Foucault,Parrhesia and the politics of presence: on not speaking truth to power

Abstract

This paper considers the take-up by geographers and others of Foucault’s late work on parrhesia, the ancient Greek concept of frank or fearless speech. While there has been productive work on its genealogy and geographies, parrhesia has been commonly translated as ‘speaking truth to power’ and discussion has centred around resistance. This paper argues that ‘speaking truth to power’ selects and simplifies the range of practices considered in Foucault’s history of truth and subjectivity. But Foucault’s genealogy of parrhesia suffers from the same problem that besets the idea of ‘speaking truth to power’. This is the privileging of the immediate presence of the speaking subject. The phonocentric ideal distorts our understanding of the geographies of parrhesia, particularly in the modern period, where political speech is never unmediated. This leaves the normative significance of parrhesia vulnerable to liberal academic self-congratulation as well as hampering the exploration of frank speech in our own day.

Introduction: Parrhesia and the final Foucault

boldness is the power to speak or do what we intend, before others, without fear or disorder; and the Greeks call the confidence of speaking by a peculiar name, παρρησία ¹

Geographers have begun to take note of Michel Foucault’s analysis of parrhesia – the ancient Greek conception of free or frank or fearless speech. ² Foucault’s geneaology of parrhesia, from the Hellenistic world through to medieval Christian Europe and more sketchily to the modern age, can be found in his later writings and seminars. This ‘final’ Foucault reveals Foucault’s work as nothing less than the ‘history of truth’. ³ Instead of the propositional logic of true and false, truth-telling is given back its full ethical significance:

What mark, which is to say as well, what wound or what opening, what constraint or what liberation is produced on the subject by acknowledgment of the fact that there is a truth to be told about him, a truth to be sought, or a truth told, a truth imposed? ⁴

This is vital work, not just for the understanding of Foucault, but for our understanding of ourselves and our present situation. Daniele Lorenzini suggests for instance that the formulation of parrhesia as critical attitude allows us to rescue the normative force of truth-telling in our fractured and only apparently ‘post-truth’ age. ⁵

In this paper I nevertheless raise some notes of caution. One source of attraction to the late lectures comes from the fact that they appear to offer a counterweight to the overweening power presented by Foucault’s earlier presentation of discourse and discipline. This reading of Foucault’s interest in subjectivity as something separate from the apparatuses of power segues into the idea that parrhesia represents a kind of courageous resistance to authority: ‘resistances-through-truth’ that critique, subvert, hold to account the manifold abuses of power. ⁶ Truth is pitted decisively against power, and several accounts rehearse Foucault’s focus on the ‘cry of the powerless against someone who misuses his own strength’. ⁷ Federico Ferretti has discussed the work of radical geographers in Brazil, for instance, excavating a parrhesia ‘from below’ as a way of challenging ‘a politically and academically conservative status quo’. ⁸ Julian Brigstocke’s discussion of artistic parrhesia concentrates on situations where speakers express their personal relationship to truth at the risk of their own lives: this is presented as ‘an improvisatory, agonistic encounter between the parrhesiast and the authority that she is challenging’. ⁹ The historical geographies as well as the genealogy of parrhesia have also been elaborated by Stephen Legg, focussing on the importance of spaces such as the sovereign’s court, the agora, the temple and the street, and Legg has begun to apply this perspective in relation to both colonial and nationalist governmentalities in 20th-century British India. ¹⁰

Nevertheless, it is easy to reduce the complexities of parrhesia to the dyad of power and resistance. Legg accepts this, noting several ‘acts of ethical self-formation’ that could be viewed as forms of resistance, but quickly adding that ‘for those seeking evidence of the ever-presence of resistance to and within power, this material offers precious little to work with’ (see note 10). Legg argues that Foucault’s work does not endorse this framing of parrhesia as resistance, of ‘telling truth to power’. ¹¹ William Walters sounded the same warning several years earlier, writing of parrhesia that ‘Like any concept it becomes rather blunt if stretched to cover all manner of acts of resistance and counter-conduct’. ¹² But commentators on parrhesia still do this, albeit with the more familiar contemporary phrase ‘speaking truth to power’. ¹³ Wikipedia straightforwardly instructs us that ‘In classical Greece, “speaking truth to power” was known as parrhesia’. ¹⁴

We might dismiss the slogan as rhetorical excess in fractious times. ¹⁵ But scholars are not immune from this formulation and its implications. The eminent political theorist Nancy Luxon equates the personally redemptive risk that defines parrhesia as ‘speaking truth to power’. ¹⁶ Geography’s most expert voice, Stuart Elden, falls into the same phrasing, as a heading for his final chapter on parrhesia in Foucault’s Last Decade. ¹⁷ Less careful commentators can be forgiven for taking from Foucault’s discussion of parrhesia an endorsement of truth-telling as an exemplary act of resistance – and more or less nothing else. In recent scholarship, parrhesia-as-speaking-truth-to-power has thus appeared in discussions as wide-ranging as nursing, prison policy and public administration, academic misconduct and whistleblowing, contemporary politics, queer activism, even sports policy and accounting history. ¹⁸

The translation of parrhesia as ‘speaking truth to power’ should come with a range of caveats. Most obviously, it is hard to see in this framing the central question in Foucault’s late work of the subject’s relationship to truth. It is worth stressing that it is not enough for the speaking subject simply to believe that what they are saying so courageously is true. ¹⁹ Instead, truth for Foucault is something that is disclosed only in the act of enunciation, the speech act or ‘truth act’, so that the ‘very event of the enunciation may affect the enunciator’s being’. ²⁰ This has key implications for the truth-teller’s subjectivity: ‘Subjectivity is conceived as that which is constituted and transformed in its relationship to its own truth’. ²¹ A crucial element in the discussion of parrhesia is speaking truth not just to ‘power’ (in the sense of some authority) but to oneself. ²²

The first task of this paper is to emphasise the richness and complexity and even awkwardness of Foucault’s discussion of subjectivity and truth. Some of the difficulties in speaking of parrhesia today are rehearsed, and the formulation of ‘speaking truth to power’ resisted. Here, however, I want to do something more, tracing some of the problems of Foucault’s own theorisation of parrhesia. I argue that Foucault seems to endorse the normative claims of the speaking voice in its ‘immediacy, authenticity and certainty’, a stance that brings with it metaphysical problems as well as material consequences. ²³ If this critique of phonocentrism or the prioritisation of the speaking voice is right, the nature of frank and courageous speech in our own day is perhaps fatally compromised from the start.

Speaking Foucault to wikipedia

I accept that the task announced in the subheading is unambitious, but we need to avoid in any serious analysis of parrhesia the pitting of truth against power. Foucault’s earliest discussions of power/knowledge and discourse clearly do not align with any access to essential, timeless truth, in whatever form this comes packaged. Foucault is a good Heideggerian, with the many and diverse ‘games of truth’ carefully historicised and differentiated; Heidegger’s goal was ‘to revise, no matter the cost, what has come down to us, i.e., to take the traditional theory of truth as correctness ultimately for granted no longer, but to experience it instead as a source of uneasiness’. ²⁴

This unease is absent in the idea of ‘speaking truth to power’. In 1996, the cultural theorist Jim McGuigan observed that ‘Unlike Said, [Foucault] did not believe in the possibility of “speaking truth to power”: “it’s not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power)”’. ²⁵ For Foucault, truth is always an artefact of a particular regime; there can only ever be a plurality of truths. ²⁶ Foucault cheerfully conceded that he had put far too much emphasis on the techniques of domination, and his later analysis of governmentality was developed precisely to trace the multiplicity of attempts over centuries and millennia to conduct the conduct of others, a genealogy that quickly came to encompass the government of the self, and thus the subject’s relation to herself through truth. ²⁷ In short, where there is power there must also be truth. ²⁸ We always have ‘games of truth’ and ‘regimes of truth’ in which the subject is produced. ²⁹ This is where the interest in parrhesia comes in, with the history of subjectivity as the third element of Foucault’s philosophical programme, the ethical complement to the earlier and still far better known analytics of knowledge and power. ³⁰

The implications of this research are profound. To put it in the simplest terms, truth-telling is not the act of telling the truth. We do not face only the task of proclaiming truth as opposed to falsity. Zachary Simpson has rightly observed that such a correspondence theory of truth would render parrhesia nothing more than a banality, something in fact very much like the cliché of ‘speaking truth to power’. ³¹ Paul Rabinow also states quite unequivocally that ‘This is not a question of speaking truth to power’. ³² Instead, the important questions are:

Who is able to tell the truth? About which topics is it important to tell the truth? What are the moral, the ethical, and the spiritual conditions that entitle someone to present himself as a truth-speaker? What are the consequences of telling the truth? What is the relation between the activity of truth-telling and the exercise of power? ³³

What then defines parrhesia for Foucault? There is an established consensus that an asymmetry of power is involved. ³⁴ Truth-tellers place themselves at potentially deadly risk: John Caputo, one more scholar who is unable to resist the lure of the banal, writes that ‘to speak truth to power requires courage and can cost us dearly’. ³⁵ One problem is that the requirement to hear and attend to the truth-teller means that the hearer or witness has as much of a claim to parrhesia as the speaker. In ancient Greece, Foucault asserted, ‘the one who speaks is not the one who holds the truth, and the truth that passes into his telling comes to him from elsewhere’. ³⁶ There must then be some kind of relationship or institutional setting in which the auditor and interlocutor are willing to hear the truth and to be open at least in principle to its consequences. The truth is produced and performed in concert rather than simply announced by the speaker; as a result, ‘It has its own geography, its own calendar (or better, its own chronology), and its “privileged and exclusive” messengers or operators’. ³⁷

The sovereign (for instance) must run the risk of the weaker person ‘turning to him and telling him what injustice he has committed’. ³⁸ I can think of no better illustration than Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I’s play extempore, with Falstaff acting Prince Hal and Hal taking the part of the king his father, a role reversal that allows Falstaff licence to defend himself, and Hal to hear uncomfortable home truths too (‘Dost thou hear, Hal?’). Even if Falstaff and truth are hardly natural bedfellows, the prince allows around him ‘a space of freedom in which others are able to speak’ and give him, if not necessarily ‘well-pondered advice’, then at least some access to truth. ³⁹

The requirement for a rigorous testing of the truth is then a more exacting imperative than it is conceived in the scenario of ‘speaking truth to power’. Parrhesia depends on and develops ‘deeper affective ties’, ties that may deepen into reciprocal relations of care and trust, the affective or emotional fabric of pedagogy or psychagogy. ⁴⁰ We have a parrhesiastic pact where truth contains and constrains all the persons involved in these performances of truth: ‘The ultimate goal of the parrhesiastic game is not the establishment of a truth, but the elaboration of a life in relation to truth’. ⁴¹ Risking repetition, we can say that it is not the proclamation of what one believes to be true that is decisive so much as the affective, open-ended ties that involve the participants in the production of truth. Parrhesia is central in this way to any effective political education, to any effective and honest political system. ⁴²

The politics of privilege, a partnership or a pact, and a place: these seem to be the defining qualities of parrhesia. Some of this definitional work fits our understanding of courageous speech as resistance to unjust authority. But much of parrhesia simply does not. The person who cries out against tyranny is apposite, save for the fact that the most tyrannous regime likely does not provide the kinds of conditions in which truth claims might be responsibly assessed, nor an ethic of reciprocal care cultivated. As Torben Dyrberg has argued, ‘no one has to my knowledge pinpointed the twin aspects of political power and critique in Foucault’s argument: that to speak truth to power and that power is able to speak truthfully are two sides of the same coin’. ⁴³

There is still not quite enough separation here between parrhesia and ‘speaking truth to power’, and Luxon is surely more convincing when she points out that we need more than the agonistic framing that is routinely used to define parrhesia:

Although tempting to read its asymmetries as speaking truth to power, such an interpretation mistakes Foucault’s comment that ‘The parrhesiastes is always less powerful than the one with whom he speaks. The parrhesia comes from “below,” as it were, and is directed toward “above.”’ The claim that parrhesia “comes from ‘below’” suggests that parrhesia might seize a moment betwixt power’s production and reproduction to interrupt it – and ground the authority of that interruption on something other than negative dialectic’. For such an interruption to occur, however, means that the vulnerable truth-teller needs to motivate his speech based on something other than vulnerability. Such an appeal would only reinforce power’s jurisdiction. ⁴⁴

Parrhesia is such a complex, dynamic and ‘spidery’ notion that ‘speaking truth to power’ not only fails to capture the contexts in which frank speech does and can occur, but actively misleads us by turning parrhesia into something that is readily graspable. ⁴⁵ Daniele Lorenzini does something like this in his recent work, where he identifies in parrhesia ‘a specific, well-defined family of speech acts, clearly distinct from other forms of truth-telling such as sincerity, authenticity, or avowal’ – but he is able to do so only by strenuously paring away alternative forms amply and repeatedly discussed by Foucault, including Cynic performance and Christian hermeneutics of the self. We can make parrhesia sound like what we now understand as ‘speaking truth to power’, but only at the expense of unnecessary surgical procedure. ⁴⁶ But parrhesia is interesting precisely because such practices of truth-telling are a challenge to our accepted understanding and conventions. Rather than translate parrhesia into terms that are ready to hand, we might follow Foucault’s interest in the difference that parrhesia represents: ‘Truth, I am afraid, would sometimes [appear] rather boring if it was not so bizarre’. ⁴⁷

Speaking geography to geneaology

It make sense to recommend that we view parrhesia ‘less as a pure form, and more as an adjective that might qualify particular practices and experiences’. ⁴⁸ Such a stress has important implications for geography: simply put, ‘the political place for parrhesiastic speech is ambiguous’. ⁴⁹ There are opportunities for geographers who have begun to explore the spaces of parrhesia, but there are intractable difficulties too. There are straightforward challenges in moving away from the intimacy of the ancient agora or the sovereign’s court, something I explore below. But there is a related and more critical issue concerning the characterisation of the locus of enunciation. This is the presumption of the presence of the parrhesiast and the audience hearing that speech act. The implicit phonocentrism – the metaphysical position privileging speech over writing, signified over signifier, presence over absence – is a problem not just for the idea of ‘speaking truth to power’ but also for Foucault’s work on parrhesia and his wider history of truth. Perhaps unexpectedly, the most pressing problem with the idea of parrhesia-as-speaking-truth-to-power turns out to be the emphasis on speaking.

The ‘situational logic’ of parrhesia seems to require the parrhesiast to be present before their auditors and witnesses. ⁵⁰ Here we find the exemplary scenario (judicial parrhesia) in which the parrhesiast rebukes the powerful to their face. But in the many other forms of ancient parrhesia we also find the need for the truth-teller to be placed directly in front of those who must hear them or witness them. ⁵¹ In Foucault’s discussion of the Cynics, for instance, one ‘reveals’ oneself, one ‘exposes’ the truth in ‘a practice of the true life as unconcealed life, . . . life under the both real and virtual eye of the other’. ⁵² The Cynic life is a permanent and public militancy, something which Foucault notes has repercussions nearer our own time, in radical and revolutionary politics. This is a life lived ‘in the open’, ‘addressed to absolutely everyone’. ⁵³ In scenarios of avowal, a practice parallel to though not identical to parrhesia, we also have the setting of the public square; only later does this become the preserve of less public spaces such as the monasteries of the middle ages. ⁵⁴ In Foucault’s extended discussion of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the tying of truth to presence looks clearer still: the revelation of truth for Oedipus takes the form of a tekmērion, an indisputable proof in which the witness to the murder of Laius must be heard. Foucault puts it this way: ‘this whole game of tekmērion is a game that complies with the law of presence and the law of the gaze. It is necessary to arrive finally at presence itself and at the gaze itself, the gaze of people who were themselves present’. ⁵⁵ The game of parrhesia seems to be tightly tied to the face-to-face, even claustrophobic, intimacy of the ancient world and the courts and cabinets of its successors.

The practical objection is: what do we do with this prioritising of the speaking subject and the speaking voice, when there are hundreds and indeed thousands of years that separate us from the public spaces in which parrhesia was first practised, whole ages that have seen profound reformulations of modes of expression and technologies of communication, and where speech and voice are complemented or challenged by language and writing? What does parrhesia mean, and what can ‘speaking truth to power’ mean, in the republic of letters, or in the age of print capitalism, in the age of mechanical reproduction, or in the digital age? The temptation is to persist with the privileging of public protest. As Legg puts it, fearless speech is the work of protesting bodies in particular spaces, ‘acting on freedoms and constraints that emerge through the dramatics of discourse, as mobilised by thinking, moving, speaking and corporeal bodies’. ⁵⁶ But it is not enough to endorse the priority of bodies assembled in public, as for instance in Rebecca Solnit: ‘Democracy was always a bodily experience, claimed and fought for and celebrated in actual places. You must be present to win’. ⁵⁷ Parrhesia cannot be equated with public protest per se: ‘telling truth (or what I believe to be the truth) to power is not the same . . . as simply protesting, contesting, or denouncing . . . it is not the pure violent irruption into the polis of a discourse that unilaterally proclaims itself to be the truth’. ⁵⁸

Nor can we expect that telling the truth in the age of mass communication is the same thing, and it is easy to sound hopelessly naïve about what has been called ‘digital parrhesia’. ⁵⁹ Parrhesia today clearly far exceeds the scale of those immediately present, and there is sensible discussion about what parrhesia means in our own day, though this still tends to be unhelpfully conflated with the language of ‘speaking truth to power’. ⁶⁰ But parrhesiastic acts in such conditions are profoundly transformed, being ‘subject to and even complicit in the same processes of selection, reduction and reification that shape most other forms of public communication’. ⁶¹ In such conditions, the geography of utterances rather than that of speech is clearly preferable. ⁶²

In one of the most important commentaries, Béatrice Châteauvert-Gagnon identifies the #MeToo movement as speaking dangerous truth to power and as a contemporary form of parrhesia in the digital age. ⁶³ As she emphasises, this is a movement that enacts a political ‘game of truth’ where the telling of one’s experiences is central, but also involving a ‘regime of truth’ determining whose truth is told and heard. Digital platforms allow the marginalised access to the public realm; stories and truths that might have been reserved or relegated to sites such as the therapist’s consulting room, the police station, or the law court have been bypassed in the move to a polyphonic and dispersed digital public. ⁶⁴ But this decentralisation means that truths are not just announced, but also selected and distorted. ⁶⁵ In these conditions, there is a profusion of voices, but just as importantly a profusion of speech genres. ⁶⁶ Châteauvert-Gagnon emphasises the media trope of white women’s sexual victimisation, and the ways in which the collective story excludes or silences alternative voices and perspectives. ⁶⁷ Speaking more generally Miles Ogborn has argued that ‘the effectiveness of these utterances depends on a more or less institutionalised geography of political speech acts, which produces different sorts of publics and different sorts of public spaces, through the location, mediation and circulation of speech’. ⁶⁸ Geography means more than the locus of enunciation; geography enters into the myriad relationships that define us as subjects of power. As Natalie Koch persuasively argues, ‘parrhesia becomes more than just a relationship that the speaker chooses to their self; now social norms join to define that relationship as acceptable or unacceptable based on the speaker’s positionality’. ⁶⁹

Parrhesia in its inadequate modern translation – the scenario of courageous dissent, ‘speaking truth to power’ – is just not well placed to advance our understanding of the geography of these manifold political speech acts. Beyond the transformation in scale and the material significance of media technologies and political activism in the modern age, we are led back to the central problem with Foucault’s account of parrhesia: the privileging of the speaking subject, of speech over writing, and of presence over absence. These are, as I want finally to argue, assumptions inherited from the phonocentric presumption of presence.

Speaking Parousia to Parrhesia

As previously noted, phonocentrism is implied by Foucault’s emphasis on immediacy. The ‘self-presence of the transcendental signified to itself’ is the dream of a pure immediacy of thought: a voice that is consciousness itself. ⁷⁰ This is a pure reasoning, an ‘absolute proximity’ of voice and being so complete that it is the very antithesis of space. ⁷¹ As Lee Braver puts it, ‘In this phonocentric ideal there is no gap where the message could get lost, and hence no need of signs to facilitate comprehension’; there is perhaps no need to speak of space at all, or at least it seems largely unimportant beyond the question of setting. ⁷² The situational logic of parrhesia is something like a metaphysical speech act. ⁷³ The logic of truth telling seemingly requires the face-to-face proximity of the parrhesiast and their ‘Other’: as Luxon argues, ‘The appeal of parrhesia lies in its consistent emphasis on the present and the immediate’. ⁷⁴ Such statements have an uncomfortably transcendental flavour, and phrases such as ‘there is no establishment of the truth without an essential position of otherness’ reminds us perhaps of Levinas: ‘Truth arises where a being separated from the other is not engulfed in him, but speaks to him’. ⁷⁵ There is a kind of mute speech here, conveyed by the ‘living presence’ of the subject with whom one comes face to face. ⁷⁶

This emphasis on the necessity and priority of presence was picked up by Derrida in his critical back-and-forth with Foucault. ⁷⁷ In Foucault’s defence, Lauri Siisiäinen has recently argued that the idea of the voice as the emanation of an undivided self-presence does not fit parrhesia as interpreted by Foucault. But the ‘phonocentric regime of truth’ remains largely unchallenged: writing is not downgraded, but instead merely faintly praised and inadequately analysed, as simply a ‘further realization’ of voice’s inherent mobility. ⁷⁸ The voice as ‘the passage of virtue and good passion’ is present and correct. ⁷⁹ We still have the enduring association of ‘living speech’ with resistance, with the refusal of power, a position that Derrida traces ultimately to Rousseau: ‘the voice always gives itself out as the best expression of liberty. It is by itself language at liberty and the liberty of language, the straight talk which does not have to borrow its signifiers from the exteriority of the world, and which therefore seems incapable of being dispossessed’. ⁸⁰ In calling out the ‘strange authority’ of the ‘agency of the voice’, Derrida tries to find an alternative, a ‘becoming-space’ that makes possible both speech and writing. ⁸¹ This is offered as an alternative to the dream of the pure, unmediated speech of a sovereign subject, an isolated consciousness and an authentic self.

The purport of Derrida’s argument is to displace and to defer the work of language, putting the emphasis on the mediated construction of meaning rather than the revelation of transcendental truths. It is difficult to illustrate the point that there is no such thing as pure speech but only ‘speech-in-the-light-of-writing’, but we might contrast Judith Butler’s discussion of public protests as speech acts with Solnit’s version of democracy cited earlier. ⁸² Butler cautions against any lingering presumptions of presence:

The speech act, however punctual, is nevertheless inserted in a citational chain, and that means that the temporal conditions for making the speech act precede and exceed the momentary occasion of its enunciation . . . The speech act is not fully tethered to the moment of its enunciation. ⁸³

We have seen how this chain of enunciation works, so that ‘geographies of utterances’ make more sense than spaces in which speech acts such as parrhesia are performed. ⁸⁴

Most fatefully, we cannot identify the locus of enunciation with a fixed and stable speaking subject: ‘The possibility of the “I,” of speaking and knowing the “I,” resides in a perspective that dislocates the first-person perspective whose very function it supplies’. ⁸⁵ Derrida insists that there is no presence without the presence of the other, and thus no presence without absence:

The speaking subject discovers his irreducible secondarity, his origin that is always already eluded; for the origin is always already eluded on the basis of an organized field of speech in which the speaking subject vainly seeks a place that is always missing. ⁸⁶

The missing absence in parrhesiastic truth-telling is suggested by the proximity of parrhesia to prophecy, which takes us back to the religious/spiritual connotations that surround truth-telling and ‘living speech’. Religion, like politics, delivers an ‘offer of subjectivity’, and we might be reminded here that the direct inspiration for ‘speaking truth to power’ comes from the Prophet Muhammed: ‘The most excellent jihad is when one speaks a true word in the presence of a tyrannical ruler’. ⁸⁷ Prophecy, for Foucault, is categorically not the same as parrhesia, since the prophet ‘does not speak in his own name. He speaks for another voice; his mouth serves as an intermediary for a voice which speaks from elsewhere’. ⁸⁸ Medieval Christianity brings the parrhesiastic and the prophetic together, and this is true for the revolutionary too: ‘revolutionary discourse, like all prophetic discourse, speaks in the name of someone else, speaks in order to tell of a future which, up to a point, already has the form of fate’. ⁸⁹ But there is for Foucault a terminal contradiction between the parrhesiastic enunciation of the truth and this voice that speaks from elsewhere: ‘The parrhesiast does not help people somehow to step beyond some threshold in the ontological structure of the human being and of time which separates them from their future’. ⁹⁰

However, the metaphysical presumptions of presence suggest that it is no easier to disentangle parrhesia from prophecy than it is from its many other related and parallel forms. ⁹¹ There is another word for absolute presence, and that is parousia – translatable as advent, presence, arrival. ⁹² We know parousia principally through the Christian doctrine of the Second Coming, and there is a prophetic quality to this metaphysical argument of an anticipated presence. As with Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical, prophetic discourse shifts the speaking of the word to a time to come. Which means that far from being living speech, the version of parrhesia that approximates prophecy is really about absence – about death, in fact: ‘a voice without différance, a voice without writing is at once absolutely alive and absolutely dead’. ⁹³

Whilst Foucault is wholly adamant that parrhesia should not be confused with prophecy, or at least not in its ‘good’/ideal version, the distinction between the two may be as ‘undecidable’ as that between parrhesia and rhetoric. If it is easy for ‘bad’ parrhesiasts to deceive others, it is just as easy for us to deceive ourselves, claiming the sanction of a higher Truth to come, and the belief that our actions will be justified by the course of history. In these terms, the dream of unmediated communication, erasing both space and time, is part of the history of truth, but only as part of the long history of truth as self-deception:

The voice is heard [understood] . . . closest to the self as the absolute effacement of the signifier: pure auto-affection . . . which does not borrow from outside of itself, in the world or in ‘reality,’ any accessory signifier, any substance of expression foreign to its own spontaneity. It is the unique experience of the signified producing itself spontaneously, from within the self, and nevertheless, as signified concept, in the element of ideality or universality. The unworldly character of this substance of expression is constitutive of its ideality. This deception is the history of truth. ⁹⁴

It is not only the consequences of ‘the shift in the places and forms of the practice of parrēsia’ that are passed over all too readily. ⁹⁵ So too is the cultural-historical privileging of speech and its downplaying of the role of systems of signification – in Derridean terms, of space and time themselves. When Derrida takes aim at Foucault, and I find the argument convincing, it is on the grounds that Foucault cannot justify the enunciative position from which he sits in magisterial judgement as a philosopher-parrhesiast. Relatedly, Geoff Bennington sees in Foucault’s argument a hidden ontology derived ultimately from Plato’s metaphysics, a truth-telling about parrhesia which nevertheless refuses to accept the inherent undecidability of parrhesia itself. ⁹⁶ For Bennington, it is only by a ‘fudge’ that Foucault is able to present the philosopher as a parrhesiast, as someone who courageously speaks truth to power. Instead of truth telling as revelation we are surely better off treating truth as an event in the Derridean sense, as an invitation to ongoing interpretation, an unpredictable novelty and not a mere unveiling or prophesy. If parrhesia offers any example to us, it is not the speaker’s conviction of truth and their willingness to proclaim it so much as an openness to a truth that is always deferred. ⁹⁷

Conclusion: speaking power to truth

There is no intrinsic value either to silence or to speech, but rather sometimes it is good to speak, sometimes it is good to keep silent. ⁹⁸

I began this paper by arguing against the presumptions inherent in the cliché of ‘speaking truth to power’, pointing out its incompatibility with Foucault’s genealogy of parrhesia. It is doubtful that an academic argument has any chance of countering the popular understanding of speaking truth to power, where the correspondence theory of truth thrives, and any qualms about the history of truth will come across as hedging and equivocation. I know that I have laboured the point, and I know too that I take a certain risk in doing so, particularly where proffered examples of parrhesiastic practice are impeccably liberal and progressive. But in the spirit of Bruno Latour, I still cannot support without wincing the three words ‘speaking’, ‘truth’ and ‘power’ – and I do not much like the preposition ‘to’ either. The notion of an objective truth, Truth with a capital T, neglects the necessary parrhesiastic games and regimes of truth Foucault excavates. The conception of a monolithic ‘Power’ neglects parrhesia’s role in the governance of the self as well as of others. The entanglement of subjectivity and truth means that both truth and the speaking subject are produced in the act of enunciation, the particular performances that constitute parrhesia. We can therefore at the very least qualify and restrain the misuse of ‘speaking truth to power’ by reading Foucault’s account of parrhesia more carefully.

But I have gone further, by throwing doubt over the account of parrhesia provided by Foucault himself. His work shares the same problems that beset the idea of ‘speaking truth to power’, namely the presumption that the subject speaks in the immediate presence of their hearers or witnesses. With some exceptions, geographers have passed over the full implications of this politics of presence, its material significance and its metaphysics. It is not just that it is a very limited historical geography that neglects the consequences of moving from the intimate spaces of the ancient world to the vastness of the internet, and everything in between, meaning that parrhesia ‘should not be projected onto contemporary situations without qualification’. ⁹⁹ The prioritisation of the speaking subject also drastically simplifies the nature of the speech act and the locus of enunciation, meaning that we focus unreflectively on the speaking subject, without acknowledging the fact that ‘speech, identities, power, and place are all intimately interwoven and highly contingent – evaporating from one moment to the next and from one encounter to another, sometimes to reappear but other times to disappear entirely’. ¹⁰⁰ At best, this conception of parrhesia-as-speaking-truth-to-power adds a spurious gloss to entirely conventional accounts of political resistance. ¹⁰¹

Foucault himself accepts that parrhesia forever risks undermining the conditions of its own possibility, and it is likely to remain as a figure of rhetoric in the game of persuasion that is politics, where battlelines are drawn around who is able to tell the truth and who must tell the truth, who must speak and who should remain silent. Now – though in point of fact always – truth-telling is caught up in signifying chains, geographies of utterance, regimes of truth that determine the place and position of the parrhesiast. Pretending otherwise is dangerous self-deception. As Brent Steele puts it, thinking of the perils and promise of academic parrhesia, when scholars enter the realm of public policy (and Steele is not arguing that we should not), ‘we are no longer speaking “truth” to power. In such a scene, instead, parrhesia becomes something different—it becomes rhetoric’. ¹⁰² We might ask ourselves, with Koch, that ‘If we continue to import the self-congratulatory liberal storyline of parrhesiatic free speech into our “critique,” at what point does this become performative, obedient speech?’ ¹⁰³ In conditions so ‘favourable to the art of declamation’, as Joseph Conrad puts it, ‘the cacophony of a crowd of games of veridiction’, we can hardly drown out the sound of millions of people speaking their truth simultaneously, and indeed telling others to shut up. ¹⁰⁴ Our ability to hear and distinguish tone and format in this deformed public space is compromised by the ‘idle chatter’ so despised by Kierkegaard and Heidegger, a degraded form of speech that qualifies as a kind of anti-parrhesia. ¹⁰⁵

We must always be wary of advancing the idea that we can easily recognise the truth when we speak it or when we hear it, or that we can straightforwardly distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’ parrhesia, separating the wheat of truth from the chaff of rhetoric or revelation. Foucault suggests that philosophy itself becomes the premiere form of truth-telling in our age, but we remain all too easily seduced by the idea that only we possess the ‘courage of truth’. As Geoff Bennington has argued, ‘the image of the solitary philosopher courageously telling truth to power is part of the problem rather than its solution’. ¹⁰⁶ I want to end with the frustration of the Žižekian critic Victor Shammas, who argues that ‘The role of the philosopher, sensu lato, is not to take on the role of a parrhesiast but to poke and prod at those who think of themselves as such – to interrogate the ways the self-congratulatory overtones of parrhesia tend to reproduce what Žižek (2006) calls the “unknown knowns” of ideology’. ¹⁰⁷ In looking to explore the geographies of parrhesia, we should first jettison the simple self-congratulation associated with ‘speaking truth to power’, its tendency towards reproducing received wisdom rather than creatively contributing to political debate.