"The history of science, the history of knowledge, does not simply obey the general law of the progress of reason; human consciousness does not somehow retain the laws of its own history. Beneath what science knows of itself, there is something it does not know, and its history, its future, its events, its accident obey a certain number of laws and determinations. These I have tried to bring to light. I have tried to identify an autonomous domain, that of the unconscious of science, the unconscious of knowledge, which could have its own rules, much as the unconscious of the human individual also has its own rules and determinations."

Michel Foucault, ’Magazine Littéraire [1968]’