What the Foucault Are You Talking About?

After reading, what seemed to me, two labyrinthine pieces by Michel Foucault, I’m not as impressed as I expected to be. That doesn’t mean I don’t respect his opinion and the effort and courage it took to speak his own mind in a coherent way – I do. However, in both of the essays that we read, Foucault is responding to or developing another person’s work, especially in the case of “What is an author?” It seems easier to me to rebut another’s argument and counter it, as he does with Barthes, than to create an argument without any provocation. I just find it hard to understand how he came to be so influential in the academic world. So what I want to know is, what makes Michel Foucault so damn special?

Now, I’m going to copy Foucault a little bit and leave my own question unanswered. I understand that I probably have not read enough of his work to cast any judgments, but it’s hard not to when he’s been put on such a tall pedestal. I made the mistake of searching for Foucault on YouTube, and found a lot of interviews and even an excerpt (and later an entire transcript) from a debate he had with Noam Chomsky. Foucault clearly was considered significant if he had a formal debate with Chomsky, who is also considered as one of the most influential thinkers of our time, but that still doesn’t answer my question as to why he is thought of in this manner. After I realized that I did not have enough patience to make sense of the debate, I started to do what his contemporaries hated, and found out more about Foucault’s life. What I did find especially noteworthy and significant about his life is that Foucault died of AIDS a little while before the disease became well-known.

I then found a quote from one of his interviews that I thought was particularly fitting: “I don’t feel it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.”  In this sense, Foucault was successful. He authored works that others have found very influential and thus has been transformed (somewhat posthumously) into what may be a "founder of discursivity." However, did he inspire a revolution? Did he reform an institution? Without concrete effects of his writing, I just don't get why Foucault is valued so highly, although I would love to find out.