On Truth-Speaking, Flattery, Lying, and Bullshit
Description
In the last three years of his life (1982-84), Michel Foucault devoted himself to the question of truth and truth-speaking, focusing on the concept of parrēsia in ancient Greek philosophy as a key component of his genealogy of the modern subject and governmentality. From this perspective, Foucault emphasized the risks—and hence the courage—required to speak the truth, to convey truthfulness, to be or stay true. In the current moment such risks and tests of courage have become increasingly urgent, as practices of parrēsia attempt to intervene in the maelstrom of flattery, lying, and bullshit. Are we now living in the aftermath of the post-truth era? Where even the difference between the news and fake news makes no difference anymore? And, if the ideal of totalitarian rule is, for Hannah Arendt, a “people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists,” are we facing the emergence of another stage of capitalist domination tied to dictatorial if not fascist power?
We find it surprising, then, that current discussions rarely turn to the late-Foucault. His final seminars trace the power dynamics of oligarchic rule, authoritarian populism, and tyranny within the structures of democracy itself, prompting us to critically interrogate neoliberal regimes of governmentality and atomized individualism in late capitalism. At the same time, the affirmative itinerary of genealogy offers altogether different governmentalities of the self predicated on aesthetic and ethical ways of living otherwise (unruly, wayward, fugitive, anarchic, queer, etc.). This seminar seeks to provide a space to engage with this material, and to read it alongside more recent scholarship, including Bernard Williams (2003); Harry Frankfurt (2005); Lynne Huffer (2024); and Michael Patrick Lynch (2025). It also seeks to ask about the relations sustained between literature, poetry, and art and truth-speaking, lying, or bullshit.
Truth-speaking is not simply a matter of fact-based, rational discourse, or even "free-speech,” but (following Foucault) an aesthetic and ethical form of life. The corruption of politics by untrue discourse currently plays a major role, as Achille Mbembe holds, in the accelerated production of surplus, disposable, and expelled populations; the limits of free speech and assembly on university campuses; and the widespread normalization of genocide. We welcome papers that: engage with this political moment or philosophical tradition, its affinities or deviations; argue for literature and art as truth-speaking; that approach truth as critical methodology, experience, or life; or bring any of these dimensions into conversation with each other. Our aim is to examine the threats to democracy today enabled by flattery, lying, and bullshit, while searching for ways out via truth-speaking.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Michael Krimper teaches in the French Department and the Gallatin School at New York University. He is the co-editor of Beckett Ongoing: Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and is currently finishing a book titled Literature's Strike: Late Modernism and the Unworking of Theory for SUNY Press. His articles and translations have appeared in diacritics, New Literary History, SubStance, parallax, and October, among other venues.
Speaker Bio
Emily Apter is Silver Professor of Comparative Literature and French Literature, Thought and Culture at New York University. She has written on translation, political theory and psychoanalytic feminism.
Speaker Bio
Sania Hashmi is a PhD Candidate in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Speaker Bio
Lynne Huffer is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. She is the author of six books, including a trilogy on Foucault’s ethics of eros: Foucault’s Strange Eros (2020); Are the Lips a Grave?(2013); and Mad for Foucault (2010). Her most recent book, These Survivals: Autobiography of an Extinction (Duke University Press, 2025), is an experimental, philosophical collage-book composed of fragments of text and original artwork on the theme of mass species extinction.
Papers
Speaker Bio
John Greyson is an award-winning Toronto video/film artist, and Associate Professor in Film at York University. Since 1984, his many activist features, shorts and transmedia works include: Door Prize (2025), Death Mask (2024), Photo Booth (2023), International Dawn Chorus Day (2020), Mercurial (2018), Gazonto (2016), Murder in Passing (2013), Fig Trees (2009), Proteus (2003), Lilies (1996), Zero Patience (1993), The Making of Monsters (1991) and Urinal (1989).
Speaker Bio
Airelle Amédro (she/her) is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate in French studies at the University of
Warwick. Her thesis analyses the proliferation of references to vulnerability and victimhood in
contemporary queer French texts. She is currently guest editing the first special issue dedicated to Constance
Debré for Modern and Contemporary France.
Speaker Bio
Etienne Turpin, PhD, is a philosopher and the general editor with K. Verlag, an independent publishing atelier in Berlin that was recently awarded the 2025 Deutscher Verlagspreis. He also co-edits several series for the publishing atelier, including Processing Process and Pensées soignées; previously, he co-edited the intercalations: paginated exhibition series (2014–25), published by K. Verlag and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in the context of Das Anthropozän-Projekt.
Speaker Bio
John Paul Ricco is Professor of Comparative Literature, Art History, and Visual Culture (University of Toronto). He is the author of The Logic of the Lure, and The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes. Queer Finitude, the third volume in his trilogy on "the intimacy of the Outside" will be published by Punctum Books in 2026. He is currently working on book titled, "Extinction Aesthetics" which includes a chapter on "Bersani's Ecology," of which this ACLA paper is a part.