Conference Agenda

Parrhesia, speaking the truth in the moments of deep societal and individual crises, is an internal dialogue, made transparent for a witnessing and emotionally involved audience. When addressing a societal issue, the parrhesiastes risks their personal existence, while establishing or maintaining their integrity. On an individual level, parrhesia demonstrates and enables the ritual separation from earlier identities and entering the unpredictable zone of liminality. Parrhesia is hazardous, however, it might be the only way to avoid freezing into an inauthentic state that paralyses human development. It requires an internal, I-I type encounter between the core self-positions and states: a courageous and fundamental expression or revision of core identity elements in a crisis when life cannot continue the way as it was before. As the values expressed by the individual are identical with those of a larger community, parrhesia is characteristic of the hero’s story, often appearing in myths, tales and works of art.

In this presentation, I compare two parrhesiastic acts performed in the former dictatorships in Hungary: Istvan Bibó’s, Minister of the State’s speech in the very last moments of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution putting an end to open terror, and Gabor Bódy’s film, the Dog’s Night Song (1983), an attempt to reflect on the destructive and powerful semantic web of lies in a soft dictatorship.

In any dictatorship, core identity elements must be suppressed or eradicated in a painful process of group- and individual-level identicide. Substitute fake elements, often, former contra-ideal selves, are linked to previous, traumatizing experiences of entrapment. Bibó could escape identicide, but suffered the grave existential consequences of his speech. Bódy’s identicide and attempted parrhesia turned into a (debated) suicide. His work is a deep reflection on the individual's dissociative responses to a traumatizing social system.