03 - The Parrhesia of the Exile: Musonius Rufus and Disentanglement

The last paragraphs of Musonius' treatise 9, 'That Exile is not an Evil', feature Musonius himself, in a development on parrhesiain exile. Exile, he says in substance, contrary to what Euripides may have written, does not deprive one of straight talk and he proves it by his own experience:

Are you not aware that I am an exile? Well, then, have I been deprived of freedom of speech? Have I been bereft of the privilege of saying what I think? Have you or anyone else ever seen me cringing before anyone just because I am an exile, or thinking that my lot is worse now than formerly? No, I'll wager that you would say that you have never seen me complaining or disheartened because of my banishment, for if I have been deprived of my country, I have not been deprived of my ability to endure exile. The reflections which I employ for my own benefit so as not to be irked by exile, I should like to repeat to you. It seems to me that exile does not strip a man entirely, not even(Musonius, IX, 49, 9-50,7 trad. Lutz).

I would like to read in this text the lineaments of a series of displacements (what are goods? what is the homeland? etc.) that point to a more fundamental displacement, a liberation. It seems to me that, in this process, the classical παραμυθία, consolation (Fuentes Gonzalez 1998, Dross 2009), delivers speech and becomes parrhesia that Musonius defines as the faculty (ἐξουσία) of saying what one thinks. Musonius thus speaks with parrhesia of exile and parrhesia in exile, and parrhesia from then on seems to be no longer only to be referred to a political situation (the attribute, more or less fantasized, of the citizen of a more or less idealized Athens - Carter 2004), but to a psychological transformation (which can have political consequences - Foucault 2009) which is determined doubly as a disentanglement of the relation to the object and an enlargement of what we could call, by summoning the classical model of oikeiôsis, the sphere of influence of the self.

Musonius assures that the power to endure exile could just as easily be exercised in the homeland itself, that it is not linked, in essence, to the reality of exile. By effectively disassociating the fatherland from the power to bear its estrangement, Musonius shows that even within the fatherland one can be in exile and draws an inner space (Bourbon 2019). The well-known Stoic topography (classically defined in the opposition between what depends on me and what does not depend on me) is somewhat clarified, because a certain exile (or the capacity to bear it) opens up the space of an interiority and the capacity to express this interiority: this is to say "what one thinks", without fear and by daring to express it.

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Presenters

Valéry Laurand, Université Bordeaux-Montaigne

  SCS-55