Jordan Peterson has an axe to grind (I only listened a little ways into his video and he made me angry, so I am no expert whatsoever on him). I don’t think Chomsky was disrespectful to Foucault in the other video. I simply think they are on different planes, and I agree with Chomsky that there is a haziness about post modern writers (even in original language, for example Barthes for me in French). But that haziness doesn’t make me respect it any the less. And I get your point that I would probably find a similar haziness with Spinoza or Descartes, whom I have never touched.
I wish I could read French just for the French philosophers and Prost.
Derrida's point is there's always haziness in every text because every word has multiple shades of meaning and possible intentional and unintentional connotations.
Foucault:
"It is true, it seems to me that modern philosophy perhaps since Kant rasied the question ‘What is Enlightenment? That is, ‘What is our actuality?’ What is happening in our present?
Since then it seems philosophy has acquired a new dimension or a certain task opened up which was ignored or not known before, and that is, to tell us who we are, and what our present is, what it is today.
It’s a question that would not have had meaning to Descartes.
It’s a question that begins to mean something to Kant when he asks what is the enlightenment.
It’s a question that has meaning for Hegel."
Foucault starts at 2:40
This is a great quote by Foucault because it shows his deep understanding of all the philosophers that came before him as well as his own personal analysis of how things have changed and the present.
There is no haziness of thought or of language. For me, the thinking is clear and profound.