Political Implications of Philosophical Parrhesia in Michel Foucault’s Late Lectures: Genealogy of Critique and Reality of Philosophy

The concept of parrhesia (free, true and courageous speech) is central to Michel Foucault’s last lecture courses. In this “late” period of his scientific career, the French philosopher started a thorough analysis of the ancient and early Christian sources with the aim to construct a detailed genealogy of the two phenomena that played a crucial role in the Western history — the genealogy of subjectivity and the genealogy of the “critical tradition” in philosophy. In order to analyze the latter, during the lecture course “The Government of Self and Others” (1982—1983), Foucault turned to the texts of Plato, which he considered foundational for the philosophical practices of veridiction in the West. The Platonic paradigm presents philosophy with a number of fundamental tasks, the main of which is the task of constantly testing the reality and seriousness — testing the words (logos) through the deeds and practices (ergon). Foucault postulates that in the modern philosophy this test invariably results in a certain attitude towards politics and power, which assumes rejection of the direct participation in political affairs, constant criticism of our mistakes and misconceptions, the search for and revelation of ways, in which we, as subjects, are able to change ourselves. In this article, the authors attempt to shed light on the genealogical significance of Foucault’s concept of parrhesia and its relationship to the modern philosophy; present the classification of parrhesia (on the basis of Foucault’s lectures) that allows to identify political and philosophical dimensions of this phenomenon and their different modalities, as well as review in a holistic way the Platonic philosophical parrhesia and consider the problem of its complex relationship with politics, which becomes especially acute when the “reality of philosophy” is being tested.

Towards a spatialized utopia: romanticism and everyday life in the Marxism of Henri Lefebvre

The presence of the spatial element in the reflections of Henri Lefebvre does not merely result from work involving the translation and adaptation of critical thinking developed up until his time. The realization that not even the highest expression of the critical tradition had sufficiently noticed this crucial dimension of life was one of the connecting points between theoretical advance, represented by the spatial orientation of critique, and the effort to renew the utopian horizon. A very distinct assimilation of the early work of Marx and the proximity to revolutionary romanticism, particularly of Nietzschean extraction, rendered a decisive impact on Lefebvrian conception. Practice, body, pleasure and instincts, recovering their place in the critical social imagination, went on to become the basis for the re-foundation of a theoretical-practical program that involved the formulation of the notion of the right to the city. The perspective of appropriation thus replaced the vague emancipatory statements of the subject's philosophies.

Caribbean Economic Thought: Advances, Retreat, Current Challenges

The reflections provided in this article were presented in the 4th Sam Moyo Memorial Lecture, delivered at the SMAIAS/ASN Summer School in January 2021. The article focuses on the critical tradition of economic knowledge and thought about the socio-economic development of the Caribbean, which began in the last decades of the colonial era. The advances made through the early Independence period were concerned with the problems of individual countries and the region as a whole. The objective was to improve the material economic welfare of the broad masses of Caribbean people while generating the requisite economic growth to sustain an improvement in the general conditions of life. From the thought of W. Arthur Lewis to the Plantation Economy theorists and subsequent critiques, a rich critical tradition emerged, only to be displaced by the onset of the debt crisis and neoliberalism. This article reviews the main elements of this critical tradition, its advances, and retreats, as well as the new challenges presented to it today.

Tennessee Williams’s Misunderstood ‘memory play’: Re-Imagining Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee Williams famously called The Glass Menagerie a ‘memory play’. This remark has been consistently overlooked or misinterpreted by critics, unleashing a tradition of approaching the play in a rather confusing fashion concerning who the characters are and how the playwright uses them. This paper engages with the character of Amanda. First of all, I will trace major transformations in the conception of characters throughout twentieth-century drama, providing background for Williams’s attempt to redefine major aspects of a playwright’s craft such as what a ‘character’ is. Secondly, I will survey a critical tradition surrounding Tom Wingfield’s mother and consider major views concerning the character. Recurrent in them, as my analysis indicates, is the failure to acknowledge her as a tool for the ‘memory work’ Tom carries out. The character is subsequently posited as a fluid entity that helps Tom (and Williams) make sense of the past and explore how their families shaped who they were. As opposed to a realistic play, where so much is given at the start, a ‘memory play’, as Williams seems to have conceived it, remains a cry for the reader to join the playwright in a common search for meaning, one that utilizes, rather than just displays, characters in order to reach standpoints that are far from fixed and immutable.

Black Indigeneity and Anti-Colonial Rebellion in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones

In The Emperor Jones, a rebellion orchestrated by the “Native Chief,” Lem, dramatizes Eugene O’Neill’s Indigenocentric reimagining of the US occupation of Haiti. O’Neill honoured his primary source, James Weldon Johnson’s Self-Determining Haiti, by creating a Black Indigenous leader who orchestrates the overthrow of an invader from the United States. Taking Lem seriously corrects a critical tradition preoccupied with the outsized “emperor,” Brutus Jones, and inattentive to Indigenous Americans in the play.

Articulation in Ruins

This chapter challenges the critical tradition that has interpreted the formal disjunctures of Roberto Rossellini’s Germania anno zero (1948) as representative of its young protagonist Edmund. The film’s complicated formal experiments—including in cinematography, editing, and sound design—have been read as expressions of the child’s distress as he struggles to survive in post-war Berlin. This criticism, however, cannot account fully for the film’s disjunctive transitions between documentary realism and expressionism. This chapter argues that year zero is a space in which all stabilizing definitions are thrown into disorientating contingency, and the clash between styles marks this unsettledness. In such a historical moment, Edmund is unable to articulate himself, and the film’s formal ruptures do not speak clearly for him. The form cannot be explained through reference to a character who is outside explanation. The film records an eccentric moment in Germany’s history, in which meaning is out of reach.

A Clash of Two Generations: A Comparative Deconstructive Discourse Analysis of Three News Reports on Megawati’s Critique for Indonesian Millennials

Written in the spirit of critical tradition, this paper aims to demystify the hegemony induced in the media coverages about the critique of Indonesian former president, Megawati Soekarnoputri, towards its millennials for ‘lacking contribution to the country’. By applying genre, deconstruction and dynamic perspective of ideological tension analyses, this article reveals how three different medias report the phenomenon differently by bringing up different topics to be discussed for their own purposes. While scrutinizing the relationship between the phenomenon and its news reports, this paper sees a need for a transvaluation to the concept of nationalism which in the end negates itself since the conception of nationalism itself has to do with power struggle that has the potential to degenerate the Self and harm the Other.

Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour

Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour examines how the US lecture tour served as a vital infrastructure for bringing regional audiences from all across America into direct contact with international modernists. In doing so, the book reroutes scholarly understandings of modernism away from the magazines and other mass media that have so far characterized its circulation and toward the unique form of cultural distribution that coalesced around public lecturing. More specifically, it highlights the role the lecture circuit played in the formation of transatlantic modernism by following a diverse group of international authors—Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, Gertrude Stein, and W. H. Auden—on their wide-ranging tours through the American landscape. By analyzing these tours, this study illuminates how this extremely physical form of literary circulation transformed authors into commodities to be sold in a variety of performance venues. Moreover, it shows how these writers responded to such broad distribution by stretching their own ideas about modernist authorship. In this way, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour adds to a critical tradition of revealing the popular dimensions of modernism by demonstrating how the tour’s social diversity forced modernists to take on new, more flexible forms of self-presentation that would allow them to appeal to many different types of audiences.

A Critical Disability Reading of Lermontov's "Taman'"

This paper provides a critical analysis of literary disability in Mikhail Lermontov's "Taman'," the most famous story in his semiautobiographical novel, A Hero of Our Time (1838-40). It focuses on three disabled characters: the blind boy, the deaf old woman proprietor, and the mad young woman. These characters have traditionally been treated as projections of the hero-narrator's imagination, as part of the story's Gothic aspects, or as metaphors meant to reveal something about him, thus reducing disability to a textual device. Even when central to the interpretation, disability tends to be read by Lermontov critics as figurative or counterfeit. This project aims, therefore, to reclaim the characters whose disabilities are undermined by the critical tradition. Through a contextualized close reading, it considers how these characters and the narrative events in which they are entangled shape—and ultimately unmake—Pechorin, the eponymous "hero of our time," whose perceptions of dis/ability are challenged by the events of the story he recounts. The paper finds that the depiction of disability in "Taman'" confirms some aspects of our limited historical knowledge about disability (invalidnost') in nineteenth-century Russia and tells us something about conceptions of Romantic literary disability more broadly.