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.