Daring the Truth: Foucault, Parrhesia and the Genealogy of Critique

Abstract

This paper draws attention to Foucault’s genealogy of critique. In a series of inquiries, Foucault traced the origins and trajectories of critical practices from the ancient tradition of parrhesia to the enlightenment and the (neo)liberal critique of the state. The paper will elucidate the insights of this history and argue that Foucault’s turn to the genealogy of critique also changed the valence of his theoretical assumptions. Foucault developed a more affirmative practice of genealogy that not only discredits truth claims by tracing them back to their inglorious origins. Rather, he presents a politics of truth as a complex interaction of (governmental) power-knowledge and critique that questions the power effects of truth and rationality. This genealogy of critique contributes to current problematizations of critique by thinkers like Boltanski, Latour and Rancière in highlighting the role of epistemological and technical critique of social rationalization and political reason.

The problem of understanding modern humanitarianism and its sociological value

“…Andreas Folkers reminds us that in his later work Foucault had begun a genealogy of critique; and here he claims that Foucault's public statements in support of the humanitarian cause of the Vietnamese boat people were, amongst other things, charged by a concern to distance himself from a culture of academic critique that sought to remove itself from real life political concerns. Folkers argues that towards the end of his life Foucault was searching for new ways to marry critique with critical practice, so that it changed “its valence from a purely deconstructive to a more positive endeavour” (Folkers , p.22).…”

From Universalizing Transparency to the Interplay of Transparency Matrices: Critical insights from the emerging social credit system in China

“…125–130) and ethics in Greek antiquity (Foucault, 1986; O’Leary, 2002), and extend the three prototypical dispositives to include a fourth, the dispositive of care. 5 This makes it possible to highlight important modalities and exemplary practices of transparency that would otherwise not be considered in detail, including the confession and parrhesia (Folkers, 2016). Our dispositional analysis enables us to go well beyond Foucault’s influential work on the panopticon and provide a more nuanced and multifaceted picture.…”

“…Fourth, the dispositional arrangement of care has as its objective the care for self and others and implies forms of managing and organizing people (‘multiplicities’) that can help establish beneficial relations within a moral community . The transparency modality here is the disclosure or exposure of a subjective truth, anchored in paradigmatic practices of ‘truth-telling’, such as the confession and parrhesia (Folkers, 2016). Especially in the digital context many confessional forms of truth-telling are associated with the promise of positive rewards or even with the pleasure of self-presentation.…”

The front line of free speech: Beyond parrhêsia in Finland's migrant debate

“…While critical scholars celebrate parrhêsia as Foucault's effort to “reintroduce politics in relation to ethics” (Fassin , 433; see also Folkers ), we might ask what another liberal imaginary of truth telling would look like if it did not begin from the assumption of possessive individualism. One could begin from where parrhêsia was first coined: ancient Athens.…”