The truth won’t tell itself

Chapter 4 addresses acts of truth-telling as a form of affirmative biopolitics, a politics of bringing truth into life or living life in truth. Drawing on Foucault’s analysis of Cynic parrhesia in his final lecture course and the experience of East European dissident movements that he actively supported in the early 1980s, the chapter reconstructs truth-telling as a practice of political subjectivation and constructs a model of truth-telling that would be adequate for the post-truth era, which differs from both the Antiquity and socialist authoritarianism in no longer even pretending to practice what it preaches, since it no longer preaches anything at all. In this new condition, truth-telling cannot be content with living in accordance with the truth, but must forcefully restore truth to existence, giving it surplus illocutionary force in one’s speech acts that, as it were, speak both the truth and one’s very act of speaking it. We shall analyze the statements of environmental activist Greta Thunberg as precisely such parrhesiastic acts that add to the semantic content of established scientific truths the force of their affirmation as truths rather than opinions. The chapter concludes by demonstrating the centrality of such affirmation to a genuinely democratic biopolitics, in which the principles of freedom, equality and community are not merely retained as transcendental conditions but enter our very experience of, and experiment in, living.