 Even more important than language is the figure of man. The most important point about “man” is that it is an epistemological concept. Man, Foucault says, did not exist during the Classical age (or before). This is not because there was no idea of human beings as a species or of human nature as a psychological, moral, or political reality. Rather, “there was no epistemological consciousness of man as such” (The Order of Things, [1970: 309]). But even “epistemological” needs construal. There is no doubt that even in the Classical age human beings were conceived as the locus of knowledge (since humans possess the ideas that represent the world). The notion of man, on the other hand, is epistemological in the Kantian sense of a transcendental subject that is also an empirical object. For the Classical age, human beings are the locus of representations but not, as for Kant, their source. There is, in Classical thought, no room for the modern notion of “constitution.”