The goal of this research is to investigate from a Foucauldian archaeological perspective the idea that ‘man’ or ‘the human’ is something to be ‘surpassed’. It is focusing in particular on contemporary discourses such as Transhumanism or Posthumanism which embody this idea in the most striking fashion, tracing back the roots of the core concepts and notions underpinning those discourses, and following the trajectory of the question of the human in the history of Western culture more generally. In that regard, this thesis investigates various kinds of discourse that have characterised the Western conception of the human through the ages in all their diversity and richness—focusing in particular on the notion of the (human) limits as something to be overcome—and ultimately leading to the emergence of Transhumanism and Posthumanism within the last few decades. It aims to makes sense of their claim that the very notion of ‘man’ or ‘the human’ (and the traditional categories and assumptions associated with it) is outdated and to be supplanted in our day and age, by critically assessing it in the light of the historical investigation conducted in this thesis. Hence, through—and beyond—its historical dimension, this investigation endeavours to make sense of our own actuality (in the Foucauldian sense) in the face of the thorough scientific and technological—but not only—transformations and challenges we are currently witnessing and partaking in as a society and species alongside their cultural, social, political and planetary implications, in a ‘post-humanist’ and ‘post-essentialist’ era in which anthropocentric and ‘Western-centric’ postulates are increasingly questioned and rejected.