Truth telling in Foucault and Arendt: parrhesia, the pariah and academics in dark times

Abstract

In this paper, I consider the problem of truth telling through the notion of parrhesia as developed and explicated in Foucault’s last lectures at the College de France (1982–1983 and 1983–1984) and the figure of the pariah that runs throughout Arendt’s work. In tracing connections and tensions in the way the two thinkers explore questions and dilemmas around the courage to tell the truth in philosophy and politics, I look into the current climate within the UK academia, where there is a lot of ambivalence about whether people mean what they say or say what they mean anymore. In a Foucauldian mode of inquiry, I raise the question: what is the role of the academic when going through ‘dark times’, vis-à-vis questions of truth telling; what are the conditions of possibility for truth telling itself to be recognised as a question or a problem and how can we start mapping the effects of what we as academics do or refrain from doing?

Keywords:

• Arendt
• academics in dark times
• Foucault
• parrhesia
• pariah

Notes

1. Blücher to Jaspers, 5 September 1961 in Arendt–Jaspers (1993, 451).

2. Arendt met Blücher (1899–1970) in Paris; they were both exiled and stateless Germans fleeing Nazism. They got married in Paris, shortly before they fled together to New York in 1941. Blücher took several manual jobs as a non-speaking English immigrant in New York, before he started teaching at the New English School for Social Research and later at Bard College in the 1950s. Apart from some reviews, he never published but after his death Arendt arranged for his lectures at Bard to be transcribed with a publication project in mind. Arendt died unexpectedly in 1975 and Blücher’s lectures were never published, but they can be accessed today at the Blücher Archive at Bard College: http://www.bard.edu/bluecher/lectures/index.htm.

3. Ibid., 452.

4. Villa (1992) has considered affinities and tensions between Foucault’s conceptualisation of power and the Arendtian configuration of the public sphere; Tully (1999) has considered Foucault and Arendt alongside Wittgestein and Skinner in reconsidering citizenship, freedom and democratic participatory politics; Allen (2002) has traced affinities in Foucault’s and Arendt’s theorisation of power, agency and subjectivity, arguing in particular that the two thinkers’ different take on power is complementary rather than oppositional in the constitution of subjectivity and agency and Stivers (2004) has drawn connections between Arendt’s notion of ‘vigilant partiality’ and the Foucauldian notion of parrhesia, while Braun (2007) has explored correlations between temporality in Arendt and modern biopolitics in Foucault.

5. I refer here of course to Heidegger’s political behaviour and particularly his brief endorsement of Nazism in 1933, which Arendt herself has publicly criticised (1994, 187, n. 2), despite her later generosity in forgetting and forgiving. For the Arendt–Heidegger relationship see Arendt and Heidegger (2004), Ettinger (1995) and Maier-Katkin (2010).

6. Arendt to Heidegger, 28 October 1960, not sent, Hannah Arendt Literary Trust.

7. For an overview of Heidegger’s influence on Foucault, see amongst others, Milchman and Rosenberg (2003) and Elden (2001). See also Hinchman and Hinchman (1984) for an excellent discussion of Heidegger’s influence on Arendt’s thought.

8. Foucault’s complimentary thesis was submitted to the University of Paris, Sorbonne in 1961 and published in 1964, but was only translated in English in 2007 (Foucault 2007).

9. See Foucault (2010, 6–39), see also Foucault (1984).

10. The essay ‘What is Enlightenment’ was written in September 1784 and was published in December in the German journal Berlinische Monatschrift. All three Kant’s essays that Foucault discusses are included in Reiss’ edited collection of Kant’s Political Writings (2011).

11. In her posthumously published Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, first given at the New School for Social Research in the 1970 Fall semester, Arendt discusses at length Kant’s views on the French Revolution, particularly referring to Kant’s The Contest of the Faculties (Part II, Sections 6 and 7) and Perpetual Peace (Appendix II). See Arendt (1982, sessions, 7–11, 40–68).

12. For a detailed discussion of the etymology and a literary genealogy of parrhesia, see Foucault (2011).

13. In the mythic plot of the play, Kreusa, daughter of the king of Athens Erectheus was seduced or raped by Apollo when she was a young girl; she gave birth secretly and abandoned the infant. Under the orders of Apollo, Hermes rescued Ion and safely carried him to Delphi to grow up in the holly atmosphere of the temple. Later in life Kreusa visits the temple with her husband Xouthos, who is a foreigner in Athens, albeit king of the city through his marriage with the princess. The royal couple wants to know whether they will ever have a child and Apollo’s answer to Xouthos is that he already has one, the first man he will meet on leaving the oracle and of course this man turns out to be Ion. After certain misunderstandings Xouthos presents himself to Ion as his father and asks him to go to Athens with him and eventually become his heir. Ion hesitates: how can he rule a city, if he is a foreigner? He needs to know who his mother is.

14. See Foucault (2011), end of lecture four till lecture eight (61–147). The notion of parrhesia was also the theme of six lectures at Berkeley in the fall of 1983, given as part of Foucault’s seminar ‘Discourse and Truth’ (Foucault 2001).

15. These four modalities of truth-telling and their corresponding figures are discussed in the very first lecture of the 1984 course (2011, 1–31).

16. As Thomas Flynn has noted, the four roles in truth-telling can coexist or overlap in one person, they are not mutually exclusive (1991, 104).

17. See Gros’ commentary on these debates in contextualizing the 1982–1983 course (Foucault 2010, 390, n. 39).

18. See Foucault (2010), Lectures on 12 January, 9 February, particularly the section on Plato’s political autobiography, (2010, 212–9) and 23 February 1984.

19. See Young-Bruehl (1982), particularly Chapter 5, 164–73.

20. Jaspers to Arendt, 19 October 1964 (Arendt-Jaspers 1993, 572).

21. For references to the ‘interesse’ in Arendt’s work, see inter alia, the Human Condition (1998, 182) and Men in Dark Times (1968, 31).

22. See amongst others Strathern (2000), Morley (2003), Olssen and Peters (2005), Archer (2008), Ball and Exley (2010), Holmwood (2011) and Peters (2011).

23. The role of the intellectual has of course a genealogy of its own, which goes back to Plato, but its exploration goes beyond the limits of this essay.

24. See amongst others, Ball (2006) and Unterhalter and Carpentier (2010).

25. I refer here of course to Herman Melville’s well-known story: Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.

26. See Ball (2006) for an overview of his overall work on academic performativity.

27. See Matthew Reisz’s article ‘Whither Art: Vanity is killing social sciences and the Humanities’ in Times Higher Education, 29 October 2009. See also Rustin and Rustin (2010).