[dlkf]

Nobody has articulated my feelings about Foucault et al better than Chomsky:

> There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out.

[nkurz]

It's a great quote, but having (tried) to read (some of) all of those authors (in English translation), I think Foucault is in a different class. I'd agree that the others are intentionally obscurantist, but Foucault is not. I'd put him at about the level of Chomsky himself --- complicated, possibly wrong, but insightful and striving for clarity.

"Discipline and Punishment" and "History of Sexuality" are short and clear. Foucault's basic idea of "power" is that one should pay less attention to the explanations and excuses that are given, and more attention to what actually happens. If despite their protestations, one side consistently ends up winning, and their opponents consistently end up losing, it's likely that they hold "power".

Which is to say, while you are welcome to skip Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, and Kristeva, I think you should read Foucault.

[dang]

Chomsky has made many such remarks and they're always interesting, but I think what Searle had to say about it—he was a personal friend of Foucault—is even more interesting ("I asked him: why the hell do you write so badly?") The conclusion is that the obscurity was culturally driven, but that's a lame way to summarize this fun clip. Just listen to the whole thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvwhEIhv3N0

[jorgesborges]

That's an excellent observation. Those philosophers are deliberately ambiguous for the sake of profundity. It's not unlike interpreting poetry or literature -- they even built that into their tradition, like a preemptive defence against their lack of clarity. The most honest way to approach Foucault and others like him is to read them as thinkers and artists and to accept what insights you can glean from it and disregard the rest and shake off its overbearing seriousness.

[raincom]

Deliberately ambiguous sentences mean 1000 meanings to 1000 followers. Then these 1000 postmodern intellectuals write treatises on the meaning of this, by adding their own ambiguity. In the end, everything goes.