>If someone were to write and (crucially) popularize a version that reads the way people explain Foucault, things would be different.

Foucault was French. French (and Europeans that are non British in general) do not write theory and history the way anglosaxons do. At least most of them doesn't. If you want to learn from them, you have to study their idioms. You cannot just point at it and say it's unquotable or alien (or, well, you can, but it's not fair).

It's like living all your life in C like languages, and being put off by functional programming and parentheses in LISP or Scheme. It's another way of doing things. If you had started with that, you'd find it perfectly normal. Since you didn't, it takes some time adjusting and absorbing the material and culture.

For me, a European, those are perfectly fine and understandable. And I also understand the use of metaphor and poetic language they often use to make a specific point. The anglosaxon idea for that is that you should write in a way that the local butcher or stock brocker can also understand -- which constraints you to only writing for issues that a stock brocker can fathom (or only handling extremely elaborate issues at that level of discourse).

To put it in programming terms, the anglosaxon way is like the C way -- they don't like "magic", unfamiliar notation, higher level code, and DSLs. And they feel that "worse is better". Which, I guess, makes the European way more LISPy.

Disclaimer: I'm Anglo Saxon, and I'm also a butcher in your terms despite spending reasonable amount of time and effort working to understand this stuff.

I think the key difference here is that code actually has to compile, so no matter how clever your lispy magic gets it's still grounded by that reality. Foucault (and Barthes, Saussure et al) are unencumbered by the constraint of their prose actually having to be parseable by anyone. Their prose is better thought of as an artistic performance than a functional machine.

> "Their prose is better thought of as an artistic performance than a functional machine."

Nail on head. The relationship between the words of the above and reality is similar to the relationship between a painting of a landscape and the real landscape. It's not that the painting is not valuable in itself, but it would be a mistake to think that it says anything about how the landscape actually works

If you're going to complain about people misinterpreting Foucault or applying the wrong norms in judging philosophy, you should drop the habit of referring to 'Anglo-Saxons' as if this alien race were somehow homogenous in their culture and opinions, when it is used for anyone white from Staines to Cambridge, Mass. There are plenty of obtuse American theorists, and plenty of philosophers whose conception of power and relations is very similar - for example Chomsky has a lot in common with Foucault in examining relations of power and control, and their relationship with language, and is fond of constructing similar thickets of prose. Many writers from James to Joyce to Faulkner also delighted in creating obtuse literature in the 'Anglo-Saxon' canon.

The label Anglo-Saxon is an absurd, racist simplification which undermines your argument. There is no coherent Anglo-Saxon way - except as it exists in the imagination of the French intelligentsia as a foil to their clearly more sophisticated approach. There is more to the world than is dreamt of in that philosophy of opposition of thoughtful Europe against shopkeeper Anglo-Saxons.