Daily Inspiration Quote by Leslie Fiedler

The sly compliment here is that Foucault, patron saint of intellectual opacity for some of his detractors, is being praised for the opposite: plain intelligibility. Coming from Leslie Fiedler - a critic who made a career out of puncturing literary pieties and dragging high culture into the bright, messy light of American life - this reads as both admiration and a backhanded jab at a certain French academic milieu. “The one person I met in France that I could talk to” isn’t travelogue; it’s a verdict on a scene where conversation can feel like ritual performance, with jargon as the price of entry.

Calling Foucault “a mensch” does a lot of work. It yanks a Parisian celebrity philosopher into a Yiddish moral register: decency, warmth, an unshowy ethical presence. That’s Fiedler’s cultural translation trick, and it also signals what he values in thinking: not just brilliance, but human readability. The line “You know whether you agree with him or not because you know what he is saying” frames clarity as intellectual ethics. In an ecosystem where ambiguity can function as status, Fiedler treats being understandable as a kind of courage.

The subtext is personal and polemical at once. Fiedler is staking out an outsider’s authority - the American critic unimpressed by continental mystique - while granting Foucault a rare exemption. It’s less about endorsing Foucault’s theories than praising his conversational candor, the sense that beneath the abstractions there’s an addressable person, not just a posture.