The Parrhesiastic (P)act

Chapter 6, “The Parrhesiastic P(a)ct”, charts the consideration on the part of both Foucault and Lacan of an ethic of the ‘discursive act’ to highlight the ethico-political stakes that inform their work. I identify ‘freedom’ in Foucault and ‘polymorphous perversion’ in Lacan as key factors that define the ontological precarity—the shifting and uncertain context—in which ethics emerges. I argue that Foucault and Lacan both formulate an account of ethics centered on the act of speaking which does not suppose the fixity or rigidity of identity as its ground. I differentiate an ethics of speaking from an ethics of coincidence with oneself or one of confession and self-disclosure. Drawing on Lacan’s L schema, I explain how his concept of ‘full-speech’ and later account of the ethic of the well-spoken (bien-dire) is correlated with the implication of the speaking subject in the enjoyment that her symptom denounces. The discursive context in which speech introduces a critical interruption that modifies the speaker’s mode of being is equally explored in Foucault’s analysis of the ancient practice of parrhesia in which the speaker uses their free courage to demonstrate reflexivity toward their own position of enunciation. Chapter 6 provides a picture of psychoanalytic praxis as an act that transpires inside the frame of speech and depends on the position of the Analyst to maintain that frame.