Parrhesia: Accounting for different contemporary relations between risk and politics

Abstract

The relationship between risk, risk-taking and politics is a central theme in sociological studies of risk. This article outlines how Foucault’s study of parrhesia can provide valuable resources with which to account for different contemporary relations between risk and critique. The contention is that analyses of parrhesia open up a different line of empirical and theoretical investigation which goes beyond the risk society thesis and expands the governmentality perspective to a specific consideration of resistance. Employed as a conceptual tool kit, parrhesia allows us to raise the question: how does risk-taking make a certain kind of critical practice and subjectivity possible today? Parrhesia provides a unique perspective from which to investigate this question by understanding critique as the dangerous practice of freedom and risk as its core feature and key resource. The analysis is essentially theoretical but relies on empirical materials for illustration.