Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

ENUNCIATION AND POLITICS
Parrhesia restructures and redefines the field of possible action both in
relation to the self and to others. It modifies the situation; it opens for a new
dynamic precisely in introducing something new. Even though the structure
of parrhesia implies a status, it is a dynamic and agonistic structure that
transgresses the egalitarian framework of right, law, and the constitution.
The new relations expressed by truth-telling are neither contained in nor
foreseen by the constitution, law, or equality, and yet it is through them
(and them alone) that a political action becomes possible and can actually
be carried out.
Truth-telling thus depends on two heterogeneous regimes: right (politeia
and isegoria) and dynasteia (power and force), and this is why the relation
between true speech (discourse) and democracy is “difficult and problematic.”
In introducing a de facto difference into equality, in expressing the
power of auto-affection and auto-affirmation, a double paradox is created.
First, “there can only be a true discourse by way of democracy, although
true discourse introduces into democracy something entirely different,
irreducible to its egalitarian structure,” 3 i.e. ethical differentiation. Secondly,
“the possibility that true discourse will die out and be reduced to silence” 4 is
inscribed into equality, since dispute, conflict, agonism, and hostility
threaten democracy and its equality. This is what in fact has happened in
our western societies, where there is no longer place for parrhesia.
Democratic consensus is the neutralization of parrhesia, of truth-telling,
and of the subjectivation and action that flow from it.
Enunciation and pragmatics
The difference between the positions of Rancière and Foucault emerges
even more clearly if we take a closer look at the relation between language
and enunciation, politics and political subjectivation. For Rancière, the fact
that those “who have no part” (demos or proletariat) begin to speak does
not mean that they become conscious or that they express what properly belongs
to them (their interests or a belonging to a social group). What it
refers to is rather the equality of logos. The inequality of domination presupposes
the equality of speaking beings, because if the order of the master
is to be executed by the subordinate, the master and the subordinate must
3 Michel Foucault, Le gouvernement de soi et des autres: Cours au collège de France, 1982–
1983, ed. Frédéric Gros (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2008), 167f.
4 Ibid, 168.
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