Article

Philosophy and Social Criticism

2023, Vol. 49(2) 178–191
(Post-)Truth, populism and the © The Author(s) 2022

simulation of parrhesia: A Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions
feminist critique of truth-telling DOI: 10.1177/01914537221147843
journals.sagepub.com/home/psc
after Hannah Arendt and Michel
Foucault

Mareike Gebhardt 
University of Muenster, Muenster, Germany

Abstract
Following tropes of light and dark in Amanda Gorman’s poem ‘The Hill We Climb’, the
article explores, from a feminist perspective, who counts as a truth-teller. Against the
backdrop of Hannah Arendt’s and Michel Foucault’s works on truth-telling, the article
theorizes feminist modes of truth-telling. It scrutinizes truth-making in politics while
unearthing the andro-centrism in truth-telling. Under the impression of post-truth
rhetoric in recent populist landscapes, the article argues for a feminist and intersec-
tional articulation of truth-telling to disclose the gendered and racialized power relations
in contemporary masculinist populism.

Keywords
Feminist theory, archive, Amanda Gorman, gender, andro-centrism

Corresponding author:
Mareike Gebhardt, University of Muenster, Scharnhorststrasse 100, Muenster 48151, Germany.
Email: mareike.gebhardt@uni-muenster.de
Gebhardt 179

When day comes we step out of the shade,

aflame and unafraid.
The new dawn blooms as we free it.
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb”

Where everybody lies about everything of

importance, the truth-teller, whether he knows it or not, has
begun to act; he, too, has engaged himself in political
business, for, in the unlikely event that he survives, he has
made a start toward changing the world.”

Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics” (p. 307)

‘The Hill We Climb’ – an introduction

When Gorman (2021) – a ‘skinny Black girl […] descended from slaves’ raised by a
single mother in Los Angeles – recited ‘The Hill We Climb’ during Joe Biden’s inau-
guration ceremony in January 2021, we witnessed a moment of truth-telling. When she
entered the stage, a clear blue sky above her and the blazing sunlight of a clear winter’s
day reflecting in her red hairband and yellow coat, the United States was a torn and
divided country – and it still is. Affective economies of mistrust, anger and hate shape its
emotional grammar, letting post-truth politics and alternative facts thrive. Those dark
times seemed to vanish in the bright light shining on Biden’s inauguration. However,
since then, police violence has not declined, and gendered and racialized murders are still
on the rise: andro-centric politics and post-truth discourse roam political and media
landscapes. As crises multiply, it has become clear that ‘post-truth’ cannot be understood
as an era we enter and then exit at some point in history; it does not ‘emerg[e] out of thin
air’ but forms as a ‘crystallization of a longer trajectory of devaluing truth in political
discussion’ (Hyvönen 2018, 1). Gorman’s poem points precisely to post-truth history and
its adjacent darkness. It shows how oppressed lives can ‘step out of the shade’, where
power play has pushed them (Gorman 2021). In a brilliant feminist manoeuvre, Gorman
declares the US’s fragility, vulnerability and heterogeneity to be its strengths, not its
weaknesses. She steps out of the shade: breaking sexist rhetoric, fighting misogynistic
tropes of ‘grab ‘em by the pussy’, and openly challenging the racist residues of slavery,
thwarting politics’ masculinist repertoire of boldness.
This article explores, from a feminist perspective, who counts as truth-tellers against
the backdrop of a dual problematization provided by Hannah Arendt and Michel Fou-
cault. In theorizing feminist truth-telling and the problematization of truth-making in
politics, I also unearth andro-centric tropes of truth-telling. A feminist and intersectional
articulation of truth-telling discloses the gendered and racialized power relations in
contemporary masculinist populism.
180 Philosophy and Social Criticism 49(2)

‘Quiet isn’t always peace’ – An archive for dark times

The archive of the history of political ideas is a powerful place. As a ‘system of
enunciation’, it is ‘the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of
statements as unique events’ (Foucault 1972, 129). Its power not only arranges but also
suppresses knowledges. Still, deep in the archive’s shadows linger knowledges, narratives
and (hi-)stories that challenge the archive’s power. The archive stores and prioritizes
political thinking and – often (White) male – authors. At the same time, it works as an
‘arsenal’ that provides us with ideas, models, tools and arguments for a struggle against
hegemonic knowledge production and meaning-making (Llanque 2008, 2). Archival
powers can make knowledges disappear and determine what counts as knowledge. In the
archive, knowledge production is connected to the production of power and truth
(Foucault 1972). In the process of normalization, knowledge and truth become inter-
twined, almost to a degree of undecidability. In turn, normalization works the archive,
deciding whose stories, lives and knowledges count.
A feminist critique of the archive, on the one hand, acknowledges that the ‘survival of
the archive is part of a truth-telling infrastructure’ that only ‘hands down the perspectives
of the masters not the enslaved’ (Honig 2021, 99). On the other hand, it troubles,
challenges and subverts the archive, browsing through its segments and properly arranged
files to expose it as a machinery of truth-making. In the archive, resistance lingers.
Gorman tells us that ‘Quiet isn’t always peace’ and explores the possibilities of resistance
within archival power structures that silence racialized, gendered and poor voices (Spivak
1988).
Arendt does not scrutinize the archive’s ‘profound erasure’ of othered populations. She
defies the political quality of gendered experiences of inequality and oppression and
feminist struggles, arguing that gender-specific claims are de-politicizing because they
belong to the private sphere. Yet her works have inspired many feminist reiterations (e.g.
Honig 1995). Foucault, in contrast, tasks himself with documenting the power machinery
that leads to such an erasure. He does so with a ‘technique of depathologization’ (Honig
2021, 73, 77; cf. Spivak 1988, 75), dedicating his writings to the analysis of power/
knowledge relations, the genealogical normalization of heteronormativity, and the
criminalization of ‘deviant’ sexuality. However, Foucault cannot count as a feminist
either. Despite his critical research on the normative production of sexuality, he does not
problematize the gendered hierarchies embedded in parrhesia, which becomes most
visible in his discussion of the ‘parrhesiastic role’ of Creusa in Euripides’s Ion (Foucault
1983, 13-21; Maxwell 2018; Tamboukou 2012, 853).1 Still, both Arendt’s and Foucault’s
masterly works provide analytical tools – an ‘arsenal’ – with which to deconstruct archival
powers. They not only reproduce the gendered and racialized power asymmetries in their
(now also archived) works but provide, at the same time, a thorough analysis of their inner
workings (Allen 2002).
Since both Arendt and Foucault are analysts of the darkness within ‘the philosophy/
truth/politics assemblage’ (Tamboukou 2012, 856), they emphasize how public opinion
together with its discursive-narrative production is bound to power play and oppression.
Following Eurocentric, enlightenment-oriented tropes of light and bright, Arendt
Gebhardt 181

connects them to freedom, politics and plurality. Foucault uses tropes of light and dark as
well when he writes that the archive determines that not all knowledges ‘withdraw at the
same pace in time, but shine, as it were, like stars, some that seem close to us shining
brightly from afar off, while others that are close to us are already growing pale’ (Foucault
1972, 129). In contrast, an intersectional feminist critique of tropes of light and dark
argues that not only do the ‘microphysics of power’ (Foucault 1978a, 28) rule in the
shades, but that resistance can emerge from there as well where it has been hiding under
the ‘protection’ of the archive’s erasure.2
Gorman turns to the dichotomy of light and dark to refer to relations of oppression: we
can ‘find light’ even in a ‘never-ending shade’ (Gorman 2021). With Arendt, we can
wonder where the audacity and courage to step out of the shade come from? Gorman
answers that something happens in the shades where we prepare and establish the
preconditions to step out of them – a thought that can be found in Foucault when he
summarizes: ‘Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently,
this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’ (1978b, 95).

‘It’s the past we step into, and how to repair it’ – Arendt and
Foucault on truth-telling
To discuss truth-telling, Arendt and Foucault turn their attention towards the past, in
particular to ancient Greece and Socrates – that is, we could claim, to an old (White) man
telling everyone what is best and lamenting that nobody seems to listen or even care.
Socrates, however, represents someone who takes politics and truth-telling seriously. He
seeks to educate his fellow (male!) citizens by asking critical questions; he wants to
improve the polis’s conditions. Moreover, against ridicule and in the face of grave danger
(Arendt 2005, 296), Socrates audaciously stands up for what he believes to be true. From a
feminist perspective, Socratic scrutiny of power relations by speaking ‘the truth’ about the
realities of oppression and inequality is crucial. Socrates is a figure representing both the
bright light of the polis, where he asks his discomforting questions about a good life (for
all?), and the darkness, where he vanishes into when he is imprisoned for ‘poisoning’ the
youth with radical ideas. By threatening the polis’s proper order, Socrates asks about ‘the
truth’, while he questions the assumption of a singular truth.
A contemporary theory of feminist truth-telling refers to the notion of ‘truth’ as post-
foundational: it is a constructed outcome of a discourse of normalization that marks
knowledges as true or untrue. This notion of truth is radically anti-essentialist. There is no
such thing as one single truth or essence of knowledge that might be understood as THE
truth. How problematic the demarcation of knowledge as truth becomes is described in
‘The Hill We Climb’, when Gorman writes that ‘the norms and notions, of that just is, isn’t
always just-ice [sic]’. What we know to be just is a construction that does not necessarily
entail a just truth. The relation between truth, politics, and the philosophical search for
truth is more intertwined than Arendt’s (2005) works on truth-telling imply (Zerilli 2021),
where she rigidly differentiates between politics (which has a complicated relationship
with truth) and philosophy (the place of truth-seeking and truth-making par excellence).
182 Philosophy and Social Criticism 49(2)

The ambivalent and messy relation between truth-telling and normalized ‘truth’
renders truth-telling a dangerous act (Arendt 2005, 307). As we saw in the beginning:
survival is unlikely for those who tell the truth. We find a similar thought in Foucault’s
parrhesia – a speech act that can be translated as ‘frank speech’ (Zerilli 2020, 9). Parrhesia
entails an action through which persons tell their truth against a regime of untruth – even
when endangering their lives. It is

a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a
certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other
people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and specific relation to
moral law through freedom and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a
speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes
truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the
speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of
falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of
flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy. (Foucault 1983, 5, my italics)

The andro-centric tropes that we find in Foucault’s definition are not explained in the
usage of male pronouns alone but also reside in the style of parrhesia: it is frank and
dangerous. Those speaking the truth ‘properly’ risk their lives out of a sense of duty – a
gendered trope that we find in patriotic narratives that connect masculinity with the fight
for freedom and selfless sacrifice.
Moreover, there is a paternalist trope in parrhesia. When Foucault writes that truth-
tellers seek to improve or help other people, it implies an agency lacking in othered
populations, and thus a form of infantilization or victimization. In today’s patriarchal
societies, there is a ‘hierarchy of truth in which some people (usually White, heterosexual,
cisgender men) are assumed to be truthful, and others (usually women, people of color,
and queer/non-gender-conforming individuals) are not’ (Maxwell 2018, 23). Since these
othered populations cannot speak the truth, they need guidance and help from (White,
bourgeois) men (Spivak 1988).
At first glance, Foucault and Arendt outline truth-telling as a speech activity linked to a
sociopolitical situation where the speaker of truth and the addressee of truth take different
positions within a social hierarchy. Parrhesia comes from ‘below’ and is directed towards
‘above’ (Foucault 1983, 5). In this scenario, parrhesia becomes a political activity of
critique. Suppose we dig a little deeper and ask about the gendered and racialized hi-
erarchies within regimes of (un)truth. Foucault has only little to offer because his concept
of parrhesia denotes someone ‘who can negotiate the tension between power and
powerlessness, public and private’ (Maxwell 2018, 24). Parrhesia ‘favors those who
appear to have the freedom to move in and out of politics as they please – usually White,
cisgender, affluent, heterosexual men – and that is sustained by (sometimes violent)
silencing or delegitimizing of those who reveal the imbrications of truth-telling and
hierarchy’ (Maxwell 2018, 24). Maxwell scrutinizes Foucault’s ‘gendered reading of
truth-telling […] not only because it leads him to offer a typical masculine understanding’
of it, but also because it ‘leads him to miss an alternative way to understand the
Gebhardt 183

predicament of truth-telling’ – not the question of how to ‘use power while retaining a
distance from power, but rather […] how to constitute power out of a position of
powerlessness’ (Maxwell 2018, 24). With Gorman and Spivak: a shady position.

‘If only we dare’ – Unearthing masculinity in (populist)

truth-telling
Binaries drive Arendt’s work. Foucault, by contrast, often blurs binaries. Yet, he remains
blind to the gendered binaries in his account of truth-telling (Tamboukou 2012, 850).
Asking ‘who counts as proper truth-teller’ (Maxwell 2018, 23; cf. Zerilli 2020, 15)
implies disclosing gender binaries inherent in the notion of truth-telling; to answer this
political question, gender matters. In what follows, I scrutinize four (gendered) binaries
found in truth-telling to show how they rely upon contemporary post-truth discourse and
populism: private versus public, philosophy versus politics, factual truths versus opinion,
and factual truths versus common sense.

Plurality and the deconstruction of organized lying

Arendt (2005, 295) is convinced that ‘[n]o one has ever doubted that truth and politics are
on rather bad terms with each other […]’. Even though ‘truthfulness’ cannot be found
‘among the political virtues’ (Arendt 2005, 295), Arendt is ‘concerned with the question
of when and how truth can matter for politics’ (Zerilli 2020, 6). However, she remains
critical of the ‘assumption, inherited from the Western philosophical tradition, that truth
simply does not matter for politics’ (Zerilli 2020, 6). To Arendt truth/fulness becomes
political, when people task themselves with confronting a ‘community [that] has em-
barked upon organized lying’ (2005, 307, my italics). When lying becomes normalized
and manipulates the plurality of the political, someone stepping out of the shade and
telling the truth is the only remedy. In concentrating on the moment of entering the realm
of the political, Arendt neglects both the politics of the private and the different conditions
of entry. She does not ask who has the power to step out of the shade or who counts as a
truth-teller. In this section, I will address the relation between politics and lying and
problematize the reproduction of the private/public divide in Arendt’s account of truth-
telling.
As with Foucault, Arendt emphasizes that power is nothing people possess. Instead, it
is produced. Unlike Foucault, for Arendt power emanates from ‘acting in concert’ (1998,
192; Allen 2002). It is not a microphysical force but the outcome of people stepping out of
the shade into the bright light of the public. Political power takes shape in the ‘in-between’
(Arendt 1998, 52); it brings people together.3 Truth-telling thus ‘always depend[s] on the
ability and willingness of citizens to listen and hear the truth that is told’ (Zerilli 2020, 15).
Arendt acknowledges this, yet she misses that those without any position in the pro-
duction of power – the ‘subaltern’ (Spivak 1988, 78f., 103) – cannot speak at all and thus
remain unheard (even when screaming right into the masters’ faces).
Foucault, too, neglects that the way that, in a regime of organized lying, places exist where
othered populations cannot insert themselves into the ‘parrhesiastic game’ (1983, 3ff.).
184 Philosophy and Social Criticism 49(2)

A feminist reiteration of truth-telling needs to take the power of exclusion more seriously. It
emphasizes that parrhesia ‘is not just about having the courage to tell the truth but also to
listen to it carefully’ (Tamboukou 2012, 861). Stepping out of the shade, if it is possible at all,
is a shared effort and a difficult one when truth-tellers are confronted with ‘the fact that the
truth is disputed, contested, and sometimes dismissed in public’ (Maxwell 2018, 23). Would
Gorman as a ‘skinny Black girl’ have been heard if she wasn’t already an acclaimed and
promising young writer, if she wasn’t already part of the parrhesiastic game? Did we ever
hear her mother speak while she raised Gorman as a single parent somewhere in L.A.? The
ability to be heard depends on gendered and racialized identities that position you within the
game of parrhesia – or outside of it.
Furthermore, we might ask whether resistance is not only realized as we step out of the
shade but already practiced beforehand? There is resistance within the shades, plurality
within the darkness, and undoubtedly different versions of ‘we’ in the dimly lit corners
that qualify as political. Not making it to the light does not devalue the politics of re-
sistance within the shade. It is an andro-centric understanding that politics (of resistance)
only appear in the light of the public, not within the dark corners of the ‘household’. The
traditional, almost sacrosanct, patriarchal separation of the public as a political realm and
the private as a sphere of ‘mere’ reproduction cannot be upheld from a feminist position.
Gorman tells us about her single mother, and she emphasizes her ancestry from enslaved
people. Black lives and PoC have been rendered unheard and unseen by a racist and
ethno-sexist regime of organized lying over hundreds of years: even though ‘truth is being
told (by some), […] many of us are not listening’ (Zerilli 2020, 16). From an intersectional
feminist perspective, Arendt’s insistence on the public-private divide is notorious (Honig
1995). It renders her ignorant of the politics resting in the private sphere.
Moreover, Arendt (2005, 307) emphasizes that truthfulness is ‘unsupported by the
distorting forces of political power and interest […]’.4 In contrast, feminist truth-tellers are
entangled in them – part of them, sometimes complicit with them but also fighting against
their perpetuation. Feminist truth-telling is messy and beyond neat organization. It does
not seek to be ‘polished’ or ‘pristine’ or form a ‘union that is perfect’, but a ‘union with
purpose’ (Gorman 2021). That is why feminist truth-telling is deeply involved in the
politics of the private sphere and brings its struggles to the light. It messes with patri-
archy’s proper separation between a realm of politics and a sphere of ‘mere’ reproduction.
In complicating the relationship between the public and the private, feminist truth-
telling provides hope for radical change starting, for instance, with disclosing ruinous
modes of lying. In contrast to Arendt, the politics of feminist truth-telling do not nec-
essarily refer to brightness and light. More often, they are dark and somber – often
‘killjoys’ (Ahmed 2017, 164): they linger in the shades, haunt the orderly archive, and
break with masculinist imaginations of rational speech and deliberative reasoning.
Feminist truth-telling is angry and upset. It often remains unheard under conditions of
patriarchal normalization as it is perceived as cacophonous – mere noise – from ‘irra-
tional’ women and queers. It still cracks open, even if only a little, patriarchy’s proper
spatial order. From these cracks, change might arise. The manifold queer-feminist truths
insert plurality into the singularizing regime of organized lying.
Gebhardt 185

Philosophy and politics – Intertwined modes of truth-telling?

Because of their traits as plural, contingent, agonistic (Hyvönen 2018, 2f.) and unstable,
as ‘simply unfinished’ (Gorman 2021), factual truths render their tellers precarious. Since
factual truths lack transcendent origin, factual truth-tellers cannot refer to a higher au-
thority, yet they carry an ‘unreasonable stubborness’ (Arendt 2005, 304). They resist
manipulation but do not rely on common ground or a fixed foundation – things often
deemed necessary for political stability. The instability of factual truths is thus considered
dangerous to a political union.
In contemporary masculinist populism,5 we witness a counterstrategy to the plurality
of factual truth-telling. Its leading figures propagandize the existence of a single truth, an
idea that is dangerous to the plurality that weaves the texture of the political realm. It
negates the plurality of truths and substitutes it with the claim that there is only one truth –
that of the ‘heartland’ and the ‘true people’. Populist semantics, narratives and tropes refer
to essentialist notions of belonging. They connect politics to imaginations of blood, race
and sex, intertwining them to a sanguine patriotism that rearranges politics towards a
hetero-sexist and racist regime of organized lying. Populism is thus ‘hostile to the very
condition of democratic politics, namely, plurality’ (Zerilli 2020, 6). As a reaction to the
danger posed by the plurality of factual truths and their tellers, the latter are ridiculed by
populist leaders and communities – especially in times of crisis, where stability, security
and safety are preferred to the ambivalence and fragility of factual truth-telling.
At first glance, Foucault affirms Arendt’s position when he differentiates between
‘political’ and ‘philosophical parrhesia’ (1983, 35; original italics). Arendt’s rigid
separation between the plurality of truth in the political realm and the singularity of THE
truth in philosophy becomes blurred in Foucault’s account of philosophical parrhesia to
which a political dimension pertains. Arendt holds onto this separation from a particular
understanding of philosophy as the ivory tower from which injustice, inequality and
inequity cannot be fought against. However, in philosophy, there is politics, and in politics
(of resistance), philosophy can help us navigate through rugged terrains of ideas, con-
cepts, claims and moral assumptions – this is the backdrop of Foucault’s account of the
politics of philosophical parrhesia.
Parrhesia also connects to systems of oppression because philosophical parrhesia
faces a ‘political predicament’ (Maxwell 2018, 24): it needs to be detached from power to
remain at a critical distance while, at the same time, parrhesiastes must be close to power
to confront its representatives – the king, the president – with truth, even if it may be a
truth challenging the stability and routines of power. To navigate between this ambivalent
and dangerous terrain, parrhesiastes rely on a critical inner dialogue to find truth and
communicate it to the public. Foucault understands parrhesiastes as outsiders within –
sometimes highly regarded by those in power – who are heard by the public because their
status allows them to be acknowledged by those in power. Here, we might think of
Gorman again, who stands so close to Biden on stage while she tells us about lives so far
away from the life in the White (!) House. Is Gorman being heard because she is both close
to and distant from power?
186 Philosophy and Social Criticism 49(2)

When Foucault enumerates criteria connected to parrhesia, its classist and gendered
assumptions are disclosed more clearly. Truth-tellers are those who received a ‘good
education’ enabling them to form an intellectually and morally demanding position from
which they tell the truth (Foucault 1983, 25), – as is the case with Gorman, who studied at
one of the US’s most prestigious colleges, Harvard. Additionally, the ‘parrhesiastic game’
(Foucault 1983, 3ff.) requires high standards of intellectuality and thus morality as a result
of both the accumulation of knowledge and the elaboration of critical thinking, also
directed towards oneself. (Foucault 1983, 3) Foucault never questions how a regime of
organized lying disables populations from receiving such an education.
Moreover, because of their ethical integrity, parrhesiastes must tell the truth even when
it results in life-threatening circumstances. The proof of their sincerity is their courage: if
truth-tellers formulate something dangerous – differing from what the majority or the ruler
believes, for instance – it indicates parrhesia. We are again reminded that gendered and
racialized populations have been rendered mute by denouncing their ability to articulate
their demands ‘properly’. Neither Arendt nor Foucault address that the notion of proper
speech has been instrumentalized to silence racialized, gendered, disabled and poor
populations. Neither challenge the idea that societies are built on imaginations of rightful
speech and tropes of propriety.

Mere opinion and common sense – populist antagonists of truth-telling

Truth must fight both the propaganda of the opinion-holders and the false testimony of the
(moral) majority. The similarity to mere opinion renders factual truth precarious because it
becomes difficult to differentiate between factual truth and mere opinion in public
discourse. When factual truth is conflated with mere opinion, however, ‘the chances of
factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed’ (Arendt 2005, 297).
This disadvantage of factual truth leads to severe consequences for the truth-teller and the
political realm itself. When mere opinion reigns, plurality, which is constitutive for
politics, withers.6
Additionally, if opinion-holders are publicly disclosed as liars, they can quickly return
to a flexible notion of opinion and sell it as one among others. Opinion-holders easily
rephrase what they formerly framed as THE truth as just another opinion within the
(democratic) competition of ideas. This perverse flexibility of opinion ― that it can be
hyper-stable and ultra-flexible ― allows opinion-holders to insist on the righteousness of
their opinion. At the same time, they deny the ‘gospel truth’ of their statement quickly if
necessary (Arendt 2005, 307). The easy movement between adamant positions regarding
what is ‘true’, ‘natural’ and ‘right’ on one side and the flexibility of truth on the other is a
critical feature of contemporary masculinist populism. Shaped by this movement, mere
‘fact-checking’ cannot remedy populist post-truth discourse (Zerilli 2020). Pointing
towards alternative facts serves as a strategy to simulate plurality while insisting on the
existence of THE people – a homogenized and ‘natural’ community. Against populism’s
nationalist, masculinist and ethno-sexist understanding of a deranged democracy, Gorman
(2021) determinedly states, ‘while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be
permanently defeated […]’. The flexibility of contemporary populist post-truth discourse
Gebhardt 187

is not given to factual truth-tellers and parrhesiastes. For ‘genuine’ truth-tellers, with-
drawal is not an option: the integrity of those practicing ‘Socratic parrhesia’ forbids them
to remain silent (Foucault 1983, 35ff.).
The fourth binary driving Arendt’s discussion on truth-telling consists of ‘genuine’
truth-telling, factual or Socratic, and common sense.7 Common sense simplifies politics,
renders it coherent, and forces a consensus, while politics and its modes of truth-telling are
only sustained under conditions of cacophonous plurality. Factual truth ‘offends the
soundness of common-sense reasoning’ (Arendt 2005, 307). The implicit consensus
formed by common sense ‘relieves’ from thinking and turns, therefore a- or even an-
tipolitical. Common sense as ‘non-thinking’ leads ‘individuals to accept values and
conventions blindly, which means that a radically different code of values or set of
conventions can be substituted for the existing ones, and no one will complain or even
much notice’ (Allen 2002, 141). Non-thinking thus provides post-truth politics with a
prerequisite to infiltrate politics and media coverage to manipulate them by ‘alternative
facts’. In contemporary populism, referring to common sense is an e/affective strategy to
denounce facts on inequality, discrimination, climate change or historical events. Often
fuelled by anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, it claims to present an alternative ‘truth’
against the ‘cancel culture’ of liberal elites in politics, education and media. Donald
Trump, Boris Johnson or Björn Höcke claim to tell ‘the truth’ against a liberal regime of
organized lying. Their masculinist authoritarian populism laments that it is silenced
behind politically correct ‘feeling rules’ (Gebhardt 2019, 3; Hochschild 2016, 135,
226ff.).
What Arendt understood as opinion or common sense, Foucault (1983, 3) refers to as
parrhesia in a ‘pejorative sense’ to clarify that ‘not everyone when speaking frankly will
tell the truth […]’ (Zerilli 2020, 12). ‘Bad parrhesia’ (Zerilli 2020, 12) appears, first, as
ignorance, second, as strength, boldness and arrogance – features we find in the mas-
culinist repertoire of (populist) politics. Third, it works by manipulation, as in the ‘al-
ternative truths’-campaigns. Fourth, it manifests as a loud voice to generate affective
reactions from the audience (Foucault 1983, 3), as we can observe in speeches of populist
leaders. In conclusion, pejorative parrhesia leads to an ‘ignorant outspokenness’
(Foucault 1983, 25) which trenchantly describes the linguistic strategies prevalent in post-
truth discourse.

‘Aflame and unafraid’ – feminist truth-telling: A summary

That even as we grieved, we grew

That even as we hurt, we hoped
That even as we tired, we tried

Amanda Gorman, “The Hill we Climb”

Arendt and Foucault are part of the archive – their works are deemed classics that are read
and discussed globally. However, they tell stories of ‘the others’ – the oppressed and
dehumanized killed in the Holocaust, the sexually ‘deviant’, or those considered ‘mad’.
188 Philosophy and Social Criticism 49(2)

Their critique of power structures and their deconstruction of normalcy provide feminist and
anti-racist struggles with an arsenal to fight power asymmetries and discrimination. Feminist
truth-telling emphasizes the ‘politics in […] counter-archival practice, which tells the stories
that haunt the archive and resist its erasure’ (Honig 2021, 98, original italics).
The truth-teller and parrhesiastes tell their truths against a corrupt, unjust and violent
regime of lying as counter-hegemonic practice. Only from positions of inferiority exposed
to violence, even death, do they tell truths. From that perspective, Gorman’s position
within the regime of (un)truth can be scrutinized: is she facing ridicule when her poem is
quoted and disseminated globally – and celebrated for its style and brilliance? Is she
risking survival when she, by official invitation of the US president, takes the stage of the
inauguration ceremony? And, more so, can we consider her a feminist truth-teller? No,
and yes.
No, because Gorman was invited by a powerful man under the most secure condition
of surveillance one can imagine. Indeed, she became even more famous on the invitation,
patronage and courtesy of an old White man. We might even think of a certain tokenism
Gorman represents on that stage crowded with White (male) people. In a self-critical
reflection, Gorman herself denotes this ambivalence when she writes that ‘a skinny Black
girl descended from slaves and raised by single mother can dream of becoming president,
only to find herself reciting for one […]’. Nevertheless, we can also answer yes, because
Gorman radically challenges (White, male) privilege and the canonical history of the
United States, which makes her a target for slander, hate speech, violence or even death.
Can we imagine a situation in which the ‘skinny Black girl descended from slaves’ is not
rendered precarious when confronting (White, male) supremacy – whether on the in-
auguration’s stage or while posting on social media or walking down an alley?
When we return to Gorman’s question, ‘where can we find light in this never-ending
shade?’, Arendt teaches us that struggles against injustices and inequalities cannot be
fought alone. A feminist theory that draws from her ideas teaches us that these political
struggles often remain unrecognized: that feminist resistances are lost in the archive.
Arendt and also Foucault provide feminist theories and practices with tools against
erasure to retrieve those unheard voices from the archive’s sediment. To start, if not anew,
then again, over and over, is part of a feminist repertoire of truth-telling that has been, still
is, and will be relentless in its work of retrieval: against the normalization of (racialized
and classist) misogyny and heterosexism, against the masculinism of populist post-truth,
and against fantasies of supreme ethnicity and cultural homogeneity.
Feminist truth-tellers contaminate the archive and call for impropriety. They withstand
the archival seductions of clear-cut power. They speak up, from the shadows, in manifold
manifestations: as a ‘skinny Black girl’ (Gorman 2021), as fighters against catcalling, rape
culture, slut-shaming, or as people challenging misogynic, (hetero-)sexist presidents.
Feminist truth-telling can be embodied by everyone, in every corner of society, every
day – even in the most improbable, improper places. In pitch-black darkness, the ever-
present potential of truth-telling challenges the inner workings of power. That is the good
news of Arendt’s and Foucault’s archival works: Those buried in the archive, those unseen
and unheard by it, are not without hope. Let us bring light and some wit to the archive’s
Gebhardt 189

serious sobriety. Let us be audacious feminist truth-tellers who act in concert, stir (gender)
trouble and climb that hill.

Acknowledgements
I want to thank Denise Walsh for her insightful comments on my article at ecpg 2022, Viktoria
Huegel for her tremendously helpful and thorough proof-reading, and the reviewers for their critical
scrutiny.

ORCID iD
Mareike Gebhardt  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1044-1777

Notes
1. Maxwell (2018) carves out the andro-centrism in Foucault’s reading of Ion where he solidifies
the differently gendered protagonists’ positions in society. See also Tamboukou (2012) and
Honig (2021).
2. Metaphors of light and dark are more ambivalent than Arendt’s opposition suggests. Whilst an
archive is dimly lit, its spotlights are concentrated on the ‘masters not the enslaved’, to use
Honig’s words.
3. By contrast, Foucault understands the power of parrhesia as a highly individualized ‘technology
of the self’ (Tamboukou 2012, 853) that estranges parrhesiastes from communities because of
their non-conformity.
4. For a more detailed discussion of power in Arendt and Foucault, see Allen (2002).
5. I understand populism as a linguistic style that refers to the empty signifier ‘the people’ (Laclau
2005) and draws from phantasmagoric notions of social and cultural homogeneity, ethnic purity,
and popular unity – a form of populism that dwells on narcissistic imaginations of imperme-
ability and invulnerability. The term populism used in this article refers to a populism in the
Global North that allies with neoliberalism, sexism, racism as well as anti-globalization and anti-
establishment positions. (Gebhardt 2019)
6. Depending on the work, Arendt connects opinion to politics in a positive way and understands it
as outcome of reflective thinking and agonistic struggle. Enaudeau and Bonnigal-Katz (2007,
1038) call ‘true opinion’ the currency of politics that distances itself from totalitarian dangers of
truth. In ‘Truth and Politics’, however, Arendt opposes a specific form of opinion against factual
truths that she calls ‘mere opinion’. Mere opinions are (moral) convictions that derive from
private conversations and inner monologue. They are rarely contested, while factual truths are
the product of public discussion and agonistic contestation. Therefore, factual truths ‘constitute
the very texture of the political realm’ since they are the ‘invariable outcome of men [sic!] living
and acting together’ (Arendt 2005, 297).
7. For a feminist re-reading of the notion of common sense throughout the history of ideas, I refer to
Henrike Bloemen’s unpublished paper ‘Common Sense and Sensibility: A Feminist Critique of
(Public) Knowledge’ presented at European Conference on Politics and Gender (Ljubljana,
2022).
190 Philosophy and Social Criticism 49(2)

References
Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Allen, Amy. 2002. “Power, Subjectivity, and Agency: Between Arendt and Foucault.” International
Journal of Philosophical Studies 10, no. 2: 131-49.
Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Arendt, Hannah. 2005. “Truth and Politics.” In Truth: Engagements Across Philosophical Tra-
ditions, edited by José Medina, and David Wood, 295-314. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Pub-
lishing. (originally published in The New Yorker. February 25th 1967).
Bloemen, Henrike. 2022. “Common Sense and Sensibility: A Feminist Critique of (Public)
Knowledge.” Unpublished Manuscript, presented at European Conference on Politics and
Gender, Ljubljana, July 2022.
Enaudeau, Corinne, and Bonnigal-Katz, Dorothée. 2007. “Hannah Arendt: Politics, Opinion,
Truth.” Social Research 74, 4: 1029-1044.
Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. New
York, NY: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, Michel. 1978a. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York, NY: Vintage
Books/Random House.
Foucault, Michel. 1978b. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. New York, NY:
Pantheon Books.
Foucault, Michel. 1983. “Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia.” Six Lectures
given by Michel Foucault at the University of California Berkeley, October–November 1983.
https://foucault.info/parrhesia/
Gebhardt, Mareike. 2019. “The Populist Moment: Affective Orders, Protest, and Politics of Be-
longing.” Distinktion 22, 2: 129-151. DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2019.1653346
Gorman, Amanda. 2021. The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem. London/New York: Chatto &
Windus/Random House.
Hochschild, Arlie Russel. 2016. Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the
American Right. New York, NY/London: The New Press.
Honig, Bonnie, ed. 1995. Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt. University Park: Penn State
University Press.
Honig, Bonnie. 2021. A Feminist Theory of Refusal. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press.
Hyvönen, Ari-Elmeri. 2018. Defining Post-Truth: Structures, Agents, and Styles. Paper, October
22nd 2018. https://www.e-ir.info/2018/10/22/defining-post-truth-structures-agents-and-styles/
Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London/New York: Verso.
Llanque, Marcus. 2008. Politische Ideengeschichte. Ein Gewebe Politischer Diskurse. Munich/
Vienna: Oldenbourg Publishing.
Maxwell, Lida. 2018. “The Politics and Gender of Truth-Telling in Foucault’s Lectures on Par-
rhesia.” Contemporary Political Theory 18, 1: 22-42.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation
of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson, and Lawrence Grossberg, 271-313. Basingstoke: Mac-
millan Education.
Gebhardt 191

Tamboukou, Maria. 2012. “Truth Telling in Foucault and Arendt: Parrhesia, the Pariah and Ac-
ademics in Dark Times.” Journal of Education Policy 27, 6: 849-865.
Zerilli, Linda. 2020. “Fact-Checking and Truth-Telling in an Age of Alternative Facts.” Le
Foucauldien 6, 1: 1-22.
Zerilli, Linda. 2021. “Rethinking the Politics of Post-Truth with Hanna Arendt.” In Political
Phenomenology: Experience, Ontology, Episteme, edited by Thomas Bedorf, and Steffen
Herrmann, 153-164. New York: Routledge.