Scatter 1: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida

Introduction: The Politics of Politics

Democracy is in ruins, and politics has become a bad joke. With few if any exceptions, politicians and statesmen, leaders, and even world leaders turn out to be crooks, cheats, liars, and clowns. Political processes the world over are little more than corrupt conduits for the forces of globalizing capital, of so-called neoliberalism, which have swept all before them. Politicians speak in a threadbare rhetoric that barely bothers to veil, under even an appearance of factual truth, cynical manipulation by special interests. Democracy covers indifferently for inequalities and injustices of all sorts on the back of public opinion. Demagogy is rife. Culture is just another branch of the economy, a sector of goods and services subject to market forces and the inexorable logic of capitalism. The academy is slowly and surely being squeezed by corporate models, by metrics and measures, by the vapid discourse of excellence. The university really is now in ruins. The bureaucracy of testing and assessment has put an end to education. Serious scholarship is in retreat. With a few loud and often caricatural exceptions, philosophers and writers have gone quiescent, retreating into the apparent safety of enclaves and niches or else collaborating more or less consciously and directly with the very forces that sooner or later will bring them down. Here and there heroic individuals make a stand against the tide, speak the truth to power, reveal the dirty secrets, attract enthusiasm and applause, and are soon enough pushed aside, taken out, or simply absorbed and recycled by the system in its own interests, sometimes for entertainment. Resistance is futile: there is no alternative—the end is here.

This book does not entirely accept this pervasive and persuasive scenario, which, in its essential features, has been available, to Left and Right, for almost a century.¹ Not so much by disagreeing frontally with the detail of its diagnosis of global capitalism and its ongoing effects, nor indeed by recommending or condoning lying and cheating, but by putting some pressure on the philosophical ground from which such claims are usually made. That ground is often enough one of a dogmatism and moralism that are more or less indirectly complicit with what they purport to attack and that depend on loudly declared and self-righteous indignation covering for a deeper complacency and failure of thought. The loudest denouncers of so-called liberal democracy, from Left and Right, thrive on all it makes possible and become the stars of an entertainment business that still sometimes calls itself philosophy. Their complacency (what Lyotard used to call piety) stems from an unwarranted assurance as to the relation between politics and truth (or even Truth) and more especially from an assumption of being in possession of the latter, or at least of being able to call us all sternly back to it from our supposedly skeptical and irresponsibly complicit postmodern play and revelry. Against such complacency, I expound here, with and against Heidegger and others, in anxiety and out of uncanniness, an account of truth that entails undecidability, a concomitant irreducibility of decision, and, with it, a certain madness that cannot be dominated by the discourse of truth, nor entirely recovered by discourses of the will, nor yet by any appeal to some subject (however rare and heroic, as Badiou would have it). As we shall see in some detail, that madness takes many forms and parses out into a semantic range that goes all the way from mere stupidity to outright craziness, but I argue that without it, politics or the political cannot be thought at all. Among other things, this madness disrupts philosophy’s congenital desire to separate out in advance the good and the bad, Good and Evil, and all that goes with those terms. On a distant horizon of what is being argued here is the thought that good and evil are always only local differentiations of the same. What I just called the same is the scatter itself that gives this work its general title, beyond (or rather before) good and evil. The claim here is that attempts to extrapolate from those local differentiations of scatter to grander Ideas, however well meaning, always entail an exercise of violence to which those very attempts can only remain blind and to which they always fall victim.

I use the phrase the politics of politics to try to capture the way in which politics is from the first doubled up in a way that the dogmatists and moralists denounce in proportion to their inability to understand it. Idioms beginning the politics of . . . are often used to describe a dimension of other activities that is usually thought to be nonessential to those activities. The politics of the university, the politics of sport, the politics of art refer to an apparently extrinsic aspect of activities thought to have their essence elsewhere. Whatever the essence of the university is, the usual thought goes, it does not reside in its politics, which more or less wastes our time and diverts us from the true academic calling that is ours. Similarly with the politics of politics: like other activities, politics is thought to have an essential part (however it be defined—participating in the life of the polis: discussing, militating, deliberating, voting, enacting, and mandating the application of appropriate legislation, protesting, demonstrating, organizing) and an inessential politics or politicking (what in Washington is called playing politics and in Paris la politique politicienne).² On this construal, everyone, including those most energetically and enthusiastically involved in it, eagerly denounces the politics of politics as a kind of corruption of what politics essentially is or should be, and everyone deplores the fact that politics seems increasingly bound up in its own politics in this way. On the other hand, the politics of . . . idiom often goes along with a more or less obscure sense that something political is in fact intrinsic to the activity being described and can have behind it the obscure conviction (which can range across the entire political spectrum from extreme left to extreme right) that in some significant sense everything is political. My contention in this book is that in fact this apparently secondary and debased dimension of politics (its politics, then) cannot satisfactorily be thought of in this way and that it is coextensive with politics from the start, but in a way that the everything is political slogan does not quite capture. Our fondest desire is to find or invent a politics unaffected by the politics of politics, and that desire is metaphysical through and through. My claim is that the zōon politikon as zōon logon ekhon is engaged in the politics of politics as soon as that zōon is engaged in politics, that is, from the very first, naturally, as Aristotle put it. Politics is always already the politics of politics. Politics is immediately doubled up in a complex self-referentiality or recursivity that flows directly from the logos that is coterminous with it and that shows up in that logos as an irreducibility of the kind of possibilities of distortion and deceit that are usually, moralistically, associated with sophistry and rhetoric. That doubling up then also affects our understanding of the politics of everything else we are inclined to present as having a politics. In this volume, with help most notably from Foucault, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Derrida, I attempt to show how this complex situation shows up saliently in the relations between politics and rhetoric, politics and truth, and politics and philosophy (and the politics of all those relations) and how thinking it through involves further thinking about decision and exception, which will lead to a necessarily ambiguous disruption of the teleological thinking that is endemic in politics and political philosophy and still at work in the moralistic and dogmatic positions I am seeking to undermine.

I associate that disruption with deconstruction and, more especially, with the work of Jacques Derrida. I argue that the deconstructive interruption of teleological patterns gives rise to what I call a scatter, which will be further illustrated and enacted in the second volume of this work but that already here affects how we might think about our activities of interpretation and reading, and the politics thereof. Taking the politics of politics seriously entails trying to think scatter, and scatter is more or less secretly at work from the start, from the ancient materialists to Plato and Aristotle and on through Bodin, Hobbes, and Rousseau to Kant and Hegel and beyond. Typically, I think, political philosophy wants to get out of politics, put an end to this politics of politics by finally speaking its truth, in that undecidable entanglement of teleology and the death drive that perhaps defines philosophy as such (so that, for a quick and easy example, the best image of Kant’s Perpetual Peace always might be that of a graveyard). But if politics is constitutively the politics of politics, then this ambition always might be quite radically compromised.

Deconstruction is one name for this situation. (Machiavelli might be another, as we shall see in Volume 2.)

Nonetheless, il faut la vérité, as Jacques Derrida says already, self-consciously untranslatably, in a note to Positions (POS 80n/105n32). Truth is necessary or needed but also lacking: perhaps something like we are wanting truth or even we want truth, truth is wanting: but, comment s’en passer? he goes on to ask, rhetorically, in the same note, how to do without it? even as he consistently suggests that truth belongs to a more capacious system that goes beyond it and in which it is one piece or element. The whole import of Derrida’s work, more obviously perhaps in its earlier phases, would be to describe and disturb that greater system without either simply belonging to it (or simply claiming to escape from it) and without simply adopting any of its terms to bring off the description and the disturbance or reinscription. I do not believe that this situation changes radically in his later work. For example, in one of the texts that has often been taken to signal an ethical or political turn in Derrida’s thought, one we shall be reading in some detail later, namely Force of Law, this excess over truth is still the issue, now formulated in a way that opens onto all the later concerns with the unconditional as precisely to do with this question of truth:

Since every constative utterance itself relies, at least implicitly, on a performative structure, [. . .] the dimension of justesse or truth of theoretico-constative utterances [. . .] always thus presupposes the dimension of justice of the performative utterances, that is to say their essential precipitation, which never proceeds without a certain dissymmetry and some quality of violence. [. . .] Dangerously parodying the French idiom, we could end up saying: La justice, y a qu’ça de vrai. This is not without consequence, needless to say, for the status, if we still can call it that, of truth, of that truth that St. Augustine reminds us has to be done [or made]. (FL, 59–60/27)³

The untranslatable idiomatic expression La justice, y a qu’ça de vrai is, I would suggest, saying more or less the same thing as the equally untranslatable il faut la vérité. And even if, by the end of his life, Derrida came to be increasingly suspicious of the language of the performative—because of its unwelcome implications of a residual subjecthood or ipseity with a power or ability to bring off the performance of the performative, whereas he, Derrida, is trying to formulate something more radically and irruptively event-like and less recoverable by a subject (see, for example, USC 73–74/233–234)—even with that late suspicion of the performative, then, some surplus or excess not captured by more traditional concepts of truth always still remains. It is that surplus or excess that clearly enough opens the political dimension I am suggesting cannot be purified of the politics of politics.

This volume began as an attempt to write an introduction to what I took to be the main component of this project, which is the ongoing scattered deconstructive reading of the tradition of political philosophy from Plato to Rawls and beyond. To do this, it seemed expedient to begin by contrasting the approach taken here with the seductive and popular but, I think, radically unsatisfactory approach to the relations of rhetoric, politics, and philosophy taken by Michel Foucault in the recently published lecture courses given at the end of his life. I was surprised to find the later Foucault positively invoking Heidegger and was led to pursue that reference into Heidegger’s own early teaching on Aristotle’s Rhetoric. This in turn led me, somewhat to my own surprise, into a much more substantive engagement with Heidegger’s published work and teaching, from 1919 up to the mid-1930s, Heidegger whose thinking on these matters I was increasingly inclined to see as quite inseparable from his own notorious political involvement in the 1930s. Trying to work out the relations between Heidegger’s account of truth (in its relation to untruth and more specifically what he both brings out and then tends to minimize in the figure of the pseudos) and his thinking about decision and the moment of decision (notably in its relation to repetition), the more especially as that thinking draws from Kierkegaard and is taken up again by Derrida, turned out to be a task complex enough to turn what had begun as an introduction into a volume in its own right. This book is, then, a record of a process of reading, what Heidegger might call the attestation of an attempt to think something through on the basis of a definite situated facticity taken on as such. That something has to do with the impact on political thinking of a complex relation between the concept of truth and the concept of decision. This is not, then, primarily a scholarly work (its main concern is not to report on what other scholars have written, to construct a historical account, to exhaust an archive, nor even to make what is often called a contribution to scholarship), although it would of course have been impossible without some effort of scholarship, however partial. The attestation here is to be sought much more on the side of what I call reading, which is not essentially a matter of scholarship nor indeed of interpretation or truth. As I argue in the final chapter in the interstices of some Derridean developments, that attestation involves a measured deconstructive retrieval of the concept of dignity, from which a more general rereading of politics (including the politics of reading) can perhaps be undertaken.

The book attempts to develop a continuous and cumulative argument from chapter to chapter, and is not to that extent scattered at all, however digressive it may sometimes appear. Chapters 1 and 6 are, however, relatively self-standing, and the reader disinclined to follow the detail of the Heidegger analyses will find a summary of the argument of Chapters 1 through 5 in the first section of Chapter 6.

This book was substantially written in 2011, before the publication of Heidegger’s so-called Black Notebooks, and the evidence of explicit anti-Semitism contained therein. I take entirely seriously the claims made by Peter Trawny, editor of the notebooks, that Heidegger’s anti-Semitic remarks are not merely adventitious, nor reducible to available cultural stereotypes, and that they constitute a being-historical anti-Semitism that raises grave questions about Heidegger’s thinking, at least from the mid-1930s onward.⁴ Although full discussion of this newly published work and some of the reactions to it is beyond the scope of this volume, I believe it makes more acute still the need to contest the positions advanced by such as Emmanuel Faye, whose rather shrill attempts to claim that Heidegger’s work is simply not philosophy (and can therefore be safely relegated to the historians) perversely enough makes the true enormity of the problem go away in a busy flurry of self-righteousness that is philosophically feeble and politically unhelpful.

As a very amateur Heideggerian, I am indebted not only to some very fine published work but also to specific pieces of advice and information kindly communicated directly to me by Hubert Dreyfus, Julia Ireland, Theodore Kisiel, David Farrell Krell, and William McNeill. I am especially grateful to my friend and colleague Andrew J. Mitchell for his generosity in sharing his own work and for his unfailingly precise suggestions about specific points of interpretation and translation. If I now casually refer to several of Heidegger’s works only by their volume number in the Gesamtausgabe edition and use words such as Kriegsnotsemester with any degree of confidence and aplomb, this is largely thanks to him. Responsibility for the reading of Heidegger presented here is, however, entirely my own. My warm thanks too to Simon Glendinning for his ongoing philosophical interest and demanding argumentative standards, to Rodrigo Bueno Therezo for pointed discussions of Heidegger’s Aristotle as well as for invaluable editorial assistance, and to Melinda Robb for editorial help with the Foucault chapter. My special thanks to Marguerite Derrida for authorizing the publication of Derrida’s notes on dignity contained in the Appendix.

A much abridged version of Chapter 1 will appear under the title "The Truth About Parrhēsia: Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Politics in Late Foucault," in Foucault/Derrida: Fifty Years On, ed. Olivia Custer and Penelope Deutscher (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming). Part of Chapter 4 was published in The Oxford Literary Review 33, no. 1 (2011), under the title A Moment of Madness: Derrida’s Kierkegaard. The core of Chapter 6 was a keynote address delivered to the Derrida Today conference in London in July 2010 under the title Derrida’s Dignity. Some of the material from Derrida’s notes on dignity was presented in French to the Herencias de Derrida conference in Madrid in February 2010 and published in the journal Escritura e imagen, vol. extraordinario, Herencias de Derrida (2011): 283–294. A shorter version of Chapter 1 was presented as a lecture to the Department of French and Italian at Miami University, Ohio, in February 2011, and different parts of Chapter 2 were presented to the conference L’avenire di Derrida in Milan in October 2012, to the departments of German Studies, Comparative Literature, and French Studies at Brown University in March 2015, and to the Department of Comparative Literature at Rutgers University in April 2015. In the latter cases, I am grateful to the questions and objections from the audience that helped me clarify several points of the argument.

New York, April 2015

Notes

1. See the characteristically incisive and discomfiting analysis in Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy [1923], trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985).

2. In light of what is to come, see Heidegger’s comments reported from a controversial class in early 1934: the realm of the political became a markedly inferior one: it went so far that ‘political’ could be equated with ‘slippery,’ and a politician meant someone who knew how to twist things with parliamentary tricks (NHS 42).

3. The final reference to Augustine, prompted no doubt by Derrida’s own Circonfession (1991), was added to the French book version of this text (1994) and is not included in the published English translation. As there are many small differences between this final French version of Force of Law and that translated by Mary Quaintance, I shall most often silently modify her translation to account for those differences.

4. See Peter Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014). I am grateful to Andrew J. Mitchell for advance access to his translation, Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

CHAPTER 1

Parrhēsia

Sans doute l’acte premier de la philosophie est-il pour nous—et pour longtemps—la lecture: la tienne justement se donne avec évidence pour un tel acte. C’est pourquoi elle a cette royale honnêteté.¹

Lesen und lesen ist ein Unterschied.² (GA 31, 89/62)

I

In his recently published 1964–1965 seminar on Heidegger, Derrida has some passing reflections on the introduction of the idiom toujours déjà into French philosophical thinking in the wake of Heidegger’s immer schon, always already (HQE 77). Heidegger’s idiom, which according to Derrida shocks standard French philosophical logos, is presented by him as translating the traditional metaphysical concept of the a priori into a zone where it is newly marked by a kind of transcendental historicity. This comment relates to a later parenthetical remark on how a contestation of a Hegelian-Husserlian view of the historicity of meaning would have, paradoxically, to posit an ahistorical ground of meaning that might misleadingly appear to revert to seventeenth-century rationalism. In describing how this appearance would be deceptive, Derrida clearly enough alludes to the disagreement with Foucault famously articulated in his 1963 paper "Cogito and the History of Madness":

The ahistoricity in question would then no longer be an eternal theological foundation, but a certain silent permanence of non-meaning, an origin of meaning and history that would precede any alternative of Reason and unreason, of a truth and an untruth and without which these alternatives could not emerge, any more than could any historicity. (HQE 167–168)

This gesture on Derrida’s part echoes a footnote in that earlier essay in which the motif of silence is more pronounced:

It is necessary, and it is perhaps time to come back to the ahistorical in a sense radically opposed to that of classical philosophy: not to misconstrue negativity, but this time to affirm it silently. It is negativity and not positive truth that is the nonhistorical fund of history. In question then would be a negativity so negative that it could no longer even be so named. Negativity has always been determined by dialectics—that is to say, by metaphysics—as work in the service of the constitution of meaning. To avow negativity in silence is to gain access to a nonclassical type of dissociation between thought and language. And perhaps between thought and philosophy as discourse, in the knowledge that this schism can be enunciated, thereby erasing itself, only within philosophy. (ED 55n/308n4; trans. mod.)

This difficult passing suggestion of a nonclassical type of dissociation between thought and language might serve as the matrix for further discussion of the already much-discussed debate between Derrida and Foucault, which extends well beyond its most obvious loci in Derrida’s original lecture and Foucault’s rather belated reply in the second edition of the Histoire de la folie.³ For example, comments Derrida makes near the beginning of the Ellipsis of the Sun section of White Mythology are clearly enough aimed at Foucault without naming him,⁴ and, at the end of the first section of The Archeology of the Frivolous, remarks about "a mythical epistēmē and how The general theory of epistēmēs has as its ground and condition of emergence the imaginary of one epistēmē, the one that supposedly makes of the table, the finite code and taxonomy its determining norm" (AF 33/48; trans. mod.) continue the criticism.⁵ Foucault too continues the themes of his reply in acerbic remarks in his late courses at the Collège de France (where, as we shall see, he virulently contests Derrida’s reading of Plato), not to mention some slightly scurrilous remarks reported by Searle and discussed by Derrida in the Afterword to Limited Inc. (LI 257n1/158–159n12). Derrida’s most sustained later discussion, in To Do Justice to Freud, after Foucault’s death, refers to Foucault’s own later admission that the whole theory of epistēmēs had led to an impasse⁶ but implies (specifically in relation to Foucault’s relation to Freud, but with much broader consequences) that this recognition on Foucault’s part does not answer the general questions Derrida is asking of him and to which I shall return in the conclusion to this chapter.

Rather than rehearse the now quite well-trodden debate around the Cogito paper itself—arguably a dialogue de sourds, in which historically inclined readers are impressed by the historical nature of Foucault’s reply to Derrida and his parting jibe at Derrida’s supposedly historically well-determined little pedagogy and philosophically inclined readers are more impressed by his failure to respond to Derrida’s more general questions except by means of invective⁷—in this chapter I will try to approach some of these questions more obliquely via Foucault’s attempts in his last lecture courses to reformulate the relationships between philosophy, rhetoric, truth, and politics. These courses are more relevant for my purposes than the slightly earlier and in fact rather brief interest in biopower and biopolitics, if only because they lead Foucault to explicit reflection on his own life’s work as a whole.

It can plausibly be argued that Heidegger is never very far below the surface of these questions and concerns: as we shall see, the immer schon structure, as taken up and radicalized by Derrida, will reappear regularly as a problem for Foucault’s readings. And although in some rather bad-tempered comments in The Beast and the Sovereign I Derrida suggests that Foucault practically never talks about Heidegger (BS I 430/323) or, a little later, that he as always makes not the slightest allusion to Heidegger (BS I 431/324),⁸ in fact, at the end of his life when these courses were being given, Foucault rather surprisingly described Heidegger as his philosophe essentiel and more generally aligned himself with Heidegger in a common concern with truth, that question of truth showing up saliently for Foucault around the concept of parrhēsia, which I will be taking as my guiding thread in this chapter. For example, in an interview conducted in May 1984 (just a month before his death), Foucault has the following (distinctly odd and perhaps not entirely consistent) paragraph:

Heidegger has always been for me the essential philosopher. I began by reading Hegel, then Marx, and I started reading Heidegger in 1951 or 1952; and in 1953 or 1952, I don’t remember now, I read Nietzsche. I still have here the notes that I took on Heidegger when I was reading him—I have tons of them!—and there are many more of them than I had taken on Hegel or Marx. My whole philosophical becoming was determined by my reading of Heidegger. But I recognize that Nietzsche is the one who won out. I don’t know Heidegger well enough, I practically don’t know Being and Time, nor the things published recently. My knowledge of Nietzsche is much better than the knowledge I have of Heidegger: the fact remains that these are the two fundamental experiences I had. It is probable that if I had not read Heidegger, I would not have read Nietzsche. I had tried to read Nietzsche in the 50s [so presumably before reading Heidegger—GB], but Nietzsche on his own didn’t speak to me! Whereas Nietzsche plus Heidegger was a philosophical electric shock! But I’ve never written anything about Heidegger and I’ve only written one little article on Nietzsche; and yet these are the two authors I have read most. (DE II 1522)⁹

So, even though Nietzsche won out, Heidegger was the philosophe essentiel who determined tout mon devenir philosophique, and indeed was the one without whom Nietzsche would have made no sense to me, and indeed had not made any sense to me when I tried to read him earlier (though when that could have been is hard to figure out from this passage).

Again, from a slightly earlier interview (1982, but published only in 1988):

I was surprised when two of my Berkeley friends [Dreyfus and Rabi-now] wrote in their book that I had been influenced by Heidegger. This is true, of course, but no one in France had ever emphasized the fact. Heidegger—and this is rather paradoxical—is not a very difficult author to understand for a Frenchman. That every word is an enigma does not put you in a bad place for understanding Heidegger. Being and Time is a difficult book, but the more recent writings are less enigmatic. (DE II 1599)

These curious references to Heidegger (which become no less curious when one notices that in Being and Time, the book that Foucault says he practically does not know, Heidegger twice says that any notion of care for oneself—which gives its title to Foucault’s last published work, also in 1984, the year of his death—would be a simple tautology [SZ 193/186, 318/304]) will help me formulate the problem I want to pursue. To put it too bluntly, I want to argue that Foucault’s appeal to the notion of parrhēsia, some of the detail of which we shall be following, brings him to a surprisingly Platonic, or at least Socratic, position on the relation of philosophy, politics, and rhetoric. Heidegger, by contrast, whatever his real importance for Foucault’s thinking, and taking (at least in the 1920s) an apparently more Aristotelian stance on these questions, opens some difficult issues for the Foucauldian position and, even as he too tends to close off the dimensions I shall be associating with rhetoric, asks some uncomfortable questions of anyone trying to think about philosophy and politics today. My broader suggestion (to be pursued in Volume 2 of this work) will be that these questions have been resolved dogmatically or at least moralistically by most explicitly political philosophers (be it Rawls or Rancière, Leo Strauss or Hardt and Negri, Rorty or Badiou) and that it is necessary to formulate the whole relationship of politics and philosophy rather differently if one wishes to escape that dogmatism and moralism.¹⁰

Some such reformulation is what Foucault seems at least to be turning around, in the many fascinating attempts in his late work (essentially the only recently published Collège de France lectures from just before his death in 1984, from The Hermeneutics of the Subject in 1982, through The Government of Self and Others in 1983, ending with The Courage of Truth in 1984) to isolate and define the value of parrhēsia, open speech, free speech, even fearless speech, as an unauthorized translation of some of this material has it, with a suitably stirring cover image of Foucault haranguing a crowd through a megaphone.¹¹ Foucault is keenly aware that his appeal to this term engages a whole problematic debate not only with the history of philosophy but more especially with the tradition of rhetoric, and he returns many times, complementing and sometimes contradicting his earlier formulations, to the attempt to clarify the terms of that debate and to arrive at a successful characterization of this apparently rather marginal term.

II

In the earliest seminar in which parrhēsia begins to be thematized (L’herméneutique du sujet, 1982, in which, after the previous year’s explorations of ancient sexuality—themselves following the rather brief interest in biopower and biopolitics—Foucault proposes to look more directly at the relations between subject and truth), it is first invoked, as if by chance, immediately after a discussion of the relation between philosophy and rhetoric. Philosophy presents itself as providing the means to govern oneself and others, giving the philosopher a special and eminent position: He is the one who governs those who want to govern themselves and he is the one who governs those who want to govern others (HS 131/135). Rhetoric, says Foucault, at least at the period he is discussing (around the turn of the second and first centuries B.C.E., but as always in Foucault, dating and periodization are more problematic than might at first appear), can be distinguished from philosophy as follows:

Rhetoric is the inventory and analysis of the means by which one can act on others by means of discourse. Philosophy is the set of principles and practices available to one, or which one makes available to others, for taking proper care of oneself or of others. (HS 131/135–136)

Immediately following this distinction, Foucault invokes the notion of parrhēsia for the first time, on the basis of a fragmentary text of that title by a certain Philodemus, who writes of the necessity for open, frank, disclosive speech between master and pupil, or director and directee, within the structure of Epicureanism, what Foucault a little later calls a new ethic of the verbal relationship with the other (HS 158/164) and which he promises to elaborate in the second part of the session (27 January 1982). Parrhēsia at first, then, means no more than open speech, speaking one’s mind, saying what one really thinks, saying what comes to mind, openly and directly, in sincere and plain speaking. Foucault’s promised further elaboration of the notion, however, is then deferred to the following week, when again he announces a detour via the neo-Platonic discussion of the probably apocryphal dialogue Alcibiades, and he returns to parrhēsia only a week later still, in a text of Epicurus opposing a practice of phusiologia to a practice of paideia, and saying here "parrhēsia [. . .] is essentially not frankness or freedom of speech, but the technique—parrhēsia is a technical term—which allows the master to make a proper use, from the true things he knows, of that which is useful or effective for his disciple’s work of transformation" (HS 232/242). This already elaborates a little on the initial value of parrhēsia as simply frank or open or truth-telling speech: now it is technical, part of a calculated technique, even a manipulation, and to that extent, one might imagine, subject to at least something like a rhetorical description. My hypothesis is that this liminal position of parrhēsia, on the border of philosophy and rhetoric (and thereby also, as we shall see, on the border of philosophy and politics), is what makes it so fascinating for Foucault but also so difficult for him to deal with directly. And indeed before coming back to parrhēsia as such, Foucault finds himself glossing Epictetus and Seneca and complicating his initial characterization of the supposedly clear separation between philosophy and rhetoric:

Philosophical discourse is not in fact wholly and entirely opposed to rhetorical discourse. Of course, philosophical discourse is meant to express the truth. But it cannot express it without ornament. Philosophical discourse should be listened to with all the active attention of someone who seeks the truth. But it also has effects that are due to its own materiality, as it were, to its own modeling [sa plastique propre], its own rhetoric. (HS 331/348; my emphasis)

This then turns out to be the real crux of this first approach to parrhēsia when Foucault finally returns explicitly to it on 3 March 1982, and he now characterizes it less as a symmetrical relationship of truth-telling between master and disciple and more as what corresponds on the side of the master to attentive silence on the part of the disciple. Parrhēsia is in fact an attribute of a certain kind of masterful speech rather than just the openness or frankness one might expect of any speaking subject (HS 348–349/366): parrhēsia, which one might have been tempted to associate with the pure absence of technique, with simply speaking one’s mind frankly and openly, takes on, says Foucault, une signification technique fort precise (HS 349/366–367). And this technical signification brings it back toward the domain of rhetoric:

basically what is involved in parrhēsia is that particular kind of rhetoric, or nonrhetorical rhetoric, which philosophical discourse must employ. [. . .] Parrhēsia is the necessary form of philosophical discourse, since [. . .] when we employ the logos, there is necessarily a lexis (a way of saying things) and the choice of particular words rather than others. Therefore, there can be no philosophical logos without this kind of body of language with its own qualities, its own figures, and its own necessary effects at the level of pathos. But if you are a philosopher, it is not the art or tekhnē of rhetoric that is needed to control these elements. [. . .] It must not be a discourse of seduction. (HS 350/368)

This borderline position of parrhēsia as nonrhetorical rhetoric, or even as philosophy itself, has Foucault further clarifying the concept at the beginning of the following week’s session. Now he says that the master’s parrhēsia has two opponents against which it must struggle: flattery (its moral adversary) and rhetoric (its technical adversary). But these two opponents are not at all so easy to separate out in fact, in that the kind of nonrhetorical rhetoric that we have just seen Foucault mention cannot simply be reduced (nonrhetorical rhetoric names, after all, the more or less secret aspiration of rhetoric itself, which most typically does not seek to announce or signal itself as rhetoric but as the truth itself: nothing is more rhetorical than the claim to be simply speaking the plain truth, telling it as it is—listen to any politician). Here is Foucault’s awkward and perhaps even contradictory attempt to make these distinctions, after he has posited that parrhēsia qualifies the general orientation of master toward disciple as both moral attitude and technical procedure and suggested that the adversarial relationship with flattery is relatively straightforward: flattery is simply the enemy of parrhēsia, whereas things are not so straightforward with the supposed technical adversary, rhetoric, which turns out to be not just an adversary but also a partner:

This technical adversary is rhetoric, with which speaking freely actually has a much more complex relationship than it does with flattery. Flattery is the enemy. [. . .] Speaking freely must free itself from rhetoric, but not only or solely so as to expel or exclude it, but rather, by being free from its rules, to be able to use it within strict, always tactically defined limits, where it is really necessary. So, there is opposition to and a battle and struggle against flattery. And, with regard to rhetoric there is freedom, a setting free. You notice, moreover, that flattery is the moral adversary of speaking freely, while rhetoric is, if you like, its adversary or ambiguous partner, but its technical partner. What’s more, these two adversaries, flattery and rhetoric, are profoundly connected to each other since the moral basis of rhetoric is always flattery in fact, and the privileged instrument of flattery is of course the technique, and possibly the tricks of rhetoric. (HS 357/373)

So rhetoric is an ambiguous opponent of parrhēsia because of its link to flattery but an ambiguous partner of parrhēsia because parrhēsia cannot in fact be practiced without some possible recourse to rhetorical technique. This recourse is characterized by Foucault as tactical, in an attempt to capture a difference between a wholehearted acceptance of rhetorical technique (which would inevitably compromise parrhēsia with its true enemy, namely flattery) and a merely occasional, external, and expedient use of rhetoric when judged necessary. Rhetoric can be locally parrhēsia’s partner for technical purposes, but insofar as rhetoric is globally a technē, which parrhēsia is not, then it is fundamentally its opponent. This apparently satisfying characterization has, however, the complicated effect that parrhēsia now has a relation to rhetoric that is in a sense even more indirect and guileful than that of rhetoric itself: in the interests of telling the truth, parrhēsia entertains a less than entirely truth-telling relation with that non-truth-telling (because flattering) discourse called rhetoric. A little later, Foucault summarizes this quite hard-won but perhaps untenable position as follows:

Of course, in its structure, in its game, the discourse of parrhēsia is completely different from rhetoric. This does not mean that, in the tactic of parrhēsia itself, in order to obtain one’s intended outcome it may not be necessary from time to time to call upon some elements and procedures belonging to rhetoric. Let’s say that parrhēsia is fundamentally freed from the rules of rhetoric, that it takes rhetoric up obliquely and only uses it if it needs to. (HS 369/386)

And later still: So: a tactical use of rhetoric, but no fundamental, overall, or total obedience to the rules of rhetoric (HS 385–386/403).

This is almost as far as Foucault gets with parrhēsia in L’herméneutique du sujet. We might summarize it by saying that there is a kind of general quasi-rhetorical dimension to parrhēsia just because it is a discursive practice and therefore is obliged to have recourse to logos and lexis but that it is opposed to rhetoric in a more restrictive sense in that its point is not exactly to seduce its listener by the exercise of flattery (that is, telling that listener essentially what he wants to hear), even though parrhēsia might have a merely tactical recourse to rhetoric on occasion, for a particular and local purpose, for example that of having an unpalatable truth accepted.

We need to add one further element, however, to the picture of parrhēsia that is emerging, an element that might help us understand the relation between the truth being told and a tactical dimension to that truth-telling that is showing up