In The Order of Things, Foucault recounts how, in his view, thought in modernity has run into something of a dead end. Different branches of enquiry are held within a structure which ensures that each alone is necessarily incomplete, or which commits them to tracking an origin that moves continually beyond reach. At the heart of this diagnosis of the condition of thought in modernity lies the figure of man, and in particular of the finitude of man. The Order of Things famously closes with the suggestion that man, this pivotal figure in the drama of modernity, may be a recent invention and one perhaps nearing its end, soon to disappear ‘like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (OT 387, 398). If The Archaeology of Knowledge is read as a methodological clarification of how Foucault understood the practice of thinking at the time, then, in its simplest form, his challenge is to explain the meaning of this disappearance. Yet the final two chapters of The Order of Things leave no doubt that Foucault was more than just a dispassionate observer of the changes he saw overtaking the figure of man in modernity and regarded himself as a participant in the transformation of the practice of thinking described in those chapters. However, for all the rich detail in Foucault's analysis of what had become of thinking in modernity, the description of what lay ahead is sketchy.