French historian Foucault, Michel uses this term, which literally means knowledge in Greek, to name the set of conditions which enable something to be known. The episteme, for Foucault, is the condition of possibility of knowledge, and in his view there can only ever be one episteme at any one moment in history. It is not, however, the body of knowledge itself. In this regard, it is similar in many respects to Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, FĂ©lixâs later concept of the rhizome inasmuch as what it actually names is the dispersed and discontinuous relations between the multitude of elements that combine to produce so-called knowledge.