Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

ENUNCIATION AND POLITICS
risk of taking up a position, to an “existential” and political auto-affirmation.
There is no logic of language, but an aesthetic of enunciation, in the
sense that enunciation does not verify what is already there (equality), but
opens for something new that is given for the first time in the act of the one
who speaks.
Parrhesia is a form of enunciation very different from the one that
pragmatics describes on the basis of performatives. Performatives are formulas,
linguistic “rituals” that presuppose a more or less institutionalized
status of the speaker, and in which the effect that the enunciation should
produce is already given institutionally (“The meeting is open,” enunciated
by the one who is authorized to do it, is only an institutional “repetition”
whose effects are known in advance). Parrhesia, on the other hand, does not
presuppose any status; it is the enunciation of “anyone.” Unlike performatives
it “opens for an indeterminate risk,” it provides “possibilities, a field of
dangers, or at least a non-determined eventuality.” 9
The irruption of parrhesia determines a fracture, something that suddenly
breaks open a situation, and “makes possible a certain number of effects”
that are not known in advance. The effects of enunciation are not only
always singular, but first of all affect and engage the enunciating subject.
The reconfiguration of the sensible first of all concerns the speaker. In
the parrhesiastic statement [enoncé], the speaking subject forms a double
pact with itself: it commits itself both to the statement and to the content of
the statement, or both to what it has said and to the fact that it has said it.
There is a retroactive action of the enunciation on the subject’s mode of
being: “In producing the event of the statement, the subject modifies or
affirms itself, in any case determines and renders precise which mode of
being it has as speaking.” 10
Parrhesia manifests the courage and the taking up of a position of the one
who states a truth, who says what he thinks, but it also manifests the courage
and the taking up of a position of the “interlocutor, who accepts to receive the
painful truth he hears as true.” 11 Who speaks the truth, and says what he
thinks, “as it were signs the truth that he enunciates, he commits himself to
this truth, he is obliged to it and by it.” 12 But he also takes a risk “concerning
the relation he has to the one he is addressing.” 13 If the professor possesses a
9 Michel Foucault, Le gouvernement de soi et le gouvernement des autres, 61.
10 Ibid, 66.
11 Foucault, Le courage de la vérité, 14
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid, 15.
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