foucault studies
© Fernando R. Zapata, 2005
ISSN: 1832-5203
Foucault Studies, No 2, pp. 150-153, May 2005空气中的主要成分
REVIEW结婚15年
Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech. Edited by Joph Pearson (Los Angeles, Ca.: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press, 2001). ISBN 1584350113
Both new and practiced readers of Michel Foucault are subject to the habitual cataloguing of his works in terms of trajectories, and might intuit Fearless Speech as a homogenously ethical piece becau of the trajectory of thought credited to Foucault in the 1980s. This ordering must be qualified. Perhaps it
is scholastically pragmatic to organize propensities in Foucault’s thinking by decade, as there are qualitative changes in theoretical content by time period, but this generates a risk for losing the potentialities of a work, in terms of how
it can be utilized in various spheres. Pigeonholing a project as stringently historical, scientific or ethical defeats Michel Foucault as a strategic philosopher and hijacks the indefatigable elasticity and prent-day pertinence that result from his continual adjustment of intellectual focus. It also restricts the ways in which his philosophical endeavors can be encountered, both conceptually and discursively. That his books greet us as philosophy, psychology, history, criminology, etc., speaks to his weight as a thinker. Fearless Speech reprents this intellectual juxtaposition as it bridges multiple Foucauldian phas thematically, at once historical and ethical.
Fearless Speech is the transliteration produced from tape recordings of a ries of six lectures that Michel Foucault gave at the University of California
at Berkeley in the Fall of 1983 as part of his minar, “Discour and Truth.” Edited into a readable and conci document by Joph Pearson, Fearless Speech captures critical, in veral ns of the word, aspects of Foucault’s late thought, and emphasizes the intellectual legacies that materialize in and via the corpus of his work. The textual topography of Fearless Speech is that of a colloquium, as it is a mostly verbatim copy of the talks, taken from the notes
of a Foucault auditor, and mirrors the candid style of a Foucault interview. One remarkable feature of
the book is the inclusion of actual respons to questions. The aesthetic element of the pro does not address the piece’s philosophical conquence as much as it implies it, considering this a text
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foucault studies, No 2, pp. 150-153
who conceptual axis is parrhesia, translated customarily as “free speech,”1 the central meaning of which is “frankness in speaking the truth.”2
The book is divided into four main ctions, unfortunately without an index for reference purpos, each ction with subdirectories that treat a comprehensive thesis regarding parrhesia in philosophic-literary contexts, with excerpts in particular from the tragedies of Euripides that underscore the rendezvous of Foucault’s thinking with classical philosophy toward the end of his life. In the introductory portion, Foucault systematically address dimensions of the definition of parrhesia, with the objective “to analyze how the truth-teller’s role was variously problematized in Greek philosophy” and how “this same Greek philosophy has also raid the question of truth from the point of view of truth-telling as an activity.”3 Such problematization is the unifying thread of the work. The concern with problematization, in general, alerts the reader as to which period in his life thi
s work is an addendum to, the final two decades of his prolific career. Foucault navigates the concept of parrhesia by means of this problematic, detailing how it is recognized by its characteristics in the relationship one has both to onelf and to others. The qualities of parrhesia are filtered through the notions of frankness, truth, danger, criticism, and duty as means of analyzing how the word “evolved” and influenced different dimensions of Greek society and culture. First, Foucault relates parrhesia to the parrhesiates, the “truth-teller,” directly to what he/she says, that he/she is “both the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciandum,” that he/she is “the subject of the opinion to which he refers.”4 In addition to parrhesia as such, this is a crucial element to contemplate for tho concerned with topics akin to critical discour analysis, in regards to the bearing of what is said in given contexts. Second, Foucault draws a comparison between “positive” and “pejorative” parrhesia, the pejorative echoing a type of logorrhea, e.g. flattery and coercion, and, as Foucault cites, the sort poisonous to democracy in Plato, whereas the positive entails a “coincidence between belief and truth,”5 a concord of sincere opinion, and the knowledge that this opinion is true. Drawing distinctions in this mode somewhat recalls the parallel of the positive/negative asceticism with respect to Foucault/Weber, mentioned in the interview The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom, and the positive/negative formulation of the ethos in What Is Enlightenment? It is not improbable to envisage positive parrhesia, a concordance of logos and bios, as an exerci of the lf enacted on the lf.
Third, parrhesia is identified as a risk, since “it demands the courage to speak
幼儿游戏教案Fearless Speech, ed. Joph Pearson (Los Angeles, CA.:
1 Michel
Foucault,
Semiotext(e)/MIT Press, 2001), 11.
Fearless Speech, 7.
2 Foucault,
Fearless Speech, 169.
3 Foucault,
Fearless Speech, 13.
4 Foucault,
Fearless Speech, 14.
5 Foucault,
151
Zapata: Review of Fearless Speech the truth in spite of some danger,”6 which positions the philosopher as the unambiguous dispenr of truth to power. The degree to which Foucault imagined himlf, and his philosophical tasks, as reflective of this facet of parrhesia can be gleaned from his lf-characterizations that appear in a number of localities. Fourth, parrhesia is cited as a “form of criticism, either towards another or towards onelf, but always in a situation where the speaker or confessor is in a position of inferiority with respect to the interlocutor,”7 conjuring up Foucault’s studies on confessions, their shifting roles, and their adoption in religious and legal institutions, but returns here to the trajectory of the techne tou biou, the art of life, where one negotiates their being-in-the-world with parrhesia in regards to how they sanction and ethically form themlves in the shadow of their milieu. And fifth, Foucault binds parrhesia to duty, where “to criticize a friend or a sovereign is an act of parrhesia insofar as it is a duty to help a friend who does not recognize his own wrongdoing, or insofar as it is his duty towards the city to help the king to bett
er himlf as a sovereign.”8The notion of duty as it disclod here is intimate with the aspects of governance in interpersonal relationships – with taking care – with respect to others and onelf that Foucault emphasized in the majority of writings in his “golden years.”
Four questions that illuminate the problematizing of parrhesia and allow a more distinct characterization than the aforementioned brief illustrations, are, in Foucault’s words, “who is able to tell the truth, about what, with what conquences, and with what relation to power.”9 Aspects of the four questions were earlier articulated in Power/Knowledge.10 However, the truth of Fearless Speech, that is, the prime rationale of the Berkeley minar, was to establish “a genealogy of the critical attitude in Western philosophy.”11 This divergence from the perceived ethical route of Foucault’s thought indicates a genealogist (perhaps elaborating the genealogy of truth that had its roots in Madness and Civilization12) operating in 1983 in tandem with an ethicist, evidence of the cond designation emerging in the evaluation of parrhesia as it developed in the care of the lf, “from the standpoint of its practices,”13which concludes the transcript. Since this is the ca, Fearless Speech can be situated, that is, read through – against – later essays such as 6 Foucault,
雷子炮
Fearless Speech, 16.
Fearless Speech, 17-18.
7 Foucault,
Fearless Speech, 19.
8 Foucault,
Fearless Speech, 170.
9 Foucault,
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977, ed.
Foucault,
10 Michel一直放臭屁
Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).
Fearless Speech, 170-171.
11 Foucault,
Foucault,
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason,
12 Michel
(New York: Vintage Books, 1988).
Fearless Speech, 107.
13 Foucault,
152
foucault studies, No 2, pp. 150-153
What Is Enlightenment? and Technologies of the Self, as well as in such interviews as On The Genealogy of Ethics, all in Esntial Works of Foucault1954-198414, volume 1, and perhaps also The History of Sexuality, volumes 2 and 3, The U of Pleasure15 and The Care of The Self16, respectively, volume 2 being where the telos of Foucault’s ethics, freedom, is central, and the free sp
eaker is en as the fearless speaker, speaking from moral obligation and not from fear of ridicule, torture, or death, where the chance for silence is prent. Volume three is his final work, treating the ways in which xuality is encountered in the West, substituting the concept of truth for x.
What is unmistakable about Fearless Speech is the arching description Foucault provides his audience of problematization and its relation to his philosophical enterpri. Foucault states that his desire is to demarcate “the history of ideas” and “the history of thought.” In this manuscript, Foucault, the tenacious historian of ideas, probes and clarifies how “practices, habits, and behavior become a problem,” while Foucault, the historian of thought, the problematizer, the philosopher under the profound influence of Nietzsche and Heidegger, asks how people “become anxious about this or that—for example, about madness, about crime, about x, about themlves, or about truth.”17 This is inadequate as a blanket summarization of his entire project, and to try to tender such a synopsis in a brief review would be futile. It is rather a reminder that his interdisciplinary impact and his inimitable role in philosophy challenge us to ask provocative questions about topics taken for granted, questions that drive our anxieties.
Fernando R. Zapata, Queens College, CUNY
14 Michel
Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Esntial Works of Michel Foucault 1954-Foucault,
1984, Volume I, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997).
The U of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Volume 2 (New York:炖鸡肉的做法
15 Michel
Foucault,
Vintage Books, 1990).
Foucault,
The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality Volume 3 (New York:
16 Michel
Vintage Books, 1988).
Fearless Speech, 74.
17 Foucault,乐游原古诗带拼音
心理学就业前景153
