ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the notion of critique in Foucault's work. It offers an analysis of the fundamental threads of Foucault's interpretation of parrhesia in the course he teaches at the College de France. The chapter deals with the relocation of parrhesia in the scheme of governmentality and focuses on the 'parrhesia of the governed' of which Foucault speaks here and there. In Plato Foucault recovers the distinctive trait of philosophical parrhesia and its being bound up with the form of the advisor's speech. More than that, because what in the Platonic dialogues becomes crucial is the line that runs from Socrates to the Cynics. Foucault's books are 'livres-experience', consciously constructed as different from 'livres-verite' or 'livres-demonstration' of the philosophical tradition within university or academia. An altering philosophy, a philosophy in action, that does not have anything to teach but paralyses as it works on the 'problematisation' of Western rationality and its practices.
