A Democratic Form of Life: Foucault and the Aesthetics of Truth
Michel Foucault’s lectures on critical truth-telling (parrhesia) offers a framework for understanding democracy as a historically specific politicization of truth and power. From this perspective, democracy appears not merely as an institutional configuration, but as a mode of practice through which subjects produce and are produced by parrhesiastic acts of truth-telling.
If one retains this mode of inquiry, democracy opens the question of truth in a radical way – an openness on which democracy itself lives. As a form of governement conditioned on the struggle over the legitimacy of the speaker itself, democracy is always threatened by its capacity to institute its own legitimacy. The political Spielraum characteristic of democracy therefore both presupposes and generates an aesthetic discourse of exemplary forms of life that at once secures and possibly threatens this legitimacy in verbal and political activity. Conditioned on risk, critique and freedom, this democratic aesthetics of truth transforms both the self and the collective body politic.
Because democracy, on this account, lacks any external foundation or transcendent justification beyond its own field of forces, it must be understood as an inherently relational and open-ended negotiation concerning what bodies, subjects, and collectivities are capable of becoming and doing. In this respect, the capacities of democracy remain to be determined: we do not know what a democracy can do. Its power must instead be analyzed through a political analytics attentive to the specific configurations of capacities, action, and domination that democratic practices simultaneously enable and constrain.
