The Conclusion to the book takes the form of a series of responses by Foucault to objections that he could anticipate, and no doubt some which had already been made. In the main he takes the (staged) opportunity to step back and provide a more strategic view of what he aimed to achieve, to reiterate a few key points, and to try one last time to head off misinterpretations.

Foucault makes the point that suspending the category of the subject in no way suppresses individuality beneath a universal form of discourse, not least because the forms of discourse that he introduces into the analysis are not universal. To be universal, they would have to be imposed on discourse from the outside and immune to any alteration, but this is not the case. Not only are the particular configurations into which all the elements of discursive formations fall local and provisional, but these elements themselves are descriptions of discourse as Foucault finds it. Although the scale of a historical transformation leading to the disappearance of one or more of what seem in this analysis to be fundamental categories would have to be much greater than those considered here, there is nothing to prevent it, and this point is underlined later in the Conclusion. In fact, the suspension of the category of the subject is a strategic decision made to align the analysis with the disappearance of man, and thereby with the current of thought that promises an escape from the impasse described at the end of The Order of Things.