"My heart, how shall I keep silent?" The Personal as Political: Foucault's Parrhēsia in Euripides' Ion and the Testimony of Christine Blasey Ford

Introduction

Teaching Euripides' Ion in an undergraduate course filled with upper-classmen makes the contemporariness of the tragedy impossible to ignore. Having a sexual assault victim step forward to publicly condemn the god who violated her strongly resonates with much of our socio-political reality today. Creusa's role in the play is not only that of someone who says "me too," but who also publicly denounces her abuser, risking the god's wrath. The significance of Euripides' tragedy for truth-telling today was highlighted when Michel Foucault shifted his attention towards parrhēsia¹ in the last years of his life. Ion is only one of the many Greek texts Foucault has referred to, but it is seen by him as a parrhesiastic play par excellence. The distinctness of this tragedy is that the truth is no longer revealed to humans by the gods, and so "human beings must manage, by themselves, to discover and to tell the truth" (Foucault 2001a, 44). Foucault's argument that Ion "concerns the human fight for the truth against god's silence" (2001a, 44) has powerful implications allowing us to theorize a secular, human-generated truth against the transcendental truth of power and to reflect on our own current responsibilities in relation to that truth.

The sense that humans can create and transmit knowledge despite the gods' reticence or even deceit might initially appear to be in contradiction with Foucault's perceived negativity and nihilism. In fact, contemplating an "outside" of the Prison cell might feel contrary to the kind of writing Foucault is famous for, causing his work to be often equated with the "carceral society."² However, this is the direction Foucault was heading, manifested more prominently in his later work, and more overtly seen in his notion of "limit attitude" appearing in his well-known, posthumously published essay "What Is Enlightenment?"

An important instance of (mis)interpreting Foucault is his critique of Kant, which is often read as a rejection of the Enlightenment, and by extension, of modernity. More ardent or faithful readers of Foucault, however, might recognize that Foucault does not dismiss the Enlightenment, but rather, perceives its philosophical ethos and particularly the reflection on one's own time as an essential element of his own work. In this critique of Kant's "Was ist Aufklärung," Foucault points to a "philosophical ethos" in Kant's conception of the Enlightenment, which Foucault articulates in the question, "in what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints" (2010a, 45). In Foucault's preceding speech "What Is Critique," it is the same "critical attitude" in Kant's Aufklärung which aids Foucault in defining critique as "the idea we have of our knowledge and limits" (2007, 49). It is Kant's "sapere aude" and his "call for courage" that Foucault attaches to critique, the "courage to know involved recognizing the limits of knowledge" (2007, 48-9). This work on limits reflects Foucault's long-established dislike and distrust of universal truths, as Foucault's "philosophical ethos" focuses on the contingencies of what we know, against the pursuit of "transcendental" meaning (2010a, 46). It is in the pursuit of limits, and in contrast to how he is often read, that Foucault discernibly allows for the possibility of a motion towards the endeavor of "liberty" (2010a, 50).

Foucault's undertaking of reflection on limits³ leads him towards a particular modality of truth-telling, which is also linked to ēthos, and "which is always applied, questions, and is directed to individuals and situations in order to say what they are in reality, to tell individuals the truth of themselves hidden from their own eyes…" (2011, 19). This is parrhēsia. As we'll see, part of the significance of this type of truth is that it does not pertain to universal schemes but to the specific circumstances at hand. Parrhesiastic truth, Foucault clarifies, is...