We should all be grateful to Paul Allen Miller for having written another bold and important book. It is another example of his distinctive classical scholarship—freed from the pursuit of detached, unmediated, historically pure access to antiquity, inviting and embracing productive encounters between the ancient and the contemporary through a rigorous and accessible engagement with postmodern critical theory. While many of us may now take this approach for granted, it is Miller, more than anyone else, who has opened the field that still calls itself classics to its very possibility. This book, like his previous work, brilliantly confronts us with the inadequacy or, I would say, the impossibility of empiricism, of an interpretive connection with antiquity that excludes a discussion of methodology. It sets up an explicit dialogue with contemporary modes of theoretical thinking that are themselves grounded in the interrogation of antiquity and that influence or even predetermine our own projects of (post)classical scholarship, whether we want them to or not, whether we are familiar with them or not. Patrice Rankine (AJP 140.2, 2019, 353) has observed that “pure philology, unmixed with contemporary realities, is and always has been a pretense, and pernicious lie,” while Sasha-Mae Eccleston and Dan-el Padilla Peralta (AJP 143.2, 2022) have remarked that the philological ideal of a textual analysis “disembedded from the world around it, untainted by contemporary feelings, biases, and agendas” reinscribes well-established practices of race-based disciplinary exclusion in classical studies, forms of intellectual biopolitics, we could say. To repeat a principle that many others have articulated, concern with contemporary antiquities, whether Foucault’s (or Derrida’s, or Judith Butler’s, or Saidiya Hartman’s, for example) is the domain not (just) of reception, which some still see as a marginal or ancillary subfield of classics, but of any hermeneutic enterprise, even the “mainstream” ones, apparently focused only on what we heuristically posit as the ancient “original.” 

There is no question that within the postmodern trinity of Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan (which has more recently expanded to include Deleuze and Guattari), it is Foucault who has had the easiest time making inroads in the discipline of classics; the other two thinkers, probably because of their explicit investment in psychoanalysis, have never become “mainstream,” and they still face varying degrees of skepticism or hostility among many classicists. The reason for the relatively smooth cooptation of Foucault is the History of Sexuality, a work that, as Miller reminds us in his introduction, radically changed the field of classics in the 1980s and 1990s by legitimizing gender and sexuality as “serious” objects of scholarly inquiry. Yet the apparent Foucauldian “novelty” was compromised, as we can discern from the title of the work, which, in significantly containing the word History, served to confirm the historicist and essentially positivistic foundations of the discipline—that is, a normative and normativizing orientation rooted in the use of the text as a vehicle for recapturing a lost context. In his seminal book Foucault’s Virginity (1995), Simon Goldhill laid bare Foucault’s refusal to heed the ironical textures of the Greek novels—texts that, yes, strongly contribute to constructing a heteronormative ideal, but also constantly undermine this construction not just with more-than-occasional explorations of ancient homosexualities, but with a contestation of the very notion of identity, with moves toward modes of queer disidentification. The possible cultural-historical correlates of this disidentification are difficult to determine, but its emergence through formal complexities is the important fact of a possibility of reading and, thus, of a political potentiality. What I am suggesting is that, treated as a work of cultural history more than a theoretical experiment, History of Sexuality has paradoxically—beyond and despite itself—caused the field of classics to be less daring, less self-critical, less prone to reassess and question its methodological grounds. The importance of Miller’s book—of its focus on Foucault’s late lectures at the Collège de France—resides precisely in urging classicists to pay attention to another Foucault, or to look at Foucault differently, an operation that cannot but have radical consequences for the self-definition of the study of antiquity, for the ongoing reconceptualization of its practices. When we read, in Miller’s introduction, that in Foucault’s “alêthurgies or ‘acts of truth’…truth is shown not to be simply a property of things or of propositions, but an activity,” or we see Miller drawing attention to Foucault’s definition of the alethurgical as the activity “through which the subject speaking the truth manifests itself…represents itself to itself and is recognized by others as speaking the truth” or “constitutes itself and is constituted by others,” we perceive the relational making of the epistemological subject, that is, a self-making that occurs through continuing moments of undoing. This Foucault is one who, as James Porter has also remarked, shows important points of contact with various trends in critical theory that contest the very notion of the subject—in particular, Butler’s theory of relational precarity, or recent interventions in critical phenomenology. There is a sense in which this alethurgical subject is a Deleuzian, posthumanist, or viral subject (see Telò, Symplokê, forthcoming), and Foucauldian archaeology implicates a kind of an-archaeology. How do historians of antiquity come to terms with this Foucauldian idea of a subject split by the epistemological activity that brings it into existence? What are the implications of the model of alethurgic an-archeology that emerges from Foucault’s late lectures? How does it alter the still prevalent historicist foundation of classics as a discipline?

My final, and more substantial point concerns the very modality of the dialogue between antiquity and critical theory that Miller stages in the book. In the introduction, Miller says, “Each chapter will take up one year of lectures and we will read them both with and against the source materials they cite” (my italics), while later, in his first chapter, he announces that he “will offer an account of Foucault’s reading of the Oedipus Tyrannus as presented within On the Government of the Living.” How shall we conceptualize the kind of reading that we perform when we read Foucault’s readings of antiquity or those other critical theorists? I propose that we consider the oeuvres of Foucault, Butler (the subject of my own monograph in the series Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing), and other contemporary thinkers as “primary” texts, that we focus, in other words, on the formal textures of their writings in our analyses, or over-analyses, pursuing the possibilities of interpretive defamiliarization or deterritorialization springing from synchronic or synoptic close (closest) readings of their verbal poiêsis along with that of ancient literature. As we see in his lectures on Oedipus the King, Foucault interprets Oedipus, but Oedipus also interprets Foucault. I am suggesting that we develop strategies for creative juxtapositions, for unconventional exchanges, for radically formalistic encounters between ancient and critical-theoretical dictions. This is how classics can become critical theory—that is, the formalization of imaginative reinventions of the social. Involving the reader in the process of this transdisciplinary becoming seems to me one of the most generative and inspiring contributions of Miller’s book. 

By the terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s reformulation of the Socratic project—philosophy is the shaming of ignorance—Miller’s Foucault’s Seminars on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth has done a philosophical service indeed. In more precisely locating Foucault as a reader of ancient Greek texts and a thinker of ethico-politics, counter to tendencies to brush off his engagement with antiquity, to minimize his commitment to the political work of aesthetics, and, in the worst case, to read this commitment through a distorted lens, Miller applies a decades-long engagement with Foucault to powerful effect. I am especially grateful to Miller for giving us much-needed context for understanding Foucault’s development of parrhēsia as simultaneously a reception of ancient projects and a reformulation of future endeavor. 

If I have understood Miller correctly, Foucault’s parrhesiast does not administer pastoral care, nor plant a seed, nor treat a fever; rather, the parrhesiast lights a fire. And if this practice is necessary to democracy, it is also necessarily ambivalent: 

“For truth to function as truth rather than as propaganda or rhetorical manipulation, it can never be perfectly coincident with either political power or ethical substance…Democratic truth, then, always depends on this contradiction that discourse must be open, everyone must have the right to speak, but only some discourses can be true, and they must present themselves first through the parrhesiastic act of direct personal engagement (I must believe what I say), and then through claims to validation whether that be through direct knowledge (like the shepherd in Oedipus), appeals to reason (like Socrates or Aristotle in the Rhetoric), or agreed upon protocols of verification: all forms of discourse that are themselves not democratic per se but either modes of wisdom, instruction, or parrhēsia (Foucault 2009: 45-6). It is this parrhesiastic intervention that Foucault hopes to reclaim for philosophy in the present as a critical discourse in relation to forms of governmentality, and Socrates is his primary model” (Miller, 165).

Thus, when Foucault observes that, “Truth is never the same; there can only be truth in the form of another world, another life” (2009: 311, Miller 188), he is well aware that such a stance could be perverted for cynical and crass political ends and so we need not worry that he was blind to manipulations of ‘alternate truths,’ because such positions attempt to make truth coincident with political power, emptying it, or, put differently, because such positions have no life in them, no bios against which they are staked. 

And it is here, on the relation between life (in this case largely bios), truth, and philosophy in Foucault’s history of subjectivity, that I would like to think with Miller and pose a few questions, focused specifically on the work of knitting together an ontological analysis of self with the philosophical life as speaking/manifesting truth. This work includes taking one’s bios, “as an object of observation, elaboration, testing, and transformation” (Miller, 84). For Foucault, this form of examined life provides a continuity between ancient Greek and early Christian theorizing, between Socratic inquiry and Christian confession: 

There is not so much a transition from a world of pagan freedom to one of Christian repression, one from which we must be freed through our modern compulsion to find liberation by expressing our sexuality—as the repressive hypothesis would posit—but rather there is a gradual repurposing of certain discursive techniques that elaborate a model of the self and its loss in relation to different material and theoretical contexts, elaborations that produce new forms of subjectivity and new relations of that subjectivity to truth, both its own and that of others” (Miller, 81).

Here is my central question—just how are we to read the emphasis on novelty, these ‘new’ subjectivities and ‘new’ relations to truth, in the context of a posited continuity between ancient Greek and early Christian thinking? To give context to this question, we could consider another thinker of the political valance of the new, Hannah Arendt, whose alignment of natality with action hinges on her focus on ‘second’ birth, on the association of birth with beginning anew marked in Augustin’s formulation initium ut esset homo creatus est: in Arendt’s translation, ‘that a beginning be made, man was created’ (HC 479). For Arendt, theorizing the new that the human capacity for action makes possible marks a decisive break with ancient Greek thinking and a gap between it and early Christian thought, insofar as the faith and hope that she maintains are bestowed by the full experience of natality are, “two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether” (HC 247). Of course, one need not agree with Arendt about natality, action, and the posited absence of ‘faith’ and ‘hope’ in Greek antiquity. But her work does serve as a provocation: is the alterity of life, its otherness, as presented by Socrates, or the Cynics, or Antigone, adequately captured by describing it as novel or new? 

In focusing specifically on Socrates—Plato’s, Foucault’s, Miller’s—in order to pose this question, I will frame it by looking toward a Platonic depiction of the act of choosing a life, the myth of Er. To do this, a little scene-setting is in order. Plato’s dramatization of the “pitiful, funny, and wonderous” (620a1-2) spectacle of psukhai choosing their future bioi is carefully staged. Having arrived at the spindle of Necessity, the souls of the dead make their choice in the presence of Necessity’s daughters, the Fates—Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos—and their messenger, who delivers the message of Lachesis: “Ephemeral souls, this is the beginning of another cycle that will end in death. Your daimon will not be assigned to you by lot; you will choose him. The one who has the first lot will be the first to choose a life to which he will then be bound by necessity. Virtue knows no master; each will possess it to a greater or less degree, depending on whether he values or disdains it. The responsibility lies with the one who makes the choice; the god has none” (617d6-e5). He then sets before the souls lots to determine the order of their choosing, and then patterns of life [biōn paradeigmata]. 

These patterns are finite, but many, and include the lives of non-human animals, as well as “all kinds of human lives” of which Plato includes tyrannies, people famous for beauty, or wealth, or athletic prowess, or high birth and the virtue of their ancestors, and those famous for nothing (618a3-b2). Nevertheless, “the ordering of soul was not included in the model because the soul is necessarily altered by the different lives it chooses” (618b2-4). And it is here that Plato marks the significance of this choice: 

Now it seems that it is here, Glaucon, that a human being faces the greatest danger of all. And because of this, each of us must neglect all other subjects and be most concerned to seek out and learn those that will enable him to distinguish the good life from the bad and always to make the best choice possible in every situation. He should think over all the things we have mentioned and how they jointly and severally determine what the virtuous life is like. That way he will know what the good and bad effects of beauty are when it is mixed with wealth, poverty, and a particular state of the soul. He will know the effects of high or low birth, private life or ruling office, physical strength or weakness, ease or difficulty in learning, and all the things that are either naturally part of the soul or are acquired, and he will know what they achieve when mixed with one another. And from all this he will be able, by considering the nature of the soul, to reason out which life is better and which worse and to choose accordingly, calling a life worse if it leads the soul to become more unjust, better of it leads the soul to become more just, and ignoring everything else: We have seen that this is the best way choose, whether in life or in death (618b6-e2). 

The bio-calculus this passage describes has no direct precedent in other Platonic dialogues. There is no single extant Platonic dialogue ‘on the soul’ or ‘on life’ and, more interestingly, a study of soul or life is not included in the philosophical curriculum Socrates outlines in the Republic. If anything, what emerges from the spectacle of choosing lives is the tragic affirmation of learning through suffering. While those who philosophize ‘in a healthy way’ fare better than others (619e1-5), many souls who had previously lived happy lives choose poorly precisely because of their lack of training in suffering (619d1-3); it is memory of his travails that enables Odysseus to choose well (620c3-d2). In fact, Plato goes out of his way to emphasize the limits on choice throughout the tale. Not only are many choices simply responses to past experience or the lack thereof, once chosen the life—which determines structure of soul—is ratified and upheld by a daimon: “After all the souls had chosen their lives, they went forward to Lachesis in the same order in which they had made their choices, and she assigned to each the daimon it had chosen as guardian of its life and fulfiller of its choice” (620d6-e1). It is this daimon, tasked with assuring the adherence to type, that leads the soul to Clotho, “to confirm the fate that the lottery and its own choice had given it” and then to Atropos, “to make what had been spun irreversible” (620e2-6). 

Arguably, then, there is a kind of ‘bio’-logical determinism here, not in a contemporary, reductively materialist sense, to be sure, but an ethical determinism marked by the Fates themselves: what has been done cannot be undone, and this means not only that one cannot go back in time, but also that one cannot escape the effects of one’s actions, that is, while one may decide to act justly or unjustly, one cannot escape the logic whereby one’s actions make one more or less just. This logic is, in fact, assigned a divine assurance in the form of the daimon, ‘guardian of life and fulfiller of choice.’ Thus, the accretion of one’s choices assure a conformity to type. Hence, the emphasis on choosing well—the choice commits you to a pattern, both finite and iterable. What one must learn, then, are the types, the patterns. This emphasis on consistency of type is in part a function of the finitude of types of lives, which grants a certain reiterative, recursive dimension to the act of living out a pattern of bios. What one is a choosing is a pattern that has been chosen by others before. 

What remains here of the new? And, to make more pressing, where is the life of the philosopher in all of this? As Miller notes, Foucault himself observes a similar finitude: 

What kind of person do you want to be, what sort of existence do you choose to fashion for yourself? Of course, the options are not infinite, and they are historically determined, but they do not exist until they are made visible, until they are denaturalized, and until the possibility of turning one’s gaze is made apparent. If there were not in fact the freedom of the subject to put into play their tekhnai as a function of their objectives and their desires, we could not meaningfully speak of the possibility of fashioning a better life, bios biōtos, and the entire ethico-political project would collapse (Miller, 121). 

Here, in the myth of Er, we could say that the kinds of lives are made visible by being supernaturalized, if you will, into a theodicy that is seen, not as counter to an ethico-political project, but rather precisely as the ethico-political project that we get when we place adherence to type, or, better, amor fati, at its heart. We do indeed need to ask what if anything is recognizable as a Foucauldean technique of self here, and the freedom it would seem to require. But I owe it to Miller to have pointed out that we also have to ask Plato, what, if anything, is Socratic about this? Or rather, have we not pressed up against precisely the gap between Plato’s Socrates and the historic, parrhesiastic Socrates? 

In a parallel passage in the Phaedrus, the life of the philosopher is listed as one of nine possible bioi (248d-e), and assigned to the stewardship of Zeus (250b-c). But in the Republic, Socrates will not only observe the possible singularity of his own daimon (496c3-5), but also that no ‘current’ polis can properly support a philosophical nature in order to nurture it into a philosophical life. The ‘true’ philosophical nature in the city is like one standing alone in a storm, seeking out some shelter against a wall, leading a quiet life and doing their own work, “satisfied if he can somehow lead his present life free from injustice and impious acts and depart from it with good hope, blameless and content” (496d5-e2). With these lines, we encounter, then, the fragility and contingency of the philosophical life, a theme also of Plato’s Phaedo, his depiction of Socrates’ final day. Socrates—who has bathed in order to save the women the trouble of washing his body—is worried that philosophy itself will ‘die,’ and admonishes/exhorts his friends to love philosophy more than they love him, and to mourn not the loss of himself but the loss of the logos. In this, Socrates too is a greater friend to the truth than himself. But what of his friendship with Crito, what of his rather scandalous alignment of death not with loss but with ignorance? In this depiction of the Socratic project, a certain absence of self-care, then, appears to be needed. Or, at least, the turning of soul will also involve a withdrawal of care from one ‘place’ to another. 

***

It is the withdrawal, or re-allocation of care that motivates Antigone’s admission of action, or refusal of denial of action: “I don’t deny it; I admit the deed was mine” (Blondell, 443). In other work, Miller has shown the ethical significance of Antigone’s refusal. But, in formulating a final question, it is to another tragic figure that I would like to turn our attention, another tragic confession of truth, complicated by a kind of double admission, or a taking back, or, we could argue following Foucault, a form of living out the truth with its own model of verification. I am thinking of Aeschylus’ Clytamnestra, at once both proud admitter of the deed of slaying her husband and avowed embodiment of the ancestral alastōr that haunts the house of Atreus and the Tantalid line. Clytamnestra, who must bide her time, whose truth (the injustice of the killing of her daughter by her husband), cannot be lived in the open if it is to be avenged (lived at all), but who welcomes the opportunity to announce herself once revenge is enacted, who revels in her act, who also gets to admit/perform her indifference to at least one form of verifiability/authority, the approval of the Chorus:

Words, endless words I’ve said to serve the moment—

Now it makes me proud to tell the truth.

How else to prepare a death for deadly men

Who seem to love you? How to rig the nets

Of pain so high no man can overleap them?

I brooded on this trial, this ancient blood feud

Year by year. At least my hour came.

Here I stand and here I struck

And here my work is done.

I did it all. I won’t deny it no.

He had no way to flee or fight his destiny…(1391-1401, Fagles trans. and numbering)

It is true that her ability to do so, like that of Antigone, relies on the divine, the alastōr, accessed through oracular announcement as a more ancient, more powerful form of verification:

You claim the works is mine, call me

Agamemnon’s wife—you are so wrong.

Fleshed in the wife of this dead man,

The spirit lives within me,

Our savage, ancient spirit of revenge.

In return for Atreus’ brutal feast

He kills his perfect son—for every

Murdered child, a crowning sacrifice. (1526-1533)

And yet, her truth is also oriented toward establishing a rule freed from the child-killing, future-destroying cycle; she seeks to purge ‘our fury to destroy one another’ and for this she attempts some degree of comfort and calm for the Chorus— 

Fathers of Argos, turn for home before you act

and suffer for it [prin pathein eixantes]. What we did was destiny [arkein khrē tad’ hōs epraxamen]. 

If we could end the suffering, how we would rejoice.

The spirit’s brutal hoof has struck our heart. 

And that is what a woman has to say [hōd’ echei logos gunaikos].

Can you accept the truth [ei tis axioi mathein]?” (1691-1695)

—even as Aeschylus concludes the play with her assertion that the Chorus’ recalcitrance is not devastating to her aims: “Let them howl—they’re impotent [mē protimēsēis]. You and I have power [kratounte] now./ We will set the house in order once for all” (1707-8).   

I take it that Clytamnestra stands outside of the parrhesiastic contract Foucault outlines in his final lectures; she is neither powerless nor without rank and authority. In the context of Euripides’ treatment of Clytmanestra’s fate, she is, according to Foucault, the one who extends parrhēsia to her daughter, only to have the contract broken to her own detriment. But I do wonder about the limits of parrhēsia in this context, and welcome Miller’s thoughts on this question. 

As P. Allen Miller points out with characteristic lightness in the middle of this book, “Few of us know in detail what is happening in our colleagues’ seminars, and we are lucky if we have time to read their published work.” I am therefore grateful to the press and to Allen for allowing this form of engagement.

Allen has given us a terrific account of Foucault’s last lectures, placing in rigorous context the volumes that came to be known as The History of Sexuality. As Allen says, these works were “but one chapter in the history of subjectivity and truth” (77). The aspect of this history that Allen makes clear, repeatedly and insistently, is that the “truth” is not an objective reality to be grasped in a world outside of ourselves, but a product of the “self’s relation to itself and… the constitution of the self of as a subject” (Miller 14, citing Foucault 1984a, 12; see also Miller 126, 152). And in the search for and expression of that truth, the subject is necessarily engaged in a set of relations: to herself, to the norms of her current society, and to the government in which she finds herself. Of particular interest in Foucault’s last set of lectures is the elusive concept of parrhēsia, the act of truth-telling (often to an authority figure) that “creates a break and opens a risk: a possibility” (Miller 148, citing Foucault 2008, 61). I hope here to explore in a bit more depth the tragedies that Foucault discussed in elaborating this concept, and then to ask (after some elaboration) what the relationship is between parrhēsia, and the structure of confession, which played such an important role in Foucault’s History of Sexuality. 

First, I would like to point out that there is a bit of slippage in Foucault’s understanding of parrhēsia as it is depicted in Euripides’ Ion. In that play, the title character explicitly refers to the political conditions that must exist for him to exercise parrhēsia, this particular and specific form of speech that is to be distinguished from isēgoria, equality of speech. (Foucault 2010, 150). (Summaries of the complex drama are given by both Foucault and Miller; see Miller 131-132). Ion has been adopted by Xuthus, the king of Athens, but worries that when he arrives in that anachronistically democratic city, he will not have the right of parrhēsia, because at this point in the play he believes his mother is not an Athenian. And again anachronistically, only the offspring of two Athenians have full citizenship rights, including the right of parrhēsia, here apparently the right to advise the city on its proper functioning. So: this form of speech becomes a question of political status within the state, here guaranteed by birth. Now, somewhat ironically, Ion is the son of Creusa, and thus in the direct line of the Erechtheids – so he does have the right of parrhēsia. But at the moment that he utters the word in the play, he doesn’t know that; and when he does return to Athens to establish the democracy (Foucault 2010, 155), he will do so by keeping his true identity (as Creusa’s son) hidden from King Xuthus. Foucault brings out the extraordinary convolutions of this at the end of his lecture on 26 January 1983: “a truth-telling which leaves truth under the reign of a share of illusion, but which, at the price of this illusion, establishes the order in which the speech which commands can become a speech of truth and justice, a free speech, a parrêsia” (Foucault 2010, 145). It is, to me, a little surprising that Foucault did not further explore this odd act of closeting that guarantees, in this play, the political aspect of parrhēsia. But his interests were, at this time, elsewhere. 

In the next lecture (2 February 1983) Foucault revisits Ion’s anxieties about parrhēsia, but he then quickly shifts the focus, to two instances of Creusa practicing parrhēsia, neither of which (as he notes) is called parrhēsia in this text: the first is Creusa’s “violent imprecation addressed to the god and turned against him” (Foucault 2010, 153), in which she accuses Apollo of having raped her. This is the sort of act that we normally think of as parrhēsia: a person in a state of relatively lower power speaks the truth to a vastly greater power (in this case, a god). This is what Foucault will shortly call “judicial” parrhēsia. And this, of course, is the form of parrhēsia that Foucault will be particularly interested in, in his final lectures, when he returns to the figure of Socrates who, when asked what his punishment should be for his violations of the law (of which he was convicted, however unjustly), replied that he should be fed for life in the Prytaneion, like an Olympic victor (Miller 149, 166). It is, to use the common parlance, speaking truth to power, and fundamental to it is the risk that it brings on the speaker. But it is a bit of a fudge at this moment in the drama, because, as Foucault points out, the Ion does not ascribe parrhēsia to Creusa; rather, Foucault says, this sort of act will be called that “later” (Foucault 2010, 154). 

The third instance of parrhēsia in the play is even more slippery: Foucault refers to the speech that Creusa makes to the Old Man, in which she “confesses” to having been raped, and having exposed the resulting child. Once more this instance is not marked by the text as parrhēsia, but Foucault sees this as the third important instance of “veridiction,” which he calls “moral parrhēsia,” “which consists in confessing the offense which weighs on one’s conscience…”( 2010, 154). Again, Foucault says that this will be identified as a form of parrhēsia “later.” Now, even within the tragic corpus Foucault can find some support for this last form of parrhēsia. As he goes on to discuss, in Euripides’ Phaedra, after Phaedra has confessed of her unnatural lust for her stepson to the nurse, she says that she would rather die than act on her passion. For, she says, she does not want to bring shame on her children, but wants to allow them to live with parrhēsia as free men, with good reputations (Eur. Hipp. 420–-423). And she goes on to say that to be aware of bad deeds (kaka) committed by one’s parents will make a man a slave (Eur. Hipp. 424), which, by implication would remove such a person from the political right to parrhēsia (Foucault 2010, 161–-162). So there is, in this instance, both a political form to parrhēsia (one must be a free man) and a moral one (to be free, one must not know shameful things of one’s parents.) In both the Ion and the Hippolytus, then, we can see hints of what Foucault calls “moral parrhēsia”— – in both cases connected to acts of confession – though in neither case is the speech by the women in the plays marked as parrhēsia. 

That brings me, at last, back to the notion of confession. I am concerned with confession here because it seems to me that Foucault wants both Phaedra and Creusa’s acts of confession to be recognized as examples of parrhēsia, of a sort of truth-telling to oneself, as part of the “care of the self” that Allen has so clearly explicated for us. But when I think back to the way that Foucault characterized confession in volume one of the History of Sexuality, it seems to me to be something rather different. Parrhēsia is, to be sure, both outward-looking and inward-looking; as Foucault put it, “This doubling or redoubling of the statement of the truth by the statement of the truth of the fact that I am thinking this truth and that, in thinking it, I say it, this is what is indispensable to the parrhēsiastic act” (Foucault 2008: 62, cited on Miller 147). But the force of judicial parrhēsia, its vector, is outward: a person tells a more powerful person (or god) the truth, because the truth must be told, and opens herself up to risk in the speaking. But that is not, I think the way that confession— – as defined in volume one— – works.

One of the striking assertions of volume one was that sexuality came about— – became a “correlative” to a certain kind of discourse— – when the religious act of confession was moved into the medical sphere (Foucault 1978, 65–-68). And as Foucault pointed out, confession is a particular form of speech with an unusual, we might even say inverted, power structure: 

The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated; and finally, a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it; it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him and promises him salvation. (Foucault 1978, 61–-62)

Now, the confessional speeches of Creusa and Phaedra do many things; they unburden the speaker of a weight of guilt and allow the plot of their respective plays to move forward. They spur action on the part of the confessor (after some intervention from the person confessed to). But they are not quite the same form of religious or medical confession that Foucault described in 1978, for the simple reason that these women are confessing secrets that they hold, but also know. They are not trying to unlock the hidden secrets, the unrealized dimensions of an unconscious mind. And that, critically, is the aspect of modern (“scientific”) confession that, as Foucault argued, allowed for the peculiar construction of subjectivity that we now call “sexuality.” A few paragraphs later, Foucault suggests, this is a fundamentally new development: “For the first time no doubt, a society has taken upon itself to solicit and hear the imparting of individual pleasures” (Foucault 1978, 63). It is this exposing of secrets that characterizes sex, famously, as:

an object of great suspicion; the general and disquieting meaning that pervades our conduct and our existence, in spite of ourselves; the point of weakness where evil portents reach through to us; the fragment of darkness that we each carry within us: a general signification, a universal secret, and omnipresent cause, a fear that never ends. (Foucault 1978, 69).

This seems to me different formulation than the investigations of Plato’s Alcibiades, “the first text that poses in a systematic way the problem of interior life, of the self ’s relation to itself.” The act of religious or medical confession is not, it seems to me, an act of self-directed askesis, but a peculiar form of submission to a strangely powerful listener. And so: I find myself inclined to draw a bright line between the form of confession that Foucault articulated as leading to the form of subjectivity known as sexuality, and the form of confession that Foucault spoke of in his last lectures as a form of “moral parrhēsia.” To be clear, what Allen has done is to provide us with a striking topographic map through these last lectures, and to allow us to see the ways in which Foucault creates a coherence between subjectivity, care of the self, and the act of telling the truth (to power, or to oneself, or both). This little essay is not meant as a critique of the splendid work that Allen has done; but reading his explication allowed me pry open this inconsistency. I hope that it will provoke from Allen some further explication of Foucault’s alethurgies, and perhaps he will tell me where I have mis–stepped. 

Works Cited:

Foucault, M. 1978 [1976]. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1., Ttranslated by. R. Hurley.  New York: Vintage Books., 1978. 

_______. 2008. Le gouvernement de soi et des autres. Cours au Collège de France, 1982–83. Edited by. Frédéric Gros. Paris: Hautes Études/Gallimard/Seuil, 2008.. 

_______. 2010. The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982-83., Ttranslated by. G. Burchell. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010..

Miller, P. Allen. 2022. Foucault’s Seminars on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.. 

Foucault’s Seminars on Antiquity takes as its central focus what Allen Miller describes as Michel Foucault’s “preoccupation” (16) with “traditional philosophical questions” (186): questions of truth, power, knowledge, the own (16). Spotlighting these questions, Miller brilliantly illuminates (against expectation, perhaps, given Foucault’s preoccupation and sources), how Foucault’s seminars on antiquity harbor a radical philosophy and politics. 

This is a philosophy according to which truth is not “objective or impersonal” (95) or “designed to provide … accurate information” (179), but indexed to a “genealogy of the subject as a locus of truth” (52), in which the “question of the subject’s truth and the truth of the subject” are not separable but “twin” (24), and in which knowledge, including self-knowledge, is not a “possession” (173) but a practice of “self-constitution” (163). It’s a thoroughly political philosophy insofar as its truths do “not happen outside of history, outside of power” (148). And it’s radical in that it makes space for “the production of new knowledge, new understandings, new truth” (143). 

From Miller’s intimate and generous engagements with the seminars, alongside his own sensitive readings of Foucault’s primary texts, we learn that Foucault’s radical political philosophy is made possible by “unceasing questioning” and “endless examination” (4), practices that are themselves prompted by what Foucault describes as “thought from the outside (1986)” (1). In Foucault, the site of this “outside” is sometimes an institution on the margins of a society, like the prison, and, sometimes, a marginal subject. And thought from the outside can appear as madness or as truth. Or, more precisely, as truth-telling, the speaking of truth to power characteristic of parrhēsia, which often appears as madness and truth, both. 

Foucault’s exemplary parrhesiast is Diogenes the Cynic (though there is also the matter of Socrates, about whom, more below). Diogenes is exemplary insofar as his “form of life” (181) is, in Foucault’s words, “an other life, radically and paradoxically other” (2009: 226, Miller 177). As Miller brings out, for Foucault, there can be “no instilling of truth without an essential position of alterity,” for only truth that “is never the same” (2009: 311, Miller 177) can “estrange” us “from our own experience,” and thereby prompt us to “come to think differently” (179). Thus, it is as truth that is “in the form of another world, another life” (2009: 311, Miller 177) that Cynic parrhēsia exemplifies the thought from the outside that powers Foucault’s radical political philosophy. 

Plato appears as parrhesiast in Foucault’s seminars as well, specifically, as Miller discusses, when, in the (for some, pseudo-) Seventh Letter, Plato speaks truth to the power of the tyrant Dionysius (145-8). Miller shows that Foucault’s seminars also trace Plato the parrhesiast to the dialogs, which will likely surprise readers for whom, as for Nietzsche, the Plato of the dialogs stands for the “‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge’” (57) and its truth that Foucault’s radical political philosophy disavows, for this traditional Plato is profoundly at odds with Plato the parrhesiast. It somewhat surprised me, too, though not because I endorse the traditional Plato – not at all — but because I see Foucault and also Miller sometimes themselves endorsing a traditional Plato, that is, in the version bequeathed to them by Heidegger, and I’m not sure how well Plato the parrhesiast and Heidegger’s Plato get along.

Let me explain. As Miller reminds us, Heidegger’s Plato is the Plato with whom the story of Western philosophy as metaphysics begins. On Heidegger’s telling, Plato inaugurates metaphysics because and insofar as Plato understands philosophy as representational thinking. This is a kind of thinking according to which, as Miller explains, “truth is defined as the adequacy of the representation possessed by the subject in relation to the object (Heidegger 1998: 181; Mortensen 1994: 80–2; Jones 2011: 43)” (30).  On Miller’s parsing, truth, so understood, is a function of correspondence: sometimes “correspondence between the perception of a subject and the reality of an independent object”; and, sometimes, “correspondence between a proposition and its referent” (5). Heidegger’s Plato – we can call him Plato the metaphysician – not unlike Foucault’s Homer, understands “veridiction” as “the manifestation of a truth exterior to the speaking subject” (34). Maintaining a strict separation between epistemic subjects and epistemic objects (5), and also between the seeming of objects and their being, Plato the metaphysician’s truth disavows its articulations with subjectivity, and also with power and history.

Heidegger sources this understanding of truth to the Republic’s famous cave allegory. Miller agrees. The “Myth of the Cave,” he writes, “offers the first full articulation of a correspondence model of truth in which an autonomous subject apprehends the truth of the object by correctly referring to it by the category or type to which it belongs (Miller 2020a)” (30). Truth for Plato the metaphysician, like parrhesiastic truth, is sited to a thought from the outside. But the outside of metaphysical truth is not the margins of a society. Nor is metaphysical truth itself radically situated. Instead, as an ahistorical and noncontingent truth, it transcends society to stand instead as a timeless universal. The thought from the outside of metaphysical truth does not prompt self-constitution and reconstitution “as a subject in a self-relation of emancipation” (153). Instead, it authorizes and justifies rule, including tyrannical rule, by philosopher-kings.

I would like to understand better how these two Platos — the metaphysician and the parrhesiast — inhabit and cohabit in Foucault’s seminars on antiquity and also in Foucault’s Seminars on Antiquity. They are too proximate and overlapping in Foucault’s seminars to be explained by a developmental story, according to which, say, Foucault started off thinking about Plato one way but changed his mind over time. To me, this kind of story is belied, in any case, by a key structuring binary to which Foucault, and Miller, too, repeatedly return: an opposition of philosophy to rhetoric (95-96, 150-52, 164-65, 186). Metaphysical truth depends on this opposition, but might it have to be refused by Plato the parrhesiast, for whom, as Miller tells us, truth “does not pre-exist discourse” (152)? And if the parrhesiast invests in a logos which, rather than “effacing [itself] before an external truth” (6), is co-implicated with subjects and/in their truth-telling, then might Plato the parrhesiast’s discursive truth be closer than Foucault and Miller allow to that of the sophists, for whom truth is “a concrete reflection of the desires, passions, and interests of the speaker (Foucault 2011: 32–3, 43, 46–7, 60, 65–6)” (6)? Moreover, if the truth-telling characteristic of parrhēsia registers “as a thousand barely audible voices that inform, contradict, and determine one another (2008: 22)” (145), then wouldn’t it be the case, contra Miller, that, for Plato the parrhesiast, as for the sophists and poets, true speech, or logos alēthēs, would not be “self-identical” (176)?

The tensions between metaphysical and parrhesiastic truth need not necessarily foreclose their coincidence. They could coincide, for example, in a Plato, who, like Diogenes, say, is “an other life, radically and paradoxically other.” But I’m not sure that this kind of alterity can be accommodated by the Plato of Foucault’s seminars (or of Foucault’s Seminars, for that matter). For, on Foucault’s genealogy of the subject as a locus of truth as surfaced by Miller, the pre-Cynic self is instead pretty seamless and unified. Its self-knowledge, “a way of mastering and forming the self” (45), which serves as “a predicate for knowledge per se,” warrants the subject’s speaking “a truth separate from itself” (48). Miller explains: 

Ancient philosophical self-knowledge takes many forms, but in no case, Foucault argues – and I would submit that he is right – do they require confrontation with the radically alien within the self, the monstrous … .  What is new with Christianity, Foucault argues, is not the drive toward self-knowledge, and the forms of self-care that form its predicates, but the relation to the radically other and perverse within. (48-9) 

To Foucault and also to Miller, it seems, a Plato hospitable to alterity would be anachronistic. More than that, such a Plato would, I believe, be anathematic, insofar as “self-identicality” is associated not only, as noted, with the logos alēthēs, but with Plato the parrhesiast as well (176). But what if attributing self-identicality to the truth-teller, no less than to the truth, is to subject Plato the parrhesiast to Plato the metaphysician? 

And if parrhēsia depends, as it does in Diogenes, on constitutive alterity, but alterity, like radically situated truth, is effaced by Plato the metaphysician, then might endorsing Plato the parrhesiast require refusing Heidegger’s Plato? I think the answer is yes, and offer elsewhere, in place of a metaphysical Plato, what I call a poetic Plato, for whom representational thinking is not correspondence between appearance and a reality determined by exteriorized truth, but rather aisthetic, aesthetic, and therefore relational, which is to say, radically situational, and always articulated with power. My key text for Plato the poet is the Republic, which I reread back to front, through the lens of its treatment of mimesis. For this Plato, as for Plato the parrhesiast, truth does not consist “in the correlation of names (onomata) and appearances (eidola) through logoi, but it is the continuing and deliberate friction (tribē) between those elements of knowledge in a fashion that reveals the contingencies, interests, and limitations that govern those correlations” (147). This Plato is constituted by alterity from the get-go in virtue of his authorial self-erasure, which, I argue, figures him as the totality of the dialogic relationships he represents via the characters he writes into his dialogs. This Plato, like Miller’s “monstrous” Oedipus, is “structured as a sumbolon … irretrievably double” (29), or, rather, multiple. Like the Socrates of the Phaedrus (92), Plato the poet is Typhonesque.

Which brings me, at last, to Socrates, Plato’s Socrates, who Miller describes as Foucault’s “lodestar” (2), “primary [parrhesiastic] model” (165), and philosophical and political “archetype” (166). More than Diogenes or Plato, it seems really to be Socrates who, for Foucault, “places the philosopher in a fundamentally new position as a truth-teller” (168). Miller, too, seems to most prefer Socrates as exemplary parrhesiast, especially compared to the Cynics, whom he calls “heirs to the most disturbing parts of the Socratic legacy” (4). Foucault describes Socrates’ life as “unpolluted and pure (Foucault 2009: 92)” (173). To Miller, Socrates’ life is “the perfect philosophic life” (173). For both, Socrates stands out as the paradigmatic self-constituting parrhesiastic “touchstone” (169-74), an emblematic “vessel of truth” (25). 

I have some questions about this Socrates. Miller and Foucault both site Socrates’ parrhēsia to his characteristic practice of argumentation, the elenchus, by way of which “Socrates transforms the traditional enigmatic oracular pronouncement of a truth yet to be realized into a proposition to be tested over and over again within a set of discursive interactions whereby statements are shown to be either true or false by logical means and the mutual agreement of the interlocutors (Foucault 2009: 76)” (167-68). This “Socratic process of examination and refutation” (168), Miller writes, demands “a commitment to the courage of truth—the title of Foucault’s final course—to parrhēsia, and to the combatting of false opinion, even unto death” (175). To Miller, what “Foucault means by ‘truth’ in this context, and what he argues Plato means as well, is something akin to Heidegger’s notion of alētheia as the ‘unhidden’” (175).

I’m less sure. While I agree that the elenchus turns truth into a proposition to be tested by logic, this does not strike me as an especially parrhesiastic practice. On the contrary, this sounds uncannily resonant with an iteration of the correspondence theory of truth referenced above, namely, truth as “the correspondence between a proposition and its referent” (5), the truth of Plato the metaphysician. But if the truth of the elenchus aligns with the truth of metaphysics, then won’t elenctic truth be at a great distance from both parrhesiastic truth and also from alētheia, which Heidegger offers as his antidote to metaphysical truth? And if Foucault’s radical political philosophy depends on thinking and acting differently, and if that, as Miller explains, requires getting “beyond the definitions, procedures, and discourses that define what it means to make a true statement … (1984a: 14-15)” (1), then won’t the Socratic elenchus, in virtue of its “definitions, procedures, and discourses that define what it means to make a true statement,” in virtue precisely of its captivity to logic, more so threaten rather than cultivate the capacities upon which radical philosophy depends?

Miller names a second site of Socrates’ parrhesiastic practice: an “encounter with the soul of Socrates” (169). Referencing Plato’s Alcibiades and Foucault, Miller writes that Socrates “functions both as a mirror, but also as a touchstone, a way of examining the self in terms of its own judgment (phronēsis), truth (alētheia), and soul (psukhē) (29e1–2; Foucault 2009: 77–9, 119)” (169). A “mirror,” yes: as Socrates maintains in the Theaetetus, “The arguments never come out of me; they always come out of the person I am talking with” (160e). And a “touchstone,” too, in the way that, in the Gorgias, say, Socrates calls Callicles his “touchstone” (487a). Whether as mirror or touchstone, an encounter with the soul of Socrates will always, in these ways, be, as in the case of Diogenes, an encounter with “an other life, radically and paradoxically other.” To this radical paradoxicality, a Typhonesque Socrates would surely be hospitable. Would the “unpolluted and pure” Socrates who serves as Foucault’s and Miller’s touchstone?

Foucault’s pedigree as a Nietzschean is fairly well established. “Truth is a thing of this world” is one of Foucault’s rallying cries against Plato, or rather Platonism, against any impulse toward the transcendental, against anything that escapes the corruption of the here and now—the dreadful realm of becoming. In this vein, Foucault is also known as France’s “philosopher of power”—meaning that knowledge as such can only be an illusory aspiration, an effect of material and discursive forces. Against this one-sided account, which often works to delegitimize Foucault’s contribution to the humanities, Professor Miller’s beautiful book demonstrates that Foucault’s relation to philosophy and its more traditional operations is infinitely more complex. 

I want to take up three converging points of interest in my response to Foucault’s Seminars on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth. The first is Foucault’s relation to ancient philosophy’s traumatophobic character; the second concerns the unexpected resonance between Foucault’s discussion of Christianity’s account of the “radically alien” within and Slavoj Žižek’s return to the (real) neighbor of scripture; and the third deals with Professor Miller’s recasting of Foucault as a kind of philosopher of the universal (albeit a universal that undergoes its own mutation via the call of parrhēsia).

Philosophy’s traumatophobic character is perhaps most clearly displayed by the Stoics, for whom the pedagogical ideal underpinning self-care is about limiting exposure to trauma via the cultivation of one’s reason. Only by “train[ing] the student to use reason to avoid suffering” (46) can one actualize their fully humanity. As Professor Miller observes, the care of the self, or the aesthetics of existence, is an injunction “to submit your existence to the logos, to reasoned discourse and self-testing, to produce a life that is accountable, defensible, and admirable” (175). And yet Foucault’s penchant also seems to go the other way, attracted to what derails (one’s) being. Foucault has no truck with identitarian impulses. In “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault explains the labor of critique as “work on our limits, that is, a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty.” This type of critique “will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.” Elsewhere, Foucault famously celebrates critique as “the art of voluntary inservitude [l’art de l’inservitude volontaire],” foregrounding its “reflective indocility [l’indocilité réfléchie],” which yearns for “desubjectification” in “the politics of truth.” How does this desire for a permanent state of negativity, that insists on experimentality and skepticism, on not foreclosing the subject’s very possibilities, sit with ancient philosophy’s vision of reason? Does the imperative to liberate the self from itself—the call to disengage from oneself, “to get free of oneself” (se déprendre de soi-même)—entail a certain traumatophilia, an attraction to unsettlement? 

This perpetual desire to break free of oneself, of one’s will to servitude, characterizes for Foucault “the ethic of the intellectual.” Is self-violence, in this light, a Foucauldian response to the Delphic injunction, “Know thyself”? Does it yield alternative modes of self and self-knowing? What is the relation between Foucauldian negativity and (ancient) philosophy’s investment in reason? Is there a reason hospitable to truth’s unruliness, to the self-violence that it fosters, or to the desire to break free from one’s symbolic identity and/or unplug from one’s organic community? I believe Professor Miller hints at an answer via his discussion of parrhēsia (a question to which I’ll return below).

Professor Miller turns our attention to Foucault’s account of the difference between an ancient philosophical self-knowledge—which takes multiple forms—and its Christian counterpart. What the former noticeably lacks is the latter’s “confrontation with the radically alien within the self, the monstrous, whether in the shape of the devil, Descartes’ evil genius, or unconscious desires” (48-49). This formulation caught my eye and reminded me of Žižek’s commentary on the figure of the neighbor, along with the biblical injunction to “Love thy neighbor.” Quoting Lacan, Žižek writes: “Nothing is farther from the message of Socrates than you shall love your neighbor as yourself, a formula that is remarkably absent from all that he says.” A certain relation to self and to the neighbor are thus utterly foreign to ancient philosophy. 

If Greek philosophy neglected the hysterical presence of this alien other, Jewish law avows the Real of the neighbor, that is, the neighbor as the “bearer of a monstrous Otherness, this properly inhuman neighbor.” Žižek’s twist is that this understanding of the neighbor does not refer exclusively to the external other, but to the otherness that resides in the self as well. The inhuman is “absolutely immanent [to] the very core of subjectivity itself.” The self as neighbor sounds a lot like the “radically alien within the self, the monstrous,” that which I/we perpetually disavow and project onto the other—the foreigner, the racialized other, the sexually deviant, the imagined enemy. Je est un monstre. Here, I am interested in what Professor Miller might say about a care of the self that avows and takes seriously the neighbor within and without. Wouldn’t this anti-normative model of self-care necessarily open to the care for others/other (real) neighbors? Isn’t this a further opportunity for a rapprochement between Foucault and psychoanalysis? 

Lastly, I found Professor Miller’s recasting of Foucault’s critical work in universalist terms provocative. This is one of the passages I have in mind: “This work [involving the separation of the self from its environment] is inseparable from the elaboration of the truth, not as a private confession or fantasy but as public speech, as reasoning on the level of the universal and the general” (130). It is, of course, well known that Foucault was quite allergic to universalisms in all shapes. Recently, Todd McGowan has underscored the authority of Foucault in anti-universalist circles, namely among the proponents of identity politics, the dominant paradigm of postmodern politics: “Michel Foucault provides the model for contemporary politics, even among those who have never heard of him. Foucault is the leading theoretical light for the move from a universalist program to particular political interventions.” I think Professor Miller’s book invites us to read Foucault against Foucault, or at least against a certain liberal or multicultural reception of his ideas.

Professor Miller’s emphasis on Foucault’s commitment to truth—the courage of truth—compels us to revisit his ascribed place among the particularists, the anti-universalists. Here we might link more explicitly the work of refusing what we are with parrhēsia (frankness, truth-telling). Foucault argues that “the parrhesiastes acts on other people’s minds by showing them as directly as possible what he actually believes.” Indeed, philosophical frankness means speaking truth to power or it means nothing at all. But isn’t there a certain traumatophilia in this vision parrhēsia? Identity politics, in this respect, is antithetical to the virtues of parrhēsia. Its politics is squarely about self-interests, the interests of one’s own group. It is after recognition from power, and even potentially a limited piece of that power. We may also characterize identity politics as traumatophobic: don’t verge away from self-interest, remain faithful to what is good for your cause. Simply put, identity politics submits to the logic of the pleasure principle. In contrast, parrhēsia gestures to an alternative politics, to a politics of solidarity, a politics in the pursuit of justice for all. Here universality breaks with a model of universalism that traffics with abstract universals predicated on an a priori category (anchored in nature, humanism, reason, etc.) which is then applied to all circumstances.  

In imagining this parrhēsia at work in today’s political landscape, I am wondering how it would account for—and potentially disrupt—fetishist disavowal, the logic of “Je sais bien, mais quand même” [“I know very well, but nevertheless”]. As Žižek observes, “fetishist disavowal” is an attempt to deal with anxiety; it splits the ego between knowing and not knowing; new information has been admitted into consciousness but its epistemic impact has been minimized and “not really integrated into the subject’s symbolic universe.’’ There is a willful turning away in fetishist disavowal: “‘I know, but I don’t want to know that I know, so I don’t know.’ I know it, but I refuse to fully assume the consequences of this knowledge, so that I can continue acting as if I don’t know.” 

Žižek gives the example of the suffering of animals to illustrate the workings of fetishist disavowal:

What about animals slaughtered for our consumption? who among us would be able to continue eating pork chops after visiting a factory farm in which pigs are half-blind and cannot even properly walk, but are just fattened to be killed? And what about, say, torture and suffering of millions we know about, but choose to ignore? Imagine the effect of having to watch a snuff movie portraying what goes on thousands of times a day around the world: brutal acts of torture, the picking out of eyes, the crushing of testicles—the list cannot bear recounting. Would the watcher be able to continue going on as usual? Yes, but only if he or she were able somehow to forget—in an act which suspended symbolic efficiency—what had been witnessed.

Žižek argues that this disavowal is emblematic of ethics as such. Fundamentally, every ethics (“even the most universal ethics”) affirms a fetishist disavowal, “obliged to draw a line and ignore some sort of suffering.” As well-meaning subjects, we need to forget about the suffering of animals. We need to remain ethical (humanist/humane), but we aren’t willing to assume the symbolic consequences: the need to radically alter society’s systemic animal cruelty and fully avowal our own animality.

As enlightened humanists, we manage a kind of split attitude. On the one hand, we know that human beings are just like pigs and birds, that we are animals subjected to evolution by natural selection (we enthusiastically fight for the teaching of Darwin in public schools). We also know that we experiment on animals, mistreat and slaughter them. Basically, we know that there is nothing exceptional about us. On the other hand, we nonetheless act as if we didn’t know, as if we were exceptional, somehow ontologically special, incommensurable with the rest of the animal kingdom. Can Foucauldian parrhēsia complicate the ideological capture of knowledge, basically its reduction to received doxa?   

Foucault’s anti-humanism dates from Les mots et les choses and has never wavered. Can parrhēsia short-circuit humanism’s affective appeal, dislodge the knowledge/belief opposition so that “it becomes possible for another world to be imagined” (182)? We know about humanism’s horrendous history, but we nonetheless still believe in humanism, in its libidinal currency. Fetishist disavowal helps to reproduce the status quo, blocking or coopting any genuine threat to complacency and normalcy, to my conformable existence; it allows liberals and humanists to indulge in self-satisfaction, that is, to have their “cake and eat it.” If fetishist disavowal effectively defangs impartial knowledge, is speaking truth to power (with all the risks that it entails) spared the same bleak future? What would learning to speak an anti-humanist truth look like in its material practice? How would it challenge humanism’s authority (an authority that is by no means premised on a pristine history of humanism—I know that humanists have dirty hands, but nonetheless…)? How would it estrange (weaken the subject’s attachment to the Human) and disable the humanist’s capacity to “know” but in a way that does not make that knowledge disruptive and unamenable to the well-being of society? Inducing cognitive dissonance and fearlessly decrying humanism’s delusions à la Diogenes may not be sufficient to alter our social coordinates, make us think differently, or simply compel us to reexamine our beliefs in who matters and who doesn’t (179–80).

Žižek returns to the relation of fetishist disavowal and ethics, proposing a way out of the former’s ideological traps. He asks and answers: “Does not every ethics have to rely on such a gesture of fetishistic disavowal? Yes, every ethics—with the exception of the ethics of psychoanalysis which is a kind of anti-ethics: it focuses precisely on what the standard ethical enthusiasm excludes, on the traumatic Thing that our Judeo-Christian tradition calls the ‘Neighbor.’” Would Professor Miller’s Foucault pin his name to this monstrous anti-ethical ethics?