Parrhesia

This dissertation is an examination of military veterans who have come home to become social justice activists. I proceed by staging encounters between their lives, stories, activism, experiences in war, with a number of theoretical concepts. These concepts include: geocorporeal actors, parrhēsia, organic intellectual, masculinity, hypermasculinity, state violence, citizenship, war imaginaries, and healing. These encounters between these veterans and concepts tell us many interesting things about war, militarism, US democracy, and US society. At times these encounters help to unravel the messiness of understanding some of these concepts; at other times it makes that which seems clear-cut more complicated. Finally, this dissertation shows the wars at home that these veterans are currently fighting. They are fighting wars that are often tied to the wars they left while in the military, and they are fighting to make sense of it all, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically.

Parrhêsia is a complex notion, with a long history in ancient Greek thought. In Epicur’s writings, parrhêsia is only found once, but its occurrences are much more frequent in the texts of one of his disciples, Philodemus, Peri Parrhêsias, a collection of fragments important both for capturing the meanings of the notion and for the history of Epicureanism. It offers, as far as it can be deciphered from the remaining fragments, a picture of the pedagogical practices and the way of life of the Epicurean community.

Foucault concluded his Dartmouth lectures in 1980 by saying that "one of the main political problems would be nowadays, in the strict sense of the word, the politics of ourselves" (Foucault 2016: 76). Despite the insistence of some, Foucault, the archaeologist of knowledge and the genealogist of power relations, held that his main concern had always been the question of subjectivity or, as he put it, "to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects" (Foucault 1983: 208). He claims to have dealt with this objective through three ways: first, by analyzing scientific discourses of inquiry that objectify individuals as speaking, living and laboring subjects; second, by looking at dividing practices that define normality at the exclusion of other subjects; and third, by studying ways in which humans turns themselves into a subject. Elsewhere (Foucault 1997a: 262) he describes this as the "three axes" or "domains of genealogy"-truth, power, and ethics-with which he engaged with differing emphasis in different moments in his work. Among the various practices analyzed by Foucault in order to get to the heart of the issue of subjectivity, he considered the seemingly mundane practices of self-narration; or practices of telling the truth about oneself. His analysis of self-narration begins implicitly in his early works on discourse and the archaeology of knowledge, and continues in the middle works on power relations, sexuality, and confession.

In this paper I propose to present an exploration of processes of negotiated autonomy in education. The concept of negotiated autonomy is a term I have arrived at through applying a Foucauldian analysis to my observations of how subjects reflect upon their situations within institutions, and engage in theory and practice to regain agency from institutional control mechanisms.

At this point in time teachers and practitioners in education are working in an environment of market forces. These economic drives permeate the regulatory pressures of Ofsted and the performance management of teachers. It is a climate in which the subject is levered through processes that are intended to shape personal discourses of creative freedom, autonomy and productivity, channelling these drives towards institutional requirements.

I will refer to doctoral research data collected between 2009-2012 from teachers, gallery educators and students. I will also draw upon subsequent observations as a teacher in sixth-form education and a lecturer in Education Studies.

En los últimos cursos impartidos por Foucault, la noción de la parrhesía se presenta como un elemento clave en su estudio
sobre los discursos de verdad. Opuesta a esta noción, es frecuente encontrar la retórica como técnica de persuasión desvinculada de la
verdad. En este artículo analizamos algunas de las formas en que Foucault vincula y opone parrhesía y retórica, partiendo de la tesis
de que la parrhesía sería aquel tipo de práctica de la verdad que vendría a marcar la distancia entre el discurso de verdad y el discurso
falaz. La problemática que se genera en torno a ese límite deriva de la dificultad por establecer un criterio de distinción entre dos modos
de ser del discurso, con sus propias formas de veridicción: el parresiástico (en sus formas políticas y filosóficas) y el retórico.
Palabras clave: Foucault, verdad, parrhesía, retórica, filosofía, democracia.In the last courses taught by Foucault, the notion of parrhesia is presented as a key element in his study of truth discourses.
Opposed to this notion, it is common to find rhetoric as a technique of persuasion unlinked from the truth. In this article we analyze
some of the ways in which Foucault links and opposes parrhesia and rhetoric, based on the thesis that parrhesia would be the kind of
practice of truth that would mark the distance between truth discourse and fallacious discourse. The problematic generated around that
limit derives from the difficulty to establish a criterion of distinction between two modes of being of the discourse, with its own forms
of veridiction: parresiastic (in its political and philosophical forms) and rhetoric.
Keywords: Foucault, truth, parrhesia, rhetoric, philosophy, democracy

I've researched and written a lot about Foucault through the years. I've reworked it and put together here, but there is also a lot's of new stuff. Some questions that might find an answer within the covers (all in Croatian though):

What is the relation between power and punishment? How did the discourse of war and why change in Foucault, and why is this important? How does a compound picture of totalitarianism offered by Arendt and Foucault help one to understand the phenomenon and why it may be still important today? What the hell is genealogy after all? Is Socrates ironist or parrhesiast? Is it possible to be both? Can knowledge save us on Nietzsche's planet? What does it mean that Agamben has an eschatology and Foucault hasn’t? Why does Bulgakov's Pilate ask Jeshua, the vagrant, about the truth? On a bit more actual and perhaps more morbid note, how does Larry Nassar's case look through Foucauldian lenses, few centuries away from controversial innocent bucolic pleasures from the Will to Know? What would Foucault say on political correctness? Why are Camille Paglia and Jordan Peterson wrong on Foucault, designated by the first as Cagliostro of modern times? Where does Foucault stand between the two poles, one being Rousseau’s total political transparency and the other Sade’s dark castle of murders? What are the similarities and what are the differences between Conrad's and Foucault's ethics when “principles won’t do“? What is the relation between madness and parrhesia after all?

Truth is produced through examinations and disciplines but also through struggles and techniques of the self. Truth as an ordeal, la vérité comme l’épreuve: Foucault’s project is not a sociology of power but history of alethurgy, the production of truth. And the famous pathos of truth? Love, beyond Valentine cards, can transform the subject. It’s the greatest ordeal of all. Promotion to be held in June on the Faculty of Political Sciences in Zagreb and announced on its web site. Hope there are not too many typos etc. in the book. We prepared it in a hurry.

De onthullingen van Snowden tonen de wijze waarop de inlichtingen diensten van de Verenigde Staten alle communicatiekanalen aftappen. De rechtvaardiging voor deze technologische capaciteiten, komt in zekere zin voort uit de angst voor toekomstige terroristische aanslagen. Om terrorisme te bestrijden, moet er meer geïnvesteerd worden in deze technologieën. De afgelopen jaren, heeft het Amerikaanse senaat wetten ingevoerd die de werkzaamheden van de inlichtingendiensten uitbreiden. De boodschap van Snowden is dat de overheid hierdoor wetten overtreed, rechten schend en aan democratische verantwoording ontkomt.
Mijn onderzoek richt zich op het dilemma dat hieruit is ontstaan. Snowden heeft de wet overtreden door geheime informatie openbaar te maken. De documenten die hij heeft overgedragen aan journalisten bevatten informatie die schadelijk kunnen zijn voor de veiligheid van de Verenigde Staten. Het lekken van informatie bevat ook een groter gevaar. Het kan in de handen van de vijand komen waardoor ze geheime operaties kunnen ondermijnen. In het ergste geval komen individuen in gevaar omdat er informatie naar buiten is gekomen die hun identiteit ontmaskerd. In dit onderzoek probeer ik deze problemen uit te werken en te zoeken naar mogelijkheden voor het democratische legitimeren van klokkenluiden.

Defacing Power investigates how nation-states create self-images in part through aesthetics and how these images can be manipulated to challenge those states' power. Although states have long employed media, such as radio, television, and film, for their own image-making purposes, counterpower agents have also seized upon new telecommunications technologies. Most recently, the Internet has emerged as contested territory where states and other actors wage a battle of words and images.

Moving beyond theory, Brent Steele illustrates his provocative argument about the vulnerability of power with examples from recent history: the My Lai Massacre and the Tet Offensive, September 11 and the al-Qaeda communiqués, the atrocities at Fallujah and Abu Ghraib, and the U.S. response to the Asian tsunami of December 2004. He demonstrates how a nation-state—even one as powerful as the United States—comes to feel threatened not only by other nation-states or terrorist organizations but also by unexpected events that challenge its self-constructed image of security. At the same time, Steele shows that as each generation uses available media to create and re-create a national identity, technological innovations allow for the shifting, upheaval, and expansion of the cultural structure of a nation.

ÖZ
İslam edebiyatlarında adab literatürü başlığı altında yazılmış olan eserler bir hükümdarın nasıl olması gerektiğini konu alırlar. Bu eserlerde hikâyeler, anekdotlar ve nasihatler yoluyla ideal hükümdarın portresi
çizilir. İktidar eleştirisinin burada önemli bir işlevi vardır. İktidar
eleştirisi hem öznenin hakikatle kurduğu ilişkiyi göstermesi bakımından hem de iktidarı dizginleme açısından adab literatürünün temel hareket noktalarından biridir. Bu çalışmada Michel Foucault’nun parrhesia/doğruyu söylemek kavramı üzerinden XV. yüzyıl Osmanlı edebiyatının çeviri eserleri arasında yer alan Kelile ve Dimne ile Gülistân örneklerinde iktidar eleştirisinin nitelikleri ve olanakları tartışılacaktır. Anahtar Sözcükler: Parrhesia, Adab, Kelile ve Dimne, Gülistân, İktidar
Parrhesia in XV. Ottoman Literature: Cautious Viziers or Brave Dervishes
ABSTRACT
Islamic literary works written in the scope of the adab literature discuss how a sovereign should be. In these works, portraits of the ideal sovereign are drawn via stories, anecdotes and advice. Criticism of rulership has an important function here, as it is the starting point of adab literature. This starting point indicates both the relationship between the subject and truth, and the restraint put upon rulership. In this study, the characteristics and possibilities of the criticism of rulership found in the XV. century Ottoman translations of Kalila wa Demna and Golestân are discussed via Michel Foucault’s notion of parrhesia/freedom of speech.
Keywords: Parrhesia, Adab, Kalila wa Demna, Golestân, Rulership

This paper has as its starting point calls for critical management studies (CMS) to engage more actively with the public. CMS has been relatively successful in gaining an institutional foothold within university business schools, but is criticised from within for a lack of influence outside the institution. We argue that while closer relationships with the public is assumed to be the next phase in the institutional development of CMS, strengthening its position within university business schools is likely only to exacerbate the present lack of public engagement, since this becomes an end in itself. Bigger and better conferences and a proliferation of journals dedicated to the publishing of CMS research takes us further from the everyday world of workplace politics. As part of creating a space in which we can think differently about CMS and the university, we draw on Foucault’s analysis of parrhesia, or fearless speech, which emphasises critique as a personal quality.

This paper seeks to reconceptualise the basis for trusting teachers in current educational discourses. It proposes moving away from trust based on 'absolute accuracy' to trust as encapsulated in the practice of parrhesia. On the surface, parrhesia appears to be the opposite of Sartre's concept of 'bad faith'. Paradoxically, however, our attempts to be sincere in our accounts are inevitably tainted by this. This paradox is especially evident in autobiographical writing, an activity that is both parrhesiastic in nature and susceptible to bad faith. This does not mean that we should abandon trust in these ways of accounting for oneself, however. Rather, parrhesiastic practices in autobiographical writing can offer a different understanding of how we account for ourselves and our practices, one that does not pertain to a narrow definition of truth as accuracy, but instead leads to a form of self-criticism where one situates oneself in relation to the 'truth' of their accounts in new ways. Towards the end of the paper, I explore three 'parrhesiastic techniques' and their relationship to accounting for oneself as a teacher, to reimagine these techniques from technicist to existential ways of relating to our practices.

Parrhêsia is a complex notion, with a long history in ancient Greek thought. In Epicur’s writings, parrhêsia is only found once, but its occurrences are much more frequent in the texts of one of his disciples, Philodemus, Peri Parrhêsias, a collection of fragments important both for capturing the meanings of the notion and for the history of Epicureanism. It offers, as far as it can be deciphered from the remaining fragments, a picture of the pedagogical practices and the way of life of the Epicurean community.

Este artigo situa a castração como ponto fundamental de divergência entre Foucault e a psicanálise. Em primeiro lugar, trata-se de abordar a crítica de Foucault à psicanálise para apreender a especificidade desta última. Em seguida, busca-se demonstrar como a castração conduz a psicanálise e Foucault para duas posturas fundamentalmente diferentes do verdadeiro-dizer. A parresia permite indicar para o psicanalista, pelo seu avesso, as coordenadas de uma possível postura para sustentar a causa analítica. A estilística da existência esclarece, pelo seu avesso, o estilo analítico.

Masumiyeti elinden alındı “İnsan”ın. Düşünce dünyası yalanla, komplo teorileri ile istila edilerek gerçekle ilişki kurması engelleniyor. Bu ayan beyan ortadayken, İnsan, yaşamı yeniden kurabilmek için hakikatin gözünün içine bakabilme cesaretini gösteremiyor. Neden? Neden ama, neden?

İnsan’ın düşüncesiyle karşılıklı oturup söyleşmesine olanak tanımıyor içinde bulunduğumuz çağın işleyişi. Hız hakim olmuş yaşama, zamanı yakalamanın peşinde insan, kaygılı, yüreği ağzında yaşamaya zincirlenmiş. Yalnız kalmaktan, yalnız bırakılmaktan korkuyor. Sürüyü bu denli içselliştirmesi de bundan. Yalnızlığı, içe dönmeyi acılarını kanatmaktan ibaret bellemiş. Kalabalıklara karışma, kendini unutma çabası bundan. Sürü gibi düşünür, sürü gibi eylerse kabul görüleceğini bildiğinden, ayrıksılığı göze alıp, eleştirel aklı devreye sokamıyor. Zaten bu yapabilmenin imkânlarından da yoksun. Yalanla, doğruyu ayırt edemiyor. İnsanlar yalan söylesin istiyor kendisine. Kandırılmak hoşuna gidiyor. Yalanı, komployu kolayca zihnine alıp düşünüşüne dahil ederken rahatsızlık hissetmiyor. Hatta eyleme geçiyor, kötüyü çoğaltmayı zekâ pırıltısı olarak gördüğü an’lara da şahitlik etmiyor değilim. Tüylerim ürperiyor.  Peki ama, bu neden böyle? Neden ama, neden?

Roman et parodie d’historiographies mensongères, le Gargantua peut aussi être lu comme un hommage à une historiographie humaniste. En témoigne l’importance donnée par Rabelais à la notion de franchise ou parrhêsia. Celle-ci relève d’une utilisation savante de la rhétorique, propre aux historiens humanistes. Le recours aux outils de la narration historique permet ainsi de représenter une franchise en situation et d’interroger les conditions politiques d’énonciation de la vérité.

This volume collects a series of lectures given by the renowned French thinker Michel Foucault late in his career. The book is composed of two parts: a talk, Parrēsia, delivered at the University of Grenoble in 1982, and a series of lectures entitled “Discourse and Truth,” given at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983, which appears here for the first time in its full and correct form. Together, they provide an unprecedented account of Foucault’s reading of the Greek concept of parrēsia, often translated as “truth-telling” or “frank speech.” The lectures trace the transformation of this concept across Greek, Roman, and early Christian thought, from its origins in pre-Socratic Greece to its role as a central element of the relationship between teacher and student. In mapping the concept’s history, Foucault’s concern is not to advocate for free speech; rather, his aim is to explore the moral and political position one must occupy in order to take the risk to speak truthfully.

These lectures—carefully edited and including notes and introductory material to fully illuminate Foucault’s insights—are a major addition to Foucault’s English language corpus.

Science denial in the post-truth era is driven by both the rejection of empirical science and the fraudulent use of scientific language. Education policy based on junk science produced by philanthrocapitalists depoliticizes political questions by relocating complex legislative and policy issues from the realm of political and philosophical discourse to that of scientific rationality using metrics and methods that are themselves fatally flawed. Dominant configurations of institutional power also attack scholarship that both debunks spurious causal claims and establishes causal links to existential crises, which in both cases inconveniences the neoliberal capitalist project. We discuss the methodological implications of education research as the counter-conduct of policy advocacy against power claims based on both the rejection of empirical science and the production of junk science. We both discuss and model Foucault’s tactic of genealogy and his analysis of parrhēsia, or truth telling, through creating an imperfect, preliminary genealogy of the “new” post-truth era, which contextualizes contemporary technologies of alternative facts in the history of public relations and propaganda that extend to the early 20thcentury. The methodological and political tactic of genealogy could be a move toward a new ethics of adversarial public scholarship that seeks to reconfigure what counts as scholarship in academia, itself a rationalizing disciplinary institution. Considering the moment, the study of power, the academy’s roles both in subverting and perpetuating it, and the necessity of epistemological and methodological counter-conduct have perhaps never been more important.

The Foucauldian conception of power as ‘productive’ has left us so far with a residual conception of freedom. The article examines a number of historical cases in which ‘relationships of freedom’ have potentially come into existence within Western culture, from ‘revolution’ and ‘political truth-telling’ to ‘cynicism’ and ‘civility’. But the argument is not just about demonstrating that there have in fact been many historical inversions of ‘the conduct of conduct’. It is about theorizing how freedom can be ‘productive’ or give rise to cultural norms if any such inversion can only come into being as an event in itself.

The article goes back to Foucault’s last course at the Collège de France (Le courage de la verité). Two issues are its focus: (1) Socratic conception of philosophy as a way of life; (2) Cynic conception of the true life. Foucault used Cynics’ thought as an example of an alternative approach to the history of subjectivity, which in turn could help us in our searching for modern ways of constituting the ethical subject.

O dizer-tudo ou franco-falar (parrhesia) chama-nos a atenção para a necessidade de definir as fronteiras da retórica. Na concepção clássica, parrhesia e a retórica colocavam-se como actividades discursivas incompatíveis entre si. No entanto, algumas actividades comunicacionais marcadamente modernas vieram reconfigurar este espaço de mútua anulação. Perante as transformações que a retórica sofreu com a intensificação da mediatização urge equacionar o grau de influência entre retórica e parrhesia. No que se segue, descreve-seum espaço hodierno de recíproca afectação entre retórica e parrhesia. Por um lado, a parrhesia aparenta manifestar-se retoricamente no discurso publicitário através da sua inclusão enquanto tropo retórico, sendo inclusivamente uma figura indispensável da elocução retórica do ponto de vista do pathos. Por outro lado, a parrhesia parece manifestar-se na própria prática profissional e deontológica do jornalismo como um tipo de discurso intrínseco à própria legitimidade do jornalista. Deste modo, sublinha-se a possibilidade de uma retórica de pendor parrhésico.

The free-speech or to speak boldly (parrhesia) calls our attention to the need to define the boundaries of rhetoric. In the classical conception, parrhesia and rhetoric were placed as discursive activities incompatible with each other. However, some distinctly modern communication activities have changed this space of mutual impossibility. Given the changes that rhetoric has suffered with mediatization, it is urgent to ponder the degree of influence between rhetoric and parrhesia. This paper describes today's reciprocal influence between rhetorical and parrhesia. On the one hand, parrhesia

The paper aims to understand and interpret the act of hunger strike as political action. Using Michel Foucault’s work on biopower and the Ancient Greek concept “parrhesia,” the paper reconstructs hunger strike as an act of truth-telling that is historically specific to modern bio-political societies.

Presented at Northeastern Political Science Association Conference (Philadelphia, PA - November 13, 2015)

The idea of truth-telling or fearless speech is one of the preferred topics in Michel Foucault’s later works and his final lectures at the Collège de France. The main purpose of the article is to present the notion of parrhesia in three primary disciplines, specifically the rhetoric, the philosophy, and the politics. In each of them fearless speech plays different role, but is related to the ethos of the person who speaks to other people. As a rhetorical figure of speech, as a philosophical lifestyle, or a political virtue, it always exceeds conventional techniques of verediction.

This dissertation is an examination of military veterans who have come home to become social justice activists. I proceed by staging encounters between their lives, stories, activism, experiences in war, with a number of theoretical concepts. These concepts include: geocorporeal actors, parrhēsia, organic intellectual, masculinity, hypermasculinity, state violence, citizenship, war imaginaries, and healing. These encounters between these veterans and concepts tell us many interesting things about war, militarism, US democracy, and US society. At times these encounters help to unravel the messiness of understanding some of these concepts; at other times it makes that which seems clear-cut more complicated. Finally, this dissertation shows the wars at home that these veterans are currently fighting. They are fighting wars that are often tied to the wars they left while in the military, and they are fighting to make sense of it all, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically.

As Chair for the International Center for Information Ethics, I am responsible for promoting and maintaining the founding vision of the academic community of ICIE, for managing its global-wide membership, its advisory board, and for attending to and updating global chapters, credentials, contacts, and communications.

Contemporary society is global and digital. States and corporations extend their political and economic power into digitality by means of the formulation and articulation of global and national security, surveillance, and censorship policies and practices concerned with information and communications technologies (ICTs) infrastructure, networks, and content.

States and corporations control most mechanisms of production and circulation of information, establishing a political economy of truth that is vital for economic production and political power. States and corporations deploy legislations, disciplinary and panoptical policies and practices, and apparatuses of security concerned with information and communications. These deployments synergize into a biopolitics of information and communications – i.e., a normalization of civil societies’ political and economic agency, inasmuch citizens and consumers, which makes difficult to contest state and corporate régimes of truth.

The speedy development and economical accessibility of novel ICTs remarkably strengthen civil societies’ demands for more transparent and accountable information about state and corporate actions, and enhance the former’s sousveillance of the latter. Whereas demands for transparency and accountability are not new to civil society, when sousveillant, they can be understood either as a contemporary inversion of disciplinary panopticism or, even, as the deployment of disciplinary technologies of power by civil society.

Collective hacktivism and whistle-blowing are sometimes crowdsourced research and data mining endeavors that attempt to produce and circulate information. These efforts can be understood as sousveillant and parrhesiastic contestations of state and corporate régimes of truth. Anonymized/encrypted communications and social media allow for collaborative networks that enable an ever more recurrent periodicity of parrhesiastic discourses relevant to national and global politics.

Contemporary biopolitics of information and communication require that civil societies be not only responsibility for their political agency, but also for the resemantization of their own politics of truth and, by extension, of their newborn digital agency.

Michel Foucault’s work concerned ‘subjectivation’. Contemporary critics argue that his work on ‘surveillance societies’ is based on the industrial organisation paradigm. In the information era, his surveillance model is said to be defunct. One way of assessing the value of Foucault’s work for present-day concerns is to examine how ‘subjectivation’ relates to technology. His own research on neoliberalism provides a starting-point. We do need to look further though, for example at Bruno Latour’s work, which claims that technologies are to people what ‘plug-ins’ are to the internet. The question is how technology-mediated subjectivation turns out in practice. This study examines the case of healthcare innovation from the point of view of ‘shaping’ the patient. The Dutch Electronic Health Record and the Personal Healthcare Budget are political designs to foster innovation. Both designs were introduced in the mid-1990s and were nearly abolished in 2011. What happened over the course of one and a half decades? The study concludes by examining the democratisation of healthcare innovation in ‘Living Labs’: local or regional platforms in which people are in some way involved in innovation processes. Again, the crucial question is: what roles are attributed to the patient?