structure … The dimension of futurity, for example, which is present in it, is not temporal.