This paper examines the limits of Cynical parrhesia. Based on fieldwork with artist-activists in post-recession Dublin, I recount their fraught efforts to use adventurous artistic expression to provoke a critical awakening in an audience of strangers, who instead respond with derision. My focus is thus on a narrow but prevalent feature of artists’ work and lives, and the public’s experience of challenging genres of provocative public criticism: the encounter with unintelligibility and alienation in the public sphere. I thus deploy ‘bad parrhesia’ as a tool through which to consider the factors that mitigate against artists establishing the desired critical relationship with audiences. Nevertheless, though these parrhesiastic encounters do not succeed, I argue that they do not yield an absence of social relations but relations of an anti-social kind. Departing from readings of parrhesia as a form of individualism, corrosive to relationality, or a playful reaction against the failures of liberal democratic politics, I make a case for framing parrhesia as a relationship of contestation over which kinds of public criticism are judged to be intelligible and valuable responses to moments of cultural crisis in northern liberal democracies.

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不善言辞：公共领域犬儒主义的局限性

本文探讨了愤世嫉俗的直言不讳的局限性。基于在经济衰退后的都柏林与艺术家活动家的实地考察，我讲述了他们用冒险的艺术表达方式来激发陌生人观众批判性觉醒的艰辛努力，而他们却以嘲笑作为回应。因此，我的重点是艺术家工作和生活中一个狭隘但普遍的特征，以及公众挑战挑衅性公共批评流派的经验：在公共领域遇到难以理解和异化。因此，我将“bad parrhesia”作为一种工具，通过它来考虑减轻艺术家与观众建立理想批判关系的因素。尽管如此，虽然这些自言自语的遭遇没有成功，我认为它们不会产生社会关系的缺失，而是一种反社会的关系。从将直言作为一种个人主义形式的解读，或对自由民主政治失败的俏皮反应，我提出了一个理由，将直言视为一种争论的关系，即哪些类型的公共批评被认为是可以理解的以及对北方自由民主国家文化危机时刻的宝贵回应。