Patently Obvious?

Reading a feisty post ('Falsehoods, Distortions and Outright Lies in the Gene Patenting Debate') at Patent Docs in conjunction with Jane Hope's Biobazaar: The Open Source Revolution and Biotechnology (Harvard University Press, 2009), David Koepsell's Who Owns You? The Corporate Gold Rush to Patent Your Genes (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Luigi Palombi's Gene Cartels: Biotech Patents in the Age of Free Trade (Elgar 2009) and The Patent Crisis and How the Courts Can Solve It (University of Chicago Press, 2009) by Dan Burk and Mark Lemley. 

 All in all, more entertaining than Ian Hacking's The Social Construction of What? (Harvard University Press ,1999), a deconstruction of 'social constructionism' that for me is less persuasive than his Historical Ontology (Harvard University Press, 2002), or Foucault's Law (Routledge, 2009) by Ben Golder and Peter Fitzpatrick. The latter is promoted as offering "a revelatory argument about one of the most important social theorists and philosophers of the twentieth century", in a pantheon that presumably includes figures such as Edward Said - oops, stay away from Robert Irwin's For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies (Allen Lane, 2006) - Herbert Marcuse and Marshall McLuhan. 

 Putting aside skepticism about Foucault's lasting significance, I wonder whether the undiscovered Foucault, like the 'secret Hobbes' revealed by Carl Schmitt, is a function of the commentator's ingenuity and enthusiasm (and in the case of Foucault the sheer messiness of the author's writing over a number of years, untroubled by notions of consistency or coherence). Time for a hermeticist reading of Talcott Parsons?