'Des responses et rencontres': Frank Speech and Self-Knowledge in Guillaume Bouchet’s Serées

The second book of Bouchet’s Serées, an exercise in commonplacing framed as a collection of tales told around a Poitevin dining table, opens with a discussion of frank speech. Written amid religious civil war, Bouchet’s diners take up this “chatouilleux” subject by turning repeatedly to Plutarch, the classical authority on parrhesia, truth-telling. Recycling Plutarch, though, Bouchet’s dialogue does not ask how or when to speak frankly but instead examines responses to “franchise” both in the tales and from the storytellers themselves. This serée illuminates a context for early modern reflections on parrhesia distinct from the familiar arena of nobles counselling autocrats or performing “liberté”. In Bouchet’s treatment of parrhesia, philosophical self-knowledge slips uncomfortably into a feeling of social self-consciousness, revealing a distinct conception of the ethics and epistemologies surrounding frankness. Thinking with commonplaces and thinking through responses to (tales of) “franchise”, Bouchet developed an idiosyncratic, exploratory way of rethinking the relationships between frank speech and self-knowledge, rewriting Plutarch’s “connois toi toi-mesme” not as an injunction to know oneself but as an attention to how one feels