Gerard A. Hauser--"Parrhesia at Robben Island: Prison Refomr from the Inside"

Hauser is examining the prisoner's behavior and transformation of the prison on Robben Island as an example of parrhesia. He contends that parrhesia constitutes a rhetorical act that can create change from those in power. Though, he admits, Foucault isn't concerned with the truth, only the truth teller, he acknowledges that the truth-teller must know what constitutes the thing he is telling.

Truth, then, is verifiable and once perceived can never be abandoned by the parrhesiastes. Political prisoners, who are jailed for their speech, embody the truth-teller. They're there not as petty criminals, but as someone who refused to capitulate, refused to compromise the truth. He uses the Czech dissident Havel as an example. Havel, who felt compelled in his celebrity to represent people and the truth, recognized the limits of his truth telling--it was his opinion--and used plain speech to tell it, hallmarks of a Foucauldian parrhesiastes. For Hauser, parrhesia is absolutely rhetorical.

Prisons, like other totalized institutions of dominance, sever agency through systematized means, resulting in a loss of identity.

The institutionalized racism of apartheid serves as a habituated vice. Here Hauser looks back to Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics and virtues and vices as habituated responses to daily life. Character is the behavior elicited in a problematic situation. Ethos in hexis. "Although we tend to talk of vice in terms of a specific behavior, we should not forget that vices are constituted by the cluster of behaviors that reinforce how we think, experience, talk, and behave in habituated ways that serve a disordered end" (72). Apartheid was institutionalized racism via habituated vice.

The prisoners of Robben Island "were conditioned by the use of power through inflicting humilation that was intended to deny prisoners' access to a rhetorical place, an inventional location from which to argue back for their human rights" (74).

The prisoners, especially the POCs, gave up hope for prison reform, and therefore "mounted vernacular performances of counterrhetoric reframing their warders' acts of depersonalization" (75).

The prisoners organized and refused to engage in actions that made them complicit in their own dehumanization. In this way they chose the battles that best allowed them to signify the truth to power. Essentially, anything that resulted in their bullying they refused on reasoned ground.

The prisoners also utilized euonia, or goodwill, and hospitality as a way to engage with the guards and gangs on a human level, both creating a rhetorical appeal to reason and change and reinforcing their own humanity.

Hospitality, as its Latin roots point out, signifies an outreach to a hostile or enemy. As such, it's a neutralizing choice that both allows the other to sit at the table while exposing oneself as something opposite and committed to the opposite of the "enemy."

As the prisoners became more organized, they formed committees that acted as universities of resistance/parrhesia. They functioned educationally, recreationally, communicatively, politically, disciplinarily, etc. They became an organization, a corporeal parrhesiastes?

"The committees were sights of embodied solidarity and felt phelia. They were arenas of discipline and pathos on which the prisoners' survival depended. The committees also were a technology of sorts, a techne or art of translating political theory into praxis. They were a rhetorical technology. They used processes of persuasion in contexts of deliberation and adjudication. They instilled the specific ethos of parrhesia as a core political value. They also inculcated the virtue of accountability" (90).

Kelly E. Happe--"Parrhesia, Biopolitics, and Occupy"

Happe investigates the parallels between Foucault's militant lifestyle and free speech (parrhesia) and the occupy movement, which Happe argues is a representation of militant life, using precarity (Precarity is a precarious existence, lacking in predictability, job security, material or psychological welfare. The social class defined by this condition has been termed the precariat). It is a lifestyle as radical speech. 

Happe focuses on the criticisms surrounding the "process is the message" formation of OWS. It represented no coherent unifying identity or policy statement; likewise its movement was amorphous and democratized, horizontally organized, which is in tune with its appeals to power restructuring. 

Happe seeks to write about OWS in way that resists the usual frameworks surrounding political speech, activism, etc. OWS, then, represents an opportunity to explore the limits of political speech and language in an era of neoliberalism. 

OWS was able to occupy the embodied space (Zoccotti Park) of Wall Street, giving the virtual and global nature of capitalism a place that could be populated with speech, discussion, care, etc. 

Happe uses the OWS early days, which were concerned mostly with doing in service of the occupation, like cooking, as a way to connect to Foucault's Parrhesiastes/Cynic ideal, a lifestyle that connects body and soul in a symbiotic relationship. The truth teller lives a certain kind of recognizable life that "opens up the possibilities for thinking beyond, or outside of the constraints of the present" (216).

The Cynics' mode of existence made room for "ethical parrhesia," the "suspension of the properly political in order to make way for ethical transformation of the self...the Cynics were engaging in practices for which the particular content of speech could not be known or anticipated in advance" (216). Cynical existence utilizes codified behaviors without cultural markers to allow "frank speech not dependent on conventions of intelligibility" (216).

Essentially, Happe argues that the OWS could be read beyond its usual critiques: lack of success (or a redefining of success) and practical failure. Instead, she sees the OWS movement as emblematic of Cynical ethical parrhesia that focuses on acts that "confront what must be lost." As a movement, it makes no ideological, utopian claim in demands because it imagines something that is yet to exist. As such, its actions confront anxieties about what would be lost.