Philosophical Parrêsia and Transpolitical Freedom

Above all on the basis of the course held by Foucault in 1982-1983 (Le gouvernement de soi et des autres), I will highlight the fact that ancient philosophy regenerated the practice of parrêsia, after the crisis into which it had fallen in the polis, establishing a strong relationship between freedom, truth and politics, and constantly eluding the risk of using “true speech” as a tool of rationalization of the exercise of power. In this sense, I sustain that philosophical parrêsia asserted itself as a practice that could not be anything but “transpolitical,” while remaining similar – at least in the case of Socrates and the Cynics – to the ideal of freedom as active participation in public life. According to Foucault, after a long period of disuse due to the predominance of theology and pastoral power, philosophical parrêsia was able to flourish in modernity, above all with Kant, through the critical ontology of the present. On my part, even rereading certain indications provided by Foucault himself in his course of 1978-1979 (Naissance de la biopolitique), I try to show how, in liberal society, philosophical parrêsia, in reality, runs the risk of being neutralized by the predominance of economic “true speech” and by the prevalence of the idea of freedom as the pursuit of private interests. Moreover, in the last sections of this paper I indicate a few possible lines of research that could be developed to grasp the difficulties that philosophical parrêsia encounters in the age of neoliberal hegemony and global media coverage.