O dizer verdadeiro, uma virtude ético-política : a tensão entre a parresía política e a parresía cínica em Michel Foucault

Abstract

What is the possible space for the courage of truth in politics? How to constitute a subjectivity in which elements of ethics, epistemology and politics are interwoven? What is the role of the philosopher and philosophy in politics? These and other questions led us to the notion of parrhesia [παρρησία] and its inflections within the pedagogical-philosophical itinerary of Michel Foucault. From these inflections emerges the problem that this study tries to examine in an attentive and detailed way: the tension between the political right to exercise parrhesia, which collapses, and the cynical practice of parrhesia. According to this problem the study wants to support the thesis that after Greek’s decay polis is not the notion of parrhesia that goes into crisis, but the institutional forms of organization of political life. Thus, we support the hypothesis, following Michel Foucault’s researches, by means of a process of epistemic-moral subjectivation of itself. We affirm with this study that it is possible to practice plural forms of citizenship whose provenance is referred to the ancient cynical way of life. Way of life characterized by detachment from material possessions, by the ability to criticize cultural and political values whose courage of truth is the ethical-political virtue par excellence.