Wow. I just want to thank the participants and everyone putting the work into recording, editing and posting these seminars online. It's an incredible resource with top notch thinkers. Really very greatful. One suggestion would be to add the names of the participants in each seminar in the descriptions, including those participating by video-call. I would have had no idea that this seminar is a key resource for Butler's recent thinking on Foucault if I had not watched to the point where she is introduced.
It is great to be able to hear these amazing speakers discuss truth and truth telling in the context of digital era. On the one hand, the psychiatric power which asks for the mad subject to confess delusions; on the other, the political use of the truth telling as a weapon - both index towards an inverted role of truth regimes in the recent popular discourses. The ethical dimension that involves the techniques of the self forms an unstable relationship to the speech act in the age of social media ; that is, the reference to truth telling does not necessarily imply historically and spiritually familiar truth procedures. In “The Courage of Truth” (1984) Foucault tells of “(t)he bad democratic city” which practices parrhesia, that is, “anyone can say anything”, and parrhesia in a positive sense “telling the whole truth, hiding nothing of the truth, telling the truth without hiding it behind anything.” Although, Trump’s tweets have ceased to constitute the major part of the everyday reality, they remain a political reference point. That is, they neatly fit into the bad democratic city’s practice of parrhesia, and make one crave for a more self-reflective relationship to truth occurrences in the public discourses.
Thank you for this so relevant lectures. Theologization of the political and other interesting concepts mentioned by Mr. Stathis Gourgouris, but not developed. Thus, it was hard to follow him. He could be more considerate to the audience improving his diction.
