Quote: Foucault

Question: When did you stop believing in 'meaning?'
Foucault: The break came the day that Levi-Strauss demonstrated - about societies - and Lacan demonstrated - about the unconscious - that 'meaning' was probably only a sort of surface effect, a shimmer, a foam, and that what ran through us, underlay us, and was before us, what sustained us in time or space, was the system ...
Question: But, then, who secretes this system?
Foucault: What is this anonymous system without a subject, what thinks? The 'I' has exploded - we see this in modern literature - this is the discovery of 'there is.' There is a one. In some ways, one comes back to the seventeenth-century point of view, with this difference: not setting man, but anonymous thought, knowledge without subject, theory with no identity, in God's place.

Interview with Michel Foucault in La Quinzaine litteraire, 1966; in 'Claude Levi-Strauss, The Father of Modern Anthropology,' Patrick Wilcken, 2010