I've known more than a few lefties who find value in Foucault's work, and like Chomsky I don't understand it. Are there any Foucault fanciers here who might give it a go?... DP
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I found Foucault difficult at first and didn't particular like what I was reading (Madness and Civilization, Order of Things, Discipline and Punishment, and the Dreyfus-Rabinow Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics).
Then after arguing with Catherine Driscoll about him and trying to find David Hawkes distain of Foucault reasonable, I changed my mind and went back over a few of the works. I was over them several more times while trying to remember things that went on in the disability movements in the seventies.
One particular view that can't really be duplicated in many readers is what it is like to re-think Foucault through a remembered experience of being institutionalized. This is going to hard to explain, but if you have been around institutionalized people, and considered the psychic deformities that institutions like hospitals, rehabilitation centers, prisons, and some public schools have enacted upon their inmates, you can read Foucault in a much more understanding light.
Foucault's critique of institutions emerges from re-considering these experiences or in my case, my knowledge of them in others---mainly disabled friends and later politicos. The deeper point is that modern public institutions were created in the nexus of the social sciences and the bourgeois socio-political mind as necessary `cures' for forms of human behavior and modes of being that were perceived as `disease', `abnormalities', and `crimes'. In this case, `disability' follows from intimately related assessments of a bourgeoise order. In fact, the entire conceptual basis for `health', `normality', and differences from these supposed norms comes into question as you read Foucault---or at least it should. Then by extension what is `moral' or `ethical' soon follows. Pretty soon the whole social science foundation of modern society begins to dissolve. That's a pretty good experience to have. I didn't really expect that to happen. But I was already primed so to speak for that kind of experience.
I want to go bicycle riding, so more later.
But this should give you some understandable position that is also sympathetic to Foucault, from which to read his writing.
Chuck Grimes