Figures of Subjectivity: Truth-Telling in Contemporary Biopolitics

Abstract

This article analyses the relation between language and subjectivity within the framework of contemporary biopolitics. To do so it proposes, first, a historicalconceptual introduction of this relation following some writings of Émile Benveniste and Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge, in order to problematize it later through a polemic reconstruction of the concepts of veridiction from Giorgio Agamben’s The Sacrament of Language and the notion of parrhesia, developed by Foucault during his last lectures at the Collège de France. Finally, focusing on foucauldian parrhesia, the paper intends to analyze the idea of an ethical difference implied in it and its contribution to the elucidation of a concept of subjectivity capable of becoming an effective form of  freedom.