Abstract
Parrhesia is instrumental to sustain the autonomy of politics by bracketing religious dogma, social stratification and expert knowledge as the basis for decision-making by setting up a pact that binds the individual to his/her statement and the authorities to the community to assure their accountability and trustworthiness. The idea that underpins the autonomy of politics and democracy is that truth and a meritocratic principle of ascendency are two sides of the same coin. Democracy and parrhesia condition each other, but democracy might be undermined by the negativeparrhesia of flattery and manipulation, which undermines democratic governing, as political power no longer unfolds in agonistic encounters. Hence, the tightrope balance between good and bad parrhesia illustrates the ambitious but fragile nature of democracy.
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Notes
It is beyond the scope of this book to deal with the affinities between the later Foucault and the later Rawls. Here it will suffice to refer to the few who have probed the thematic links between them, notably Fleischacker 2013: chs 9–10; Moss 1998; Patton 2010 and Redhead 2010.
‘I think that the theoretical opposition between the state and civil society, on which political theory has been labouring for a hundred and fifty years, is not very productive’, says Foucault, IF: 290. Villadsen and Dean (2012: 402–4) try to explain away Foucault’s critique of this opposition by reducing his comments to the contexts of polemical exchanges in the late 1970s. In my opinion, this is not a viable, let alone fruitful, way of getting at Foucault’s argument, which, instead, should be seen in the context of carving out the specificity and autonomy of politics. This is especially clear in Foucault’s lecture on civil society in The Birth of Biopolitics, which is transformed from a legal to a political concept with the rise of the political economy. Juridical theory with its subject of rights is inadequate to govern a space of sovereignty inhabited by economic subjects. Civil society becomes a politicized space generated by liberal governmental technologies (BB: 294–7), and government becomes an organic component of the social bond just as the social bond becomes an organic feature of the form of authority (BB: 308).
Rawls 1995: 174–5. This argument is closely related to the principle that preconditions democracy, namely the autonomy of politics, relies on the bracketing of social factors that undermine the principle of liberty and equality. The point is also that whilst technical expertise is recognized as important, it is mandatory for democracy that political matters are dealt with by everybody in their capacity as citizens (Saxonhouse 2006: 94).
It should be noted that Foucault speaks of prophecy, wisdom, teaching, technique and parrhesia as five fundamental and partially overlapping modes of truth-telling. The political mode (parrhesia) cannot then be insulated from the other ones (CT: 26–7). This does not, however, prevent the democratic project from aiming parrhesia to be ‘freestanding’ in relation to prophecy, wisdom and so on.
Cf. Foucault’s comments on positivism ten years earlier that knowledge of madness was based on the medical profession’s ability to master it (HM: 505–6).
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© 2014 Torben Bech Dyrberg
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Dyrberg, T.B. (2014). The Politics of Parrhesia:The Autonomy of Democratic Politics and the Parrhesiastic Pact. In: Foucault on the Politics of Parrhesia. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137368355_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137368355_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, London
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