Howell, P. (2025). Foucault, Parrhesia and the politics of presence: on not speaking truth to power. Cultural Geographies, 0(0).
https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740241310238
Abstract
This paper considers the take-up by geographers and others of Foucault’s late work on parrhesia, the ancient Greek concept of frank or fearless speech. While there has been productive work on its genealogy and geographies, parrhesia has been commonly translated as ‘speaking truth to power’ and discussion has centred around resistance. This paper argues that ‘speaking truth to power’ selects and simplifies the range of practices considered in Foucault’s history of truth and subjectivity. But Foucault’s genealogy of parrhesia suffers from the same problem that besets the idea of ‘speaking truth to power’. This is the privileging of the immediate presence of the speaking subject. The phonocentric ideal distorts our understanding of the geographies of parrhesia, particularly in the modern period, where political speech is never unmediated. This leaves the normative significance of parrhesia vulnerable to liberal academic self-congratulation as well as hampering the exploration of frank speech in our own day.
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