EVENT DETAILS

Etienne Balibar Mini Seminar "Speak Truth to Power: Transgression and Resistance in Foucault's Theory of Discourse"

Monday and Wednesday, May 6th and 8th , 2013, Humanities Gateway 1030; 4:00 – 6:00 p.m.
(Alternating with J. H. Miller; a common concluding session will take place on May 10th)

"Speak truth to power: transgression and resistance in Foucault's theory of discourse"


The seminar aims at reading, interpreting, and relating to contemporary debates the theory of “fearless speech” (or parrèsia), based on a close reading of Greek texts of philosophy, tragedy, and history, that he proposed in his lectures at Berkeley and the College de France in his last two years before his death (1983-1984) and left unfinished. They form his final attempt at problematizing the articulation of philosophy and politics, albeit through a detour to the ancient corpus, which unsettled many readers.

A partial version (already useful) was published by Joseph Pearson on the basis of the Berkeley classes as Fearless Speech (now reprinted by Semiotexte, 2001). The (more useful) complete version is to be found in two volumes of the “Lectures at the College de France” : The Government of Self and Others (edited by Arnold J. Davidson, translated by Graham Burchell, Picador, 2011), and The Courage of Truth (edited by Arnold J. Davidson, translated by Graham Burchell, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011), whose reading is encouraged.

In the first session, the seminar will closely follow the text, to describe the historical hypothesis that it contains (a transition from the “political” meaning of parrèsia, linked to the institution and practice of democracy, or isonomia, to the “philosophical” meaning, linked to the constitution of the figure of the subject as practicing the care of the self, or epimeleia heautou) and the corresponding oppositions between polar ethical types, from which Foucault derives a splitting of the discourses of “truth telling” (or veridiction). It will also discuss the “method” for the understanding of such types which Foucault calls “dramatization”, rejecting the idea of performative action of discourse. Finally it will discuss the relationship between the analysis of ancient parrèsia and the problem of modern critique, which seems to involve a new synthesis of the political and the philosophical “lost” since ancient times.

In the first session, the seminar will continue the discussion of critique in terms of “speaking truth to power” (an expression borrowed from Edward Said, who himself explicitly referred to Foucault), trying to trace back the polarity in Foucault’s work of two major forms of “counter-conduct” in the realm of public discourse: transgression and resistance, which involve antithetic relations to truth, subject, and power. It will refer as much as possible to Foucault’s own illustrations of such discourses (with respect to prisons, “dissident” movements in totalitarian regimes, or the “spiritual insurrection” that he believed to find in the Iranian Revolution), but also interpret the antithesis as such, with the help of more of less developed comparisons to such authors as Leo Strauss (Persecution and the Art of Writing), Maurice Blanchot (“Insurrection, the Madness of writing”, on Marquis de Sade, in The Infinite Conversation), Edward Said (Representations of the Intellectual), and Judith Butler (The Psychic Life of Power, Excitable Speech, Giving an Account of Oneself). Some of the referred texts will be provided as Printouts).