The dispute for the truth in late Foucault. The truthful saying of ‘parrhesia’ on the border between philosophy and rhetoric

Abstract

In the last courses taught by Foucault, the notion of parrhesia is presented as a key element in his study of truth discourses. Opposed to this notion, it is common to find rhetoric as a technique of persuasion unlinked from the truth. In this article we analyze some of the ways in which Foucault links and opposes parrhesia and rhetoric, based on the thesis that parrhesia would be the kind of practice of truth that would mark the distance between truth discourse and fallacious discourse. The problematic generated around that limit derives from the difficulty to establish a criterion of distinction between two modes of being of the discourse, with its own forms of veridiction: parresiastic (in its political and philosophical forms) and rhetoric.