Abstract
Parrhesia is interesting for Foucault because it focuses on the political ground for exercising political authority, which is specific for democracy. It connotes truthful and trustworthy speech, which is entwined with the accountability and capability of democratic government. With parrhesia we get a political take on truth, for which personal integrity, frankness, timing, courage and resolve are defining features. The political ethos of parrhesia is readiness to challenge norms and rules, popular opinion and political authorities. Foucault’s discussions of parrhesia are vital for getting at his political triangulation of power, knowledge and ethics, alias techniques of governmentality, truth-telling and the shaping of the relationship to self. This is the basis for approaching his discussions of the autonomy of politics and democratic political authority.
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Notes
QM; BB: lecture 1, 4, 8; GSO: lecture 1, 3; CT: lecture 1; HS: lecture 1; ST: 151ff. In addition, there are numerous extracts from interviews, lectures and articles where he reflects on how he works and what has always interested him.
QM: 79; see also 75 where he speaks of ‘what is to be done’, alias ‘effects of “jurisdiction”’ and ‘what is to be known’, alias ‘effects of “veridiction” ’.
QM: 79; see also SW: 8, where he mentions the problem he has dealt with in all his books: ‘wie ist in den abendländischen Gesellschaften die Produktion von Diskursen, die ( … ) mit einem Wahrheitswert geladen sind, und die underschiedlichen Mactmechanismen und –institutionen gebunden?’ Note also his earlier comments on truth in relation to ideology where he mentions that the problem is to see ‘historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which are neither true nor false’. Truth is understood as an ‘ensemble of rules according to which the true and the false are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true’, which is a battle of the status and role of truth; TP: 118, 132. It follows that this way of approaching the question of truth cannot be an epistemological one, but it is political. More specifically, it has to do with political authority.
Veyne (2010: 93) is onto something similar when mentioning that Foucault did not set out to outline ‘a logical or philosophical theory of truth, but an empirical and almost sociological critique of telling the truth, that is to say the “rules” for speaking truly’. From my perspective it is more to the point to say that Foucault outlines a political critique.
Patton 2003: 519. See also WE: 117; PHS: 199–203 which is close to but not identical with the introduction to HS2; GSO: 3–5; CT: 8–9. For a discussion of Foucault’s two conceptions of the term experience as ‘everyday experience’ and ‘transformative experience’, see O’Leary 2010.
HS1: 99. This is the second preliminary rule for studying discursive practices, which tie together power/knowledge: ‘Rules of continual variations’. As Kelly (2013: 75) notes power/knowledge is about governing transformations as opposed to setting up static distributions or hierarchies.
HS1: 100 and CT: 8–9, respectively. The first quote is part of the fourth preliminary ‘Rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses’.
Cf. Foucault’s linkage of parrhesia to Kant’s Aufklärung, GSO: lecture 1. Moreover, there is a thematic link between Foucault and certain strands of Critical Theory with the exception, however, that the early Frankfurt School displayed an apocalyptic disillusionment with Reason’s complicity with power. In speaking of the particular form of rationality characterizing the West, Foucault (IF: 273) asks, ‘how can that rationality be separated from the mechanisms, procedures, techniques, and effects of power that accompany it and for which we express our distaste by describing them as the typical form of oppression of capitalist societies.’
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© 2014 Torben Bech Dyrberg
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Dyrberg, T.B. (2014). The Nature of Parrhesia: Political Truth-Telling in Relation to Power, Knowledge and Ethics. In: Foucault on the Politics of Parrhesia. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137368355_5
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