The politics and gender of truth-telling in Foucaultșs lectures on parrhesia

This essay challenges dominant interpretations of Foucaultșs lectures on parrhesia as affirming an ethical, non-political conception of truth-telling. I read the lectures instead as depicting truth-telling as an always political predicament: of having to appear distant from power (to achieve credibility), while also having to partake in some sense of political power (to render oneșs truth significant). Read in this way, Foucaultșs lectures help us to understand and address the disputed politicality of truthtelling – over who counts as a truth-teller, and what counts as the truth – that his ethical interpreters tend to neglect. Yet the essay also shows that Foucaultșs depiction of the predicament of truth-tellers is problematically gendered: focused on the masculine problem of moving in and out of the public sphere, rather than on the experience of the dispossessed, who are excluded from political power altogether. The essay mobilizes an alternative reading of one of Foucaultșs key texts – Euripidesș Ion – to draw out an alternative, more democratic model of the predicament of truth-telling: of having to constitute power that can lend significant to truth-telling, while speaking from a position of powerlessness.