Foucault’s opposes two terms for knowledge: connaissance refers to a specific corpus of knowledge or a discipline (it is knowledge as an object, known by a removed subject); savoir, at least for Foucault, refers to a kind of knowledge that is underlying but explicit and describable. Foucault’s method treats knowledge in the sense of savoir, as ‘the conditions that are necessary in a particular period for this or that type of object to be given to connaissance’ as something that is known. In short, ‘knowledge,’ as the major focus of Foucault’s method refers to the discursive conditions of possibility for what we generally understand as objective or subjective ‘knowledge.’ At one point in ‘Science and Knowledge,’ Foucault describes the archeological method in these terms: ‘Instead of exploring the consciousness/knowledge (connaissance)/science axis (which cannot escape subjectivity), archeology explores the discursive practice/knowledge (savoir)/science axis.’
