ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a question that poses a more serious obstacle to taking Michel Foucault's work seriously than do misconceived charges of extreme relativism and irrealism. The cogency question is one about why people might accept and adopt Foucault's novel construals, or what Gary Gutting calls his "complex interpretive frameworks". Novel construals admit of justification only individually and in particular contexts. The value of Foucault's novel construals supposedly is useful interpretive novelty, and that is value to be assessed retrospectively. Foucault's archaeological, genealogical, and ethical analyses are unified by the fundamental role of historical research in each. Historical research and its focus on the marginal and subjugated may be described as a methodological unifying factor. The unifying role of subjectivity is least important in archaeology and secondary to effective or nonessentialist history in genealogy. Archaeology traces and charts the conceptual structures that enable, support, and define a socio-intellectual reality.
