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The difference between the predictability of the situation that authorizes performative speech acts contrasts markedly with that of parresia. The key for the speech act of parresia is that it cannot be uttered without risk to the speaker. Parresiasts call their own existence into question through the act of speaking freely. Foucault cites several examples during the course of his lectures, beginning with an interpretation of Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?” as a way into an analysis of the ancient Greek and Roman philosophical and literary sources, including such theoretical texts as Plato’s Laws and Galen’s On the Passions and Errors of the Soul and literary texts such as Euripides’ Ion and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex.

At stake in the discourse of parresia are the various challenges by the weak made against the injustices of the strong. These discourses challenge injustices or perceived injustices committed by the strong on behalf of those who are not powerful enough to contest the ruler by force. The challenges are not limited to words, however. Foucault cites the practices of hunger strikes in India and certain forms of ritual suicide in Japan as examples of actions functioning as part of this discourse (ECFGSO, 133). Although he does not mention them, presumably one could expand this list to include civil disobedience as practiced by members of various civil rights movements in the United States, South Africa, and India in the latter half of the twentieth century.

As a result of the confrontation between the just but powerless subject and the unjust but powerful ruler, some accommodation must be made so that the ruler’s discourse can be both just and powerful. The reason Euripides’ play Ion serves as a prototype for parresiastic discourse, despite (as Foucault notes) failing to employ the term parresia, is because it enacts this accommodation in paradigmatic fashion. It is revealed at the end of the play that Ion is the true son of Apollo, thus making it possible for him to legitimately ascend the Athenian throne and avoid the illegitimacy of his apparent father, the tyrant Xuthus. Although the term parresia itself comes into widespread use only later, during the Hellenistic period, important precursors to this discourse of parresia can be found in Euripides and Plato.

Ion is important for another reason, for the play enacts the basic relationship between democracy and parresia. Parresia and democracy codetermine one another. Ion is a story of founding that tells the story of one of the founders of the four tribes of Athens. Thus his act of frank speech will provide the origin of Athens as a democracy. Furthermore, without parresia, democracy becomes impossible. “Ion needs parresia so that he can return to Athens and found democracy. Consequently, parresia, in the person of Ion, will be the very foundation of democracy.... In order for there to be democracy, there must be parresia. But conversely, as you know ...

parresia is one of the characteristic features of democracy” (ECF-GSO, 155). Parresia is not the formal, constitutional dimension of democracy, however. Rather, it designates the experience of democratic dissent, in which those who can speak exercise

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the power to do so (Foucault, citing Claude Lefort, distinguishes between the formal dimension as that of the political and the latter, which includes parresia, as politics).

Although Foucault was able to do little more than outline the project that would link the ancient conception of parresia to the modern conception of critique, it is clear that this was his intent. Indeed, he indicates at the outset of The Government of Self and Others that his investigation of parresia, understood as “true discourse in the political realm,” would be an essential aspect of his investigations of governmentality around the igure of the prince (ECF-GSO, 6). Finally, this genealogy of true political discourse links up with the critical attitude, the conditions under which one begins to question the various political games of truth under the particular experiences of power relations that constitute individuals as the subjects that they are in relation to others. It is at this point that Foucault commences his reading of Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?” understood simultaneously as a text that examines this question of the conditions under which an enlightened public becomes possible and harkens back to the ancient question of parresia.

Corey McCall

See Also

Care

Ethics

Governmentality

Truth

Plato

Suggested Reading

Bernauer, James. 2004. “Michel Foucault’s Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life,” in Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience, ed.

James Bernauer and Jeremy Carette. New York: Ashgate, pp. 77–97.

Flynn, Thomas. 1988. “Michel Foucault as Parrhesiast: His Last Course at the Collège de France,” in The Final Foucault, ed. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen. Cambridge, MA:

The MIT Press, pp. 102–117.

McGushin, Edward. 2007. Foucault’s Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life. Evanston,

IL: Northwestern University Press.

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of an intention that endows the object intended with a sense. Intentionality can be explained in the way (based on Husserl’s Logical Investigations [1901]) I think about

(think in the direction of) there being a person over there in the garden. I look out the window and see the person; the intuition of the person veriies my intention; and now I can say with certainty that what I see over there has the meaning of a person. But we can also explain intentionality (based on Ideas I) using sense data, which

Husserl calls “hyletic data.” Among phenomenologists, this explanation is sometimes disputed since it presents the subject as entirely active and creative (while the very concept of hyletic data implies that the subject includes a fundamental level of passivity). In any case, here is how the explanation works: I see an indeterminate shapecolor over there. I think it is a person (I think about it being a person). I look more carefully and thereby endow the indeterminate shape-color with the meaning of person; it is a person. In the “hyletic data” explanation of intentionality, the subject is a constituting subject. Given these explanations, intentionality implies that livedexperience is a directedness toward an end. In other words, intentionality implies that all lived-experience is not only intuitionistic but also teleological.

Third, Husserlian phenomenology transforms Cartesianism. Phenomenology being a philosophy of the cogito, a subjectivism, means that the subject is the source of meaning, that it is a constituting subjectivity. Husserl, however, recognizes that, since Descartes conceives the thinking thing as a substance, he conceives it on the model of something found in the world; it is, as Husserl says, “a little tag-end [or a little piece] of the world” (Husserl 1977, 24). Insofar as the cogito then is relative to the world, it cannot be absolute. What Descartes calls the cogito is only the psychological, empirical, or anthropological subject; it is the “me” who exists in the world. Therefore, a transcendental conversion of Cartesianism is required. The conversion happens by reducing the cogito itself to an appearance. Insofar as the cogito (the psychological, empirical, or anthropological subject) appears as an object of an intuition, it receives its sense from some other agency. For phenomenology, what constitutes the sense of the cogito is another subjectivity, called “transcendental subjectivity.” With the conversion of Cartesianism, Husserl is not positing a separate and second subjectivity (a kind of God) behind the psychological, empirical, or anthropological subject. Although this is paradoxical, Husserl is claiming that, if the psychological subject is me, the sense of the psychological subject is constituted by the transcendental subject; but the transcendental subject is still me. In reference to this relation, Husserl speaks of a “parallelism” and a kind of “doubling” of the psychological with the transcendental (Husserl 1997, 244).

Fourth, we must notice that we have now reached a kind of absolute constituting subjectivity. Yet, just as with the psychological subjectivity, if the absolute subjectivity has a sense, it, too, must be constituted. Absolute subjectivity comes to be endowed with sense, according to Husserl, by means of the fact that it is temporal. For Husserl, all lived-experience is temporalizing. As we saw in the earlier

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description, there is a temporal expanse to intentionality. It moves from an anticipating intention to a future veriication. The implications of the claim that all livedexperience is temporal are far-ranging. The claim results in Heidegger’s statement in Being and Time that time is the horizon within which being must be understood. Still within Heidegger, it results in existence (Dasein) being deined as transcendence

(a futural going beyond), a term that both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty will take up respectively in Being and Nothingness and in Phenomenology of Perception. Most importantly, however, the claim that all experience is temporal leads Husserl to reconceive phenomenology, in the last phase of his thinking, as historical. It results in Husserl’s last great work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. What

The Crisis shows is that transcendental subjectivity is conditioned by history but, still being oriented by the idea of intentionality, Husserl argues that history is teleological. The very purpose of The Crisis is to “strike through the crust of the externalized

‘historical facts’ of philosophical history, interrogating, exhibiting, and testing their inner meaning and hidden teleology” (Husserl 1970, 18, my emphasis).

If there is one phenomenological claim that Foucault always contests, it is the claim that history is teleological. As Foucault says in The Archaeology of Knowledge,

“The essential task is to free the history of thought from its subjection to transcendence.... My aim is to analyze this history in the discontinuity that no teleology would reduce in advance.... [My] aim is to free history from the grip of phenomenology” (EAK, 203). Undoubtedly, on the basis of his early study of Hegel (Eribon 1991, 17–18), Foucault recognized that teleological thinking (and therefore phenomenology) is a form of circular thinking. We have seen the circular structure in the concept of intentionality: one intends a meaning that one possesses in advance while not having the intuition that veriies it. Then one intuits the object. The veriication is achieved when the intuition is synthesized with or becomes the same as the intention. Teleological thinking therefore turns history into a continuous progression from an originating intention to a inal purpose. In other words, teleological thinking eliminates the event character of history. However, if history is conceived without events, then history is no longer, as Foucault would say,“actual” or “effective” (EEW2, 379–382). In order to free the history of thought from teleology in order to liberate its actual existence, Foucault eliminates not events but terminal truths. In History of Madness, for example, it is not the case, according to Foucault, that the truth of madness is hidden, latent, throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the classical age. It is not the case that we make progress across the classical age toward the truth of madness, a truth fully disclosed in the nineteenth century (EHM, 425). Instead, the knowledge of madness and the practices in regard to the mad are different in the Renaissance, different in the classical age, and then different once again in the nineteenth century. The suspension of the belief in terminal truths allows history to appear in dispersion (a dispersion best understood through the concept of multiplicity, as we shall see at the end) (EHM, 164–165). Foucault’s

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historical analyses do not lead us back to an original intention and they do not lead forward to an endpoint. They do not lay out a “dialectical enterprise” (EOT, 248) in which history starts from the same and ends with the same. Indeed, as Deleuze has pointed out, Foucault’s thinking aims at making us be other, at thinking otherwise (Deleuze 1988, 119). Thus, we see that what is really at stake in Foucault’s criticism of phenomenology’s conception of history is the fundamental role that intentionality plays, as if history were one large lived-experience: an intention always seeking its own veriication. For Foucault, what is at issue in phenomenology is “transcendental narcissism” (EAK, 203).

Foucault’s criticism of the phenomenological concept of lived-experience appears in the ninth chapter of The Order of Things, “Man and His Doubles” (EOT, 303–343). Somewhat like Husserl’s Crisis, Foucault’s The Order of Things locates phenomenology in the movement of the history of Western thought and science. Whereas Husserl sees phenomenology as the culmination of Western philosophy, Foucault locates it at the precise moment of the nineteenth century when Western thinking reaches “the limits of representation” (this phrase is the title of his seventh chapter). According to Foucault, classical thinking (in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in Descartes, for example) was a dualism; it constructed a “table” in which words, without any mediation, represented things. The classical mode of “representing” reaches its limit, however, when the classical modes of “speaking” (logic), “classifying” (natural history), and “exchanging” (wealth) are no longer direct relations of representation. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, these modes of classical thinking transform themselves into the positive sciences of philology, biology, and economy. With the development of these positive sciences, “labor, life, and language appear as so many ‘transcendentals’”; that is, they appear as conditions for the possibility of discourse and grammar, exchange and proit, and the living being (EOT, 244). But, labor, life, and language are conditions of possibility in a peculiar sense. The sciences are supposed to be the grounds for knowledge of all possible discourse, exchange, and life. However, within their domain, one inds the one who knows: man. Man then becomes the third term (the mediation) for what in the classical age had been a dualism: he is at once a conditioned item of knowledge and a condition of knowledge. The chapter is called “Man and His Doubles” because of this “at once,” because of this “doubling” of man as condition and conditioned. For Foucault, phenomenology appears on the scene when Western thinking (that is, modern thinking) becomes anthropological.

For Foucault, the igure of man that appears at the beginning of the nineteenth century is a igure of initude. In one sense, man is governed by labor, life, and language; his position in these sciences tells him that he is inite like any other object of nature. Yet, man’s initude has another sense. The positive content of these sciences will not arise unless man has a inite body through which he learns of spatiality, unless he suffers desire through which he learns the value of all things, and unless he communicates in a language through which he learns all other discourses (EOT,

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314). In this second sense, man’s initude is not something that comes on him from the exterior (because he has a nature or a history); through the body, desire, and language, human initude is fundamental (EOT, 315). The very opening to knowledge through which he learns that he is not ininite is inite. The dual sense of initude is grounded in death (and here Foucault seems to base his understanding of phenomenology more on Heidegger than on Husserl; the title of one of the sections of Chapter 9 is “The Analytic of Finitude,” which echoes the “Dasein analytic” of Being and Time) (EOT, 315). Man’s initude is not only the fact that one is going to die like any other animal but also the fact that man is aware that he is going to die, an awareness that separates humans from “the happy opening of animal life” (EOT, 314). From one end of the experience of initude to the other, death answers itself. On the basis of the description of the dialectical sameness of the analytic of initude (“the interminable play of a doubled reference: if man’s knowledge is inite it is because he is gripped, without the possibility of liberation, within the positive contents of language, labor, and life; and inversely, if life, labor, and language may be posited in their positivity, it is because knowledge has inite forms” [EOT, 316]), Foucault then outlines a series of doubles: “the empirico-transcendental doublet,” “the ‘cogito’ and the unthought,” and “the retreat and return of the origin.” As we know already from our description of the phenomenological conversion of Cartesianism and from the transformation of the positive sciences of philology, economy, and biology, the empirical subject and the transcendental subject double one another. “The ‘cogito’ and the unthought” make a double because the cogito inds itself conditioned by life, labor, and language, which always darkens its transparency; thus the darkness of the cogito makes sure that there will always be more to think, an “unthought” that must be brought into light. “The return and retreat of the origin” is a double because, as the cogito inds itself subject to darkness, its origin always seems to lie in the past. Every attempt to recover the origin seems, however, only to uncover more darkness, so that the origin continues to retreat. But then the very project of thinking seems to be the indeinite recovery of and return to that origin – in the future. In each double, we start from the subject and return to the subject; we start from the cogito and we return to the cogito; we start from the origin and we return to the origin. What Foucault describes each time is a dialectic of the same.

We must not pause over the “empirico-transcendental doublet” since it is here that Foucault discusses “lived-experience” (“vécu,” which the English translation calls “actual experience”) (EOT, 321). Foucault approaches the discussion of livedexperience by stressing that, because the conditions of knowledge must be revealed on the basis of the empirical contents given within knowledge, two kinds of analyses come into being. On the one hand, there must be an analysis that provides the nature of human knowledge (this would analyze the sensory modes of acquiring knowledge); on the other, there must be a history of human knowledge (this would analyze the economic and social conditions of knowledge) (EOT, 319). In other words, there

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would be a truth of basic perception in the body and a truth of the movement of history. Yet, as Foucault argues, this true discourse is ambiguous. It can be a true discourse that refers to the empirical side (whether this be nature or history), or it can refer to a truth that is anticipated by nature and history; it can refer to positivist truth or to an eschatological truth (EOT, 320). It is this ambiguity between positivity and eschatology (reduction and promise) that Foucault sees in the phenomenological concept of lived-experience. Foucault sees this ambiguity in the phenomenological concept of lived experience because, as we described earlier, lived-experience in Husserl seems to consist in two inseparable poles. On the one hand, lived-experience is an intuitionism. Indeed, because Husserl wants phenomenology to accept nothing that is not given in an intuition, he calls phenomenology a “true positivism” (Husserl 1965, 145). On the other hand, lived-experience is teleological, and we have seen how this teleology orients Husserl’s Crisis. The movement of intentionality (transcendence) is futural. The two inseparable poles make lived-experience be, as Foucault calls it, “a discourse with a mixed nature” (EOT, 321). Lived-experience is at once the reduction of all objects down to their positive givenness, and livedexperience is the promise of the fulillment of the intention.

According to Foucault, as this mixture, phenomenology (despite Husserl’s explicit claims) does not really contest positivism and eschatology; phenomenology conirms them by giving them roots. They have their source in the ambiguity of lived-experience. Because phenomenology only conirms positivism and eschatology, it really does not break free of terminal truths; it remains enclosed in the circle of origin and end. Therefore, Foucault’s criticisms of phenomenology amount to the attempt to escape from the enclosure. Such an escape is the very meaning of contestation. In “Man and His Doubles,” Foucault therefore asks this question: “The true contestation of positivism and eschatology does not lie, therefore, in a return to lived-experience.... If such a contestation could be made, it would be from the starting-point of a question which may well seem aberrant ...: does man truly exist” (EOT, 322, translation modiied)? This question created a lot of controversy in Foucault’s lifetime since it seemed to suggest that he wanted the actual species of man, humanity, to be destroyed. The question, however, suggests something else. It suggests a kind of thinking or experiencing. With this “aberrant question,” Foucault is asking us to think what the world would look like if we did not think in terms of ourselves being at once the condition of knowledge and the conditioned of knowledge. Then we could think about things other than all the things we condition and all the things that are conditioned as we are. What happens if instead we focus on the fact that the doubles never make an identity, that between them there is “a minuscule but invincible hiatus” (EOT, 340)? If we place ourselves at this distance, then we no longer think about the same as ourselves but about something other than ourselves. The experience toward which Foucault is pointing us would not be a subjective experience but an experience that “wrenches the subject from itself”; it would not