Fuck the Police!: Parrhesiastic Speech from Below?

• In Event: Transgressive Criminology

Abstract

Parrhesia is verbal activity in which a speaker expresses her/his personal relationship to truth, and risks her/his life because s/he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to help other people and improve social realities. Parrhesiastic speech employs freedom and frankness rather than persuasion, prefers truth over silence, engages in criticism rather than flattery, is motivated by duty not self-interest, and places the speaker in a position in relation to power that risks death. At the same time, parrhesia also has a pejorative meaning. Parrhesia risks devolving into violent passion, arrogant bluster, and clamorous bellow when its inherent radical honesty manifests in the absence of intellectual and moral consideration. In this paper, I interrogate “Fuck the Police!” in order to explore the extent to which it is an instance of truth-telling in the face of power, and/or the degree to which it is an explosive epithet of unambiguous rage.

Author

• Albert de la Tierra, The Graduate Center, CUNY