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Abstract
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.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 31-36 |
Number of pages | 6 |
Journal | Res Publica: Revista de Historia de las Ideas Políticas |
Volume | 27 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2024 |
Funding
I thank Viktoria Huegel and Luke Edmeads for the invitation to join this conversation as well as for their concise comments. I am grateful to Gerald Posselt for long-standing discussions and joint reflections on parrhesia. Helpful remarks also came from Sara Gebh and Anna Wieder as well as the two anonymous reviewers for Res Publica. This article has been funded by the European Union (ERC, PREDEF, 101055015). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. B. Honig, A Feminist Theory of Refusal. Cambridge, Harvard UP, 2021, p. 104. Ibidem, p. 14
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506013 Political theory
Keywords
- Refusal
- Parrhesia
- Truth-telling
- Euripides
- Intensification
- Bonnie Honig
- Foucault
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