the comment about "Anglo-Saxon earthiness" puts me in mind of a certain Ivy League philosophy department. . .

Foucault thought the heydey of letters was over and Derrida's multilingual grammatalogical tour de forces were basically reactionary attempts to forestall the inevitable. I'm not so sure, but what stands out to me is that american students who might otherwise delight in all the nuances of language-learning and translation aren't enouraged to today. There's a tremendous premium on scientific knowledge coupled with a cynicism against "frippery" that makes such things not only "boring," "pointless," and so on like the rest of the school, but actually "pretentious" "pedantic" and a kind of social liability. At least, that's how I see my own indifference to learning foreign languages up to the middle of college, despite having a certain flair for it.

Hear hear! Setting their differences in philosophy aside, I think Foucault also suffers tremendously from poor translation. Despite his elevation to the status of a demigod within the academy, few of his concepts survive without re-acquiring the phony mysticism that it is the only function of Foucault's actual research to dispel. (come to think of it, it is probably because of this elevation, or at least part and parcel).

I am thinking in particular of shoddy translation of "pouvoir," half of the critical couplet "pouvoir-savoir." The translation into English as "power" leads to an intractable confusion with the french word "puissance," also usually translated as "power." It's my feeling that "pouvoir," which means power in the sense of "power over" should be translated as "authority," leaving "puissance" (strength, influence, or "power-to") as the best equivalent to the English (or, at least, American) "power." "Power/knowledge" sounds flashy (and spooky), but "authority/knowledge" is more true to Foucault's research, which is somewhat more modest than many academics would have us believe.

I think translating pouvoir as "authority" would be entirely incorrect. Foucault's notion of power is Nietzsche's--you need the cross-resonance between the english translations of Nietzsche and Foucault. What is more, Foucault has--explicitly and everywhere--disavowed the equation between power and "authority"; indeed, the gist of his "capillary conception of power" is that power is not just something wielded by authorities over the weak, but appears everywhere. Nietzsche argued, for instance, that woman, in seemingly being dominated by man's paternalistic authority, was at the same time exerting a kind of power over him.

I haven't read Foucault in ages, but from what I remember of his work, his use of "power" stripped the word of its top-down/judicial associations. Power is ubiquitous, and defies neat categories like dominating/dominated. . . He's using "power" in a way that's opposed to the neat coupling between power + authority, so replacing "power" with "authority" would undermine his word-concept. But, really, like I've said, I haven't read him in a long time, and my memory of his texts lacks real nuance.

Pierre,
I don't know many people who haven't learned a second or third language. I still think, in the culture of higher education, foreign languages are (large, blunt, almost comic) signifiers of "the thinking class." So-- what's the context of your observation: college, high school, general culture? At this point, it's redundant to say that American culture is insular and anti-intellectual.
N.

Clearly you are both correct in your assertion that Foucault imbibes "pouvoir" with a deeper meaning than is often found in the use of "authority." But isn't that exactly the stretch that Foucault is asking us to make? His "capillary conception," which Pierre claims can only apply to power, jibes against only his limited sense of "authority." "The authorities" have never simply existed as an a priori distinction of dominating/dominated, as this reading would suggest, but instead have always been constructed by means of technique (savoir). This is what Foucault has said "explicitly and everywhere."

Moreover, it is important to go beyond the priciple of "correct" translation of Foucault and Nietzche, beyond the impasses of their research, and I see no area of greater importance. We live in a time in which "the authorities" have very little, and yet the power to overthrow them needs a new active language of collective constitution. Developing a new understanding of "power" itself is critical.

For me, this question boils down to a simple choice of whether we wish to add to English or subtract from it. "Authority," deprived of the additional meaning I would lend it, seems an entirely useless word, describing only the fiction Foucault sought to discredit; while "power," specified to mean potential or power-to, gains in depth and functionality. The choice seems clear to me.

Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.