Culture of ‘Confession’ and Power-Politics | Sunita Samal

Abstract: Are confessions and revelations hidden truths? Augustine wrote his ‘Confession’ for the same reasons that people write confessional autobiography today. There was a moral imperative for one to confess his or her sin in order to be a good Christian or for attainment of good life. The historical goal of confession as Foucault argues is to transfer sex into discourse.

Introduction: Christianity has brought a growing suspicion of man’s power to shape identity. But confession so conceived is relational, thus ethical act [1]. We further theorize truth telling within the tradition of confession which reflects on understanding as a collection of the self from dispersion which always willing to bear witness to where one founds ‘one self’. For Rousseau, it is possible to act other than as one is or ‘not to be one self’. Foucault’s genealogy of the confession over time and explored the linkage between psychoanalysis and religion that contribute to the confession as a ritual of truth production. Taylor explained that confession as a practice to discipline the other by instilling anxiety as much as providing comfort or relief.

Confession and Identity Politics: Communication and literary production, acts of revelation and confession, prompt the revision of previously secret aspects of the historical part [2]. Perpetrators testimonies often raise grave suspicion as the testifiers underlying motives are difficult to be opened. Here judiciary and confession are other sides of same coin. These testimonies are sometimes seen as a form of confession—a performative ritual meant to cleansed one from sin and clear one’s conscience and get of guilt and responsibility. Indeed, public confession and narratives of perpetrators were often meant to provide softer, more tolerable versions of violent events to help them to escape punishment.

This thesis considers analysis of confession in the continental philosophy and interpreters’ examples of confession in film and literature in life of philosophical texts. There are three main objectives of the study of confessions.

The first objective is to refute common notions about confession such as that it reveals the truth of a pre-given subject and that it functions as a form of psychological catharsis. Instead, it is argued that confession as we know it, is a modern product of disciplinary power and that it serves to fix identities rather than to relieve minds of their memories.

The first part of this thesis, therefore, pieces together and supplements Foucault’s writings on confession in order to sketch a genealogy of what he calls the ‘confessing animal’. It aims to show that confession is a contingent rather than a trans-historical compulsion and that it is often constraining rather than liberatory subjects [3].

The second objective of this is to consider the relation between confessor and confessant not only according to what Foucault calls the ‘axis of power’ but also ‘axis of Ethics’ concerns relations with self. Here ethics will here be taken as a relation of responsibility for the other. The confessional other will, therefore, be considered in so far as she is called upon both to listen and respond.

The third objective of this thesis is to explore both discursive and non-discursive alternatives to confession including silence, non-fictional autobiography, political and artistic practices. The elements of modifying the self through truth telling is consequently is more self-conscious in antiquity.

Repeated pointing our factures and contingencies in histories of confessional practices, Foucault points out that the political dimensions of refusal and reinvention by becoming what we are rather than binding ourselves to offered identities by confessing what we are. The constant need for verbalization of referral reasons as inner truth and avowing to these underlying reasons was indeed shown to be part of larger expert culture that exercise power while silencing alternative solution beyond food charity. This approach makes possible a rich vein of research including analysis and resistance of Burchell’s important reconstruction of problem of confession posted for Foucault in the genealogy of his work [4]. Thus, a genealogical analysis questions, the very search for essence and stability. The starting point for genealogical analysis is rather to problematize the present, that is to destabilize and question that taken-for granted ways of thinking, knowing and doing things in the present.

Self-consciousness and Discourse Formation: Foucault observes that the examination of conscience is rare and exist only as rather uncommon philosophical practice. The obligation to tell the truth about oneself occupies a rather limited place. In comparison to the explosion and omnipresence of confessional discourses today, it should be stressed first and foremost that such discourses were nearly absent in antiquity.

But these statements of truth do not accompany by repression and shame. The later elements appeared in monastic confession of the Middle Ages. In Greek it was a form of self-examinations that were different from what has been taken in the time of modernity. Ancient techniques of self-transformation and self-mastery rather than interpretation. The element of modifying the self through truth-telling is consequently more self-conscious in antiquity than in modernity at which point the subject will think he or she is ‘discovering’ herself. It binds the manners in which self-discovery is in fact a positive act of production.

In antiquity, the truth question was not a hidden and secret truth unique to being of the speaking subject and how well they conform the philosophical truth of the good life. Among ancient philosopher, one was ideally one’s own master. These ideas about good life was consider true and the aim was to exercise how well one’s behavior had adhered to these ethical guidelines in order to better attain them over time. Examination of one’s acts were thus part of a self-consciously under taken process of becoming a certain kind of subject in conformity with the philosophical truth of an ethical teaching which one rationally accepted. Temporarily, the emphasis on truth does not lie with the truth of one’s declarations nor with the truth of one’s self, but with the truth of the ethical ideals at which those declarations aimed and to which one compares them [5].

Unlike in Christian and modern forms of confession, Foucault notes that what is confessed to is not concerned with ‘shameful desire’ and things of that sort of but related to more properly Greek concerns of political life and glory [6]. In contrast to antiquity, the technique of truth-telling and practice of self in Christianity would be increasingly complex and hierarchical in nature. At the same time, the discipline involved would argument and aim towards obedience to doctrine within a hierarchy ever less clearly and less calmly chosen [7].

A confessional faith in Christianity especially Catholics followers to develop certain relations between themselves and the truth. By knowing one’s sin and temptations, a Christian could better access the truth of God. Foucault is far more concerned with the techniques which Christianity developed for making truth inside oneself. As Foucault notes, however, this is a late invention of Christianity which he did not discuss at all in Christianity. Although the concern with confession runs through Foucault’s writing during the last decade of his research which he did not address systematically [8].

Publishing One’s Inner-self: Most of this above performance occurred in public. Here, one renounces the sinful and embodied self-become closer to the light of God. One tried to get rid of or change one’s former self, therefore, not to discover it. In this sense, publishing one self was a technology of self. At the same time, confession in modern time is basically public and that we found in modern judiciary system.

It is important to note that in the temptation to remain silent which is over come through the verbalization of confession is the subject’s attachment to ‘Satan’. This attachment to Satan is also an attachment to oneself. She also renounces her attachment to her body and to his self and its pleasure in favor of truth and God.

As in ‘Publishing oneself’ one manifests the truth of self-aimed to be forms of self-sacrifice, self-destructions which brought one close to God. It is a new kind of relationship to ourselves one which is far more complicated than to be discovered in the technologies of the self in ancient Greece [9].

Foucault distinguishes between two forms of early Christian truth-telling practices. First is the one which is concerned with telling the truth of Christian faith and second is those concerned with telling the truth to self. Despite a dominant interpretation, Augustine’s confessions are more concerned with confessing the truth of the Christian faith than with telling the truth of the author. This is perhaps another reason for Foucault’s attention to the work.

The contrast which Foucault draws between Augustine and ancient Greeks is supported by Phillip Cary’s theses in ‘Augustine’ intervention of the Inner-self. In the view of Cary, the concept of inferiority is new to Augustine who invented the idea of private interior self as a solution to his unique theological problems. Cary observes that the concept and experience of private interior realm is not an inevitable part of human self- description [10].

Much as Foucault shows that various experiences which deemed instinctual, natural, universal and inevitable are in fact contingent accident of history. Cary argues that it was only the particular teleological questions which Augustine posed and the particular solutions which he reached, were his notion of experiences. It resulted finally in modern secularized institutions about the self which are quite different from those entailed by Augustine thought.

According to Cary, God is within Augustine, we can look up to God. This individualism is not conceived by Augustine as a source of human dignity, but as a tragic consequence of ‘original sin’. For Augustine, we only have differentiated souls or private, inner world because we are fallen. This individualization of souls experienced by the saint as a tragic form of isolation, making even new born babies unknown to the women who nurse them as Augustine would lament in his confession. While for the modern confessional subject, truth is to be found within, for Augustine, as Taylor acknowledges ‘The truth is not in me. I see truth in God’ [11].

To conclude with Augustine, it showed be clear that we need to hesitate before seeing his confessions as prototype of modern autobiographical writings, while they are also unlike ancient practices of self-writing because they are not overtly concerned with self-fashioning. Augustine’s confession, according to Foucault is not like ancient practices of self-examination. It Is an example of problem nor of solution.

What really interests Foucault is not various forms of sexual confession in his sexual discourses and the internalization of the coercion to confess such that it is today experienced as a pleasure and a desire. This transformation into desire masks and inverts our intuitions about the working of power [12]. Power mechanism now work in such a way that it would invert sex in to discourses which has to be examined and become essential.

Concluding Observations: The media has also revamped confession blurring the private-public boundary altering its function and transforming its power. While St. Augustine acknowledge the truth is not in human being but sees truth in God, but for modern confessional subject, the truth is to be found in human being. Confession that found by Foucault is ending where the story began with the Greeks. The whole essence of confession can not be reached without publishing oneself for revelation.

(Author: Political Commentator, and author of multiple books including ‘Politics: Promises and Compromises’ (2021) published by Asian Press Books, Kolkata)