Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking
This sort of thing is always by turns boring and frustrating to read, because there are good and interesting philosophical criticisms to be made of Foucault&#x27;s epistemology, but the idea that for him facticity itself is questionable isn&#x27;t one of them. Foucault is never really in doubt about what constitutes, e.g., an event, occurrence, or fact - actually his entire corpus very self-consciously relies on having a common set of texts that we agree constitute accounts of what happened in a given field of inquiry in a given time period. Foucault&#x27;s epistemology strongly requires and insists on the objectivity of the archive. He wouldn&#x27;t be able to make authoritative claims about the historical importance of Kantian representation, or Bentham&#x27;s pantopticon, if he didn&#x27;t think the archive of philosophical and scientific writings had some objective merit that wasn&#x27;t in question. He&#x27;s emphatically not the moral relativist he&#x27;s made out to be by low-hanging fruit conservatism like this. What he - and a lot of his colleagues in France at the time - wanted to know was whether the system of interpretations that has accrued around this archive has  gotten to the bottom of what our 19th century forebears were really up to when they were, for instance, busy examining the shapes of skulls to determine personality traits.