Why is ‘speaking the truth’ fearless? ‘Danger’ anD ‘truth’ in foucault’s Discussion of parrhesia

to read the text of Michel foucault’s late seminars on the topic of parrhesia from the perspective of the work of nearly a decade earlier on the topics of disciplinary power and biopower, one is struck by the seemingly irreconcilable positions he adopts in these two periods on the topic of ‘truth’ [la vérité]. his 1983 Berkeley seminar places considerable emphasis on the courage of the parrhesiastes. here foucault distinguishes the moderns’ tests of verification in context-independent rules (science) or procedures of dubitability (Cartesian philosophy) from the ‘proof’ furnished by the sincerity of the parrhesiastes. this sincerity can be measured by the fact that the speaker ‘says something dangerous – different from what the majority believes’.1 as the epigraph to the published seminar notes indicate, foucault is interested in exploring the way that it is the status of the one who speaks, regardless of the dangerous implications of what they say, that determines whether they are speaking the truth.2 These two lines of investigation the status of the truth-teller as the one with an existential stake in what is said and the question of the consequences and risks of their telling of truth direct attention to the analysis of relations between the subject and truth as these provide a privileged locus for a genealogy of the ‘ “critical” tradition in the West’: