Robert Burns and the Critique of the Parrhesiastic Reason
Résumé
Provocation is still palpable in Robert Burns’s poems, songs, and articles he sent to various Scottish newspapers over the decade spanning between the first publication of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) and his death in 1796. The Scottish Bard questions all forms of authority, driven by a personal conviction for “truth” which he turns into a poetic strategy. « Plain truth to speak » (« Epistle to John Lapraik ») aptly describes Burns’s motto of outspokenness. Michel Foucault studied the dialectic of such a public posture under the Greek term of parrhesia. Foucault traces back the semantics of this term in the courses he gave at the Collège de France, mostly in Le gouvernement de soi et des autres, 1982-1983 (2008) and Le courage de la vérité, 1984 (2009). This talk shall address the persona of Burns as a parrhesiast in his poems, songs and articles, while considering the limits and consequences of this political and poetic strategy which attacked the axiological foundations of British/Scottish society in the eighteenth century. More specifically, we shall focus on several polemic areas consistently broached by Burns.