The Parrhesiastic Enterprise of Black Philosophy

Abstract

Black philosophy, which includes a plethora of divergent viewpoints and competing theoretical frameworks, at its best, is a liber tory practice. In its most progressive expressions, Black philosophy is a multi-vocal tradition that seeks to undo the epistemic erasure of Black experience by creating and cultivating philosophical tools that promote social justice. In the context of this journal, The Black Scholar, these may not be read as very radical claims. Nevertheless, I want to assert a certain radicality by linking Black philosophy to the exercise of parrhesia and note Black philosophy’s role in cultivating a parrhesiastic attitude toward traditional philosophy. Such an attitude marks the way in which Black philosophy transgresses traditional Western philosophy by generating a “taxonomy of the different kinds of silences and invisibility”1 that signal Black folks’ epistemic absence. This essay is not an account of all the instances in which Black philosophy challenges the Western philosophical canon. Such an account exceeds the scope of this essay. My aim, instead, is to explore the ways that Black philosophy promotes the emergence of social justice possibilities that cannot be prefi gured or codifi ed. As such, the essay will propose an index for analyzing practices that engage in transgression and resistance as a means of promoting social justice. In short, the essay will argue that where and when parrhesia is exercised it has the effect of promoting social justice—not because of the concrete consequences but because practicing parrhesia invents new modes of subjectivity. Utilizing parrhesia as an index for resistance becomes especially important when one understands that contemporary power operates through production and not simply prohibition. In this respect, strategic knowledge for effective resistance must account for the productive functions of power and must not see resistance merely as opposition to prohibitions and exclusions. As Foucault has observed, in the contemporary landscape, power’s operation is ensured not by law but by normalization. Hence, one might transgress normalizing processes without resisting power’s oppressive effects, which are not only prohibitive but also productive. As a means of establishing a mechanism for analyzing transgression and resistance, let us now turn to an explication of Foucault’s notion of parrhesia.