Abstract

This contribution will consider whether it is possible today to rethink parrhesia in a space of disjunction between the critical attitude and the truth-telling by focusing on critical strategies and oppositional forms of subjectivation that are actually more related to a non-truth-telling, which we propose to grasp through the concept of negative alethurgy. This entails questioning the tensions and ambivalences concerning the kind of truth at stake in the telling-truth of parrhesia, as well as the ethical-political framework of Michel Foucault’s research on the Greco-Roman Antiquity. In order to shed light on what we call negative alethurgy, firstly, parrhesia will be placed within the relations between the genealogy of obligations to tell the truth about oneself (which defines what Foucault means by alethurgy) and the critical attitude consisting of thwarting these same obligations; then, it will be clarified to what extent we can speak of negative alethurgy when the manifestation of the truth concerning a condition of subjection cannot consist in a truth-telling, but rather in a refusal to tell the truth or in lying. Finally, we will briefly analyse three examples that allow us to grasp the strategic force of lying, the falsehood, or the dissimulation within an alethurgic framework