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Thank you for taking the time to reply, I really do appreciate it.
Sorry if I didn't emphasize this enough, but I did say that you had to evaluate every work on a case by case basis. What I meant that "guys shooting the shit" is a helpful way to approach some continental works. I don't think it's the best way to approach all continental works. Derrida's Voice and Phenomenon lays out some claims and arguments in the philosophy of mind that, I think, can be phrased in simple and accessible terms. Foucault's Discipline and Punish is a pretty down to earth history of the development of the western prison system over the last several centuries. They're just, like, normal books. Nothing too mysterious going on.
I do think that Lacan goes off the reservation sometimes, to the point that the commentaries and secondary sources on his work are sometimes better than the original works themselves. But that doesn't mean that everything he wrote is bad, and it certainly doesn't mean that every work of continental philosophy is bad.
"Deference" to an "authority" is a concept that's about as antithetical to philosophy as you can get. For every single claim in the history of philosophy, you can find examples of someone asserting the opposite; for every canonical philosopher, you can find another canonical philosopher who thought the first guy was an idiot. Even if you were to just focus on continental philosophy alone, I really can't emphasize enough just how fragmented it is. Philosophy just is debate and disagreement, in a way that no other field is. I mean it when I say that if you walk into an English department (which is where continental philosophers usually hang out in the US) you can find people who think that Lacan was bullshit and evil, Sartre was bullshit and evil, Derrida was bullshit and evil... who is the authority to defer to? No one would be able to agree!
Analytic philosophers I think are quite scrupulous about this, to a fault. Because of continental philosophy's greater focus on specific figures rather than isolated positions and arguments, it's more common to get people who are "fans" of one figure or another, and I acknowledge that sometimes it looks like they're treating them as an authority figure. Although I don't think that's really what's going on usually. When someone says "Marx said X" for example, it should be read as more like "X is a claim that was developed in Marx's work, so you should refer to his works if you want further justification for it" or "I believe X is true, but I didn't come up with it, Marx did", rather than "you should believe X because Marx said so". More like citing your sources, rather than an assertion of authority. Even if someone did start treating their favorite philosopher like an authority figure, they wouldn't be able to do so without major cognitive dissonance, for all the reasons mentioned above; they'd have to explain why there are a lot of other philosophers who think their favorite "authority" was wrong about everything.
I can't personally vet the psychology of everyone who talks about philosophy. Maybe there are some people who really do believe "X is true because Y said so". But, that doesn't reveal anything in particular about philosophy itself. That just reveals that that particular person is dumb and wrong. It would be like saying that data fabrication is a part of science because some scientists have fabricated data before.
I would be legitimately fascinated and highly interested if you could provide specific examples of that happening.
I think you're overestimating the real world impact of academic philosophy here. I think it would be kinda neat if it actually did have that level of impact. But I don't think it does.
I believe (and please correct me if I'm wrong; I'm not trying to put words into your mouth) that you see a direct causal link between continental philosophy on one hand and contemporary wokeness on the other. It's a claim that I've seen repeated in various forms on TheMotte on multiple occasions, and I've always disagreed with it, for 3 main reasons:
Broadly speaking, I don't think that people hold the political positions they do because they read a book, or even because they talked to someone who read a book. I think people believe the things they do because they want certain things (wealth, power, various types of freedom, etc). The desire and the need for something concrete comes first, and then they look for an ideology later to justify it. So, for example, I don't think that DEI exists in the US today because of humanities academics. I think it exists because that's naturally the sort of thing that arises when you have an ascendant coalition of racial minorities and a demographically declining racial majority.
The "big names" of continental philosophy are not particularly woke (there's little in their work that would be recognizable as modern wokeness, anyway) and in fact I think there are resources in their work that could be a benefit to anti-wokeness.
Regarding the point about obscurantist language - do you think that's somehow necessary to leftist politics? If they were forced to only use simple words then the whole thing would collapse? Because I think that's clearly not true. You can easily put all the key tenets and arguments of wokeness into simple language. To reiterate the point above, woke people are woke because of the intrinsic content of the positions, not because they were hypnotized by a humanities tract.
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