Associate Professor Henrik P. Bang,
Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen and
Visiting Fellow, School of Sociology, The Australian National University. 

Larry Saha Seminar Room 2175, Level 2, Haydon-Allen Building,
The Australian National University. 

There are two recurrent political themes that run through Foucault’s texts as a read thread. These are about the fact and norm of ‘the political’ as obedience and parrhesia. The theme of obedience refers to the dark side of the Enlightenment project as depending for the pursuit of individual freedom and social solidarity on its self-maintenance as a vast and strongly hierarchized state of domination reproduced in and through the exercise of disciplinary subjection. The more legal and legitimate this state is believed to be, the more smoothly and silently discipline will be able to function to reproduce the built-in political asymmetries of autonomy and dependence that prevent people from exercising self- and co-governance. The theme of parrhesia is about how to make ‘the political’ whole again by reuniting political authorities and laypeople in their political communities in terms of their real and necessary difference as senders and receivers of politically communicated message. On the one hand, this requires the advent of a new, dialogical, positive, productive and creative form of political authority who does not seek power over others, but who possesses the political capacity, knowledge and guts to speak the truth to people about what necessarily has to be done to handle the risks, challenges and problems that confront them in their everyday life. On the other hand, this new political authority relies for its political continuity and strength on the advent of new reflexive political communities in which people possess, know how to and also dare to exercise their general political capacity for governing and taking care of themselves.