Foucault/Latour judo

I had the same reaction that Chad had to the absence of Foucault in the work of one so concerned with mapping associations--especially when reading We Have Never Been Modern. There Foucault is nary mentioned at all there, whereas in Reassembling he is regulated to footnotes, though at least still present. Latour seems to acknowledge Foucault's influence, his brilliance and his absence, in a way, in the footnote on 86. The footnote is to the following: "To the studied and modifiable skein of means to achieve powers, sociology, and especially critical sociology, has too often substituted an invisible, unmovable, and homogenous world of power for itself"; and the footnote reads:

That this lesson is easy to forget is shown dramatically by the transatlantic destiny of Michel Foucault. No one was more precise in his analytical decomposition of the tiny ingredients from which power is made and no one was more critical of social explanations. And yet, as soon as Foucault was translated, he was immediately turned into the one who had 'revealed' power relations _behind_ every innocuous activity: madness, natural history, sex, administration, etc. This proves again with what energy the notion of social explanation should be fought: even the genius of Foucault could not prevent such a total inversion.

It seems as if Latour does not bring Foucault directly in because Latour feels that Foucault's work has been so overdetermined, in a way--that it has so much baggage associated with it is a more honest way of saying it--that to bring in Foucault explicitly runs the risk of bringing in these associations which would lead many down the wrong path, so to speak. I think Latour acknowledges Foucault's influence however--and it seems to me that he does a bit of judo, to extend Chad's metaphor, in letting the reader go through his own work without bringing in Foucault except as in these digressive, suggestive footnotes. I hope so, any way, as Foucault is on my cmap for next week.