Notes on Foucault’s Fearless Speech and The Government of Self and Others
S. Jarratt, October 2011
Government of Self and Others (GSO)is a transcription from cassette tapes of lectures given at the Collège de France, 1982-83 (but actually delivered January through March, 1983). The editor, Frédéric Gros, has access to Foucault’s lecture notes.
Fearless Speech (ed. Joseph Pearson, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001) (FS), also compiled from tape recordings, presents Foucault’s six lectures at UC Berkeley in Fall 1983. F. didn’t write, correct, or edit any part of the text, and Pearson did not have access to Foucault’s notes.
Definition
One thing to notice about the two, then, is that the Berkeley lectures represent the second time through this project in the history of thought. One difference I can see is that the later lectures begin with a somewhat neutral, less “interested” definition of the word parrêsia and its appearances in classical and post-classical texts.
GSO begins with an essay on Kant’s Aufklärung essay, which F. says does two things, inaugurates two great traditions in philosophy: (1) the history of reason; the conditions of possibility for true knowledge (an “analytical philosophy of truth in general,” 21), and (2) the Revolution as an event, a failure, but also an “operational value in history and the progress of the human species” (20). We discussed this in terms of F. aligning himself with a form of philosophy—not analytic, but in the odd company of Hegel, Nietzsche, Max Weber “and so on.” None of this appears in FS. In the earlier iteration, F. returns to the status of philosophy in relation to politics at the end of the course (351-55), and here we find out why (in F’s terms) it is necessary to reject rhetoric, which will try to say “what must be done” in the realm of the political, in favor of philosophy, which has to “exist in a permanent and restive exteriority with regard to politics” (354).
When F. gets to parrêsia in the earlier lectures, it is presented within the culture of the self framework (43). He calls it “a spidery kind of notion” (45), alludes to its moment in Athenian democracy (46), but sets up the telos of the project strongly: “it is used on the borders of what could be called individual guidance and the political fields, and specifically around the problem of the Prince’s soul” (46-47). Then F. says he will begin by “eliminating some hypotheses” (52) and goes on to show why parrêsia is not demonstration, an art of rhetoric, a way of teaching, or a way of discussing (52-55). This introduction/definition is a negative and dismissive treatment of the term in relation to the field of rhetoric, as we noticed.
In contrast, in FS, though he does offer an overview of the genealogy/argument he will develop in more detail in the subsequent sections, the categories of definition are less interested than those presented in GSO. In FS, we find Frankness, Truth, Danger, Criticism, Duty (12-20), then the schema for the evolution of the parresiatic practice from rhetoric/democracy to philosophy/self-care/advice to Princes.
FS is much shorter than GSO, so perhaps there were fewer lectures and less time to include the detail of the Collège de France lectures. But the changes and compression could also suggest changes in his thinking. I’m wondering if he might have made this change in part because of a question (“objection”) he received by mail before the 9 February 1983 lecture (“First Hour” GSO 187) to his failure to acknowledge the canonical or everyday understanding of the term. He goes on at that point to lay out parrêsia as a political problem (187-89).
Pericles and the character of democracy
This whole treatment of Pericles as the ideal democratic politician is missing from FS, as is the very interesting discussion of democratic practice (and good parrêsia) as joust, rivalry, and confrontation (174). The point he gets to with Pericles himself and with Ion in the Euripides play is that not just anyone can distinguish himself in this field: it must be an exceptional person. So isegoria (equal access to the public forum) is really not what it seems, and this paves the way for the monarch and the need for the philosopher to use parrêsia in relation to the Prince. [For a longer treatment, the deep investment in myth and the drama, the structural anthropological reading of the Ion, gender and the treatment of Creusa as a parrhêsiastes.]
In its place in FS we find a fairly lengthy discussion of Dio Chrysostom, second sophist/philosopher (my terms) with an extended treatment of the Fourth Discourse on Kingship, an imaginative reconstruction of Diogenes conferring with Alexander (115-33). F. brings in Dio under the heading of a Cynic parrhesia, describes him on 123 as an intellectual, “possibly as a professional rhetorician” and as involved with Musonius Rufus, the Stoic philosopher; also references his exile by Domitian. F. refers to Dio’s discourse as a kind of preaching, and a “provocative dialogue,” offering a reasonably full rhetorical analysis of the dialogue.
What happened in the interim to lead to this change? Perhaps F. became more disillusioned about the possibility that there could have been or could be a genuine democracy or “good parrêsia”? Or perhaps he just became a bit more familiar with the classical scholarship on this question.
Foucault as amateur
I keep getting caught up in the difficulties of reading Foucault’s representations of the ancient world and its texts from a perspective so very different from the ones prevailing in the discipline of classics. So, one could simply reject his project on that ground. For example, his presentation of Pericles fails to take into account the highly artful manipulations of the Athenian general in the imperialist project, not even mentioning the fact that his speeches are attributed/created by Thucydides, himself a general in the same conflicts and writing decades later in exile. Even granting the funeral oration a central role in democratic theorizing, F’s concentration on the pair isegoria/parrêsia leaves out other crucial terms: homonoia (like-mindedness), beauty, ritual, space. The arbitrariness of Foucault’s choices of texts some times makes me wonder if he was using some kind of concordance: a list of appearances of the word. The use to which F. tries to put Isocrates via a late speech, On the Peace (which of course has its own complex context), for example, characterizing him as suspicious of democratic contestation by orators and critical of flatterers (FS 80-83) ignores I’s long life of participation in these contestations (though as a writer rather than a speaker) and his participation in and use of these arguments as positions (see Levy below).
One way to get around this problem is to think of Foucault as an amateur in the discipline of classics, a position he himself adopts. So if we grant (thinking of the end of the Kant lecture on his methodology--GSO 20-21) that he is bringing his (amateur) readings of these ancient materials for the purpose of a problematization of a present problem, it’s easier to overlook the disciplinary differences. He wants to study parrêsia as a hinge between politeia (law and constitution) on the one hand, and dunasteia (capability, strength, power, faculty: problems of “the political game,” GSO 158) on the other. This is a problem for modernity and post-modernity. His way of formulating the problem—“What is the relation between the activity of truth-telling and the exercise of power? (FS 170) – is provocative and useful. It acknowledges the failure of democracy but the persistence of democratic rhetorical practices (my terms, not his), that I can use for a project in Greco-Roman rhetoric and for thinking about contemporary political discourse. The fact that F. omitted Kant from the beginning and the decisive rejection of rhetoric from the end of FS may suggest that his further readings and reformulations changed his opinion about the status of rhetoric in the problematization of free-speaking and the genealogy of the “critical” tradition in the West (FS 170).
As evidence of Foucault’s curiosity as an amateur in classics, we could point to the appearance in FS, the later lectures, of Dio Chrysostom, who appears only briefly in GSO (290) in the context of the new politic units in the Greco-Roman world. In FS, F. mentions a “very interesting book by C. P. Jones” about Dio (123) (see above). Jones doesn’t appear in GSO.
It’s also hard to read Foucault’s work from 1982-83 in light of later scholarship. On the problematization of demagoguery, we think of the powerful and convincing work done on this problem by Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1991). Does Ober use Foucault? I can’t remember. The traffic back and forth between classics and critical theory is uneven. I was thinking of mentioning the other night a book (a short set of lectures) by Simon Goldhill (a wonderful Cambridge classicist) called Foucault’s Virginity. F. is a “virgin” reader of classical texts, Goldhill says: he takes them at their word. But Goldhill’s is a critical appreciation, not a dismissal.
I also forgot to mention a very interesting essay by Carlos Lévy, “From Politics to Philosophy and Theology: Some Remarks about Foucault’s Interpretation of Parrêsia in Two Recently Published Seminars” Philosophy and Rhetoric 42.4 (2009): 313-25. He’s working with the French text of GSO and the next set of Collège de France lectures (perhaps?) from 1984: “Le courage de la vérite.” This essay takes up the problem of rhetoric in Foucault’s treatment of parrêsia. Perhaps we should add it to our list of readings for next time?
For a response to Arthur Walzer's recent essay, “Parrêsia, Foucault, and the Classical Rhetorical Tradition” RSQ 43.1, 2013, please click here:
S. Jarratt, October 2011
Government of Self and Others (GSO)is a transcription from cassette tapes of lectures given at the Collège de France, 1982-83 (but actually delivered January through March, 1983). The editor, Frédéric Gros, has access to Foucault’s lecture notes.
Fearless Speech (ed. Joseph Pearson, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001) (FS), also compiled from tape recordings, presents Foucault’s six lectures at UC Berkeley in Fall 1983. F. didn’t write, correct, or edit any part of the text, and Pearson did not have access to Foucault’s notes.
Definition
One thing to notice about the two, then, is that the Berkeley lectures represent the second time through this project in the history of thought. One difference I can see is that the later lectures begin with a somewhat neutral, less “interested” definition of the word parrêsia and its appearances in classical and post-classical texts.
GSO begins with an essay on Kant’s Aufklärung essay, which F. says does two things, inaugurates two great traditions in philosophy: (1) the history of reason; the conditions of possibility for true knowledge (an “analytical philosophy of truth in general,” 21), and (2) the Revolution as an event, a failure, but also an “operational value in history and the progress of the human species” (20). We discussed this in terms of F. aligning himself with a form of philosophy—not analytic, but in the odd company of Hegel, Nietzsche, Max Weber “and so on.” None of this appears in FS. In the earlier iteration, F. returns to the status of philosophy in relation to politics at the end of the course (351-55), and here we find out why (in F’s terms) it is necessary to reject rhetoric, which will try to say “what must be done” in the realm of the political, in favor of philosophy, which has to “exist in a permanent and restive exteriority with regard to politics” (354).
When F. gets to parrêsia in the earlier lectures, it is presented within the culture of the self framework (43). He calls it “a spidery kind of notion” (45), alludes to its moment in Athenian democracy (46), but sets up the telos of the project strongly: “it is used on the borders of what could be called individual guidance and the political fields, and specifically around the problem of the Prince’s soul” (46-47). Then F. says he will begin by “eliminating some hypotheses” (52) and goes on to show why parrêsia is not demonstration, an art of rhetoric, a way of teaching, or a way of discussing (52-55). This introduction/definition is a negative and dismissive treatment of the term in relation to the field of rhetoric, as we noticed.
In contrast, in FS, though he does offer an overview of the genealogy/argument he will develop in more detail in the subsequent sections, the categories of definition are less interested than those presented in GSO. In FS, we find Frankness, Truth, Danger, Criticism, Duty (12-20), then the schema for the evolution of the parresiatic practice from rhetoric/democracy to philosophy/self-care/advice to Princes.
FS is much shorter than GSO, so perhaps there were fewer lectures and less time to include the detail of the Collège de France lectures. But the changes and compression could also suggest changes in his thinking. I’m wondering if he might have made this change in part because of a question (“objection”) he received by mail before the 9 February 1983 lecture (“First Hour” GSO 187) to his failure to acknowledge the canonical or everyday understanding of the term. He goes on at that point to lay out parrêsia as a political problem (187-89).
Pericles and the character of democracy
This whole treatment of Pericles as the ideal democratic politician is missing from FS, as is the very interesting discussion of democratic practice (and good parrêsia) as joust, rivalry, and confrontation (174). The point he gets to with Pericles himself and with Ion in the Euripides play is that not just anyone can distinguish himself in this field: it must be an exceptional person. So isegoria (equal access to the public forum) is really not what it seems, and this paves the way for the monarch and the need for the philosopher to use parrêsia in relation to the Prince. [For a longer treatment, the deep investment in myth and the drama, the structural anthropological reading of the Ion, gender and the treatment of Creusa as a parrhêsiastes.]
In its place in FS we find a fairly lengthy discussion of Dio Chrysostom, second sophist/philosopher (my terms) with an extended treatment of the Fourth Discourse on Kingship, an imaginative reconstruction of Diogenes conferring with Alexander (115-33). F. brings in Dio under the heading of a Cynic parrhesia, describes him on 123 as an intellectual, “possibly as a professional rhetorician” and as involved with Musonius Rufus, the Stoic philosopher; also references his exile by Domitian. F. refers to Dio’s discourse as a kind of preaching, and a “provocative dialogue,” offering a reasonably full rhetorical analysis of the dialogue.
What happened in the interim to lead to this change? Perhaps F. became more disillusioned about the possibility that there could have been or could be a genuine democracy or “good parrêsia”? Or perhaps he just became a bit more familiar with the classical scholarship on this question.
Foucault as amateur
I keep getting caught up in the difficulties of reading Foucault’s representations of the ancient world and its texts from a perspective so very different from the ones prevailing in the discipline of classics. So, one could simply reject his project on that ground. For example, his presentation of Pericles fails to take into account the highly artful manipulations of the Athenian general in the imperialist project, not even mentioning the fact that his speeches are attributed/created by Thucydides, himself a general in the same conflicts and writing decades later in exile. Even granting the funeral oration a central role in democratic theorizing, F’s concentration on the pair isegoria/parrêsia leaves out other crucial terms: homonoia (like-mindedness), beauty, ritual, space. The arbitrariness of Foucault’s choices of texts some times makes me wonder if he was using some kind of concordance: a list of appearances of the word. The use to which F. tries to put Isocrates via a late speech, On the Peace (which of course has its own complex context), for example, characterizing him as suspicious of democratic contestation by orators and critical of flatterers (FS 80-83) ignores I’s long life of participation in these contestations (though as a writer rather than a speaker) and his participation in and use of these arguments as positions (see Levy below).
One way to get around this problem is to think of Foucault as an amateur in the discipline of classics, a position he himself adopts. So if we grant (thinking of the end of the Kant lecture on his methodology--GSO 20-21) that he is bringing his (amateur) readings of these ancient materials for the purpose of a problematization of a present problem, it’s easier to overlook the disciplinary differences. He wants to study parrêsia as a hinge between politeia (law and constitution) on the one hand, and dunasteia (capability, strength, power, faculty: problems of “the political game,” GSO 158) on the other. This is a problem for modernity and post-modernity. His way of formulating the problem—“What is the relation between the activity of truth-telling and the exercise of power? (FS 170) – is provocative and useful. It acknowledges the failure of democracy but the persistence of democratic rhetorical practices (my terms, not his), that I can use for a project in Greco-Roman rhetoric and for thinking about contemporary political discourse. The fact that F. omitted Kant from the beginning and the decisive rejection of rhetoric from the end of FS may suggest that his further readings and reformulations changed his opinion about the status of rhetoric in the problematization of free-speaking and the genealogy of the “critical” tradition in the West (FS 170).
As evidence of Foucault’s curiosity as an amateur in classics, we could point to the appearance in FS, the later lectures, of Dio Chrysostom, who appears only briefly in GSO (290) in the context of the new politic units in the Greco-Roman world. In FS, F. mentions a “very interesting book by C. P. Jones” about Dio (123) (see above). Jones doesn’t appear in GSO.
It’s also hard to read Foucault’s work from 1982-83 in light of later scholarship. On the problematization of demagoguery, we think of the powerful and convincing work done on this problem by Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1991). Does Ober use Foucault? I can’t remember. The traffic back and forth between classics and critical theory is uneven. I was thinking of mentioning the other night a book (a short set of lectures) by Simon Goldhill (a wonderful Cambridge classicist) called Foucault’s Virginity. F. is a “virgin” reader of classical texts, Goldhill says: he takes them at their word. But Goldhill’s is a critical appreciation, not a dismissal.
I also forgot to mention a very interesting essay by Carlos Lévy, “From Politics to Philosophy and Theology: Some Remarks about Foucault’s Interpretation of Parrêsia in Two Recently Published Seminars” Philosophy and Rhetoric 42.4 (2009): 313-25. He’s working with the French text of GSO and the next set of Collège de France lectures (perhaps?) from 1984: “Le courage de la vérite.” This essay takes up the problem of rhetoric in Foucault’s treatment of parrêsia. Perhaps we should add it to our list of readings for next time?
For a response to Arthur Walzer's recent essay, “Parrêsia, Foucault, and the Classical Rhetorical Tradition” RSQ 43.1, 2013, please click here: