PARRHESIA: Reading Snowden Through Foucault; Part 2

Edward Snowden - A Parrhesiastes

Parrhesia - Fearless Speech - Truth-Telling

 The Parrhesiastes is the one who uses parrhesia, i.e., the one who speaks the truth.

The Meaning of the Word

• Frankness
• Truth
• Danger
• Criticism
• Duty    

Frankness:The word parrhesia, then, refers to a type of relationship between the speaker and what he says. For in parrhesia, the speaker makes it manifestly clear and obvious that what he says is his own opinion. And he does this by avoiding any kind of rhetorical form which would veil what he thinks. Instead, the parrhesiastes uses the most direct words and forms of expression he can find. ...in parrhesia, the parrhesiastes acts on other people's minds by showing them as directly as possible what he actually believes. 

For, as we shall see, the commitment involved in parrhesia is linked to a certain social situation, to a difference of status between the speaker and his audience, to the fact that the parrhesiastes says something which is dangerous to himself and thus involves a risk, and so on. 

Truth: There are two types of parrhesia which we must distinguish. First, there is a pejorative sense of the word not very far from "chattering," ....This pejorative sense occurs in Plato, for example, as a characterization of the bad democratic constitution where everyone has the right to address his fellow citizens and to tell them anything - even the most stupid or dangerous things for the city. In Christian literature the emphasis will change as it is an obstacle to the contemplation of God.

Most of the time, however, parrhesia does not have this pejorative meaning in the classical texts, but rather a positive one. .....To my mind, the parrhesiastes says what is true because it is really true. The parrhesiastes is not only sincere and says what is his opinion, but his opinion is also the truth. He says what he knows to be true.  The second characteristic of parrhesia, then, is that there is always an exact coincidence between belief and truth.  

It would be interesting to compare Greek parrhesia with the modern Cartesian conception of evidence....It appears that parrhesia, in this Greek sense, can no longer occur in our modern epistemological framework.

 I am soon to disagree with Foucault here, as I think the "proof" produced by Snowden satisfies Cartesian evidence while demonstrating classical parrhesia attributes in addressing the "sovereign." I think Snowden has executed a Foucauldian CUT in the genealogy of parrhesia.
The discontinuity is that all requirements of classical parrhesia have been met by Snowden accompanied by Cartesian evidence. By inverting the paradigm, the searchlight is thrown on the Other, the more powerful entity, and we see that the parrhesiastes using parrhesia discloses the character and "truth" of the "sovereign" to the people. In that respect parrhesia lifts the mask of the "sovereign."

As Bane says in The Dark Knight Rises, "When all is lies, the truth is a weapon."

If there is a kind of "proof" of the sincerity of the parrhesiastes, it is his courage. The fact that a speaker says something dangerous - different from what the majority believes - is a strong indication that he is a parrhesiastes. 

Danger: Someone is said to use parrhesia and merits consideration as a parrhesiastes only if there is a risk or danger for him in telling the truth. ...when a philosopher addresses himself to a sovereign, to a tyrant, and tells him that his tyranny is disturbing and unpleasant because tyranny is incompatible with justice, then the philosopher speaks the truth, believes he is speaking the truth, and, more than that, also takes a risk (since the tyrant may become angry, may punish him, may exile him, may kill him.) And that was exactly Plato's situation with Dionysius in Syracuse....

And of course this is Edward Snowden's situation with the US Empire's government.

 So you see, the parrhesiastes is someone who takes a risk....Parrhesia, then, is linked to courage in the face of danger; it demands the courage to speak the truth in spite of some danger. And in its extreme form, telling the truth takes place in the "game" of life or death.

It is because the parrhesiastes must take a risk in speaking the truth that the king or tyrant generally cannot use parrhesia; for he risks nothing. 

When you accept the parrhesiastic game in which your own life is exposed, you are taking up a specific relationship to yourself; you risk death to tell the truth instead of reposing in the security of a life where the truth goes unspoken. Of course, the threat of death comes from the Other, and thereby requires a relationship to the Other. But the parrhesiastes primarily chooses a specific relationship to himself: he prefers himself as a truth-teller rather than as a living being who is false to himself. 

Hamlet anyone? 

 Criticism: For in parrhesia the danger always comes from the fact that the said truth is capable  of hurting or angering the interlocutor. Parrhesia is thus always a "game" between the one who speaks the truth and the interlocutor. The parrhesia involved, for example, may be the advice that the interlocutor should behave in a certain way, or that he is wrong in what he thinks, or in the way he acts, and so on. ...So, you see, the function of parrhesia is not to demonstrate the truth to someone else, but has the function of criticism: criticism of the interlocutor....Parrhesia is a form of criticism either toward another or towards oneself, but always in a situation where the speaker or confessor is in a position of inferiority with respect to the interlocutor. The parrhesiastes is always less powerful than the one with whom he speaks. The parrhesia comes from "below," as it were, and is directed towards "above."...But when a philosopher criticizes a tyrant, when a citizen criticizes the majority, when a pupil criticizes his teacher, then such speakers may be using parrhesia.

This is not to imply, however, that anyone can use parrhesia. ....most of the time the use of parrhesia requires that the parrhesiastes know his own genealogy, his own status;...In "democratic parrhesia" - where one speaks to the assembly, ....one must be a citizen; in fact, one must be one of the best among the citizens, possessing those specific personal, moral, and social qualities which grant one the privilege to speak. 

However, the parrhesiastes risks his privilege to speak freely when he discloses a truth which threatens the majority. For it was a well-known juridical situation that Athenian leaders were exiled only because they proposed something which was opposed by the majority, or even because the assembly thought that the strong influence of certain leaders limited its own freedom. And so the assembly was, in this manner, "protected" against the truth. That, then, is the institutional background of "democratic parrhesia" - which must be distinguished from that "monarchic parrhesia" where an advisor gives the sovereign honest and helpful advice. 

And it is here that the boundaries of democratic parrhesia and monarchic parrhesia begin to get blurry for me. Snowden's situation seems not only to be an example of "democratic parrhesia, but also one of "monarchic parrhesia," speaking truth to the tyrant. Although in this case it is a team of tyrants, a multitude of tyrants that includes the rulers and citizens combined. And this is something very new in the US. Solzhenitsyn in Soviet USSR was gulagged and when he survived was exiled. Snowden faced something swifter and something worse. This is where I see the Foucauldian CUT in the genealogy of parrhesia:

1. A merging of proof and classic parrhesia
2. An automatic and threatened sentence of endless torture and captivity proposed in advance of the supposed "criminal trial" of truth-telling, to silence all future truth-tellers

Duty: The last characteristic of parrhesia is this: in parrhesia, telling the truth is regarded as a duty. The orator who speaks the truth to those who cannot accept his truth, for instance, and who may be exiled, or punished in some way, is free to keep silent. No one forces him to speak, but he feels that it is his duty to do so. ...Parrhesia is thus related to freedom and duty.

To summarize the foregoing, parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty.  More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.  

Although Foucault is constructing a genealogy of parrhesia within the time period of the Fifth Century B.C. to the Fifth Century A.D. - one thousand years! - It would seem with Solzhenitsyn and Snowden that parrhesia does not stop there but has only rested. Its form has changed but I see no reason to change the name or the concept.

Doubting Love

Butler's Doubting Love
"One knows love somehow only when all one’s ideas are destroyed, and this becoming unhinged from what one knows is the paradigmatic sign of love."

Love destabilizes what one knows, what Sontag calls "our gods today". The names we have for important things. Our name for and idea of love.

Butler's doubting love  is Foucault's curiosity- "a certain relentlessness in ridding ourselves of our familiarities and looking at things otherwise..."
It is also what awaits further yet.
"People know what they do; they often know why they do it but what the people don't know, is what they do does".(DH&RP, 187)
It is love, Butler says, that always returns to us what we do and do not know.

"One finds that love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision. "
... love in flux, love which doubts itself into flux, out of 'comfortable', out of the known and the familiar idea of love, and any/every lesser thing then as well.

Butler reads Freud on doubting love as calling the most important thing into question, not letting assumptions go on unquestioned. Doubting as opening up of space, within and beyond the space already there.

"I cannot pretend to know myself at the moment of love, but I cannot pretend to fully know myself. I must neither vacate the knowledge that I have — the knowledge, after all, that will make me a better lover — and I cannot be the one who knows everything in advance — which would make me proud and, finally, lovable."

Finally, Butler's doubting love  is  Nietzsche's questioning, as Babette Babich writes about in Nietzsche's "Gay" Science, Nietzschean belief that everyone possesses a lust for questioning, and questioning at all costs (BB, pg.102). Doubting Love meets gai saber.

Nietzsche’s gay science is a passionate, fully joyful science. But to say this is also to say that a gay science is a dedicated science: scientific “all the way down.” This is a science including the most painful and troubling insights, daring, to use Nietzsche’s language here, every ultimate or “last consequence” ( BGE 22; KSA13, 14[79]). Doubting just as well as Montaigne, doubting in a more radical fashion than Descartes, and still more critical than Kant or Schopenhauer, dispensing with Spinoza’s and with Hegel’s (but also with Darwin’s and even Newton’s) faith, Nietzsche’s joyful, newly joyful, scientist carries “the will henceforth to question further, more deeply, stringently, harshly, cruelly, and quietly than one had questioned heretofore” (GS, preface, 3). Even confidence in life itself, as a value, of course, but also as such, now “becomes a problem.” The result is a new kind of love and a new kind of joy, a new passion, a “new happiness.” (BB, 99)

To Be Read in the Interrogative - Julio Cortazar

Have you seen

have you really seen

the snow the stars the felt step of the breeze

Have you touched

really have you touched

the plate the bread the face of that woman you love

so much

Have you lived

like a blow to the head

the flash the gasp the fall the flight

Have you known

known in every pore of your skin

how your eyes your hands your sex your soft heart

must be thrown away

must be wept away

must be invented all over again.

* * *
July 2013
...months go by, I forget about this doubting, reading in the interrogative, and settle in fixity of the idea of love. Comfortable because it has been repeated enough times to have become so familiar a truth that needn't be doubted. Safe. A god worshipped in unquestionable unquestioning repetition.

Then, a reminder:

Badiou, In Praise of Love:

“I am really interested in the time love endures. Let’s be precise: by endure, one should not simply understand that love lasts, that love is forever and always. One has to understand that love invents a different way of lasting."(Love Dog)

and another:

"An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.
It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us."
(Adrienne Rich)

Robsessed Turns Rob Pattinson Pap Pics Into A Muybridge Motion Study

Science oAlthough Eadweard Muybridge thought of himself primarily as an artist, he encouraged the aura of scientific investigation that surrounded his project at the University of Pennsylvania. Published in 1887 as Animal Locomotion, the 781 finished prints certainly look scientific, and historically, most viewers have accepted them as reliable scientific studies of movement. The recent rediscovery of Muybridge’s working proofs, however, demonstrates that he freely edited his images to achieve these final results. How does this change our idea of his photography?r Art—or Both? http://americanhistory.si.edu/muybridge/

So it's been going on a long long time eh.

http://americanhistory.si.edu/muybridge/

See Rob walk. Look, look, look Jane. Look, Sally, look. See Rob walk. Walk, Rob, walk. See Rob walk, Sally and Jane! Oh Dick, see Rob walk!

 

really good motion ones from top:

http://www.robsessedpattinson.com/2012/10/no-photo-left-behind-robert-pattinson.html

 

http://www.robsessedpattinson.com/2012/10/robert-pattinson-at-lax-heading-to.html

See Rob go. Rob can go down. See Rob go down. Down down down.

 

Muybridge again not Rob

 Top upper right sort of looks like that day on the beach though 

Oh oh oh! See Rob run. Rob can run fast. Run, Rob, run! Run fast, Rob, run run run! Oh, oh, oh! Look, look, look!

http://hollywoodlife.com/2012/04/03/robert-pattinson-beach-pics-paddle-boarding-work-out/

http://www.robstendreams.com/2012/11/new-pics-of-rob-and-kristen-at.html#comment-form

Crotch shot from Robsten Dreams
Don't you just love it?

HERE

Embarrassing to have fans like these eh

See the man walk. Walk, man, walk. Man, walk. Walkman.

http://americanhistory.si.edu/muybridge/

 http://www.robsessedpattinson.com/2012/10/robert-pattinson-and-kristen-stewart.html 

 

Image of a typical robsessed fangirl

blackbeanie replied to Kazrob

Where do you keep getting them, Kaz?  Stupid, I know, but when I see a poem of you, I know everything's fine in our happy place. :)

Happy Trail

You tease me with these little peeks

When there's been no sign for bloody weeks

Then a pic appears and oh my god

Its you in a hoodie flashing the bod.

You reach up to pull on the hood

Knowing full well you're looking good

Sunglasses on, unmistakeably male

My eyes are riveted on your happy trail.

This trail of hair, my eyes they linger

I want to trace it with my finger

Should my hand dip to the pleasure dome

I know I've found my sweet way home...

Video Exposes the Fraud of US Weekly Photos of Kristen Stewart and Rupert Sanders.

On The Road NY Premiere Kristen Stewart

Is everyone happy now to see the flailed actress all skin and bones

Has she been punished enough for THAT AFTERNOON

Or do you want more more MORE

For THAT AFTERNOON see The Rashomon Effect here:

Complete with pictures from THAT AFTERNOON

The camera never lies. It records what is there. It is we who lie to ourselves when we perceive what we think we see. as it filters through our own protective shield.

Does this mean that the photos we see take on the literal truth of what the camera has recorded? 

Look at this video

Now tell me what you see in those pictures you just looked at

Watch and Learn
!AND ANOTHER ONE NEW!

HERE:  http://youtu.be/bnPCF9AQzCM 

As Diana was dying in her car pleading with her eyes for help the papz were filming her 
THEY TURNED HER INTO A SNUFF FILM


WIN ONE FOR DIANA
DOWN WITH THE TABLOIDS WHO CREATE THE MARKET 
FOR THE PAPZ

YAAAAY          OCCUPY!

Guerrilla Filmmaking - Review: Sound Of My Voice at the MOXIE in Springfield MO

Is She From The Future?

Or is she heralding the future?

In her interview with Interview Brit Marling discusses her time at Georgetown where three people met and became friends, deciding to make the documentary:Boxers and Ballerinas 2004

Brit Marling

Mike Cahill

Zal Batmanglij

Directing, Producing, Writing, Acting, Shooting, Editing

They collaboratively took Another Earth to Sundance and won two prizes there. What is wonderful is that they work together equally. There is no big Other involved in the making of their films. Zizek! Take notice please!

Once again Brit Marling is exploring Alterity

From her earlier film Another Earth

We can recall moments in the past when we had equal chances of living or dying - in a car crash, for example.... Every time someone finds himself at a crossroads of this kind, he has two worlds before him... It is the same with each decisive moment, both with birth and with death. Just as the virtual dead man that I am continues on his way on the other side, carries on with his existence which runs just beneath the surface of mine, birth is that dividing line where on the one side I exist as myself, but on the other I begin, at the same moment to exist as other Such is the form of alterity...(Impossible Exchange 82)

Kenzaburo Oe in A Personal Matter  opts for a choice-centered cosmology, and puts this in the mouth of one of his characters:
Every time you stand at the crossroads of life and death, you have two universes in front of you...  

A lovely review of this film: Sound of My Voice

Se défendre/To Defend Oneself or Why Occupy?

Michel Foucault: Se défendre

« Se défendre » est un inédit de Michel Foucault qui présente une saisissante synthèse de ce que peut être un rapport offensif à la légalité et aux institutions chargées de la mettre en oeuvre. Il vient d’être publié par Courant Alternatif avec un article (voir plus bas) qui montre ce que l’activité de défense doit aux luttes afin de souligner que le droit en général et les procédures judiciaires en particulier sont des espaces de lutte qu’il est nécessaire d’investir.

Se défendre

1- Evitons d’abord le problème ressassé du réformisme et de l’anti-réformisme. Nous n’avons pas à prendre en charge les institutions qui ont besoin d’être transformées. Nous avons à nous défendre tant et si bien que les institutions soient contraintes de se réformer. L’initiative doit donc venir de nous, non pas sous forme de programme mais sous forme de mise en question et sous forme d’action.
2- Ce n’est pas parce qu’il y a des lois, ce n’est pas parce que j’ai des droits que je suis habilité à me défendre ; c’est dans la mesure où je me défends que mes droits existent et que la loi me respecte. C’est donc avant tout la dynamique de la défense qui peut donner aux lois et aux droits une valeur pour nous indispensable. Le droit n’est rien s’il ne prend vie dans la défense qui le provoque ; et seule la défense donne, valablement, force à la loi.
3- Dans l’expression « Se défendre », le pronom réfléchi est capital. Il s’agit en effet d’inscrire la vie, l’existence, la subjectivité et la réalité même de l’individu dans la pratique du droit. Se défendre ne veut pas dire s’auto défendre. L’auto-défense, c’est vouloir se faire justice soi-même, c’est-à-dire s’identifier à une instance de pouvoir et prolonger de son propre chef leurs actions. Se défendre, au contraire, c’est refuser de jouer le jeu des instances de pouvoir et se servir du droit pour limiter leurs actions. Ainsi entendue, la défense a valeur absolue. Elle ne saurait être limitée ou désarmée par le fait que la situation était pire autrefois ou pourrait être meilleure plus tard. On ne se défend qu’au présent : l’inacceptable n’est pas relatif.
4- Se défendre demande donc à la fois une activité, des instruments et une réflexion. Une activité : il ne s’agit pas de prendre en charge la veuve et l’orphelin mais de faire en sorte que les volontés existantes de se défendre puissent venir au jour. De la réflexion : se défendre est un travail qui demande analyse pratique et théorique. Il lui faut en effet la connaissance d’une réalité souvent complexe qu’aucun volontarisme ne peut dissoudre. Il lui faut ensuite un retour sur les actions entreprises, une mémoire qui les conserve, une information qui les communique et un point de vue qui les mettent en relation avec d’autres. Nous laisserons bien sûr à d’autres le soin de dénoncer les « intellectuels ». Des instruments : on ne va pas les trouver tout faits dans les lois, les droits et les institutions existantes mais dans une utilisation de ces données que la dynamique de la défense rendra novatrice [1].
Michel Foucault

From: http://michel-foucault-archives.org/?Deux-textes-de-Michel-Foucault-en

(Source: http://variazionifoucaultiane.blogspot.com/2012/05/se-defendre.html) 14.5.2012.

 

Michel Foucault: To Defend Oneself

To Defend Oneself is an unpublished article by Foucault which presents a striking synthesis of what could be an offensive relationship to legality and institutions charged with enacting it. It is to be published by Courant Alternatif with an article (see below) which expresses what does the activity of defense owe to combats in order to accentuate that the law in general, and the legal procedures in particular are the spaces of combat which need to be moved into.

To defend oneself

1- Let us first avoid the worn out problem of reformism and anti-reformism. We do not have to take charge of institutions that need to be transformed. We need to defend ourselves for as long and as much until the institutions are forced to reform. The initiative needs then to come from us, not in the form of a program but in the form of questioning and in the form of acting.
2- It is not because there are laws, not because I have rights that I have the ability to defend myself; it is in the measure within which I defend myself that my rights exist and the law respects me. It is then primarily the dynamics of the defense which can give value, an indispensable one for us, to the laws and rights. The law is nothing unless it comes alive in the defense it provokes; and only the defense, valuably, gives the force to the law.
3- In the expression to defend oneself the reflexive pronoun is capital. It is effectively a matter of inscribing life, existence,subjectivity and even reality of the individual  in the practice of the law. To defend oneself does not mean auto-defense. Auto-defense, it is the will to do justice to one self by one self; that is, to identify oneself with an instance of power and to prolong the actions of its own master. To defend oneself, on the contrary, is to refuse to play the game of the instances of power, and to use the law itself for limiting its actions. Thus understood, the defense has an absolute value. It cannot be limited or disarmed by the fact that the situation was worse before or could be better later. We do not defend ourselves except in the present; the unaccaptable is irrelevant.
4- To defend oneself requires then simultaneously an activity, the instruments and a reflexion. An activity: it is not about taking charge of a widow and orphaned child, but about making it so that the existing willingness to defend oneself comes into the light of day. On reflexion: to defend oneself is a work that demands a practical and theoretical analysis. It often requires the knowledge of reality which is so complex that no voluntarism can dissolve it. It requires then a return to actions undertaken, a memory which conserves them, information that communicate them and a point of vue which puts them in relation with others. We will of course leave it to the others to worry about denouncing «the intellectuals». On the instruments: we will not find them all ready-made in the existing laws, rights and institutions, but within the utilization of those premises that will be rendered innovative by the dynamics of defense.

 Žižek on Occupy Wall Street 

There is no lack of anti-capitalist sentiment in the world today. There’s an overload of critiques of the horrors of capitalism: books, in-depth journalistic investigations and television reports abound on companies ruthlessly polluting our environment, on corrupt bankers who continue to get fat bonuses while their banks are saved by public money, of sweat shops where children work overtime.

The “democratic illusion”, the blind acceptance of the institutions of democracy as the only and the right force for change, actually prevents radical change.

What is as a rule not questioned, however, is the democratic-liberal framework of fighting against the excesses of capitalism. The explicit or implied goal of such critiques is only to democratise capitalism, to extend democratic control to the economy through pressure from the media, government inquiries, harsher laws, honest police investigations and so on. But we never ever question the democratic institutional framework of the state of law. This is the sacred cow that even the most radical forms of ethical anti-capitalism—think of the Porto Allegre forum, the Seattle movement—do not dare to touch. http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?279483

 

Addressing the protesters at Zucotti Park:

"So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent to work in East Germany from Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends, ‘Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say; if it is written in red ink, it is false.’ After a month, his friends get a first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: ‘Everything is wonderful here. The stores are full of good food, movie theatres show good films from the West, apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot find is red ink.’This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want, but what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom, ‘war on terror,’ and so on, falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here: You are giving all of us red ink."

http://guerrillablog2.blogspot.com/2012/03/slavoj-zizek-speaks-at-occupy-wall.html?zx=d7341d264673f3f4