Il governo di sé e del sapere fra valutazione e parrhesia

Our paper reconstructs the features of an educative discourse in Foucault by focusing on the concepts of genealogical critique and parrhesia. Moving from the Foucaldian notion of “political analysis of truth”, the article examines the democratic crisis of the public sphere in a context of post-truth and disintermediation of communication: the epistocratic temptations as well as the populist drifts express a conflict of power that produces conflicting regimes of truth. In the first case, some aleturgical devices (such as, for example, the administrative evaluation of the quality of performances) are developed in order to affirm a principle of order and objective truth at the expense of the freedom of the subjects. In the second case, we are witnessing a phenomenon the proliferation of communicational bubbles that are impermeable to each other with serious prejudice to any deliberative process aimed at producing socially shared truths. Foucault’s reflections on parrhesia and the “basanic” role of the discourse of truth in ancient Greece allow us to get out of this aporetic opposition, moving from the search for truth to the constitution of the subject of truth as an essential condition for reconstructing the viability of the communication in democracy. From the educational point of view we believe that this turning point made by Foucault is reflected in the transformation of educational practices from the model of “docility” (the docere that tames and disciplines the subject) to that of “study”, the desire that propitiates the subjectivation of the self.