Unruly Truth: On Parrhesia and/as Political Refusal

This article employs Bonnie Honig’s concepts of refusal and intensification to conceptualize the ancient practice of ‘parrhesia’ as a form of conflictual, political truth-telling. This entails envisaging political truth-telling as an intense, agonal practice that does not establish unalterable foundations but takes part in world-building practices. To this end, I first reconstruct parrhesia as an agonistic practice of truth-telling. Against this background, I take up Honig’s concept of intensification to make sense of parrhesia’s intricate political stakes with reference to Euripides’s Ion tragedy. Finally, I reenvisage the bacchants’ secession to Cithaeron as displayed in Euripides's Bacchae tragedy against the backdrop of Michel Foucault’s analysis of the cynic tradition, where parrhesia turns into a subversive political practice of displaying and prefiguring other forms of existence and social relations.