Authority, Interpretation and the Space of the Parrhesiastic Encounter

Nancy Luxon

As more of Foucaults lectures come to be published either those at

the Collge de France or the guest lectures given at the Universities of

Berkeley, Louvain, Dartmouth, and Grenoble it becomes possible to
work differently with these lectures. Reading and working with lectures
is always tricky: public lectures are at once forms of public address, at
times constrained by the terms of invitation, and can only rarely serve
as stable texts. In Foucaults case, reading his Collge de France lectures against the versions published as Discipline and Punish or The Will to
Know reveals a dramatic disparity between the pedagogical relations and
obligations that govern his teaching material, and the different relationships that govern its internal logic when writing it for an imagined audience. With this lecture, La Parrsia, originally presented at lUniversit
de Grenoble, one sees Foucault test something else through the content
and form of his remarks: the constraints that enable speakers to elaborate and test new narratives1. In this sense, La Parrsia offers an unusually clear aperu into Foucaults work on ancient ethics and truth-telling,
insofar as it serves as a hinge between Foucaults earlier work on the
production of truth through confession (as in Discipline and Punish, The
Will to Know and Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling), and his turn to a different
mode of truth-telling that would sidestep the relations of power so constitutive of his earlier work. If the speech of contest and law relies on
pre-specified rules and procedures rules that ostensibly protect from
the vulnerable from domination, even as the expertise to navigate within them only reproduces these injuries and asymmetries then parresia
draws from the irreducible relationship between parresiastes and student.
By contrast, I argue La Parrsia sketches the unfurling of a space whose
liberty is not over-determined by these relations, and yet a space which
may, provocatively, still reside among them.
All references to the Grenoble lecture, in the form of in-text citations, are to the
version printed in Anabases, no. 16 (2012), pp. 157-188.
1

materiali foucaultiani, a. III, n. 5-6, gennaio-dicembre 2014, pp. 71-90.

72 Nancy Luxon
The parrhesiastic pact at the center of La Parrsia thus seeks to
challenge two tenets central to Foucaults earlier work on confession and
avowal. First, the parrhesiastic pact emphasizes the relation between master
and disciple rather than the production of a singular, desirously truthtelling subject. Already the 1982 Collge de France lectures that compose
The Hermeneutics of the Subject had moved away from the indissoluble bind
between truth and desire and towards truth-telling as interpretive understanding. A few months later in Grenoble, the rumination on these lectures and their compression into a single survol sharpens the attention to
asymmetric relationships in which the student not the master speaks.
Second, the lecture further clarifies that Foucault sought in parresia not
the roots of confession or avowal, but the articulation of distinct, plural
models of truth-telling that would differently bear on ethical subjectivity.
From this plurality of models, Foucault suggests that the collaborative
dynamics between parresiastes and student allow for a different kind of
ethical change than those he had previously analyzed. Simply, Foucault
finds in the form of the parrhesiastic encounter a way to move the student
and those around him towards authoring and authorizing change in their
own right. Foucaults lecture thus outlines the relationships that organize a
truth-telling whose legitimation is not settled in advance, and whose effect
is not undone by asymmetries of position2.
Somewhat differently from Foucaults other late lectures, however, La
Parrsia gestures provocatively to parresias unfolding through movements
of desires, ideas and person and the space of liberty they both require
and compose. Such attention to the space of encounter works both contrary to the incredibly spatialized account of power and knowledge in
Discipline and Punish and frictively with the publicity that is the condition
of knowledge in Kant and especially the political writings that so interest
Foucault3. Foucaults work around Discipline and Punish (such as the GIPs
earlier activism in 1971-72, and the later 1982 Louvain lectures) sought
Thus, one might understand Foucault in this lecture, and his last four years of
research broadly, as responding to the modern legitimation crisis identified by Jrgen
Habermas. Likely inadvertently, these lectures also serve address questions raised by Ch.
Taylor in Foucault on Freedom and Truth, in Political Theory, vol. 12 (1984), n. 2, pp. 152-183.
3
Foucault writes most consistently about What is Enlightenment? and Conflict of
the Faculties, although similar themes of Aufklrung, authority, reading publics, novelty,
and history resonate in the other essays included in Kants Political Writings, 2nd edition,
ed. H. Reiss and trans. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1991.
2

Autority, Interpretation and the Space of the Parrhesiastic Encounter 73

to differentiate regimes of jurisdiction and veridiction, or regimes of law

and truth-telling. As a truth-telling that challenges the presumptive ordering of nomos rather than entrenching it, parresia would seem to unfold
in a context other than a jurisdictional organization of space and movement through law. It also presumes something other than the republic
of readers envisioned by Kant even as Foucault draws subtly on Kant
to analyze truth-telling as one of those impossible professions4 that are
practically caught between right and force and oriented towards freedom.
Foucaults lectures raise but do not answer the question of what alternative public space might enable parrhesiastic speech to gain more explicitly
political effects.
Foucaults allusive claims about the space of the encounter in La Parrsia thus leave open many questions. How should we understand this
space of liberty that is also a space of asymmetry and inequality? What
dynamics characterize this space and in what sense should we see them
as spatialized, given Foucaults repeated insistence on relationships, engagement and pacts that is, on activities that do not obviously or necessarily need spatial articulation? With this essay, after quickly sketching
the asymmetries at work in Foucaults reading of parresia, I will turn to this
space and argue that Foucault characterizes it in terms of its movements.
Attention to these agitations, these movements in and out of city and
soul, suggests that Foucaults work on parresia might offer the preliminary
resources to think about the new public spaces for politics. If Foucault
recognized that his public speaking deployed different modes of truthtelling and so triggered different responsibilities, perhaps the response of
his readers should be equally creative. What republic of readers might
so find itself born posthumously?
Truth-telling in the Parrhesiastic Encounter
In this Grenoble lecture, Foucaults reading of parresia strikingly diverges from his reading of Christian practices of penance and confession,
Kant declares pedagogy and governance to be impossible professions for the
contradiction between force and right, as well as between liberty and authority, each
embodies. First Freud and then Foucault will echo this comment, with Freud adding
psychology to the list of professions.
4

74 Nancy Luxon
along with his claims elsewhere about medical, psychoanalytic, and juridical practices. If Christianity (and psychoanalysis) insists that the disciple
speak, then parresia insists that the master speaks, and that he speaks a
potentially hurtful truth. Such claims diverge markedly from the earlier
Will to Know (1976), in which Foucault famously glosses the clinical, psychoanalytic encounter as confessional. They also differ from the less successful efforts to extend the confessional frame backwards, as in The Use
of Pleasures in which Foucault toys unpersuasively with Artemidorous and
dreams, or in the floundering opening lecture on aphrodisia and elephants
for Subjectivity and Truth (1980). However, over the next few years of lectures with their constant scaffolding, revising, and abandoning of different frameworks emerge a steady collection of texts that will orient Foucaults lectures from the Hermeneutics of the Subject (1982) onwards. Eventually, a clearer rendition of ancient truth-telling crystallizes, one very much
at odds with the lectures on avowal given just a year earlier at the Universit de Louvain. Initially, both lectures appear to revolve around truthtelling practices in the ancient world, and to analogize these practices to
the arts of governance such as medicine and piloting5. It would not have
been unreasonable for the Grenoble audience to expect something like the
lectures given in Louvain lectures that moved from pre-law Greece, to
Christian confession, and then contemporary expertise, and that unfolded
in the context of Belgian debates around penal reform and the doctrine
of social defense6. But between the lectures at Louvain and Grenoble, and
within Foucaults reading of the transition from ancient ethics to early
Christianity, a pivot point emerges: this kind of reversal, a reversal which
means that parresia weighs on the master in ancient philosophy (160)7.
With that inversion, the dynamics of the encounter between master and
disciple, teacher and student, radically alter even despite the remaining
inequalities and asymmetries that define their positions. Surprisingly, FouM. Foucault, Wrong-doing, Truth-telling. The Function of Avowal in Justice, eds. F. Bion
and B. Harcourt, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2014, p. 75.
6
Brion and Harcourt, eds., p. 2.
7
For a fascinating account of judgment, judicial decision-making, and subject-formation in early Christian martyr acts one that captures the tension between the formal
rationality of [Roman legal] institutions and the intuitive judgments of a [Christian] community, see A. Bryen, Martyrdom, Rhetoric, and the Politics of Procedure, in Classical Antiquity,
vol. 33 (2014), no. 2, pp. 243-280.
5

Autority, Interpretation and the Space of the Parrhesiastic Encounter 75

cault offers the parrhesiastic relationship as what that educates, rather than
produces subjects.
Distinctions from Christian confession and juridical avowal duly noted, Foucault distinguishes different modes of parresia so as to schematize
the practices that sustain its engagement and prevent it from reducing to
institutional status, polemics (174), or simple adhesion to political program. If citizenship for Euripides guarantees the space for the right
to speech, then parresias place in Platos Republic remains linked to the
space of the democratic city. Likewise, Platos Laws allows citizens a frank
speech that assured the freedom, friendship and commonalty of the city,
and so emphasizes the need for harmony in this space of liberty. The
experience of being moved politically turns inwards with the Gorgias and
the figuration of parresiastes as touchstone for his students soul. Each
truth-telling model returns to something simple: when a soul wants to
take care of itself, when it wants to heal itself, it needs another soul, and
this other soul must have parresia (166). Parresia is the ensemble of
practices, rules and techniques that assure the exercise of the care of the
self (159) and thus is always linked to practice (166). And yet, such
practices are more than individual virtue or skills: parresia is always an
operation with two terms; parresia is something that plays out between
two partners (176). Within this swiftly sketched framework, Foucault
offers an ancient world littered with different truth-telling models Ion,
Plato, Socrates, Oedipus whose exemplary status remains tethered to
their institutional status within politics. Even as their personal biography
remains in tension with their public lives, these figures lack the ability to
rewrite the truth-telling game in which they are enmeshed. Their authorial status remains institutionally bound and over-written by Fate.
Such authorial status changes, and changes dramatically, as Foucault
moves through the writings of Seneca, Epictetus, and Epicurus writings complemented by the reciprocal exchanges of their students, including most notably Lucilius and Arrian. Suddenly, the cast of characters
changes, and moves away from the iconoclastic who either uphold a singular conception of truth (Plato) or rage against it (Oedipus). Instead,
truth-telling unfolds in a context at once collaborative and authorized by
a parrhesiastic pact between master and student. Where other modes of
truth-telling relied on expertise (legal, psychiatric, etc.), publicity (trials,
deliberation) or privileged access to truth (confession, psychoanalysis),

76 Nancy Luxon
parresias legitimacy lies elsewhere. Namely, it derives from the dynamics
of the encounter itself from both participants ability to author and be
compelled by a relationship to authority. Authority emerges out of the
parrhesiastic encounter itself, and in a manner that does not reduce to
consent or obedience.
With parresia, then, Foucault finds a way to return to these relationships of authority that is predicated neither on a basis of expertise nor
on some authority external to human community (such as tradition, custom, religion, or nature) nor on the equality of persons. Instead, parresia
is linked to the exercise of a personal power and strongly inegalitarian
structure (167). It forces adherents to consider what in the relationship
prevents position from over-writing speech and vulnerability. It relies on
parrhesiastic students ability to search, test, and then think alongside another. Again, the contrast between such asymmetric interactions and those
of confession is striking and unexpected. This shift from the Louvain
lectures and those at Grenoble, Berkeley and later Paris, traces the emergence of a new model for subject-formation, and one with a different
relation to truth. In my earlier work, Ive argued that Foucaults lectures
from 1981-84 offer a model for a relational, expressive mode of subjectivity; here, I will only present the encounters broad contours in order to
sketch how legitimation emerges from (rather than prior to) the encounter8.
Namely, the first movement of parresia the search [recherche] for a speaker
considered as truthful confronts the question of power. The conditions
of parresia include an asymmetry of power; yet, for Arrian to trust that
Epictetus speaks truthfully rather than out of fear, self-interest, or from
a desire to flatter, the relationship must be structured so as to enable the
interpretive competence of both speakers: there is an art of speaking,
there is a competence in listening (177). Both parties must be prepared to
take on the challenges of the relationship, and to endure its contest. The
second movement concerns the subsequent testing [preuve] of the truthtellers authority. Foucault invokes conditions of risk to test the strength
of the truth-tellers claims and the conviction behind those claims: one
must continue to test him, in order to see if he has the necessary severity
(179). Mutual vulnerability becomes less a condition to overcome than a
reminder of the stakes of the encounter. Risk also deepens the encounters psychological dimension by playing on the hopes and fears of both
8

N. Luxon, Crisis of Authority, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2013.

Autority, Interpretation and the Space of the Parrhesiastic Encounter 77

participants the affects that allow the contents of speech to reverberate and be felt from within. Finally, with the third movement of parresia,
Foucault seeks a congruence what he sometimes terms care in other
moments9 between student and teacher (180), one that consolidates the
conditions in which the discourse of the other to act over me (168), a
peculiar phrase to which Ill return in the next section. Where moderns
usually turn to the scientist, the legal expert, or the revolutionary (and
where ancients turn to the prophet, seer, or sage)10, parresia holds out the
promise for a relationship whose authority does not come from beyond
human community. Rather than invoking Bible, nature, or science, parrhesiastic partners establish the conditions of truth-telling that will govern
the exchanges to follow.
Parresia thus offers a pact that, to use Foucaults language from What is
Critique?, is governed by a reflective indocility rather than obedience or a
consent legitimated by external authority11. If in What is Critique? Foucault
asked, How does meaning [sens] arise from nonmeaning [nonsens]?12 then
parresia will thus develop through the emission of signs in one direction
[sens] or another, now on the side of the disciple, now the side of the master (178). With this attention to the exchange of signs, Foucault suggests
a primary difference from confession or the avowal. That its participants
compose the relationship, determine its severity, and assess its adequacy
means that the parrhesiastic pair collaborate on its principled orientation
and its very experience. They sculpt the context of engagement through
three tools metron (measure), kairos (opportunity), and sygkrasis (blendBoth care and eros play a more prominent role in the first January 6, 1982 lecture
of The Hermeneutics of the Subject. By May 1982, Foucault appears to have narrowed the
focus to a relationship that precedes in despite of asymmetry, rather than one that draws
on care or love to contextualize and affectively soften these asymmetries. Indeed, in the
course summary for The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault writes: In the first and second centuries, the relation to the self is always seen as having to rely on the relationship
with a master, a guide, or anyway someone else. But the need for this relationship was
increasingly independent of the love relationship M. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the
Subject, trans. G. Burchell, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2005, p. 496.
10
Foucault considers these figures and distinguishes parresia from their speech on
several occasions, including The Government of Self and Others, trans. G. Burchell, Palgrave
Macmillan, Basingstoke 2011, p. 69.
11
M. Foucault, What is Critique?, in What is Enlightenment?, ed. J. Schmidt, University
of California Press, Berkeley 1996, p. 386.
12
Ibidem, p. 389.
9

78 Nancy Luxon
ing) that modulate speech so that its not the violent, interpellating
speech of polemic, but instead crafted with an eye towards timing, circumstances, and reciprocity (174-175). Parrhesiastic practices search out
chance opportunities both in a strategic intervention into the political
field as well as in a political dramatics that can sustain such speech. A year
later, Foucault will characterize parresia as that space which serves as the
hinge between politeia and dynasteia, between the problem of the law and
the constitution on the one hand and the problem of the political game on
the other13. Where governmental techniques intervened to manage individual souls and spirituality, to render them congruent with social reality,
the art of parresia now draws on the negotiated exchange between student
and truth-teller. The two collaborate on the expression of a shared language, context and understanding. Foucaults model of parresia resonates
obviously with Kants What is Enlightenment?, although Foucault will not
make this direct connection until the following year. In parresia, as in Kantian Aufklrung, knowledge and experience exist in ceaseless tension and
contradiction. Caught as humans are between the sensible and the intelligible, they find themselves confronted with the hermeneutic challenge of
working with ambivalent signs and limited understanding. Uncertainty and
risk will forever be the condition of knowledge.
In contrast to the truth-telling scenes that push authority beyond
their borders, the parrhesiastic encounter begins with questions about the
world and its conceptual organization that knowledge and politics make
possible. It differs remarkably from avowal in two ways. First, the parrhesiastic encounter demonstrates a markedly different relationship to norms
and convention; rather than demanding that its participants stipulate and
conform to a pre-determined norms, the parties involved choose negotiate the norms to organize their encounter. In this sense, parresia is expressive of a relationship to norm and convention, rather than of individuality or obedience14. And second, parresia differs from avowal through its
management of asymmetries. In formalizing the dynamics of avowal,
Foucault describes avowal as a verbal act through which the subject affirms who he is, binds himself to this truth, places himself in a relationM. Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, p. 159.
Foucault reiterates this point in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, p. 218. For longer
reflection on this distinction, see D. Owen and C.M. Woodford, Foucault, Cavell and the
Government of Self and Others. On Truth-Telling and an Ethics of Democracy, in Iride, vol. 66
(2012), no. 2, pp. 299-316.
13
14

Autority, Interpretation and the Space of the Parrhesiastic Encounter 79

ship of dependence with regard to another, and modifies at the same time
his relationship to himself 15. Unlike in parresia, with avowal we de-couple
the assertion from the act of truth-telling; avowals relationships of dependency are deeply disjunctive and lodge subjects firmly within the logic
of representation. Instead, parresia exemplifies that peculiar kind of asymmetrical relationship in which persons retain their freedom. Its commitments are to the relationship itself (rather than personal charisma, office,
or a given regime of truth), and to the paradoxical task of cultivating the
exercise of liberty from within an asymmetric relationship. Echoing the
critical project of the art of not being governed so much16 or in this
way, the resulting parrhesiastic relationship is neither organized in relation
to some external source (such as nature, culture, tradition, religion, etc.)
nor over-written the asymmetry in power that separates its participants.
Instead, authority comes to be something negotiated, authored, and authorized by the two participants involved.
And so La Parrsia crystallizes a commitment to a truth-telling that is
not only or even primarily one of philosophic critique but one that unfolds
between persons and, in its first moments, not obviously as part of politics,
but rather more off to the side. Parresias asymmetrical relationships offer a context in which to disaggregate and analyze those practices that bind
trust, truth-telling, and authority. By offering relationships of authority not
over-determined by power or an existing regime of truth, Foucault can explore the conditions that educate students (on terms of their own choosing)
rather than produce them (on the terms of another). Individuals are no
longer passive subjects of injury, but rather their selfhood emerges from
their ability to risk authority themselves. By risk authority I mean that
individuals exercise the capacity to risk the authorship of their own words
and deeds, despite uncertainties of context and consequence. Risk becomes
not a generic quality of circumstance but part of a structural dynamic that
sets these relations to symbolic authorities apart from others more quotidian. Instead of the automatic, presumptive valorization of innovation, or
the prudential move towards risk management, parresia re-attaches risk to
the shrewdness of deliberate claim and strategy. More than a philosophic
approach to authoring and reading texts, such interpretive authority enables
us to read and authorize the political context in which we find ourselves.
15
16

M. Foucault, Wrong-doing, Truth-telling, p. 17.

M. Foucault, What is Critique?, p. 384.

80 Nancy Luxon
Undoubtedly, the preoccupations with the trust and truth-telling that
compose authority struck Foucaults audience as odd the contrast to
the work on avowal is jarring. This contrast also reminds, however, that
something is being flattened: the complexities of social relationships, the
imperfections of their reproduction, the flux of the world. What might
it mean to seize hold of these and direct their movements? In a political
context fixated on power, practices of trust and truth-telling would seem
to have no clear place. And indeed, in the modern western world claims to
trust and truth- telling claims that would normally sustain the legitimacy
of authority have become empty markers, mere veiled invocations of
power. Where trust generally sustains social interactions in the face of
generational change, unpredictability, and despite the momentary ruptures
from the occasional broken promise or betrayal, it permits us to regulate
attachments broadly speaking. Irreducible to simple instrumentalism, trust
smooths over the uncertainties of exchange by reminding those involved
that trusting behaviors enable them to pursue other shared values of community. For trust to achieve this effect, individuals need to be able to regulate not just attachment but claims to speak truthfully. Absent such trust,
an approach to politics in terms of power could draw on the clarifying
force of contest. Where a contestatory politics relies on the stark potency
of claim-making, not all political exchanges are or ought be adversarial nor
can they always rely on fair rules of the game to adjudicate contest. Cultivating a politics rich in texture and generative in project requires equally
cultivating political strategies of negotiation, imagination, revision, and
critique. To reduce truth claims to power is to truncate the potential for
an ethical cultivation of person or community. As practices of trust and
truth-telling become eviscerated through suspicion, it becomes impossible
to speak meaningfully about authority, the process of legitimation, or even
the collective of political community. Losing the vocabulary of authority
narrows the possible relationships for ruling and being ruled into ones of
simple command and obedience.
Composing New Spaces Through Speech
If the last section emphasized the distinction between philosophic
critique and parresia as a political relationship, the effect is to call attention not to epistemological uncertainties, but the political uncertainties

Autority, Interpretation and the Space of the Parrhesiastic Encounter 81

of context and the potential for relations of trust to counter these.

Foucaults project certainly seeks to explain, contra Habermas and others,
how an ethical disposition that arises situationally rather than in relation
to transcendental norm, could nonetheless have normative content. If
Habermas relies on the presence of experts in a public sphere to generate political debate with normative effect, then Foucault turns to the
parrhesiastic relationship to organize practices of truth-telling. Even so,
the Habermasian framework still possesses one clear advantage: its reliance on the public sphere explains how such normative claims can extend
beyond personal relationships. Foucault cannot be unaware of the importance of the public sphere, as demonstrated by his consistent engagement with Kant and with Kants reading public, and his own forays into
his journalistic writing (through interviews, editorials, and public statements). Nonetheless, his work on avowal and expertise across disciplinary
contexts indicates a skepticism that its publicity can withstand the effects
of institutionalization. What emerges incipiently in La Parrsia and more
broadly across the lectures from 1982-84, is a return to Kant by rethinking the conditions of publicity and without automatically reading this as a
public sphere. At the very least, such publicity conditions how individuals
might evaluate events by searching for a historical sign [at once] signum
rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognostikon17. More importantly, however,
for parrhesiastic relationships to play out in a politically and ethically robust manner, participants need to trust that these engagements and pacts
will find a context to sustain them. By hinting at the agitations that move
in and beyond persons, and the space of liberty that surrounds parresia,
the Grenoble lecture pushes readers to inquire into the contexts or communities opened up by frank speech.
With these concerns about space and publicity in mind, what might
we see in returning to La Parrsia? Re-entering the essay, the contrast to
confession, or exomologesis, reads differently. If confession amounts to the
performance or externalization of faults and sins so as to make these legible, then the obligation to say everything is an invitation to express all
of the movements of his thought, all the movement of his desire or of
his concupiscence (159). It treats the movement, the agitation of spirit
and seeks to restore the thread of discourse which is, in principle, continuous (159). From its first definitions, parresia captures something of
17

I. Kant, Conflict of the Faculties, in Kants Political Writings, p. 181.

82 Nancy Luxon
the restlessness of curiosity, desire, and discourse, and the movement of
these across the simultaneous threshold of personality and public. These
movements of thought and desire also seem to break with the preoccupations with psychiatry in penal, psychoanalytic, and psychiatric settings that
characterize Foucaults work on truth-telling as avowal or testimony18.
With Euripides, the space and mode of parresia is political; speech
remains tightly connected to citizenship and the rights that make political speech possible. Ion and Hippolytus dwell on the speech of citizenship,
while The Phoenicians contrasts such free and frank speech with the constraints of dependency. In The Bacchants, then, the strain between freely
speaking and dependent position come to a head, as a servant receives
permission to deliver bad news despite lacking such rights by citizenship.
Commenting on this tension between the constraint of position and the
urgency of truth Foucault concludes:
You see appear something that will have, I think, much importance [] the
theme of engagement, of the parrhesiastic pact: he who is the strongest and he
who is the master open a space of liberty, a space for the right of speech, to he
who is not the master and who asks to speak, to say a truth, a truth that may hurt
he who is master [] (163).

The Bacchants suggests the possibility for free speaking to map imperfectly onto right, and the space of liberty and frank speech that might
emerge from within this tension.
Shifting to Plato, Foucault finds a similar set of dynamics governing
truth-telling practices in the Laws and the Republic: in what circumstances
might truth-telling strain those distinctions between he who is strongest,
and he whose mastery of frank speech organizes a different asymmetry?
For all that parresia might be read pejoratively as the chatter of the democratic city (as in the Republic), it was also central to binding liberty, friendship and community in monarchies such as that of Cyrus (Book III, Laws).
The penal psychiatry present in Foucaults lectures for The Will to Know remained
muted in Discipline and Punish, arguably so as to emphasize the impersonality of techniques of discipline and surveillance. For all that Subjectivity and Truth, as well as the lectures at the Universit de Louvain, open with scenes from 19th century French psychiatry,
this framework becomes dropped. Instead, the preoccupation with Kant and Aufklrung
present in What is Critique? operates in the background of La Parrsia and opens the next
set of Collge de France lectures, The Government of Self and Others.
18

Autority, Interpretation and the Space of the Parrhesiastic Encounter 83

In a manner that Foucault finds akin to Isocrates, the challenge of distinguishing flatterers from frank speakers necessitates that the monarch
leaves about himself a space of liberty where the others will be able to
speak and to give him reflective counsel (164). Such spaces come to render less provisional and more connected to governance that space opened
by Callicles after his his first, noisy entrance in the Gorgias (165). If the
rhetor Gorgias is associated with figures that suggest some kind of simulated movement trope, or turn; metaphor, or transfer; apostrephein, or a turning away then Callicles connects this movement more crudely to force.
If the sweep of Callicles as he enters and his sycophants flutter about him
sketches the space of rhetoric, then Socrates differently makes contact
with other souls by serving as a touchstone [pierre de touche] for those in
search of therapy. Euripides and Plato thus mark different sites for the
action and movement of parresia.
By virtue of its connections to these practical spaces, parresia can suggest something different, according to Foucault. Such spaces not only offer
protection and quite literally a hearing they differently challenge what
Foucault will term later in the essay the art of speaking and the competence in listening (177). Between speaker and auditor opens up the space
of figuration. These contexts quite literally make room for a figure of
thought that is a non-figure, that is the zero figure [figure zro], the one that
augments the listeners emotions (166)19. These contexts conjure up the
shadowy contours of something that may later take representational form,
but whose symbolic resonance presently remains open to shaping and interpretation. In contrast to rhetoric, parresia is characterized by a liberty
of form (174). In this symbolic sense, such spaces differ markedly not
just from rhetoric, but also from the distorted representations externalized
through confession or from those representations that will later be debated
and sanctioned by an 18th century Kantian public. Instead, parresia touches
directly the soul of the interlocutor and has the potential to re-orient the
direction of conscience. That Foucault associates these earlier forms of
parresia with la chaire (167) meaning alternately the pulpit or the university chair from which a speaker speaks suggests his association of its
practice with those that formatively touch on subjects. Less directively, parresia orients the student towards his place in the world (173).
Foucaults comment resonates with Barthes in Writing Degree Zero, a resonance I
explore at greater length in Crisis of Authority.
19

84 Nancy Luxon
Indeed, in turning to Epictetus and Galen, Foucault explains, I would
like to take on another practical context which is neither that of rhetoric
nor of politics but one of conscience. With this new domain emerges, I
would argue, the question of where, in what site, might the direction of conscience unfold? On the one hand, shelter is a common metaphor for reflections on soul, spirit, or self20. Shelter stands in for the organization and
housing for those internal spaces we can only see metaphorically. On the
other hand, such a question resonates with modern practices in interesting
ways. Much earlier, Foucault had argued that Freuds genius was to remove
psychological interactions from the clinic or hospital, and to relocate them
into a dyadic encounter between doctor and patient21. Only a year earlier,
in the Louvain lectures on avowal, Foucault recounted a clinical encounter
between a patient and a psychiatrist, Dr. Leuret. The account concludes,
He was not at all attempting to persuade the patientHe wanted a specific act, an affirmation22. The encounter was both beside the point and
crucial to establishing Leurets authority; it introduced a mediating third
voice between knowledge (Leuret) and power (the prefect). Perhaps such
thoughts echo in Foucaults suggestion that philosophic practice is like
the care of the self, then if the care of the self needs the other, and the
discourse of the author, what is the essential character of this discourse of
the other envisioned as act, as an action over me? Such a question invites
a different participation of others, one whose presence is irreducible and
a necessity for any care or reflection yet one whose influence over me
(sur moi) might be the not-so-light impress of conscience or super-ego (in
French, super-ego is rendered as sur-moi). What conditions might enable
such an action over me to not be one over and against me?
To answer this question, Foucault turns to Seneca, Epictetus, Plutarch and Galen and to texts in which the movements and circulations
of speech broaden to complicate those between subsequent reader and
originary author. Foucault returns to the movement of thought cited
earlier as testimony of the restlessness irreducible to, perhaps uncaptured
by, confession23. In reading the Interviews of Epictetus, Foucault unfolds a
Foucault calls attention to this metaphor in his discussions of Seneca in The
Hermeneutics of the Subject, p. 213.
21
M. Foucault, History of Madness, trans. J. Murphy, Routledge, New York 2006.
22
M. Foucault, Wrong-doing, Truth-telling, p. 12.
23
A longer discussion of movements of the self and their contrast to the metanoia
or conversion associated either earlier with Plato or later with Christianity, can be found
in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, pp. 212-218.
20

Autority, Interpretation and the Space of the Parrhesiastic Encounter 85

multi-layered context that moves from the published Interviews back to the
notes taken by the student Arrian, to Epictetuss movement in thought
articulated through his movement of speech. To hold together both the
movement and form of truth-telling, Arrian decides to publish, to deliver
to the public, the notes that he took (169). These notes thus have their
own internal movement and form; they are pushed outwards towards a
public; a movement that permits them to be renewed, and ceaselessly
reflected upon [] to read them [] to act on them. If Arrian hopes to
capture an internal dialectic between thought and articulation, then when
extended to a new public, this dialectic presses its restless movement between thought and speech towards action. If such a movement in other
contexts may risk becoming solipsistic, then parresia thus appears as being in rupture here where it neglects the forms of rhetoric and writing
[] parresia is an action, it is that which acts, which allows discourse to
act directly on souls (170). As parresia abandons the usual forms or topoi
of rhetoric, it takes on a different topos of its own. It quite literally carves
out the space of enunciation moving from meletan (meditation, re-animation), graphein (writing), and gymnazein (action) from within an existing
regime of truth (169). In this way, parresia demands that the speaker use
his freedom not to sway another but to risk a declarative statement of his
own a statement that tests the boundaries of the games rules rather than
reproducing those rules and his own authority.
Present throughout this process are mechanisms of transparency and
publicity quite different from those that later come to be associated with
the Kantian and Habermasian public spheres. Where Kant argues that
publicity ought further the conflict between conflicting interpretations
of practical reason in ceaseless search for the more purely intelligible,
Habermas will later interpret such conditions as a deliberation oriented towards normative consensus. The restlessness and violence of the former
becomes sublimated into public reason. On Foucaults reading, however,
parrsia becomes something other than the rational disputation over contents of claims. In dispensing with the usual rhetorical forms that encase
content, parrsia intervenes more radically as an action, as something that
allows discourse to act directly on souls (170). Parrsia becomes a sort
of coupling, or transparency between discourse and the movement of
thought (170). Differently from some kind of common sense that might
also act over me, one in which the speaker seeks to persuade that he

86 Nancy Luxon
represents the audience, parresia grounds its speakers in their ability to give
value to an utterance that bypasses this representative voice altogether.
Turning back to the receiver, such listening challenges what might be considered more flat-footedly as a public sphere, and instead seeks to regain
the sense of novelty prompted by happening upon Kants newspaper article. Foucaults parresia relies on an audience capable of receiving, working with, working over a set of claims not yet settled into representative
form. It seeks to cultivate an audience capable of wielding an interpretive
authority that would make this audience into a site of authorization.
Effectively, then, these spiritual practices permit Foucault to break
with the representational practices that anchor confession as a production
of the subject of desire. The practices he traces back to ancient parresia
touch on the soul, and the movement between the internal and external
conditions of truth-telling, but with a resolute focus on the movement
that opens up a new (provisional) space between student and parresiastes.
Such spatialization makes the risk that organizes the relationship between
student and parresiastes something more than a validation of sincerity or
ethical stakes. Both the undoing of the usual manner of subjectification
and the self-cultivation of parresia arise from the willingness to risk a mode
of existence an existence that holds in place representations. Although
undoing the force of these representations and undertaking a project of
self-cultivation are analytically distinct, these two processes are deeply entwined in practice. Both the scope and the stability of any world-making
project that is to follow will depend on the strength of the parrhesiastic
pact and the space in which it unfolds especially when the person speaking is one who is imperfect, faltering, and en route towards a changed state.
Not only does the space sculpted by parresia contour what is to follow,
it also sediments an analytic framework of thought and traces its movement towards worldly presence. It underscores the need for some kind of
containing space necessary in order for someone to make their words and
deeds consonant. Differently from philosophic critique, and not yet settled into the proxy form of an institutionalized public, parresia as a practice
relies heavily on the social trust that binds its practitioners. It requires such
trust so that persons can speak frankly and bluntly, all the while trusting
that they address an audience ready to receive their words.

Autority, Interpretation and the Space of the Parrhesiastic Encounter 87

Conclusion: Governance and the Control of Representations

By the end of The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault returns to the
question of representations, and considers the control of representations
urged by Epictetus.24 Epictetus would have his students be like the nightwatchman or the money-changer, who differently monitor the circulations
of persons and things with value. Foucault ends his course summary, written in 1982 and likely before the Grenoble lecture, by advocating the ability
to control representations as the limits of that contradiction that tension
between critique and struggle, or right and force that composes the life
of the critical person and reaches its apogee in the evaluation made just before death. That Foucault should invoke the night-watchman, the moneychanger, and elsewhere the scout is suggestive. Each of these figures regulate circulations of different kinds the ways in which persons, money, and
armies move across borders and boundaries and presides over thresholds
that determine what is inside or outside a polis, what is inside or outside a
person. These figures trace these movements, modulate them even, but do
not coordinate them. The question of what social institutions might intervene in the space opened by parresia returns with urgency.
Foucaults comments some four years earlier in What is Critique?
ended on a provocative note. Foucault suggests that one might seek the
opposite path from the route that led from critical attitude to the question of critique, from engagement to resolution of the contradictions
besetting an imperfect politics. He asks, would one not now have to try
to take the inverse path to the movement that tipped the critical attitude
into the question of critique And if it is necessary to pose the question
of knowledge [connaissance] in its relation to domination, it would be first
and foremost on the basis of a certain decisive will not to be governed
25 Foucault suggests that too readily, the questioning of Aufklrung becomes coopted into the project of critique and preoccupation with the
legitimate destination of knowledge26. What if, instead, this questioning were to refuse such stabilization and instead renew its questioning of
emergent forms of domination? Foucault turns to eventialization as a
way to gain insight into the forms that over-write the contents of daily
M. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, p. 503.
M. Foucault, What is Critique?, p. 398.
26
Ibidem.
24
25

88 Nancy Luxon
practices27. Might we press harder and ask: What different events might
such a project compose and make intelligible, from which ensembles of
practices and techniques, and which audiences would test it?
At the end of The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault more decisively
concludes on a note of invigorated practice. He gestures towards the social institutions that support something like parrsia: the school, the clinic,
the family, and friendship28. It is difficult to imagine Foucault uncritically
embracing any of these institutions in their modern form; after all, institutional extension was critical to making avowal into a relationship of
dependence29. One might differently ask, however, that if these are the
social forms that condition our symbolic imaginary, what would it mean
to inhabit them critically? At the very least, such habitation suggests attention to the nexus of knowledge, power, and social relationships. It
also suggests a more lingering attention to any undoing or letting-go of
already-existing investments in these social forms, the identities they stabilize, and the truths they delimit. But should people attempt the kind of
speech that evokes the zero figure of representation, can and ought
they remain within these forms? Which might be abandoned, revised, or
radicalized? And more pressingly: how can these discourses remain open
to those whose status is not (yet) sanctioned by order?
Such questions return to claims to knowledge and legitimation, not
with an eye towards certifying knowledge or resolving some legitimation
crisis. Instead, it asks how a certain kind of hermeneutics might be adapted
for more deliberate political effect or intervention. Much like the concept
of rule, authority often is associated with its ability to stand for the public
claim, and further carries with it an association to legitimacy. Who, though,
authors this public claim and by what process does it become authoritative? Although democratic authority is often taken to result from popular
activity, whether that activity is ever more than the endorsement of elite
authorization remains under-examined. Two dilemmas result. The first is
the inability to think about governance on terms other than subordination.
As a result, and second, it becomes impossible to think of authority as
anything other than the opposite of freedom. Both would seem to leave
intact the fantasy of liberation from authority, and so the presumption that
the popular experience of authority can never be more than obedience
Ibidem, p. 393 ff.
M. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, p. 497.
29
M. Foucault, Wrong-doing, Truth-telling, p. 18.
27
28

Autority, Interpretation and the Space of the Parrhesiastic Encounter 89

or rote authorization. Cued by this expected domination, these dilemmas

urge a fugitivity that is always a movement away from community and its
governance. Despite being figured as interruptions, these dilemmas leave
intact the political order or frame that binds dependency and freedom into
endless contradiction. Pressing beyond a static stance of evaluation or a
fantasy of flight, what other spaces and solidarities might differently organize the circulations of value re-oriented and re-activated by parresia?
Foucaults reflections on parresia do not offer an easy answer to these
questions posed. In the two years of lectures to follow at the Collge de
France, Foucault raises again these questions of the circulations of authority within a public audience and its intervention in any collective process
of valuation circulations in which power and value predominate. Even
in this brief lecture, Foucault has raised these questions without ignoring the presence of asymmetry and inequality. To work these ruminations
on parresia forward into our own present, we (as Foucaults own critics
and students) would need to show ourselves to be a reading public truly
skilled in the art of listening and the competence of listening. We would
need to press harder on the place for the market and those circulations of
capital that would commodify interpretive authority itself, along with a
news media only too quick to proliferate representations. If the challenge
to self-cultivation is the challenge of undoing earlier subject-formations
even as one seeks to form oneself on new terms, then the challenge for
politics is to dismantle the architecture of existing political spaces so as to
contrive new settlements. But haunting both of these projects is a more
searching question of value and valuation. From the 19th century onwards,
the ethical canopy of utilitarian instrumentality has proven to be a tensile
and adaptable one in western societies. For either of these two projects to
have radical effect, they would need to find sustenance in values that sustain their expressive dimension values often at odds with the foresight
and calculability of utility. Otherwise, the risks of parresia will continue to
be an attribute of manageable populations rather than the trace of new
claims, relationships, and ways of living.
Nancy Luxon
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
luxon@umn.edu

90 Nancy Luxon

.
Authority, Interpretation and the Space of the Parrhesiastic Encounter
With the newly available lecture, La Parrsia, originally given in 1982 at lUniversit de Grenoble, Foucault examines the constraints that enable speakers to
elaborate and test new political claims. La Parrsia serves as a hinge between Foucaults earlier work on the production of truth through confession, and his turn
to modes of truth-telling in the ancient world. The speech of contest and law
relies on pre-specified rules and procedures rules that ostensibly protect from
the vulnerable from domination, even as the expertise that governs these rules
only reproduces political injuries and asymmetries. By contrast, the speech of
parresia draws from the irreducible relationship between parresiastes and student
and the political context it composes. Differently from Foucaults other lectures
on ancient ethics, I argue La Parrsia sketches a space of freedom and truthtelling quite different from the pulpit, the clinic, the law court, or the Kantian
public sphere.
Keywords: Foucault, Parresia, Power, Speech, Authority, Kant, Public.