ABSTRACT

This short essay examines the performance of what I call ‘obscene public speech’ and its relation to the democratic assembly. Central to this is the idea that obscenity haunts democracy, appearing specifically in the speech of populist demagogues. The example used here is Donald Trump, who I examine in relation to Michel Foucault’s analysis of the ancient Greek polis, and the concern (notably in tragic theatre and the speech of public figures) with parresia or ‘truth telling’. For the ancient Greeks, there are two forms of political parresia – good parresia and bad parresia (or what Foucault designates as parresia’s ‘shadowy double’). It is through the latter that the demagogue appropriates ‘parresia’, not as truth telling, but in the form of flattery: the demagogue flatters the assembly; he tells them what they want to hear – not the truth. To fully understand the bad parresia of Trump, I relate Foucault’s idea of parresia’s ‘shadowy double’ to Zizek’s invocation of the obscene supplement. What this supplement reveals are obscenities that Trump makes visible in all his brazen shamelessness: the racism and misogyny that was always already there as structural features of liberal democratic society.