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The Cosmopolitics of Parrhesia: Foucault and Truth-Telling As Human Right

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The Cosmopolitics of Parrhesia: Foucault and Truth-Telling As Human Right David Kim The Cosmopolitics of Parrhesia: Foucault and Truth-Telling as Human Right This is my question: At what price can subjects speak the truth about themselves? Michel Foucault, “Structuralism and Poststructuralism” Truth-Telling as Human Right In June 1981, at the inaugural meeting of the United Nations International Com- mittee Against Piracy, Michel Foucault appealed to the notion of “international citizenship” on behalf of Vietnamese boat people (Foucault 1984a, p. 22).⁵⁹ Following the Fall of Saigon some six years before, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese had begun to flee the country by sea, but no government at the time was willing to halt their brutal and recurring victimization by pirates in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea. Pirates had historically been consid- ered “enemies of humanity” for their stateless status according to international maritime law and their “unpolitical,” personally driven motives for assaulting members of any nation-state (Schmitt 2011, p. 28). Furthermore, the 1958 Con- vention on the High Seas, the 1974 International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, and the 1979 International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue had specified that member states were required to aid people in distress at sea (UNHCR 2011).⁶⁰ And yet, help did not come from any government. So Foucault reminded his listeners in Geneva of their moral duty as international citizens, a duty that obligated everyone “to speak out against every abuse of power, whoever its perpetrator, whoever its victims.” He said: “It is a duty of this international citizenship to bring always to the eyes and ears of governments the testimony of people’s misfortunes for which it is not true that they are not responsible” (Fou- cault 1984a, p. 22). By recognizing the work of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Amnesty International, Terre des Hommes, and Cap Anamur, 59 All translations are mine unless otherwise stated. 60 The three conventions provided an international framework for rescuing people in distress at sea regardless of citizenship, mode of transportation, and number. © 2015 David Kim, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. 84 David Kim Foucault put forth an ethical framework for confronting indifferent or idle gov- ernments in violation of or at least in disregard of international human rights. Since states refused to share political power with their citizens in confirmation of Max Weber’s characterization of politics as a vocational “monopoly,” Foucault contended that this “division of labor” in the public sphere was a universal con- dition under which individual subjects around the globe experienced a certain shared difficulty (Weber 1919, p. 4, p. 10). In fact, since governments distin- guished themselves from other political associations by using physical force as a legitimate means to monopolize power, this distinction gave citizens everywhere “an absolute right to stand up and speak to those in power” (Foucault 1984a, p. 22). What entitled them to public opinion – and thus, to mobilizing shame – was the membership in an international community of commonly governed subjects: “After all, we are all of the governed and, for this reason, in solidarity” (Foucault 1984a, p. 22).⁶¹ On the surface, then, Foucault presented an adversarial or agonistic model of democracy, pitting the liberal emphasis on individual rights against the rep- resentational responsibility for commons. The title of his speech – “Facing Gov- ernments: The Rights of Man” – alluded to this universal opposition to state sovereignty. Since political regimes had abandoned the obligation to safeguard each and every citizen in the rapidly globalizing market economy, what Foucault suggested was the idea that only a persistent insistence on populist reason con- structed an alternative public sphere where the plight of abused prisoners, poli- tical dissidents, refugees, and the poor could properly be heard. Upon closer examination, though, Foucault’s impassioned and somewhat hastily composed appeal to the notion of international citizenship turned out to be far more complicated. As he pointed out in succinct terms, the burden of mon- itoring human rights violations fell upon private individuals whose impatience with politics as usual led to international humanitarian initiatives. Such modes of resistance came from “indignant” individuals who despite having no qualifica- tion for representation joined hands across international borders in opposition to national governments. For Foucault, this status of non-representation was pivotal for claiming the right to say truth to power in neoliberal democracy: “So who appointed us? No one. And that is precisely what constitutes our right” (Foucault 1984a, p. 22).⁶² Being governed and yet abused, ignored or neglected by state repre- 61 I borrow the term “mobilizing shame” from Thomas Keenan who draws upon Kant to argue that “mobilizing shame has Enlightenment roots” insofar as reason constitudes a faculty of pub- lic exchange that “exposes, reveals, and argues” (Keenan 2004, p. 436). 62 Jacques Rancière refers to Book III of Plato’s Laws to specify how the seventh possible quali- The Cosmopolitics of Parrhesia 85 sentatives gave individual citizens both the right and the duty to stand together in solidarity. It grounded their moral obligation to tell the truth in international citizenship. According to Foucault, international human rights groups managed to create “this new right – that of private individuals to intervene effectively in the sphere of international relations and strategies” and to refute “people’s misfortune” as “a silent remainder of politics” (Foucault 1984a, p. 22). Although Foucault simpli- fied human rights as the rights of speechless victims, victims who were unable to claim their rights as national citizens, he singled out Peter Beneson of Amnesty International, Edmond Kaiser of Terre des Hommes, and Christel and Rupert Neudeck of Cap Anamur as exemplary cosmopolitans who pressed states to take action and came first in offering their help to Vietnamese asylum seekers. While mobilizing passions at local and national levels, they exposed the untruth of public officials on the world stage. Acting upon their right as governed subjects, these private citizens told the truth about hypocrisy, lies, and broken promises by indifferent governments. I have opened this essay with a close reading of Foucault’s speech to address a broader issue he raises, namely truth-telling or parrhesia as a revolutionary practice in democracy and as an exercise in international citizenship. The origin of his intense interest in this speech act dates back to the second half of the 1970s when he began to work on ancient Greek modes of subjectivity and self-knowl- edge, coupled with public criticisms of the Gulag, the deportation of Klaus Crois- sant from France back to West Germany, and the widespread denunciation of the Iranian Revolution. As he reflected in one of his last interviews, Foucault was interested in statements of truth as opposed to scientific verifications and his intel- lectual trajectory moved accordingly from structures of power-knowledge to his- torical conditions under which political subjects considered themselves objects of critical inquiry. He explained this turn as follows: “This is my question: At what fication for government is illustrative of this paradox. Four of the seven qualifications (axiomata) are traditional insofar as they are related to “positions of authority” (master and slave, parents and children) and “the difference of birth” (young and old, nobles and serfs). The fifth qualifica- tion has to do with “the principle of principles” and that is “the power of those with a superior nature, of the strong over the weak.” The sixth qualification is grounded in science; it is “the power of those who know over those who do not.” As Rancière goes on to say, Plato does not stop there. He adds a seventh one, which introduces a “paradox” to democratic rule. Here, “democ- racy is characterized by the drawing of lots, or the complete absence of any en titlement to gov- ern.” In other words, democratic rule originates in “the absence of entitlement” (Rancière 2010, p. 31). 86 David Kim price can subjects speak the truth about themselves?” (Foucault 1999, p. 444). For Foucault, telling the truth constituted a communicative – and thus essentially political – activity in which speaker and listener did not interact with each other on equal terms. Moreover, it was a deeply personal and courageous deed whose truth claim aimed to improve the speaker’s life and the lives of others. As Fou- cault added, the problem with this risky practice was that a high price had to be paid; parrhesia was rarely possible for free. What concerns me in this essay is Foucault’s critical valuation of veridiction in international solidarity with human beings who are equally governed, but whose rights as individual citizens are violated by governments in a spectacle of false claims and neoliberal policies. If humanitarian aid in the form of money is always already corrupt in a profit-driven coordination between governments and businesses, Foucault asks how telling the truth in its unembellished entirety intervenes in such hegemonic relations and strategies beyond politics as usual. What is it about this ethical practice in cosmopolitanism that has the potential to reject the lies of corrupt and irrespon- sible states and resists the instrumentalization of truth claims in theatrical public relations? Under what circumstances does parrhesia engender a truly transform- ative politics? Although this investigation originates in the desire to understand more deeply the fluid concept of solidarity in European intellectual thought, I want to investigate Foucault’s concern for human rights toward the end of his manifold life – basically, during the early 1980s – as a way of thinking through what Pheng Cheah has recently identified as variously alienating processes in global moder- nity, processes that compel individuals and communities “to radically rethink what it means to be human” (Cheah 2006, p.
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