The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault (Studies in Philosophy)

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

Studies in Philosophy ROBERT BERNASCONI, General Editor

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Names and Nature in Plato’s Cratylus Rachel Barney

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Reality and Impenetrability in Kant’s Philosophy of Nature Daniel Warren

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The Immanent Word The Turn to Language in German Philosophy, 1759–1801 Katie Terezakis

Art as Abstract Machine Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari Stephen Zepke

Discourse, Desire, and Fantasy in Jurgen Habermas’ Critical Theory Kenneth G. MacKendrick

The German Gı¯ta¯ Hermeneutics and Discipline in the German Reception of Indian Thought, 1778–1831 Bradley L. Herling Hegel’s Critique of Essence A Reading of the Wesenslogik Franco Cirulli Time, Space and Ethics in the Philosophy of Watsuji Tetsuro¯, Kuki Shu¯zo¯, and Martin Heidegger Graham Mayeda Wittgenstein’s Novels Martin Klebes Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature Ulrich Plass Diderot and the Metamorphosis of Species Mary Efrosini Gregory The Rights of Woman as Chimera The Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft Natalie Fuehrer Taylor The German “Mittelweg” Garden Theory and Philosophy in the Time of Kant Michael G. Lee

Volition, Rhetoric, and Emotion in the Work of Pascal Thomas Parker Heidegger on East-West Dialogue Anticipating the Event Lin Ma Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism The Political Theory and Practice of Opposition Emanuele Saccarelli On Mechanism in Hegel’s Social and Political Philosophy Nathan Ross Heredity, Race, and the Birth of the Modern Sara Eigen Figal The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault A Genealogy of the ‘Confessing Animal’ Chloë Taylor

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault A Genealogy of the ‘Confessing Animal’

Chloë Taylor

New York

London

First published 2009 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

© 2009 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Taylor, Chloë, 1976– The culture of confession from Augustine to Foucault : a genealogy of the ‘confessing animal’ / Chloë Taylor. p. cm. — (Studies in philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Confession. I. Title. BV845.T39 2008 128'.4—dc22 2008012993 ISBN 0-203-89056-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-96371-0 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-89056-6 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-96371-8 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-89056-1 (ebk)

For James, Brock, and Cydney

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction

xi xiii 1

1

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation

13

2

Confession and Modern Subjectivity

66

3

Psychoanalysis

116

4

Confessing the Other

167

5

Alternatives to Confession

191

Figures

236

Conclusion

250

Notes Bibliography Index

255 283 295

Figures

1.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, 1610.

237

2.

Annibale Carracci, Susanna and the Elders, etching and engraving, c. 1590.

238

3.

Rembrandt, Susanna and the Elders, 1647.

239

4.

Peter Paul Rubens, Susanna and the Elders, 1636–40.

240

5.

Titian, Tarquin and Lucretia, 1568–71.

241

6.

Giovanni Biliverti, Tarquin and Lucretia, 17th Century

242

7.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Lucretia, 1621.

243

8.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1612–13.

244

9.

Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1598–99.

245

10.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, 1630.

246

11.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, 1622.

247

12.

Kathleen Gilje, Susanna and the Elders, Restored, 1998.

248

13.

Kathleen Gilje, Susanna and the Elders, Restored. X-Ray, 1998.

249

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Rebecca Comay, Matthias Fritsch, Amy Mullin, Mark Kingwell, Ladelle McWhorter, and Robert Bernasconi for their careful readings, encouragement, helpful criticisms, and insightful comments on this work over the past several years. Part of Chapter Five was previously published in Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy as “Alternatives to confession: Foucault’s ‘fragments of an autobiography’” (Spring 2005). Part of Chapter Two was previously published in the Journal of Modern Literature, volume 28, number 2 (2005), as “The Confessions of Annie Ernaux: Truth, Autobiography, and Repetition for its Own Sake.” I would like to thank Symposium and the Journal of Modern Literature for permission to reproduce these articles here.

Introduction

THE TRANSHISTORICAL VIEW OF CONFESSION In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston writes that her main character, Janie, is “full of that oldest human longing—self-revelation. [ . . . ] So Janie spoke.”1 In an early work, Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer offer a medical explanation for this longing when they write of the “curative effect” of confession: “It brings to an end the operative force of the idea which was not abreacted in the fi rst instance, by allowing its strangulated effect to find a way out through speech [ . . . ].”2 Writing of a different kind of confession, that which takes place in police interrogations and courts of law, American Chief Justice Warren Burger states that “The human urge to confess wrongdoing is, of course, normal in all save hardened, professional criminals, as psychiatrists and analysts have demonstrated.”3 In the opening lines of The Psychology of Confession, Erik Berggren combines these views on confession when he writes: It is common human knowledge that talking about painful and disturbing memories or experiences which have lain on our minds unburdens us of them and affords a sense of relief. This means that such recollections or experience may be felt as a weight. They induce a psychic pressure which can create worry and depression. The pressure, as if by its own force, impels a release; the process may take the form of a powerful need to make disclosures, to speak openly about oppressive secrets. This need fi nds expression in two ways: either in personal confidences to a trusted friend or as a written description. In the latter case, the memories involved have perhaps left the writer no peace until he “got them out of his system.” The cathartic element involved is of importance in explaining the genesis of all literary confessions since Saint Augustine’s Confessions. 4 This paragraph introduces Part One of The Psychology of Confession, which is called “A Phenomenology of Christian Confession,” and thus these attributions of a transhistorically cathartic or psychologically-curative aim

2

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

and effect of confession is being made for Christian confession from the time of Augustine to today, as well as, later in the book, for psychiatric confession, confidences in friends, and “all literary confessions” from a few centuries after Christ to today. Similarly assuming that the function of confessional practices would have been the same for Augustine as for later writers such as Rousseau and as for autobiographers today, Peter Brown argues in his influential biography of Augustine that the writing of the Confessions was an “act of therapy” for a man who was undergoing a form of mid-life crisis. Putting thing in distinctly modern terms, Brown writes that Augustine was “com[ing] to terms with himself” and was engaged in “an attempt to fi nd himself.”5 Brown thus attributes to Augustine reasons for which modern subjects commonly confess. Also assuming continuity in confessional practices over a vast period of time, Shlomit Schuster writes that “Rousseau’s Confessions can be called the eighteenth-century version of Augustine’s autobiography,” and claims that each philosopher wished to “reveal his own true self.”6 Georges Gusdorf traces the autobiographical urge back to Adam and Eve.7 In Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation, Thomas N. Tentler initially aimed to show that confession in the Middle Ages and Renaissance functioned to respond to the psychological needs of penitents, and was a practice of consolation, curing anxiety, in the way that secularized forms of confession such as autobiography, psychoanalysis and art therapy are often assumed to function today. Medieval and renaissance priests were thus to be re-cast by Tentler as proto-psychoanalysts. Penitents, in turn, were to be recast as proto-analysands and autobiographers, much as Brown sees Augustine. Unlike Berggren and Brown, Tentler soon realized that this thesis was untenable, that the history of confession is in fact “long and varied,” that the institutionalization of confession did not occur as a response to a desire, compulsion, or need to confess on the part of the laity but was the invention of something new and difficult, and that confession was designed to instill anxiety as much as to cure it, to control and to discipline as much as to comfort.8 In an interview, Michel Foucault, like Tentler, would explore the link between psychoanalytic practices and Christian confession while recognizing that this link is one of developing and unpredictable disciplinary power, and not one of continual and unshifting discipline, nor an ahistorical response to an innate psychological need.9 Moreover, even while pointing out similarities between Christian confession and contemporary psychoanalysis, Foucault demonstrates the novelty and surprise of Christian confession, its difference from ancient and medieval penitential practices, the resistances it encountered, the violence with which this habit was inculcated in Christian bodies, the additional novelties of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and the transmutations which occurred over confession’s history between antiquity, the Middle Ages, and our own times. Foucault thus stresses diversity rather than continuity, contingency rather than

Introduction 3 transhistoricity, and the possibility of resistance as well as the production of docility. A particularly dramatic example of the resistance-submission to confession to which Foucault points is the early modern phenomenon of possession, in which the bodies of Christian women were experienced as battlegrounds where devils and confessors fought. Unlike the receding phenomenon of witchcraft—which also involved eroticized, corporeal possessions of women by devils and Satan—possession concerned not marginalized, barely-Christian women, but women at the heart of the Church, and women in convents in particular. As Foucault writes, “Rather than someone who is denounced by another person [such as a witch], [the possessed woman] is someone who confesses, and who does so spontaneously.”10 In possession, bodies made to submit to daily spiritual direction, to “a constant discursive fi lter of life” and to “the practice of permanent autobiography,”11 fell into convulsions, cursed their confessors, writhed at their feet, seeking them out erotically and in some cases getting them killed, spat out and vomited the host, simultaneously confessing that it was the devil that made them do so, at once confessing and rejecting the direction of confessors, desiring and submitting to their confessors even while endangering them, torn between combating forces. Foucault argues that possession was a spectacle of involuntary resistance to confession: The convulsive flesh is the body penetrated by the right of examination and subject to the obligation of exhaustive confession and the body that bristles against this right and against this obligation. It is the body that opposes silence or the scream to the rule of complete discourse, the body that counters the rule of obedient direction with intense shocks of involuntary revolt or little betrayals of secret connivance. The convulsive flesh is at once the ultimate effect and the point of reversal of the mechanisms of corporeal investment that the new wave of Christianization organized in the sixteenth century. The convulsive flesh is the resistance effect of Christianization at the level of individual bodies [ . . . ] What witchcraft was to the court of Inquisition, possession was to the confessional.12 What this example suggests is that confession, far from being experienced as “that oldest human longing,” was in fact difficult to inculcate into bodies. Foucault’s brief discussion of the phenomenon of possession, along with his discussion of confessional practices in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction and shorter writings from the end of his life, can be considered as fragments of a genealogy of confession. In the pages that follow I would like to piece together and supplement these fragments, or to provide a genealogy of what Foucault called the “confessing animal.”

4

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

A GENEALOGICAL APPROACH TO CONFESSION In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault opposes genealogy to the history of historians who “assumed that words had kept their meaning, that desires still pointed in a single direction, and that ideas retained their logic.”13 According to Foucault, the work of historians has for the most part functioned conservatively to inscribe the present onto the past, to fi nd affi rmation in history for what has happened to emerge. Historians seek to bolster assumptions about the necessity of the present state of their thought, morality, desires, and bodies by fi nding this state of affairs in other times and places. By charting a continuous history that resembles the present, historians make that present appear universal, and then deduce that it is innate or revelatory of the “human.” Following such histories, questioning and re-evaluating the present and ourselves would be to struggle futilely against essence or human nature. According to Foucault, historians have fulfi lled their desire for stability and coherence by fi nding recognition in the past. The past is searched in order to “rediscover” the present and ourselves. As Foucault writes, “We want historians to confi rm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities.”14 In particular, we assume and expect history to confi rm the primacy and immutability not only of our values, but especially of our sentiments, desires, instincts, and bodies.15 In searching the past to fi nd affi rmation of ourselves, however, historians project the present upon the past while obscuring “countless lost events.”16 In contrast, genealogy, or what Nietzsche calls “effective history,” realizes that “What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity.”17 Genealogy “disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself.”18 With genealogy there are no constants—not even bodies, instincts, or desires, and certainly not morality: “Nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men.”19 What genealogy does is less importantly to offer its own coherent narrative than to refute essentializing histories which impose the sameness of the present onto the diversity of the past. Genealogy strives less to give us a new story than to deprive us of the consolations of totalizing histories. While genealogy, as an alternative history, troubles totalizing histories, it does not trouble genealogy that it is itself but one possible way of describing history, that another historian would write history differently, for genealogy embraces disparity and has no ambition to be the fi nal word. Genealogy shows that history, and the persons who inhabited history, are other, and that what we are is not determined by the past or by a human nature to which history attests, but is accidental. Genealogy does not so much provide an alternative and “true” reading of history as set about destroying the

Introduction 5 essentializing histories which already exist, bereaving us of their comforts and forcing us to rethink who we are. Foucault writes: “[t]his is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.”20 Genealogy shows that all histories which have claimed to be objective in their searches for origins, of timeless metaphysical or philosophical truths about human nature, have in fact sought the historian himself at the origin, or have been autobiographical ventures. Histories are not objective, but tell us about the historians who wrote them, and yet they present themselves as objective. Genealogy is also autobiographical in that it is always given from the perspective of the author, betraying her biases. The difference is that genealogy recognizes and even affi rms this situated perspective—genealogy is self-consciously and overtly political—whereas totalizing histories attempt to disguise their biases, and to present themselves as unmediated facts, universal truths, and insights into “human nature.” According to Foucault, “The fi nal trait of effective history is its affi rmation of knowledge as perspective. Historians take unusual pains to erase the elements in their work which reveal their grounding in a particular time and place, their preferences in a controversy—the unavoidable obstacles of their passion.”21 In contrast: Nietzsche’s [genealogical] version of historical sense is explicit in its perspective and acknowledges its system of injustice. Its perception is slanted, being a deliberate appraisal, affi rmation, or negation; it reaches the lingering and poisonous traces in order to prescribe the best antidote. It is not given to a discreet effacement before the objects it observes . . . 22 While essentializing histories will claim to discover philosophical truths and objective knowledge of human nature, and in so doing maintain and reinscribe the present, genealogy searches the past for an antidote to the present, and presents historical facts selected from a politically-invested perspective in an attempt to disturb that current status quo and thus open up a space for change in sites which were considered to be innate and immutable: the body, instincts, sentiments, desires, morality, knowledge, reason, truth. As such, Foucault writes that genealogy “has a more important task than to be a handmaiden to philosophy, to recount the necessary birth of truth and values [ . . . ]. Its task is to become a curative science.”23 Genealogy is politically engaged; Foucault writes, “Let us give the term genealogy to the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today.”24 This means that although genealogy considers the past and “is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary,” it is also always self-consciously written from the perspective of the present, and in particular with the political aim to “cure” that present. More modestly, genealogy may disturb the totalizing histories which posit inevitable continuity, and

6

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

can do so in such a way that alternatives to the present (now shown to be contingent) can be thought. If this describes genealogy, what will a genealogy of confession entail? C. G. Prado writes, “Genealogy [ . . . ] needs the historians’ grand narratives because without them it would lack a counterpoint.”25 A genealogy is structured by the totalizing histories which it seeks to refute. In the case of confession, these totalizing histories are the ones which assume that there is a transhistorical human need or psychological compulsion to confess. Examples of such histories would include the studies of Gusdorf and Berggren, but also lie tacit in the assumptions about confession found in the writings of Breuer and early Freud, Zora Neale Hurston, Peter Brown, and Justice Burger cited above, and more generally in popular notions of psychology which fuel the industry of therapy, memoirs and talk shows. Such histories and assumptions about confession believe that an immutable psychic need to confess can be traced continuously from Augustine (or even earlier) to the medieval development of the Christian confessional, to Rousseau and from there to contemporary psychoanalytic and autobiographical practices. Totalizing histories of confession will search for their Augustines and will establish them as exemplary. The Augustines will in turn have their differences obscured, and will be read in ways which recognize the historian’s own experiences and desires, or for the manners in which they confi rm our present sentiments and strivings. A genealogy of confession, in contrast, will also read Augustine, but for his alterity, for the ways in which his Confessions disrupt universalizing claims about confession. A genealogy of confession will also read more obscure texts, such as medieval confession manuals and the bodies of seventeenth-century nuns, as other interruptions in the totalizing story being told. Consequently, a genealogy of confession will, like all histories, be episodic and incomplete, but the episodes chosen will be selected not for their similitude with the present, but for the manners in which they put pressure on assumptions made about confession in the present. A genealogy of confession, like all histories, will thus be invested with the author’s concerns for the present, however these are not concerns to preserve the present or to see it reflected in the past, but to show its contingency and its difference or absence in other eras. To pick up Foucault’s terms again, while a genealogy of confession, like other histories of confession, will draw on facts from the “entangled and confused parchments”26 of the past, it will not offer us the consolation of having “understood” the past and thus the present. Instead, genealogy uses history to cut open the present in order to create the space in which transformation can occur. Finally, a genealogy of confession will be the historicization of an instinct and a desire—instinct and desire, like reason and the body, being some of the sites which we most tend to understand as innate or origin-al. However, much as Nietzsche points out that a genealogy of “man” will

Introduction 7 not show a man, but rather a monkey, at the origin, thus destabilizing all attempts to tell a universal history of “man,” a genealogy of confession will show that a desire for confession is not to be found at the origin. Instead, the instinct, compulsion, and desire to confess will be shown to have developed in accidental ways. Our present, in which confession seems an inevitable outcome not only of our psychological makeup and of our social bonds (familial, erotic, punitive), but also of our system of values or morality, will thus be shown to be contingent and to admit of antidotes and alternatives. To cite Foucault again: “this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.”27

CONFESSION AND ITS STAKES In “Subjectivity and Truth,” Foucault defi nes confession as “To declare aloud and intelligibly the truth of oneself.” 28 For Foucault, such a declaration, a confession, is always made in the presence of another. In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Foucault again describes confession as a self-referential utterance which requires a relationship with another, defi ning confession as: a ritual of discourse where the subject who speaks corresponds with the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual which unfolds in a relation of power, since one doesn’t confess without the presence, at least the virtual presence, of a partner who is not simply an interlocutor but the agency that requires the confession, imposes it, weighs it, and intervenes to judge, punish, pardon, console, reconcile. 29 A case of a “virtual” other for Foucault is found in the practice of autobiographical writings in which one projects a reader even if one never in fact intends to offer one’s text to her, as is the claim of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. The text is written “aloud” in so far as one is delivering it to another in one’s imagination. Foucault will call Seneca’s examination of his day’s activities to himself (silently, in bed) “self-examination” rather than confession, for Seneca requires and imagines no listener other than himself, in contrast to his contemporary Serenus, who recounts his day (aloud or in writing) to Seneca, which Foucault calls “confession.” In the passage from The History of Sexuality: An Introduction cited above, Foucault goes on to defi ne confession in two more signifi cant ways. First, it is “a ritual where truth is authenticated by the obstacles and resistances that it has had to lift in order to be formulated,” or one which is always told with difficulty and shame. Finally, it is “a ritual

8

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

[ . . . ] where articulation alone, independently of its external consequences, produces, in the person who articulates it, intrinsic modifi cations: it makes him innocent, it redeems him, purifi es him, promises him salvation.”30 The requirement that confession tell the truth about the subject, and the notion of truth that can be at work in this claim, will be considered in Chapter Two, both in terms of what confessional truth can mean for Foucault and in terms of what it can mean following readings of authors such as Jacques Derrida and Peter Brooks. If the defi nition of confession in “Subjectivity and Truth” may eventually need to be qualifi ed, the defi nition in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction will serve throughout the current work. Following this account, confession is not to be narrowly defi ned as only those speech acts avowing wrong-doings. Rather, confessions as understood here are statements which claim to explain the being of the subject who is speaking, which are introspective, which utterances change her in manners to be explored in Chapter Two, and which are told despite claims of repression, or with difficulty and shame. As such, even a declaration that, far from having done wrong oneself, one has been wronged—for instance that one has been abused by a family member—or that one is in love, can be called a confession if the subject fi nds this hard to say, looks inside herself to say it, and is changed by what she says. In a lecture given in 1980, Foucault said: “Let me announce once and for all that I am not a structuralist, and I confess with the appropriate chagrin that I am not an analytic philosopher—nobody is perfect.”31 Whatever the irony of the second half of this “confession,” Foucault’s concern to distance himself from structuralism, despite the apparently blatant structuralism of works such as Les mots et les choses, is related to his reknown for having, along with structuralist thinkers such as Roland Barthes, declared the death of “man,” of the author, or of the subject more generally. Foucault would remove the more flagrantly structuralist terminology from his work by the time of the English translation of The Order of Things, and at the end of his life he interprets his work retrospectively according to the claim that, rather than declaring its death, and not merely as a weapon of murder, all of his writings function as a “genealogy of the subject.”32 Foucault explains, “This genealogy has been my obsession for years because it is one of the possible ways of getting rid of a traditional philosophy of the subject,”33 and yet Foucault still wants to discuss a living and becoming subject of some sort. Foucault notes that in most of his works he had been concerned (and, he reproaches himself, too concerned) with how the subject is formed as an object of knowledge and domination, through studies of subjects in institutions such as the asylum and the prison. In his fi nal works, on the other hand, Foucault is concerned with how the self knows and creates herself, and an analysis of how she is created and dominated by social forces all but drops away. In both cases—in the studies of techniques of domination as in the studies

Introduction 9 of techniques of the self—speaking the truth about the self is a privileged form of subject formation. Self-reflective discourse is thus a crucial technique both of domination and of self-care, of being acted upon and of acting upon oneself, and is as such a significant theme in both the genealogical writings and the fi nal writings of Foucault. Although in practice Foucault mainly discusses manners in which the subject is acted upon throughout his genealogical writings, and almost exclusively analyzes manners in which she acts upon herself in the fi nal writings, in principle Foucault will claim that techniques of domination and techniques of the self are always interwoven. These two processes will always “overlap” and together make up “governance,” he writes, a “versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and confl icts between techniques which impose coercion and processes through which the self is constructed or modified by himself.”34 Unfortunately, as noted, Foucault seldom draws out this overlapping and complementarity in his writings: having fi rst emphasized discipline in his studies of the modern period, he amends this by almost exclusively analyzing autonomy and self-formation in his researches into antiquity. Several Foucault scholars have however demonstrated the interconnectedness and inseparability of discipline and self-care which Foucault in theory insists upon, arguing that even paradigmatically disciplinary practices such as therapy and dieting can also be described as technologies of self-care. 35 In the fi rst three chapters of this book, while piecing together and supplementing the genealogy of confession which Foucault traces through antiquity, the early Christian period, and in the modern era, I will attempt to stress the interconnectedness and inseparability of discipline and self-care; I will also note the manners in which the balance between the two shifts over time, becoming increasingly disciplinary, and will consider the ways in which subjects can tip the balance back towards self-care. This exploration of the historical forms which confession has taken from antiquity through modernity hopes to shed light on the production of the confessional subject today. Such a genealogy of confession is important for what Foucault calls its “political dimension.”36 As he elaborates: “By this phrase ‘political dimension’ I mean an analysis that relates to what we are willing to accept in our world, to accept, to refuse, and to change, both in ourselves and in our circumstances.” 37 By describing confession as subject-forming, Foucault intended that we understand how we came to be what we are, but also, more importantly, to recognize the contingency of this being and of this manner of subject-formation, and the treasury of historical alternatives that exist and which can be drawn upon, invented and re-invented, such that rather than confessing to what we are, we can make ourselves other than what we are. This “becoming other than what we are,” which Socrates himself “advises” (“What I don’t advise is that we remain as we are”38), is how Foucault came to defi ne philosophy. 39

10

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

THE CHAPTERS The fi rst three chapters of this book will follow and supplement Foucault in writing a genealogy of the long and varied history of confession, and it will do so in order to undermine the “commonsense” claims made for the impulses which motivate confessional practices today. These chapters will examine how modern confessional subjectivity was formed, and what alternatives to it have historically existed. Chapter One, “Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation,” will take up and expand upon Foucault’s fragments of such a genealogy over this extended period of history in the West, drawing on his writings on self-examination in antiquity, early Christian penitential practices, and confession in the early modern period. This chapter will also consider periods and texts which Foucault’s extant work does not examine40: for instance, while Foucault scarcely mentions Augustine, Chapter One will include an analysis of Augustine’s Confessions in order to counter the assumption, found in Berggren and Brown but also in many introductions to autobiography as a literary genre, that Augustine’s project is the prototype of autobiographical confession as we know it today. Chapter Two, “Confession and Modern Subjectivity,” will continue to explore the history of confession, beginning with the Counter-Reformation and Foucault’s discussion of confession in the modern period, as found in the fi rst volume of The History of Sexuality. This chapter will also question Foucault’s emphasis on the truth-telling function of confession and on the spiraling pleasures of confession as he describes them. Drawing on works by Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Peter Brooks in order to consider Rousseau’s Confessions, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, and legal confessions, it will be argued that confession is in fact structurally inclined towards untruth, while these same works and examples, and the writing of contemporary confessional writers Annie Ernaux and Nelly Arcan, will be drawn upon to indicate the spiraling displeasures of confession, their failure to bring closure and their unpredictability in attaining the subject acceptance, forgiveness, and love. While the structural proclivity of confession towards untruth seems particularly pernicious with respect to legal confessions, the displeasures of confession, their failure to bring catharsis or psychic relief or admiration from others, also betray the hopes with which subjects enter psychoanalysis and write autobiographies, to which disappointment the latter most often bears witness. For these reasons this chapter will focus on legal and autobiographical confessions, while Chapter Three will turn to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is perhaps the paradigmatic activity of what Foucault calls the “confessing animal,” and is a confessional and disciplinary practice to which he frequently refers. Nevertheless, and contrary to his treatment of psychiatry, Foucault does not ever discuss psychoanalysis in depth. For this reason Foucault has been accused of treating psychoanalysis only

Introduction 11 generally or abstractly and thus drawing his conclusions too hastily. Foucault is said to have not attended to the manners in which psychoanalytic theory and practice have developed over the years, auto-critiquing and correcting the very problems to which Foucault points. Several authors have suggested that while Foucault only ever describes psychoanalysis as disciplinary, psychoanalysis may in fact function not (or not only) as discipline but instead (or also) as an ethical practice of care on the part of analysts, and as a technology of self-care on the part of analysands. After having presented Foucault’s critiques of psychoanalysis, Chapter Three will consider these arguments, or attempt to ascertain whether psychoanalysis is inherently disciplinary or whether it has attended to the problematic features which Foucault notes. The question motivating Chapter Three will be whether, despite Foucault’s critiques of the practice, the particularly modern confessional phenomenon of psychoanalysis can be described as both an ethical engagement with the other and a modern technology of the self comparable to those found in Foucault’s studies of ancient Greece and Rome. While remaining wary of the normalizing dangers of psychoanalysis, ultimately it will be argued that like any practice, psychoanalysis can be adapted and subverted to individual ends. As such, psychoanalysis can simultaneously function as a practice of discipline and self-governance, and potentially analysts and analysands can adjust the balance between the two in order to subvert the disciplinary effects of the practice which Foucault has shown. Although the fi rst three chapters will have focused on the confessing subject, an account of the listening other and of the relation between confessor and confessant will already have been consistently present. This relation will become the explicit focus of Chapter Four, “Confessing the Other.” Chapter Four thus entails a shift of focus from the confessional subject to the confessional other, or from the one who speaks to the one who listens. While in the fi rst three chapters I will have followed Foucault in describing the manners in which the confessant is coerced to speak confessionally, in Chapter Four I will be interested in the manners in which the listening other is expected to respond or counter-confess in equally circumscribed manners. In particular, the confessional other is expected to respond in such a way that she reciprocates the subject’s confession, and this anticipation of a counter-confession on the part of the confessional other is frequently presented as a call for recognition, community, and forgiveness, and hence as an ethical demand. Through readings of Nancy Miller, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Judith Butler, and Derrida, it will be argued in this chapter that the demand for the other’s confession—and failing this, confessions made for the other—in fact violate her freedom and alterity. If the fi rst four chapters will have explored the historicity and hence the contingency of confession as well as some of the problems of confession, this will have hoped to establish that alternatives to confession are both

12

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

possible and desirable. Consequently, the final chapter will consider such alternatives to confession. The fi rst alternative to be considered is autobiographical silence, which for Foucault can be a means of resisting discipline and practicing freedom, and is also a positive manner of experiencing the self in relation to others. The remainder of the chapter will be concerned with non-confessional and self-fashioning forms of autobiographical practice, or technologies of the self which undo the work of discipline and which cultivate autonomy and enable self-transformation. In this context I will consider Foucault’s own examples of non-confessional autobiographical practices: his studies of ancient Greek and Roman hupomnêmata and the nineteenth-century memoirs of Pierre Rivière and Herculine Barbin, as well as his description of his own writings as “fragments of an autobiography.” I will also consider the paintings of the seventeenth-century Carravagista Artemisia Gentileschi and the writings of feminist art historians who study her, and the political and philosophical practices of feminism more generally, as additional instances of self-fashioning which differ from those of Foucault in at least two ways: fi rst, the examples of self-fashioning which I am interested in have been practiced by women in the past and today, whereas Foucault not only dismissed the possibility of female selffashioning in antiquity, but also did not consider modern or contemporary examples of women’s self-care; second, while Foucault’s examples tend to theorize the cultivation of autonomy and independence from others as an aesthetic and ethical ideal, I will be interested in examples which recognize the self in relations to others, or cultivate relational autonomy, for instance self-fashioning practices which occur within group political movements. As is already apparent, each of these chapters is indebted to the work of Foucault on confession and to his philosophy generally, but each chapter also either diverges from Foucault’s interests or challenges some aspect of his argument. This book is Foucaultian in outlook and methodology, but consistently puts Foucault in dialogue with other philosophers in order to take the topic of confession in new directions, including ethical and feminist directions which Foucault neglects. 41

1

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation

ANTIQUITY In lectures and articles he wrote in the 1980s, Foucault traces forms of confessional discourse through antiquity and into the fi rst centuries of Christianity.1 Regarding such discursive acts in antiquity, Foucault observes that examinations of conscience were exceedingly rare, existing only as a rather uncommon philosophic practice: “in all the ancient philosophical practices, the obligation to tell the truth about oneself occupies a rather limited place.”2 In comparison to the explosion and omnipresence of confessional discourses today, it should be stressed fi rst and foremost that such discourses were nearly absent in antiquity. Moreover, as shall be seen, the discursive acts which Foucault analyzes in antiquity do not share all of the characteristics of confession detailed above: telling the truth of the self, and modifying the self in the process, are present in antiquity, but these statements of truth do not come accompanied by protestations of difficulty and repression and shame. These later elements, confession as such, only appear in monastic confessions of the Middle Ages. Moreover, since Greek philosophy was less about the project of knowing the subject than about knowing how the subject could change himself in order to live a better life, the form such self-examinations took was different from the forms they would take in modernity. In particular, ancient techniques of self-examination pursued the goals of self-transformation and self-mastery rather than self-discovery and 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 she is “discovering” herself, blind to the manners in which her self-“discovery” is in fact a positive act of production. So far as techniques of truthful examinations of conscience did exist in antiquity, the crucial argument that Foucault makes about such practices is, fi rst, that the truth in question was not, as in modernity, a hidden and secret truth unique to the being of the speaking subject, but was a rationally cognized philosophical truth about how all persons wanting to live the good life ought to behave. One examined one’s actions,

14

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

but less to tell the truth of these actions than to see and to manage how well they conformed to the philosophical truth of the good life. Among ancient philosophers, one was ideally one’s own master, and any tutelage prior to self-mastery was transitory and aimed at autonomy. Thus, while such self-examinations and confessions were not common, one fi nds certain philosophical practices of recording and recounting one’s acts and thoughts either to oneself or, if one was still in the process of becoming autonomous, to a temporary master. Such inventories of acts were judged in terms of how well they conformed to certain ideas regarding how the subject ought to act. These ideas about the good life were considered true, and the aim was to examine how well one’s behavior had adhered to these true ethical guidelines in order to better attain them over time. Examinations of one’s acts were thus part of a self-consciously undertaken process of becoming a certain kind of subject in conformity with the philosophical truth of an ethical teaching which one rationally accepted. Importantly, 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 ideal at which those declarations aim and to which one compares them. Indeed, in contrast to today, there was no truth of the self, and this absence of truth was related to the fact that the self was free, autonomous, and could thus become other than what it was. In “Self Writing,” Foucault gives the example of ancients who would exchange daily letters in which they would record all of their actions of that day, in a practice that can be compared to keeping a diary for another to read. 3 Here we can see the conjunction of discipline and techniques of the self in antiquity. Foucault is analyzing these daily correspondences as ways in which the ancients would work towards shaping their actions in conformity with a rationally chosen model of the ethical life, and thus as a technique of the self. Nevertheless this form of correspondence involves offering one’s life up to the surveillance of another. Moreover, knowing that one’s activities will be judged by another, the point was that the ancient subject would monitor himself in order to have nothing shameful to report to or to have seen by the other. Correspondence was a self-conscious attempt to enforce a habit of self-surveillance through a pact of surveillance between two subjects. Nonetheless, this is not the panopticism of modernity which Foucault would describe in Discipline and Punish, since the ancient subject is choosing to offer his day’s activities up to the judgment and surveillance of another, rather than monitoring himself because he fi nds himself already-monitored, and the transformation of surveillance into self-surveillance will only work with the subject’s truthful cooperation from the outset. The ancient subject submits to and internalizes surveillance not because he is dominated, but because he has rationally decided that he wishes to be subjected to and to internalize, and thus to conform to, the model of the ethical life which he philosophically endorses.

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 15 In “Subjectivity and Truth,” Foucault notes that confession to another— for instance the correspondence analyzed in “Self Writing”—was “a practice not very developed in philosophical life” in antiquity, but it did exist in the Epicurean schools and in medical practice, and also existed in Seneca’s school of thought. In an example of confession involving another, Foucault describes the case of Serenus’s confession to Seneca regarding his spiritual malaise, a sort of medical consultation concerned with the state of his soul. Unlike in Christian and modern forms of confession, Foucault notes that what is confessed to is not concerned with “shameful desires” and “things of that sort,” but related to the more properly Greek concerns of riches, political life, and glory: the domains of activity of the free man. Once more, in this act of truth-telling, the truth involved is not a correspondence with reality, and is not psychologically buried and to be discovered through analysis of the individual, but is a philosophical truth which is rationally known and which is true of the good life, the life of the philosopher.4 If Seneca, as master of himself, can examine his own deeds at the end of the day, Serenus, like the ancient correspondents, confesses to Seneca in the process of attaining a similar self-mastery. The function of this form of confession is not self-discovery and self-interpretation but becoming-autonomous, and the hierarchical relation involved in Serenus’s truth-telling to Seneca is not intrinsic to the discourse, as in modern confession, but is part of the process of becoming autonomous and thus of telling the truth to oneself, in the process abolishing the need for this hierarchy. Seneca himself, further along in the process of self-mastery than Serenus, undertakes a similar examination of self without the mediation of another. He describes taking a nightly “inventory” of his day’s activities, not as a judge of them, but as an administrator, deeming any errors in judgment to be, not faults of the subject, but mistakes, wrong applications of his ideas rather than tell-tale indicators of character flaws. Seneca undertakes his nightly self-examination not with anxiety or guilt, but with aesthetic pleasure and serenity. He asks: What could be more beautiful than to conduct an inquest of one’s day? What sleep better than that which follows this review of one’s actions? How calm it is, deep and free, when the soul has received its portion of praise and blame, and has submitted itself to its own examination, to its own censure. Secretly, it makes the trial of its own conduct. I exercise this authority over myself, and each day I will myself as witness before myself. When my light is lowered and my wife at last is silent, I reason with myself and take the measure of my acts and of my words. . . . 5 Though, as shall be seen in later chapters, modern confessants certainly take pleasure in their confessions, the pleasure is more perverse, erotic, and less calm, often followed by displeasure, accompanied by predictable claims about the difficulty of the discursive act involved, the courage

16 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault required, denial of masochistic, narcissistic, or exhibitionist pleasure, and so forth. Seneca’s pleasure, in contrast, is aesthetic (“What could be more beautiful . . . ?”) and serene (“How calm it is”), and is a practice in selfmastery (“I exercise this authority over myself, and each day I will myself as witness before myself”) without submitting itself to or fantasizing the shameful exposure to and condemnation by another, whether it be God or the reading public. While Seneca reproaches himself for how he spoke to an individual during the day, this examination of conduct is not accompanied by guilt or shame, but a calm pleasure in knowing that by examining the mistake he is in the process of improving and mastering himself such that he will remember to act according to the code of behavior which he ascribes to in the future. While in the case of correspondence found in “Self Writing,” surveillance is needed to produce the requisite self-surveillance in a subject, Seneca has reached a point of self-mastery at which he monitors himself without need of another. To sum up, in contradistinction from modern confession, the deeds Seneca reflects on do not reveal to Seneca truths about his character or about his personal predilections, drives, or desires, but simply truths about how well he has conformed to a certain and true idea of ethical behavior in action. Also in contrast to modern confession, this truth is immediately and fully accessible to him, it is not hidden or indecipherable or unconscious, and does not require the intervention of another to be interpreted. Finally, the examination of conscience in Seneca is part of the process of becoming of the self, rather than a means of discovering a certain essential being of the subject. It is clear that this form of confession as means of becoming autonomous would have been a technique of the self used only by a small and élite group of individuals in Ancient Greece and Rome: a select group of free men, and certain philosophers more specifically. Legal confessions could be tortured from slaves in ancient Greece, though not from free men such as Seneca, but in either case, confession in law was not, as in modernity, a reflection of a more everyday demand that subjects confess. Moreover, legal confessions in antiquity admitted to acts rather than to the psychological being (motives, intentions) of the confessing subject. What Foucault is provisionally calling “confession” or selfexamination in Greek and Roman antiquity was thus not a wide-spread aspect of subject-formation intrinsic to identity, which is to be noted in contrast to modern forms of confession which, Foucault will argue, would become crucial in the formation of the modern subject across classes and genders. Confession and self-examination in ancient Greece and Rome were relatively simple techniques based on an un-complex conception of the self. They involved discipline but in the form of rationally chosen and cultivated self-discipline, however culturally-circumscribed the notion of the good life (and who had access to it) entailed may have been. In contrast, techniques of truth-telling and practices of the self in Christianity would be increasingly complex as well as increasingly close to modern

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 17 truth-telling technologies and notions of subjectivity. At the same time, the discipline involved would augment and aim towards obedience rather than autonomy, an anxiety-ridden obedience to a doctrine within a hierarchy ever less clearly and less calmly chosen.

EARLY CHRISTIAN PENANCE AND MONASTIC CONFESSION

Making Truths In “Christianity and Confession,” Foucault notes that Christianity is a confession, and that this entails that Christians, as with persons of other confessions, tell the truth. A confessional faith is not a private spirituality; rather, in Christianity, and particularly in Catholicism, one is obliged to subscribe to a certain set of doctrines as true, to believe that certain texts are sources of truth, to accept the decisions of religious authorities as true, and to manifest one’s subscription to this faith.6 A confessional faith thus requires its followers to develop certain relations between themselves and the truth. Beyond these relations to the truth of the faith, however, Christianity developed an idea according to which one also needed to know and to manifest the truth of oneself, and this second form of truthfulness was related to one’s knowing and manifesting the truth of the religion. According to Augustine, qui facit veritatem venit ad lucem: by making truth inside oneself one could get access to the light.7 By knowing one’s sins and temptations, and by bearing witness to these sins and temptations in the presence of others, a Christian could better access the truth of God. From a notion of truth as external in antiquity, we move to a notion of two truths, one external (God) and one internal (the self), and have thus taken one step towards the modern confessional interest in truth as purely internal or introspectively-discovered. What interests Foucault, of course, are not the manners in which Christians confessed the truth of their faith, which I argue below is crucial to his neglect of Augustine. Rather, Foucault is far more concerned with the techniques which Christianity developed for “making truth inside oneself.” The method which comes to mind is of course the sacrament of penance. As Foucault notes, however, this is a late invention of Christianity, one which he will not discuss at all in “Christianity and Confession,” attending instead to forms of manifesting one’s truth between the second and fifth centuries A.D. In particular, in this lecture Foucault will discuss the practices of exomologesis and exagoreusis, or publishing oneself and permanent verbalization.

Publishing Oneself The fi rst technique of “making truth inside oneself” which Foucault analyzes is exomologesis, a term so peculiar that the Latin fathers normally

18 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault kept it in the Greek, but which was translated by Tertullian as publicatio sui, or publishing oneself. Tentler, in his history of confession, calls this form of penance “canonical penance,” while Mortimer refers to it as “the public penitential system.”8 As Tentler writes, in the fi rst two hundred years of Christianity, “Christianity was confi ned to zealous and selective communities,” and there was thus little need for ritualized penance. As the community grew, however, a method was required for “restoring sinners” who strayed.9 Canonical penance was the dominant form which this restoration took between the second and seventh centuries, and was remarkable for its severity. This form of penance was an entirely public affair, and was initially only undertaken by Christians who had sinned gravely. Penance at this time was not considered an act, but a status: Tentler speaks of “entrance into an order of penitents, a third class of Christians distinct from catechumens and faithful.”10 If a Christian had committed a serious sin, he could enter this order of penitents through a public ritual which involved the laying on of hands, and could also include the shaving of his head and the donning of a hair shirt and ashes. During his time amongst the penitents, the contrite sinner would perform almsgiving, keep fasts, and endure public humiliation.11 Such a period of penance, necessary for readmission into the faithful, usually lasted for the forty days of Lent, but in exceptional cases could last for several years.12 Significantly, it could be undertaken only once in a person’s lifetime. If an individual sinned gravely again, he was excluded from the faithful once and for all; as Ambrose wrote, “There is only one penance, just as there is only one baptism.”13 Moreover, having once been a penitent, a Christian remained marked by his previous penitential status by a series of permanent restrictions: he could never become part of the clergy or serve in the military, he was not to become too involved in worldly affairs, he could never contract a marriage and, even if he was already married, he had to live abstinently for the rest of his life.14 According to Mortimer, these restrictions were a manner in which the Church protected the penitent from “the ordinary sources of temptation,” since he would have no other chance at redemption should he sin gravely again. Restricted from sexual, commercial and military activities for the remainder of his life, the penitent “became to all intents and purposes a professed religious: in the world, yet not of it, wholly devoted to pious exercises and charitable works.”15 Exomologesis, occurring at the end of the period of penitence, usually at Lent, is the part of the ritual which interests Foucault. This was a publishing of the truth of oneself as having penitential status, or as being a sinner. To take an example of Foucault’s, Fabiola was an aristocratic Roman woman who married a second husband while her fi rst husband was still alive. As this was a serious sin, she took on the status of penitent. At Lent, exomologesis took place. As Saint Jerome explains, this occurred over a period of several days preceding Easter during which Fabiola “was to be found among the ranks of the penitents.”

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 19 The bishop, the priests, and the people wept with her. Her hair disheveled, her face pale, her hands dirty, her head covered in ashes, she chastened her naked breast and the face with which she had seduced her second husband. She revealed to all her wound, and Rome, in tears, contemplated the scars on her emaciated body.16 While this is an example from the beginning of the fi fth century, Tertullian provides similar descriptions from the end of the second century, and there is indeed a continuity in these penitential performances over several centuries. In the case of Natalius from the third century, the penitent is found “rolling himself under the feet not only of the clergy but also of the laity” and “showing the weals of the stripes he has received.”17 In each case, the penitent is making manifest the truth of his or her self as a sinner. So Fabiola is showing that her face and her body and her hair are in truth not beautiful and seductive, as she had deceived her second husband that they were, but are in fact filthy and sinful. By covering herself in dust and ashes, she shows that she chose filth and earth over purity and heaven. By exposing her defiled flesh to Rome, rather than concealing her true nature by cleaning and adorning her body and living as affluently and peacefully as she might have, she shows that she chose the life of the flesh over God, and shows the wretchedness of this choice. By performing a sort of martyrdom of her flesh, such that by the time of the exomologesis it is wounded and emaciated and dirty, Fabiola publishes the truth that in her sinfulness she had chosen spiritual death over eternal life. Without speaking or making a verbal confession, therefore, Fabiola, like other penitents, is making manifest the truth of her self which might otherwise have remained hidden. At the same time, in this evocation of bodily martyrdom, Fabiola is renouncing that body and her prior self and enacting its death. As such, she is abnegating the self of which she is simultaneously manifesting the truth. In exomologesis, the self whose truth is made manifest is thus simultaneously destroyed, and a new, purified self is in the process of being born. Accordingly, one model frequently given for exomologesis was medical: to heal a wound one must fi rst show it to a physician or expose one’s woundedness. Similarly, to rid oneself of the corruptions of the flesh and to renounce worldly life one must fi rst show the flesh to another or to the public, acknowledging the truth of the self in order to destroy it. In Foucault’s terms, exomologesis could be analyzed as a fusion of discipline and self-fashioning, in so far as the subject submits to the discipline of the Church, but does so in order to create or give birth to a new form of subjectivity which she prefers and is choosing. She is thus choosing herself, creating herself, even while renouncing and disciplining herself and accepting the discipline of the Church, and this is thus once more an example of the overlapping of discipline and techniques of self-care. A few points are crucial to emphasize. First, there is not necessarily a verbalization of sins in these early Christian performances of penance, and

20

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

hence no confession as we know it, or at least this is not crucial to the process of publishing oneself. Second, most of these performances of exomologesis occurred in public: confessions of the flesh required witnesses and could not be made to oneself, as could Seneca’s self-examinations, nor simply to an authority, as in later Christian penance and modern confession. Third, penitents such as Fabiola did not confess to Rome or to the public their particular sins, the details of their trespasses and temptations, nor individuate themselves as sinners of a certain sort as, again, in later Christian penance and in modern confession. Although Jerome does highlight the abnegation of Fabiola’s flesh as appropriate to her particular sins, she is found amongst other penitents, all of whom would have been similarly dirty, emaciated, and wounded, to be found weeping and chastening their flesh, cause of all worldly temptations, at the end of their period of penance. The penitent is manifesting the truth of her self as generically sinful, rather than exploring the individuality of her sinful nature in symbolic gestures or words. Finally, as noted, the self which is “confessed” to is simultaneously renounced. In this sense, qui facit veritatem venit ad lucem: by making the truth of oneself (which truth was always the same: that one was sinful) through theatrical performances of that self’s destruction, one renounced the sinful and embodied self and became 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 oneself was a technology of the self, of choosing to become other than what one was. At the same time, unlike pre-Christian technologies of the self and modern confession, exomologesis did not occur discursively but through public acts.

PERMANENT VERBALIZATION The second form of early Christian truth-telling techniques of the self which Foucault explores in “Christianity and Confession” is a practice which the early Greek fathers called exagoreusis, and which was, in Foucault’s words, a “permanent verbalization” of one’s thoughts in the presence of another (one’s spiritual director), and which developed within the context of monastic life. While exomologesis was a radical departure from the ancient self-examination and confessional practices of philosophers such as Seneca, exagoreusis could be seen as a Christianized version of the ancient techniques of the self, which is unsurprising since it was in the monasteries that philosophical life continued and that the ancient philosophers continued to be read during the Middle Ages. To show the similarity of certain forms of monastic self-examination to that of Seneca, Foucault cites John Chrysostom, who writes: It is in the morning that we must take account of our expenses, then it is in the evening, after our meal, when we have gone to bed and no one

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 21 troubles us and disquiets us, that we must ask ourselves to account for our conduct to ourselves.18 While Seneca must patiently wait for his wife to “at last” be silent, the celibate Chrysostom writes more vaguely of “no one troubl[ing]” and “disquiet[ing]” the individual after a certain hour. Despite their similarity, Foucault notes that two elements are altered in monastic forms of selfexamination, and reflect two virtues of monastic life which departed from the ideals of Stoicism: obedience and contemplation. Regarding obedience, while the ancient philosophical disciple studied with his master in the process of becoming autonomous, and would then examine himself without need of an intermediary, the monk, in Foucault’s words, “has to keep the spirit of obedience as a permanent sacrifice of his own will” for his entire life, and as such would always confess to a spiritual director and would never be autonomous.19 Anything a monk did without the permission of his spiritual director was considered a “theft.”20 While Chrysostom might rehearse his day in bed, other monks would soon be required to make their confession to another to whom they owed perpetual obedience. As such, with monastic confession we see an increase in discipline over self-governance. Secondly, if the monastic life did not aim at the virtue of self-mastery, or even at an ethical life of acts, it aimed instead at the continuous contemplation of God. As Foucault writes, “The obligation of the monk is continuously to turn his thoughts to that single point which is God, and his obligation is also to make sure that his heart, his soul, and the eye of his soul are pure enough to see God and to receive light from him.”21 It is thus appropriate that while Seneca would examine his deeds of the day, the monk would examine his thoughts. Although Chyrsostom still speaks of “expenses” and “conduct,” the main object of examination within monastic life would quickly become mental. The transformation of self-examination in light of these ideals of obedience and contemplation are apparent in two works by John Cassian which Foucault analyzes, Institutiones and Collationes, which describe monastic techniques of self-examination amongst Palestinian and Egyptian monks at the beginning of the fi fth century A.D. The fi rst transformation, as noted, is that the self-examination concerned the monk’s thoughts rather than his actions. Since the monastic life was one of contemplation, it was the monk’s thoughts which had to be controlled more than his actions, so that they could be continually directed towards God and kept perpetually pure enough to receive His light. We might think of Heloïse’s anguished writings to Abelard in which she tells him that although she is enclosed in a convent, unable to act upon her desires, she nevertheless dwells on erotic reminiscences of him, even during periods meant to be devoted to meditation and prayer, and even during the celebration of mass. 22 She notes that men are wrong who judge her chaste because of the unwilling purity of her flesh, for

22

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

“virtue belongs not to the body but to the soul.”23 As is apparent, directors of the monastic life had to control less the deeds than the thoughts, desires, mental images and fantasies which interfered with the religious contemplation of the ordained. Also importantly, the truth involved in examining these thoughts is different from that of Seneca and Serenus: the monk is not concerned with how well his thoughts correspond with the truth of a philosophic doctrine, but with whether they are true or false in the sense that if they are the temptations of a demon, then they are illusory, deceptive, and false, whereas if their source is God, they are true. The monk examining his thoughts must sort out the good from the bad based, not on their philosophical logic, but on their origin. Cassian uses three metaphors for this sorting or censoring process: one is of the miller who sorts through grains to remove those which are bad, only allowing the good grains to enter into the millstone. The second metaphor is of the military officer examining the soldiers as they march by and again sorting them according to their capacities. The third metaphor, which is the most interesting because, as Foucault points out, it is also used by Freud to describe the censorship of thoughts, is that of the moneychanger who tests each coin for its authenticity, once more sorting out flawed and impure coins from the pure ones. The moneychanger needs to be able to tell which workshop the coins came from, whereas the monk examining his thoughts needs to know if particular thoughts originated from God or from the Devil. The origin of thoughts, like that of coins, may be deceptive, and so some experience and expertise in examining or interpreting them is required. While the task of Freud’s censor is to only let adequately disguised thoughts pass into consciousness, that of Cassian’s censor is, on the contrary, to expel the illusory thoughts and only allow true thoughts, originating in God, to enter the mind as objects of contemplation. In both cases, a hermeneutics is developed to discover and to decipher the reality hidden in the thoughts of the subject. Thoughts are not always immediately accessible to the subject in early Christian thought because they could be the work of Satan within one, and thus one needed to be permanently vigilant in deciphering illusion and deception in the thoughts coming from Satan, and separating these from the pure thoughts originating in and pleasing to God. Importantly, another person is required to help the monastic subject reveal the hidden truth of his thoughts. While Seneca, and even Chyrsostom, thought one could lie in bed and contemplate one’s day silently and alone, for Cassian it is clear that the examination of thoughts needed to be made to one’s spiritual director, and that, unlike in the case of exomologesis, this examination could not merely be manifested performatively, but needed to be put into words. Regarding the first point, given that certain ideas in one’s mind could originate from the Devil, who would disguise evil and false thoughts as tempting and true, the greater wisdom and experience at deciphering thoughts that one’s spiritual director offered was crucial in

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 23 the permanent effort of keeping one’s thoughts on the path to God. Instilled with fear of being possessed by Satan and thus suffering for eternity in the fi res of Hell, we might say that monks submitted to both surveillance and self-surveillance with less freedom than Stoic philosophers decided to consent to an idea of the good life, and so the balance between self-governance and discipline had radically shifted. Surveillance is no longer chosen as a means to help the subject develop a sense of self-surveillance and selfmastery, but as a permanent discipline with no end of autonomy in sight; and yet, the monks were fashioning themselves—self-consciously fashioning themselves after Christ, for instance, as Greenblatt notes24 —through the discourses they chose, but no longer with the sense that they could do otherwise without being led by the Devil and ending up in Hell. Regarding the second point, the necessity that thoughts be expressed verbally rather than performatively is shown through an example in Cassian which Foucault analyzes. According to the story, a young monk named Serapion found that he was unable to keep a fast, and so he stole a loaf of bread each day and enjoyed a secret meal. One day, his spiritual director gave a sermon to all the monks about the importance of truthfulness. Convinced, Serapion revealed to all present the loaf of bread he had hidden under his robes, and then confessed that he had been stealing and eating a loaf each day. At this point, and not before, “a light seems to tear itself away from his body and cross the room, spreading a disgusting smell of sulphur.”25 Satan and his temptations were not dislodged from Serapion at the moment that the monk felt contrition, nor at the moment that he acknowledged within his heart that he had done wrong, nor even at the moment that he displayed the stolen loaf of bread to his fellow monks and thus theatrically exposed his guilt. Only when Serapion confessed his wrong-doing in words was the Devil forced from his body, for, according to Cassian, the darkness of Satan is incompatible with the light which only verbalization sheds; as Cassian writes: “A bad thought brought into the light of day immediately loses its veneer. The terrible serpent that this confession has forced out of its subterranean lair, to throw it out into the light and make its shame a public spectacle, is quick to retreat.”26 This verbalization as exorcism is only effective if made in the presence of another. As Foucault notes, “The presence of somebody, even if he does not speak, even if it is a silent presence, this presence is required for this kind of confession, because the abbé, or the brother, or the spiritual father, who listens to this confession is the image of God.”27 It is the image of God which exposes thoughts for what they are. Verbalization in the presence of another is also necessary because it functions to help sort thoughts after the manner of the miller, the military officer, or the money changer. Only when speaking a thought in the presence of another does one experience the difficulty of admitting to shameful thoughts and thus realize the extent of their shamefulness and untruth. The difficulty of speaking betrays the impurity and falseness of that of which

24 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault one speaks. So long as Serapion thought about his nightly meal, he could always justify it and be convinced by the temptations of his flesh and of the Devil, and to feel that it was not wrong, that it was even desirable. But the shame caused by speaking of the stolen bread in front of his fellow monks and in the presence of his spiritual director shed light on the origin of the Serapion’s thoughts and desires in a manner which could no longer be denied, and this realization was synonymous with the exorcism of Satan, and with the cessation of the sinful behavior. The resistance that the subject experiences in speaking is a means of ascertaining the quality of the thought, its truth or falsity, and thus, in a point which will occur again and again from this point in history onwards, we see that expressions of psychological resistance will always accompany confession, or at least anything worth confessing (but everything must be confessed in order to ascertain what is worth confessing!). Interestingly, however, while for the monks the difficulty experienced in admitting a thought revealed that it was a false thought, originating in the devil, for modern confessants, as shall be seen, this same resistance will be proof of the truth of what is being expressed. Just as Cassian’s censor only allows true thoughts into the mind, while Freud’s censor only allows in false or disguised thoughts, so for moderns it is the truth which is difficult to express, which our censors reject and which our minds resist uttering and even acknowledging, and which must be torn from the darkest recesses of the soul. In contrast, as seen, for Cassian thoughts exorcised with difficulty were the false and demonic ones, stinking of sulphur. Finally, it is important to note that in the monastic context, what is also being resisted in the temptation to remain silent, and which is overcome through the verbalization of confession, is the subject’s attachment to Satan, and this attachment to Satan is also an attachment to oneself. In renouncing his stolen bread, Serapion renounces the Devil, but he also renounces his attachment to his body and to his self and its pleasures in favor of truth and God. As in “publishing oneself” or exomologesis, in exagoreusis one manifests the truth of oneself in an act, this time a verbal act, which is simultaneously a renunciation of that self. In both cases, early Christian techniques of manifesting the truth of the self aimed to be forms of self-sacrifice, self-destructions which brought one closer to God.

THE TEMPTATIONS OF CHRISTIANITY Foucault calls the theatrical “publishing oneself” the “ontological temptation of Christianity,” whereas “constant verbalization” is the “epistemological temptation of Christianity.”28 “Publishing oneself” was a manifestation of one’s ontological being as sinful, while “permanent verbalization” is a tendency towards a continual discursive analysis of a subject’s thoughts in the pursuit of self-knowledge. While both, unlike ancient techniques of the

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 25 self, require the presence of another and are self-sacrifices, Foucault notes that it is the second form of truth-telling which, after centuries of fluctuation, fi nally dominated, and it is the second technology of the self which dominates subjectivity-formation today. By studying the monastic practices of early Christianity, Foucault therefore writes that we “discover the beginnings of great things,” “the apparition of a new kind of self, or at least of a new kind of relationship to our selves,” one which is far more complicated than is to be discovered in the technologies of the self of ancient Greece. 29 One problem with the Christian perspective on human subjectivity which has been widely recognized over the past two hundred years is its negativity, its abnegation of the flesh and of the subject as perpetually sinful, or the fact that, as Foucault has highlighted, it is a sacrifice of the self. Intriguingly but all too briefly, Foucault suggests by way of conclusion that in recent, more secularized centuries, political thought, psychiatry, judicial institutions, and medicine have all tried to fi nd positive grounds for these technologies of the self, “to constitute the ground of subjectivity as the root of a positive self, what we could call the permanent anthropologism of Western thought.”30 This is perhaps a reference to the sorts of discourses Foucault studied in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, the discovery, which was also a production, of “man” as a positive notion in the human sciences of the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Or we might think of Foucault’s study of the medical gaze in The Birth of the Clinic, and of the sciences of sex in The History of Sexuality, or even the judicial, legal, medical and psychiatric documents surrounding the cases of Pierre Rivière and Herculine Barbin. In each of these cases, the discourses Foucault studies were similar to those of monastic confession in that they were so many quests for the truth of human subjects through the obligating of those subjects to provide a “permanent verbalization” of their thoughts in the presence of an other, which other, like the spiritual director, is both authority and interpreter of the subject’s thoughts. Unlike in the monastic setting, however, these discourses of the human sciences and of psychiatry, medicine and law do not aim to simultaneously destroy the subject which they discover, even if they are unaware of the fact that, as with Schrödinger’s cat and as shall be discussed below, these examinations and interpretations are active in their interference with and fi xation of the subjectivity which they aimed to “discover.”31 In the past few hundred years, Western culture, Foucault argues, has tried to salvage the hermeneutics of the self developed in Christianity, while dispensing with the self-sacrifice and abnegation of the self which such technologies had previously entailed. Similarly, modern forms of confession such as autobiographical writing tend to take up the Christian hermeneutics of the self, but more often to affi rm than to negate that self. 32 Contemporary autobiographical confessions most often aim to discover and reveal the self without wishing to renounce it. Such practices take up Christian practices of confession but, crucially, subtract the guilt and desire

26

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

for self-transformation. Foucault concludes “Christianity and Confession” with the suggestion that instead of trying to maintain a positive version of the Christian technologies of the self, as modern autobiographical practices have done, perhaps we need to dispense with those technologies altogether, and to fi nd new ones. In his own words: The moment, maybe, is coming for us to ask: do we really need this hermeneutics of the self (which we have inherited from the fi rst centuries of Christianity? Do we need a positive man who serves as the foundation of this hermeneutics of the self?) Maybe the problem of the self is not to discover what it is in its positivity; maybe the problem is not to discover a positive self or the positive foundation for the self. Maybe our problem now is to discover that the self is nothing else than the historical correlation of the technology built in our history. Maybe the problem is to change those technologies (or maybe to get rid of those technologies, and then, to get rid of the sacrifice which is linked to those technologies). And in this case, one of the main political problems nowadays would be, in the strict sense of the word, the politics of our selves. 33

THE CONFESSIONS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE

Augustine’s Absence in Foucault Augustine’s Confessions are clearly neither a case of exomologesis nor of exagoreusis: the saint is neither undergoing public ascetic exercises nor is he confessing obediently in a monastic context to a religious superior. The Confessions do not fit into Foucault’s dichotomized presentation of early Christian confession in “Christianity and Confession,” and yet Augustine wrote his Confessions during the period which Foucault analyzes in this lecture. It is in fact surprising that Augustine is neither discussed here nor (or scarcely ever) in other writings by Foucault dealing with the early Christian period. This seems particularly strange since Foucault is concerned with the history of confessional discourses, and Augustine, considered the father of confessional writing, is certainly the figure who looms largest for this and perhaps for any period. The few times that Augustine is mentioned in the late writings of Foucault it is to make the point that Augustine, like other Christian thinkers, was preoccupied not with the sexual act of penetration, as the ancient Greeks had been, but with the more passive sexual phenomenon of erection. 34 This seems neither here nor there as far as confession is concerned, and indeed the passage on erection to which Foucault directs our attention is found not in the Confessions but in the City of God. Although we may hypothesize whether Augustine’s Confessions were examined in Foucault’s destroyed manuscript dealing with the Christian

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 27 period, Confessions of the Flesh, the near-absence of Augustine in the extant works may be partially explained by Foucault’s concern to do original archival research for each of his studies, rather than relying on wellknown philosophical and historical texts and the secondary literature on them. Foucault decidedly privileges the obscure over the canonical, and Rousseau’s Confessions are also notably absent from the discussion of modern confession in the fi rst volume of The History of Sexuality, with preference given to the less-known English text, My Secret Life, for which Foucault would also publish a preface. As was seen above, however, Foucault distinguishes between two forms of early Christian truth-telling practices, those concerned with telling the truth of the Christian faith, and those concerned with telling the truth of the self, with Foucault’s interest lying in the latter form of truth-telling. As I will argue below, and 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, and this is perhaps another reason for Foucault’s inattention to the work. Despite this otherwise notable neglect, Foucault does mention an incident from Augustine’s Confessions in an interview. Having been asked: “What is the ethical difference between the flesh and sexuality?,” he responded, For the Greeks, when a philosopher was in love with a boy, but didn’t touch him, one appreciated his attitude. The problem was the following: did he touch the boy or not? This was the ethical substance: the act tied to the pleasure and desire. For Saint Augustine, it is very clear that when he remembers his relationship with a young friend when he was eighteen years old, what bothers him, what torments him, is to know exactly the type of desire which he had for him. So you see that the ethical substance is not the same. 35 From this we can see that Foucault viewed Augustine’s reflections on his sexual past as concerned with his interiority, with fantasies and desires and not only with acts. So far as acts are concerned, the questions are: Why? Through what inner as well as external compulsion? With how much guilt? With how much shame? Foucault argues that it did not occur to the ancient Greeks to analyze their thoughts or feelings, and they were instead concerned exclusively with administering acts. For the Greeks, what or whom one desired was not of interest, what mattered was how one mastered one’s desires in order to act on them in a certain way or to refrain from doing so altogether. A similar point was seen with respect to the move from Stoic self-examination and confession, which was primarily preoccupied with acts, to early Christian monastic confession, which was a “permanent verbalization” of thoughts and desires. If this is the extent of Foucault’s extant analysis of Augustine’s Confessions, we might push a Foucaultian examination of confession in Augustine

28

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

on our own, since he is so often assumed to be the literary prototype of modern and contemporary confessions.

INTERIORITY The contrast which Foucault draws between Augustine and the ancient Greeks is supported by Phillip Cary’s thesis in Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self. According to Cary, the concept of interiority is new to Augustine, who, Cary argues, in fact invented the idea of a private interior self as a solution to his unique theological problems. Cary observes that the concept and experience of a “private interior realm [ . . . ] is not an inevitable part of human self-description.”36 Much as Foucault shows that various experiences which we deem instinctual, natural, universal and inevitable are in fact contingent accidents of history, Cary argues that it was only the particular theological questions which Augustine posed, and the particular solutions which he reached in order to solve them, which resulted in his invention of the notion and experience of an inner self—a notion and experience which then had a long and varied career, resulting fi nally in modern, secularized intuitions about the self which are quite different from those entailed by Augustine’s thought. Cary charts the development of a notion of an interior self in Augustine’s writings. The early Augustine followed Plotinus in believing that the soul was divine and immutable. For this reason, Augustine thought we could turn the eyes of the soul in upon itself in order to see God. Both Plotinus and the early Augustine therefore conceive of an inner self, and are motivated to introspect upon it, and yet this is quite different from modern and contemporary forms of introspection, for this inner self was not yet private or individualized, but was the undifferentiated divine. Because immutable, this soul would not be tailored to particular human beings, but would be the same for all human beings, and identical with God. By looking in on one’s own soul one would thus not only see Christ but all other souls as well, and the purpose of introspection would not be to explore one’s individuality but to fi nd theological truth. Augustine eventually realized that this Plotinian theory confl icted with official Christian doctrine according to which the soul, as created rather than Creator, could not be divine and immutable. In obedience to the teachings of the Church, Augustine was obliged to concede that the soul was mutable in time, if not in space, and that it was not divine. Because mutable, or corruptible, subject to sin, each individual soul would differ, and we cannot therefore know other souls by looking into our own, and nor can we fi nd God simply by looking within. Augustine would continue to maintain that a turning inwards of the eyes of the soul was necessary to see God, but, as Cary puts it, the eyes must turn in and then up. Indeed, as J. Lenore Wright indicates, this in-and-then-up

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 29 movement characterizes the Confessions themselves: the fi rst nine books retrospect upon Augustine’s spiritual life, while the last four books are more abstract philosophical and theological musings. 37 Having looked in for nine books, Augustine then looks up in the last four. According to Cary, God is within for Augustine, but also above and beyond the individual soul. This soul is not to be imagined as a dark room with no windows or way out, as it would be for Locke many centuries later, but as “the inner courtyard of a great palace, for the crucial thing about it is that it has no roof: it is open to the light of the Sun above. In fact, it is the only place to go to see the Sun shining clearly.”38 However, “Outside, it is overcast at best, and one could wander long in the darkness. For unlike Locke, Augustine thinks it is easy enough to leave the inner space of the self. All you have to do is sin [ . . . ]”39 Our souls are thus differentiated, private worlds, for the later Augustine—as perhaps for no earlier philosopher—and yet, even if it is from within our individual souls that we can look up to God, this individualism is not conceived by Augustine as a source of human dignity, but as the tragic consequence of original sin, and we can only look up through overcast skies. For Augustine, we only have differentiated souls, or private, inner worlds, because we are fallen. It is the possibility for corruption which makes our souls our own, and this individualization of souls is experienced by the saint as a tragic form of isolation, making even newborn babies unknown to the women who nurse them, as Augustine would lament in his Confessions. 40 In Augustine and Modernity, Michael Hanby will problematize what he calls the “continuity theory,” according to which the modern soul, inwardness, or Cartesian self-reflectivity, can be traced back to Augustine, as is suggested by authors such as Stephen Menn and Charles Taylor.41 Again, what is at issue is that for Augustine the need to look in at the soul aims not so much at seeing the self, but is rather a means to another end, which is to look up and see God. Interiority, Hanby writes, is, in Augustine, “constituted in a relationship to a God more intimately related to the self than itself, [which] is in a sense radically exterior.”42 For Augustine, as seen, one does not look inside one’s soul in order to explore one’s interiority for its own sake, or because we should be interested in our private inner selves, as will be the case for modern introspective and confessing subjects. Rather, one looks in to know God, or in order to look out again, and, most importantly, to look up, rather than about or at the things of this world. 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.”43 As Hanby elaborates, truth, for Augustine, is in the heavenly city, which is where the self will fi nally be realized. This “complicate[s] the meaning of Augustinian interiority.”44 That the soul will only be realized in the heavenly city, which is the macrocosm to the microcosmic

30

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

soul, is a tenet made clear in the fi nal books of Augustine’s Confessions, which, as shall be seen below, are ignored by most scholars of Augustine who assume the “continuity theory,” or who read Augustinian interiority as like our own. Hanby calls such a reading of Augustine, according to which we fi nd ourselves in the early medieval saint, “retrospective anticipation,” and argues that the price of this anticipation is a “standard omission of those specifically Christian aspects of Augustine’s thought that might radically redefi ne, or criticize, the modern self.”45 One instance of this is the privileging of the earlier books of the Confessions over the fi nal books, which privileging facilitates a reading of the Confessions as autobiographical. Ann Hartle also argues that the notion of an inner self and its relation to truth is markedly different in Augustine than in the modern subject, and different from Rousseau’s inner self in particular. For Hartle, Augustine and Rousseau should be contrasted rather than compared. Like Cary, she notes that there was no inner self for the ancient Greeks, and in Plutarch’s Lives, for instance, citizens simply “are no more and no other than what they show themselves to be in their public (visible) acts.”46 In contrast, Augustine “is what he is for God. Only God can say what Augustine is. [ . . . ] Augustine has his being from and through another: he is what God sees him to be.”47 As for Plutarch, for Augustine it is in the eyes of another that one is, and yet this Other is no longer one’s fellow citizen but God, and it is not only one’s exterior actions which the Other observes, but one’s motivations and desires. For Rousseau, things are different again, for it is the individual herself who can see who she is, who can introspect on her “true” self, and this self may be very different from what it seems to be in the eyes of others who can judge her only by her acts. For Rousseau, it is possible to act other than as one is, or to “not be oneself.”48 Cary’s analysis of the Augustinian notion of an inner self supports Foucault’s insight that something new is happening in Augustine which differentiates his thought from that of the ancient Greeks. This novelty is that Augustine introspects on the states of the inner self (how did he desire the boy?), and not only on the activities of that self in the world (did he touch the boy?). It is, however, important to note that unlike the modern confessing subject, Augustine is not interested in his desires in order to know who he is (is he homosexual?), but to know whether he sinned. Moreover, as Cary, Hanby, and Hartle each make clear, the inner self in Augustine is very different from the interiority of the modern confessing subject. Importantly, truth does not reside in this inner self. As Cary also shows, the notion of a private inner self occurs quite contingently in Augustine, while the differences between Augustine’s inner self and our own shows that there is nothing inevitable or universal about our current way of conceiving of interiority, or about the fact that we conceive of interiority at all.

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 31 AGENCY In a project which is contemporary with and in some ways similar to Foucault’s late work on the aesthetics of the self, Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-fashioning, Greenblatt notes, like Foucault, that “selfconsciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process [ . . . ] had been wide-spread among the élite in the classical world.” He continues: “but Christianity brought a growing suspicion of man’s power to shape identity: ‘Hands off yourself,’ Augustine declared. ‘Try to build up yourself, and you build a ruin.’”49 As seen, Foucault also stresses that Greek aesthetic practices of the self altered with the early Christian period with respect to autonomy, and here the reference to the preoccupation with active penetration in the Greeks being replaced by a focus on passive erection in Augustine might actually be relevant. Greenblatt’s reference to Augustine shows the saint’s ambivalence about whether human beings could shape or fashion their selves any more than they can control their corporeal responses of sexual arousal. Interestingly, Augustine speaks of trying to build oneself up, not of being able to do so. If one is able to build oneself up, if there does exist the possibility of self-fashioning autonomy which the Greeks assumed, then Augustine merely predicts that the results will always be disastrous, or that one ought not to pursue this possibility. One ought rather to put oneself in God’s hands, whether or not one has any choice in doing so. But perhaps Augustine is suggesting that we only try to “build ourselves up” out of fallacious human vanity, not realizing that only God can do the work of human fashioning. The ambivalence of this word “try” points to an undecidability in Augustine’s Confessions as to whether he is responsible for his own self-fashioning, for either his sinful past or for his righteous conversion. Augustine seems uncertain as to whether he is responsible for who he is, for his sins, and even for his relation to God, and this ambivalence is tied to his long theological prevarication on the question of evil. The problem of evil, or whether God is to be attributed with all apparent evils and not just Augustine’s own, remains a complex and undecidable one in the Confessions. While the early Augustine defended human free choice against Manichaean determinism, the later Augustine would argue against Pelagian assertions of free will, which appeared to him to be a denial of the omnipotence of God and of the necessity of grace. 50 Thirteen years after writing the Confessions, Augustine would maintain that humans had been so weakened by Adam’s sin that they could only will evil, and so any good deeds on their parts were due to God’s grace. In this case Adam is, in a sense, to blame for all of an individual’s sins, while God’s grace is responsible for all of her good deeds. Accordingly, an individual is not the agent of anything she does, whether good or bad. Moreover, these good and bad deeds have nothing to do with whether or not one will be damned or saved. The late Augustine will argue that following the Fall, all

32

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

humans became sinners and were thus damned, but God intervenes out of mercy in some cases, allowing “the grace of baptism to a few.”51 Contrary to later Christian doctrine, it is, for Augustine, baptism alone—or, in rarer cases, martyrdom—which determines who will be saved and who will be damned, and not the number or quality or the recognition and confession of one’s sins. Which humans are to be granted grace, moreover, is for the aging bishop a matter of predestination, and so nothing an individual can do can influence whether or not she will receive grace. 52 If she “chooses” to get baptized or to embrace martyrdom, for instance, she is not in fact choosing but is being bestowed with God’s grace. In what Gerald Bonner has called “the horrifying aspect of Augustine’s theology,”53 the bishop of Hippo would argue that individuals who do not receive grace, including unbaptized infants, go to Hell. Subjects are held responsible or punished for their sinful states even though this state follows from Adam’s trespass and from God’s failure to intervene. While this is a frightening theory, according to which one is born damned or saved and can do nothing to save oneself, the later Augustine simply maintained that God’s wisdom was beyond human understanding. Against Pelagius, who insisted that individuals take full responsibility for their acts, Augustine, in Hampl’s words, argued for “a fallen, flawed human nature, helpless in sin without the intervention of God’s provident and salvific grace.”54 According to Bonner, “Augustine’s immediate purpose was to prevent any possible reliance on good works as a cause for salvation and so commend humility to his readers.”55 While early and late Augustine seem to be in utter confl ict on the question of evil and human responsibility, arguing fi rst for and later against free will in exchanges with his various theological interlocutors, Bonner claims that even in his early writings, when he argued that man was free, what most readers do not realize is that Augustine was only referring to man’s state before the Fall. 56 According to Bonner, fallen humanity was never free for Augustine, even at the time of the writing of the Confessions. This does not seem to be entirely clear, however, as the following discussion shall show. If we look at the Confessions, it is true that at all times Augustine gives God full credit for his good deeds. With respect to Augustine’s evil deeds, however, things are quite a bit more complicated. At times, entirely consistent with his later theological views, Augustine attributes his evil deeds to a fallen human nature and to God’s refusal to “speak” to him or to grant him grace. As such, he presents himself as the passive victim of Adam’s crime and of God’s plan. Of one period of sin, for instance, he writes: “But I was far too impetuous, poor wretch, so I went with the floodtide of my nature and abandoned you.”57 In sinning, Augustine is merely acting according to his nature as a fallen man, and is a “poor wretch” helpless to stop himself. In other passages, we see Augustine abdicate responsibility to God in his repeated questions with respect to the absence and silence of God which

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 33 allowed him to be led astray: “Where were you at that time?”58; “You see this, Lord, but you are very patient and look on silently [ . . . ] Will you always remain silent?”59; “and you were silent. [ . . . ] At that time you kept silence as I continued to wander far from you [ . . . ].”60 In these cases, it seems that Augustine does evil because it was not part of God’s plan to grant him grace until later in life. God thus remains silent and refrains from intervening in acts which followed from Augustine’s fallen nature. Nevertheless, at other times Augustine seems to think that he is responsible for his sins, while God remains responsible only for his good deeds. For instance, he writes: “when I am bad, confession to you is simply disgust with myself, but when I am good, confession to you consists in not attributing my goodness to myself [ . . . ] because you have fi rst made him just when he was sinful.”61 Or again: “The good derive from you and are your gift; the evil are my sins and your punishments.”62 Despite Bonner’s claim that Augustine never believed that fallen man was free to choose not to sin, Augustine’s “disgust” for himself seems to suggest some sense of agency, although it remains possible that he is simply disgusted with himself for having been born with a fallen nature to which God has not yet chosen to grant grace. However, more problematically for Bonner’s thesis, in the overwhelming number of cases Augustine neither accepts guilt for his sins nor attributes responsibility for them to his nature or to God but, rather, blames other human beings. Throughout the Confessions Augustine takes recourse to lengthy excuses, blaming social influences such as family and friends. It seems that if Augustine had already dismissed the idea of human agency for sins, he would not attribute agency to other humans as a means to exculpate his own agency. If Augustine sinned because he was born to do so, there would seem to be no point in blaming other people for his sins, or in reproaching them for what they had no agency to prevent. The fact that Augustine does blame other people for his sins would seem to require that we nuance Derrida’s claim that Augustine confesses because he knows he is guilty, in contrast to Rousseau who confesses to prove he is innocent.63 I will take some examples. First, Augustine blames his teachers: “Small wonder, then, that I was swept off helplessly after profitless things and borne away from you, my God. The models proposed to me for imitation were people who would have been caught out and covered with confusion if they had related any of their doings.”64 He also blames his family: “Who was there to alleviate my distress? No one took thought to arrange a marriage for me, so that my pursuit of fleeting beauties through most ignoble experiences might be diverted into useful channels. Some bounds might have been set to my pleasures if only the stormy surge of my adolescence had flung me up onto the shore of matrimony”65; “Yet none of my family made any attempt to avert my ruin by arranging a marriage for me; their only concern was that I should learn to excel in rhetoric and persuasive speech.”66 He then blames his pagan father: “[ . . . ] all the while this same father

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The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

of mine was unconcerned about how I would grow up for you, and cared little that I should be chaste, provided I was intellectually cultivated.”67 Surprisingly, he even blames his mother, Saint Monica, who spent most of her life weeping and praying for her son’s conversion: “My natural mother had by this time fled from the centre of Babylon, though she still lingered in its suburbs. She warned me to live chastely, but did not extend her care to restraining within the bounds of conjugal love (if it could not be cut right back to the quick) this behavior of mine, of which she had heard from her husband, even though she judged it to be corrupt already and likely to be dangerous in the future.”68 Augustine also blames his Manichean companions: “I was being subtly maneuvered [ . . . ]”69 At the same time, in repenting his Manichean delusions, Augustine argues that it is a sin to not accept the blame for one’s own misdoings: It still seemed to me [in his Manichean period], that it is not we who sin, but some other nature within us that is responsible. My pride was gratified at being exculpated by this theory [ . . . ] I liked to excuse myself and lay the blame on some other force that was with me but was not myself. But in truth it was all myself. My impious ideal had set up a division, pitting me against myself, and my sin was the more incurable for my conviction that I was not a sinner. It was a detestable wrong, almighty God [ . . . ]70 Surprisingly, given what he has just said, Augustine continues, “You had not yet set a guard over my mouth or a chaste gate at my lips to keep my heart from straying into evil talk, and from making excuses for itself in its sins as it consorted with evildoers.” In this contradictory passage, Augustine says it is a “detestable wrong” to not accept blame for one’s own sins, and yet immediately implies that God is responsible for his sin of blaming others, since it is God who had not yet put a gate at his lips or a guard over his mouth, which attribution of the responsibility for the fashioning of mortals with God is, once more, consistent with Augustine’s later theological position. Interestingly, in the Confessions, of all the attributions of blame, it is only the accusation directed at God which Augustine ultimately retracts, when he cries, “Alas for me! Do I dare to say that you were silent, my God, when I was straying from you? Were you really silent to me at that time?,”71 admitting that God was speaking to him through Monica, and thus that he, Augustine, was at fault for not listening to her/Him, and thus for his sinful self-fashioning. In this case, it seems that the fact that it took Augustine a long time to fi nd God and to be baptized was not a result of God’s decision to not speak to Augustine, to not grant him mercy and grace until later in life, but was the fault of Augustine’s refusal to hear God and to respond. This is, of course, inconsistent with Augustine’s later theological views and with Bonner’s claim that at no point did Augustine attribute agency to fallen humanity.

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 35 In the end, there is no clear conclusion to be drawn in the Confessions with respect to the question of free will, of human agency or self-fashioning potential, and of evil, just as there is no clear answer for Augustine as to who fashioned him, whether he is a product of his family and teachers as well as of nature and God, whether he is responsible for his self-fashioning and sinful in denying this, whether God fashioned him entirely, or whether he is responsible only for having fashioned his sinful side, while God fashioned all parts of him that are good. With respect to autonomy, Augustine thus prevaricates between ancient techniques of the self which assumed the power to self-fashion, and his own later doctrine of a sinful and ultimately passive human nature.

AUDIENCE While Seneca and the early Christian monk both knew to whom they were speaking (Seneca to himself, the monk to his spiritual advisor), Augustine appears unable to decide on this matter, much as he cannot decide, in the Confessions, on the question of evil. In particular, Augustine does not know whether he is writing the Confessions for himself, for God, or for his fellow Christians, or what good these Confessions could do for any of these possible audiences. Les W. Smith describes Augustine three and a half centuries after Seneca as “stammering” as he repeatedly remembers to address himself to God, after periods of apparently speaking to himself.72 It is even more complex than this, however, as Augustine is not convinced that he should be addressing himself to God any more than he should be speaking to himself. On the one hand, it is true that he frequently says that he is confessing to God, however he also often underscores that God is already aware of everything he has done and everything in his heart, and so this address, and putting it into words, and words on paper, is seemingly superfluous: “But the abyss of the human conscience lies naked to your eyes, O Lord, so would anything in me be secret even if I were unwilling to confess to you? I would be hiding you from myself, but not myself from you.”73 Indeed, Augustine occasionally notes that God knows better than Augustine what he has done and thought, since Augustine must rely on his human and thus fallible memory: “Is my recollection not accurate, Lord God, judge of my conscience?”74 On the other hand, he imagines his book being read by other “worshipers,”75 and thus thinks that he is writing for fellow Christians. The book is not simply intended for a mortal, as opposed to divine, audience, however, as non-Christians are explicitly excluded. Augustine even fears that his text will fall into the hands of non-believers, apparently because they will mock him, which seems to worry him more than he loves the possibility that he might persuade them towards conversion with his arguments and example. He states that he wants a “brotherly,” Christian, sympathetic audience, and does not want “strangers” and “foes” to read him.76 On yet

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The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

another hand, however, Augustine problematizes the notion of confessing to other human beings at all: What point is there for me in other people hearing my confessions? Are they likely to heal my infirmities? A curious lot they are, eager to pry into the lives of others, but tardy when it comes to correcting their own. Why should they seek to hear from me what I am, when they are reluctant to hear from you what they are? And when they hear from me about myself, how do they know that I am speaking the truth, since no one knows what goes on inside a person except the spirit of that person within him?77 While God will at least be able to attest to the veracity of Augustine’s Confessions, a mortal audience will have no way of knowing that they are even true. If they are already faithful, the text is once more superfluous, whereas if they are non-believers, it is unlikely that Augustine will persuade them where God’s own Word has failed. Furthermore, other human beings could mock Augustine for what he writes, and so he tells God: “for it is to your mercy that I address myself, not to some man who would mock me.”78 Still, he writes: But to whom am I telling this story? Not to you, my God; rather in your presence I am relating these events to my own kin, the human race, however few of them may chance upon these writings of mine. And why? So that whoever reads them may reflect with me on the depths from which we must cry to you. What fi nds a readier hearing with you than a heart that confesses to you, a life lived from faith?79 It is perhaps due to his own arguments against confessing to other people, and awareness of the apparent pointlessness of confessing to God, that Augustine, when confessing to his theft of pears, takes recourse to addressing himself to his theft itself: “What did I love in you, O my theft, what did I love in you, the nocturnal crime of my sixteenth year?”80 This is an odd passage which speaks to the confusion regarding audience in the Confessions, and a passage which fascinates Derrida.81 Such an address occurs only once, however, while for the most part Augustine is divided between confessing to God and to other people. An intermediate position is found when the saint claims not to be confessing to God, which is unnecessary, but “in God’s presence”: “Now, in God’s presence, I will describe my twentyninth year.”82 It must, however, be “to my own kin” that he confesses in God’s presence, if the confession is to be slightly useful at all. Of such a limited use, he writes: “It is cheering to good people to hear about the past evil deeds of those who are now freed from them: cheering not because the deeds were evil but because they existed once but exist no more.”83 Removing ourselves a bit from Augustine’s own claims, a worldly reason for confessing to his fellow Christians is suggested by Hampl, who notes that Augustine wrote his Confessions at a time when his ecclesiastical

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 37 authority was being attacked “by politically motivated rumors about his sensational past.”84 By describing that past and how he had repented for it and converted, Augustine may have hoped to counter these accusations. James J. O’Donnell supports this explanation, noting that “Augustine had every interest in telling the story he did.” As O’Donnell elaborates: To make the centerpiece of his life a whole-hearted conversion to authentic Christianity in 386 would first repel the claims of continuing Manichaeism, and would second take attention away from the changes he underwent in 391 and the difficulties surrounding them. He converted, not to Caecilianism, his narrative suggested, but to Christianitydegree-zero, Christianity plain and simple, Christianity at the hands of an undoubted saintly and orthodox bishop of imperial distinction.85 If we accept Augustine’s versions of events, these forays into the interhuman would in any case be half-hearted. According to Augustine’s own account, he had wished with his entire being to be a recluse, and to live a life of meditation and prayer, and only became ordained as a priest and then as a bishop with reluctance, weeping through his entire ordination ceremony. Augustine wished only to explore his personal relationship with God intellectually and hermitically, not to take up the worldly roles of priest and bishop. Unable to live as a recluse, however, not knowing whether he is responsible for his self or for his sins, and not knowing to whom to describe these, or towards whom to direct his praise of God, in yet another contrast it can be seen that Augustine’s Confessions lack the serenity which Seneca claims characterize his self-examinations. O’Donnell, however, casts precisely this version of events into doubt, pursuing the suspicious opportuneness of Augustine’s Confessions. According to O’Donnell, we accept the veracity of Augustine’s own telling of his story too quickly, and the existing biographies of Augustine remain overlycredulous of the author’s account. Peter Brown’s retelling of the conversion in the garden in his biography of Augustine, for instance, does little more than “present without comment a slightly abridged translation of the crucial passage from the Confessions.”86 O’Donnell suggests, however, that the historical Augustine was not simply recording his life and his self in the Confessions, but rather that the text was part of a process of constructing a new life and self for the recently ordained bishop. As O’Donnell puts it, Augustine’s writing of the Confessions was “part of a movement to create a new kind of bishop and a new kind of church, a movement that would be astonishingly successful over the next quarter-century, and whose success would make it hard for later centuries, including our own, to see the scope of the transformation.”87 He continues: The religion that Augustine and his Caecilianist/catholic contemporaries were creating was the high-tech religion of late antiquity—Christianity

38

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault constituted by texts and by leaders who were masters of textual interpretation and production—leaders who knew how to confess and in confessing to make a new past for themselves and thus a new future. But much of the real experience of their lives was thereby effaced and moved into the shadow world of the things that were unconfessed.88

If O’Donnell is right, then, despite Augustine’s own command of “Hands off yourself,” the Confessions are a hands-on approach to the writer’s life and a practice of self-transformation which would rival those of antiquity explored by Foucault. The Confessions, as O’Donnell reads them, were a process of Augustine building himself up, and this built self is the entity which we call “Augustine” to this day. Augustine’s self-constitution through the writing of the Confessions, on this interpretation, was not the ruin that Augustine himself would have predicted, but was instead a remarkably successful architectural achievement. This architectural accomplishment, “Augustine,” is continually renewed through the preservation activities of contemporary biographers. Henry Chadwick is probably right in characterizing the Confessions as an extraordinary “prose-poem addressed to God, intended to be overheard by anxious and critical fellow Christians.”89 What O’Donnell’s interpretation does is to foreground the importance of Augustine’s intention to be overheard in this world, and thus his intention to construct a new self through his writing. If O’Donnell is correct, then Augustine is closer to the ancient Greeks and Romans than we would have thought, and was actively involved in self-fashioning in his Confessions. I would, however, like to resist an entire acceptance of O’Donnell’s reading. For one thing, O’Donnell’s Augustine is perhaps too suspiciously akin to Rousseau: both of the writers of the canonical Confessions would, on this model, be engaged in defending themselves against the rumors being circulated against them by slanderers. Does O’Donnell project Rousseau’s project onto Augustine without realizing it? Moreover, O’Donnell requires that we disbelieve Augustine’s own voice in the Confessions. I am entirely willing, with O’Donnell, to disbelieve Augustine’s interpretation of the “facts,” and do not suggest that we naïvely insist that Augustine’s own version of events is the historically accurate one (as Brown does), or that autobiography may be confounded with biography. However I do propose that we believe that the tone and the contradictions of the text are genuine, or that the philosophical confusion and theological anguish which pervade the Confessions are sincere. Augustine seems genuinely confused with respect to his audience, with respect to the purpose of his writings, and with respect to his (or God’s? or Adam’s?) responsibility for who he is, and is preoccupied by theological questions. If we believe that the emotional pitch of Augustine’s text is at all sincere, then we will conclude that Augustine’s self-confidence in his self-fashioning abilities is tenuous compared to that of the Seneca, and if this is the case, then things are more complicated than O’Donnell assumes.

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 39 Augustine’s project of self-constitution, or of fashioning a new bishop through his text, and thus the resonance of the Confessions with ancient practices of the self, is important to note, but it is, on my reading, but one of the many contradictory threads with which the Confessions are woven. Moreover, another problematic aspect of O’Donnell’s interpretation is that, as with the readings of Augustine’s text which see it as a prototype of modern, secular autobiographies, in insisting that Augustine’s audience and intentions were primarily worldly ones, O’Donnell seems to ignore the distinctly religious purposes of Augustine’s text. As shall be seen in the following section, this is typical of contemporary readings of the Confessions.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY? It was seen that Berggren, in The Psychology of Confession, claims that Augustine wrote his Confessions for the same reasons that people write confessional autobiographies today. This continuity between Augustine and the confessional writings of, say, Rousseau, would be what Zora Neale Hurston has described as expressing “that oldest human longing—self-revelation,” a self-revelation sought as an unburdening of memory. Peter Brown, as seen, calls Augustine’s Confessions “therapy.”90 And yet, in the first two sentences of Augustine’s Confessions, the saint writes of a very different “human” longing: “Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise [ . . . ] And so we humans, who are a due part of your creation, long to praise you.”91 In the following sentence, Augustine repeats the expression of this human longing, strangely, almost verbatim: “Yet these humans, due part of your creation as they are, still do long to praise you.” He continues, “You arouse us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you.”92 The human being is once more described as anxious or “unquiet,” as in the modern confessional, and yet the appeasement that it seeks does not seem to be sought in self-revelation, but in the opportunity to praise God, and ultimately to return to Him. A few lines further and Augustine asks, “Who will grant me this grace, that you would come into my heart and inebriate it, enabling me to forget the evils that beset me and embrace you, my only good?” Not only unquiet but “beset,” Augustine seems closer to the modern confessant than to the serene Seneca, which is perhaps why he still appeals to us, and yet he does not suggest that it is introspection which will cure him of his psychological torment, but rather that he will drown out his woes by becoming drunk with God. It is not speaking of the “evils that beset” Augustine which will make those evils disappear, as pop-psychology would today advise; rather, they will disappear when Augustine has praised God to the point that he becomes inebriated by Him in a drunkenness which will drown all worldly anxieties and all reflections on the self. The Confessions are the process of becoming drunk, of self-forgetting.

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The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

Wondering how to begin his Confessions, Augustine asks God, “Grant me to know and understand, Lord, which comes fi rst: to call upon you or to praise you? To know you or to call upon you?” These seem to be the tasks which Augustine sees his book as undertaking in his introductory lines of his Confessions, which is very different from the introduction to Rousseau’s Confessions in which it is certainly, right away, a question of JeanJacques and nothing else. Rousseau wants to know, and moreover wants to make other people know through his writings, who he is, but Augustine asks instead, in the introduction to his Confessions, “What are you, then, my God? What are you, I ask [ . . . ]?”93 He does not seek throughout his Confessions to know or to divulge himself, but rather to know God and to praise him. Augustine longs to know God with a desperation which matches the fascination that the modern subject has for knowing herself, and throughout the text he cries out to God to reveal Himself. Unlike almost every modern confessional subject, Augustine does not speak of his own silence or of having been silenced, but rather laments again and again the silence of God, and implores Him to speak, while questioning again and again his own right to speak and the pointlessness of this speech. This is the prayer with which Augustine begins his Confessions: O Lord my God, tell me what you are to me. Say to my soul, I am your salvation. Say it so that I can hear it. My heart is listening, Lord; open the ears of my heart and say to my soul, I am your salvation. Let me run toward this voice and seize hold of you. Do not hide your face from me: let me die so that I may see it, for not to see it would be death to me indeed.94 Augustine is writing in the hopes that God will respond, crying out in the hopes of an answer, speaking because he wishes to listen to one who has too long remained silent. This straining of his ears, the ears even of his heart, is the painful longing which pulsates through the entire Confessions, and not the longing for self-revelation. Augustine is compelled to write his Confessions, and is anxious and beset, not like Rousseau, not by the need to speak about himself, but by the longing to hear the Other speak at last. Then why are the Confessions so often invoked as the prototype of modern autobiographies? Why are they read as an expression of the same autobiographical impulse which characterizes later confessional writings? I think we recognize in Augustine the anxieties and disquiet with which we enter into our own confessional discourses, and this is combined with the fact that his writings are, after all, a so-called “confession,” and that there is, of course, autobiographical material in the work. Moreover, it is these self-referential passages which we most often read, which are collected in and commented upon in anthologies and scholarship on autobiography, severed from the context of the rest of the

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 41 book, and not the long meditations on theological matters. Brown, in his discussion of the Augustine as an “autobiographer [ . . . ] compelled to reveal himself,” also hones in on the usual passages: Augustine’s theft of pears, his separation from his mistress, his reflections on erotic temptation. In Brown’s chapter on the Confessions, a discussion of the fi nal four books, which are entirely non-autobiographical, is not entered into in any detail. Rather, Brown simply describes them as “illustrat[ing] directly the effects of the therapy [Augustine] has just undergone. It is this therapy of self-examination which has, perhaps, brought Augustine closest to the best traditions of our own age.”95 Brown wants to understand the Confessions as an autobiography which brings Augustine closer to modern man and his therapeutic practices, and so the last four, non-autobiographical books are problematic. As such, they are passed over quickly, and, since they cannot be read as therapy itself, are referred to as the product of a successful therapy. Patricia Hampl also wishes to read Augustine as a proto-modern autobiographer, and is more frank than Brown about the consternation which the last four books of Augustine’s text cause for such a reading. She openly wonders why there is so much non-autobiographical material in the work, and seems to regret its presence. She asks: But why the fi nal four books? Why ruin the narrative symmetry of his life story by attaching a long, speculative essay on memory (Book X), chapters on time and eternity, and a fi nal intense reading of the opening lines of Genesis (Books XI, XII, and XIII)? Perhaps the speculation on memory makes sense in an autobiography, which is rooted in personal recollection. But after writing the sublime scene in Ostia with Monica, and recounting her fi nal hours and his grief in Book IX, Augustine moves smoothly, without explanation or apology, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, through the long chapter on memory into an extended allegorical meditation on the opening lines of the Creation story of Genesis as if this, too, were ‘his life.’ [ . . . ] The writing becomes more, not less, urgent.96 To respond to Hampl’s confusion, and to counter the assumption that Augustine’s work functions just like contemporary confessional literature as Berggren implies, it is important to note that autobiography and autobiographical confession occur as only two of many methods for proclaiming Augustine’s faith and for praising God, and, judging from the relative bulk as well as the passion with which they are written, the other vehicles he employs to this same end, such as prayer, theological arguments, biblical exegesis, refutations of competing faiths, and the stories of other faithful person’s lives, are at least equally important to the text. There are many ways in which Augustine professes his faith in the Confessions, therefore, only one of which is his description of his personal relation to God, in the

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The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

course of which he tells of his sins as well as of his more righteous deeds and thoughts. As Hampl notes but cannot explain, the transition for Augustine between the account of his mother’s death to reflections on theological matters is indeed smooth since he is considering his own life and that of his mother only as other theological proofs, other ways of describing God’s existence and goodness. Although Hampl reluctantly realizes that for Augustine, “His story [ . . . ] is apparently only part of the story,”97 the fact that the last third of the book contains no autobiographical elements at all clearly remains a puzzling flaw as far as she is concerned, as she is narrowly reading the work as a monument in the history of autobiography in the West. She writes: There had been autobiographies, Christian and pagan, before Augustine’s. The Catholic Church, since 310 the orthodox religion of the Roman Empire, was less than a century away from outlaw status. The harrowing, sangfroid testimonials written at the edge of martyrdom by the early saints were a traditional genre for pious Christians. Lacking the drama of these martyrs, refi ned late-Roman Christians could still be edified by the inner struggles of good and evil in the formula conversion tales of their contemporaries. The fact that Christianity, unlike either Judaism or the religions of the Greeks and Romans, was a cult founded on the narrative of a single life—that of Jesus of Nazareth—may help to explain the appeal of the life stories in Christian literary culture, and continuing into our own. Even further back, the pagan West had honored the notion of self as the pathway of spiritual ascent. ‘Know yourself,’ the doorway to the oracle at Delphi counseled. Knowing yourself had always been, for the West, just a short step away from writing yourself.98 Thus Hampl, following Brown,99 reads even earlier testimonials of Christian lives, dashed off immediately before martyrdom, as other autobiographical explorations of subjectivity, of knowing oneself, just as she insists on reading Augustine. Literary explorations of subjectivity, however, seem an unlikely preoccupation for people about to be thrown to lions. What these martyrs were concerned with at the moments that they wrote their testimonials was a proclamation of their faith in God, thus ensuring their salvation after death, which is what they were willing to be martyred for. Their confessional writings, like Augustine’s, were confessions of faith rather than autobiographies, and it was a confession of faith, and not a confession of sins, which they believed was necessary for their salvation. Regarding the relation between confession and forgiveness, Augustine writes, “you are merciful toward the sins of those who confess to you.”100 Despite later Christian and secular moral notions of a causal relation between admitting to wrong-doings and forgiveness for them, it is not clear here that it is those

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 43 sins towards which God is merciful that Augustine is here claiming one must confess. Rather, for Augustine, God is merciful with respect to our sins if we confess not to the sins themselves, but to our faith in Him. This becomes clear when Augustine reveals his assumption that those who are baptized into Christianity, thus proclaiming their faith, are forgiven for all their sins, even if this baptism occurs only on their deathbeds, and independent of an avowal of particular sins. He tells the story of Verecundus who converts and thus declares his faith in Christianity only at the very end of a life, writing that on these grounds alone he is guaranteed “the delights of your verdant paradise for ever.”101 Despite the later Christian practice of last confession, what Verecundus does on his deathbed to ensure his entry into heaven is not confess to his sins, but confess his faith, and it is this act of confession which ensures that God will be merciful with respect to his sins, not the confession of the sins themselves. The profession of sins, and of God’s mercy in forgiving them, is but one way among others to tell of one’s faith, and not the most crucial one. As such, like the martyrs, Augustine is confessing to a faith in order to ensure or attest to his personal salvation and the forgiveness of his sins, and out of a longing for God’s response rather than for self-knowledge. It was seen above that for Augustine it was baptism or martyrdom alone, and not a recognition or confession of one’s sins, which brought about salvation. For this reason, confessing one’s sins would be of little purpose. Confessing one’s faith, or telling the tale of one’s conversion to that faith— whether this led to martyrdom, as in the fi rst years of early Christians, or to baptism, as in Augustine’s case—would, on the other hand, seem more to the point, since it is conversion and baptism which save. The Confessions predate Augustine’s doctrine of predestination, and so at this stage in his writing, conversion and baptism as acts declaring one’s faith would not necessarily be acts in vain. Nevertheless, since God is responsible for all of one’s good deeds, including conversion, God already knows of these conversions since he engineered them. Indeed this seems to describe the tone of the Confessions: it is more important to confess to faith than deeds since it is the former which ensures salvation, yet even a confession of the faith is futile since God already knows of one’s conversion and faith, since these are His doing, His grace, and not one’s own, and hence Augustine does not know for whom he is writing or why. Even if it is the last four books which most strikingly pose a problem for a reading according to which Augustine is writing about his life and not primarily about his faith, the fi rst nine books of the Confessions also contain entire sections about other people’s lives, such as the section called “Monica’s story” in Book IX, as well as long prayers, extensive theological debates, metaphysical questions, and refutations of rival faiths. Much that one might expect to be included in an autobiography is furthermore absent, notably anything not directly relevant to Augustine’s faith: for instance, although he had a fourteen-year-long monogamous relationship with a

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woman, she is never named, and indeed she is never mentioned except when Augustine notes that he began to live with her, and when he much later describes having to send her away. Augustine was apparently devoted to this woman, as when he had to abandon her he describes the event as having her “ripped from my side [ . . . ] So deeply was she engrafted into my heart that it was left torn and wounded and trailing blood.” Despite this passion for her, he has not written a word about her in his account of the previous fourteen years. Rather, what we heard of these years is primarily the theological questions he was pondering at the time. This commonlaw wife bore Augustine a son, but even the existence of Adeodatus is never mentioned until he converts to Christianity with Augustine. The birth of Augustine’s only child, the presence of a child in his household for over twenty years, goes unmentioned, but that child’s baptism in adulthood is fully described. Even if we want to conclude that Augustine was a callous lover and father, it is clear that his criteria for inclusion in his Confessions is that the event be relevant to a declaration of his faith, rather than important to his life in general, once more suggesting that the task he is engaged in is not what we would normally consider confessional in the autobiographical sense. Again, this indicates that Augustine is writing his faith, not his life, and his life is recorded only in so far as it is a vehicle, among others, for writing his faith. This is why Augustine’s Confessions, like the writings of early Christian martyrs which Hampl and Brown refer to as autobiographical precedents, are concerned with their tales of conversion, and not with their lives more generally. Conversion is a climactic moment in a declaration of faith, which faith is also declared by Augustine in multiple manners besides autobiography. That which does resemble autobiography here, moreover, is not necessarily confessional in the sense of avowing to sins, since Augustine recounts many aspects of his life which are pertinent to professing his faith, and not just his strayings from God. Robert Bernasconi notes that “in the early middle ages the fi rst questions penitents were asked were not about their sins, but about their beliefs. This is not so extraordinary if one reflects on the word ‘confession’ which extends to both the confession of faith and the confession of sins.”102 Bernasconi goes on to observe that in one of his sermons Augustine criticized those who when they heard the word ‘confession’ only thought of sin and started beating their breasts. At that time the rite of reconciliation required sinners to make a confession of faith as well as a confession of sins and this double sense of confession is displayed by Augustine’s Confessions itself. It is reflected, for example, in his reference in the Retractions to how ‘the 13 books of my Confessions of what is evil in me and what is good, praise the just and good God.’ In confessing his faith and in praising God, Augustine asserted his faith before mankind. In confessing his sins Augustine discovers his inner self in shame before the face of God.

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 45 Confession in this double sense has a complex structure, one which was transformed when confession came to be dominated by the examination of conscience and associated with the philosophical task of pursuing self-knowledge.103 Augustine clearly confesses both in the sense of recounting his sins and in the sense of professing his faith, and yet what I have argued is that it is the latter sense of confession which both predominates and subsumes the former in Augustine’s writings, as it did in early medieval questionings of penitents, while it is the former sense of confession which would later prevail, and which is the ancestor of modern practices of self-examination. Finally, this argument can also be made by considering the way Augustine employs the term “confession” and describes its function throughout his work. Augustine uses the words “confession” and “profession” interchangeably, and these synonyms are not followed by “my sins” but by “to God” or “to faith” or “to Jesus” or “to your name.”104 He writes: “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow [ . . . ] and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, in the glory of God the Father”105; “Accept the sacrifice of my confessions offered to you by the power of this tongue of mine which you have fashioned and aroused to confess to your name; [ . . . ] But allow my soul to give you glory that it may love you more, and let it confess to you your own merciful dealings, that it may give you glory.”106 Here, confessing clearly means declaring a certain religious belief. A bit later, Augustine writes: “In a spirit of thankfulness let me recall the mercies you lavished on me, O my God; to you let me confess them.”107 In the last two cases, what Augustine would confess to God are God’s own mercies, and thus we see that the confessions he has in mind are not to be conceived of as exclusively concerning his own sins, or his own actions at all. Rather, he is far more interested in confessing to God’s doings, to positive acts on the part of God, or to God’s name itself. Writing of his life thus functions as a means of confessing to the acts of God, to His mercy and name, while so far as the text is preoccupied with Augustine’s former sins, these are a testament to God’s benevolence and forgiveness. Augustine writes: May I be flooded with love for you until my very bones cry out, ‘Who is like you, O Lord?’ Let me offer you a sacrifice of praise, for you have snapped my bonds. How you broke them let me relate, so that all your worshipers who hear my tale may exclaim, ‘Blessed be the Lord, blessed in heaven and on earth, for great and wonderful is his name.’108 This is the objective of Augustine’s text, to which autobiography and confession in the sense of avowing to sins, when present at all, are subordinated. To conclude with Augustine, it should 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

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because they are not overtly concerned with self-fashioning. Foucault was arguably not drawn to write on Augustine’s Confessions in his genealogical study of confession (narrowly construed as truthful self-examination) because, although we might be able to fi nd moments of such self-examination in Augustine’s text, the saint’s own project lay primarily neither in administering nor in interpreting his self, but in declaring his faith in God. Augustine’s Confessions are neither like the modern form of confession which Foucault wishes to problematize, and nor are they like the ancient practices of self-examination which interest Foucault as strategic alternatives to modern confession. For Foucault, Augustine’s work is neither an example of discipline nor of self-care, and it is thus neither an example of the problem nor of the solution. This neither/nor status, I suggest, explains Foucault’s neglect of Augustine’s text.

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN CHRISTIAN CONFESSION

Moving Indoors: From Public to Private Penance It has now been seen why Foucault may have excluded Augustine from his genealogy of confession, and we thus return to his dichotomized view of the development of Christian confession, or to penitential exercises or “selfpublication” on the one hand, and monastic “permanent verbalization” or confession to one’s spiritual advisor on the other. As Foucault notes, although the monastic form of confession eventually triumphed, for many centuries there was a fluctuation between, co-existence of, and theological debate regarding the relative merits of public penance and private forms of confession. For a period in the late Middle Ages a balanced position seems to have been taken such that, as Le Goff writes: “secret sins require secret penance, public sins require public penance.”109 Until the seventh century, however, confession was for the most part restricted to monasteries, and so the only means of attaining forgiveness for sins for non-clerics was canonical penance, or public rituals of humiliation and asceticism, followed by a lifetime of sexual abstinence and restricted offices, and as such these spectacular penances were usually only resorted to for serious sins and no more than once in a lifetime, and only by the most fastidious believers. Many Christians would thus never have confessed or done penance, and confession was certainly not a “habit,” to use Le Goff’s word, as it would later become. 110 As Mortimer writes, penance was “abnormal and reserved only for the worst and most scandalous offences.”111 Similarly, during these centuries, confessions were not central to adjudication and legal practice, and guilt or innocence was instead proven through practices such as ordeals (walking on hot coals, holding hot irons) and trials by combat. Berggren, however, wanting to argue that confession, and moreover confession to

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 47 an authority, is an “original,” “innate,” “primal,” and “natural need” or “instinct,”112 tries to make sense of these centuries during which confession was not a crucial part of penance (or law) by saying that “the original need to confess was [being] prepared for and developed.”113 As such he implies that a primal instinct can be put off for centuries or lived vicariously through one’s descendants and can do without a more immediate and simple outlet. Several centuries of inconveniently non-confessional penance are in this way quickly skipped over by the universalizing or totalizing history of confession, and subsumed despite themselves into the narrative of an innate instinct to confess. Similarly, Paul Galtier argues that private confession must always have existed in the Church, even during these centuries where there is a lack of evidence to support such a claim.114 Important in the development of this canonical penance which is so awkward for Berggren and Galtier, both of whom wish to see something like private confession as a universal practice at least since Augustine, an exception was made for the mortally ill. Dying persons could receive absolution at the time of death without undergoing the usual severe penitential exercises of canonical penance, since such rigorous ascetic exercises could hardly be expected of a person on her deathbed. Quite understandably, given that the reconciliation received on one’s deathbed was for all practical purposes equivalent to that received through penitential exercises and exomologesis, it quickly became common for most Christians who had sinned gravely enough to warrant penitential status to postpone penance until they were dying, which, as Tentler remarks, marks a shift from actually doing penance to simply receiving it. By thus calculating when to do penance such that it would entail the least hardship, Christians avoided not only the humiliating and arduous ascetic works of penance, but also forestalled taking on the sexual, economic, military and moral restrictions these involved until a time in life when these were all but irrelevant. Deathbed penance is significant because in this unique case absolution depended entirely on the power of priests to grant it, and had nothing to do with acts performed by the penitent. Moreover, while canonical penance normally had to be performed by a bishop, in the case of a dying person any priest could grant absolution. As Mortimer argues, this accustomed medieval Christians to a belief in the priestly power of absolution, paving the way to private penance and to the rise of the parish priest. Nevertheless, at this point in time, deathbed penance was still public penance, and if the penitent should happen to recover, she was required to fulfill the usual public penitential acts and to take on the usual life-long restrictions.115 Another crucial shift in the history of penance began in the sixth century in Ireland, when what has been discussed so far as the monastic form of confession left the monasteries and developed into an alternative form of penance for the laity.116 Priests in Ireland developed penitentiales, manuals which listed and classified sins as well as punishments to be imposed for each specific sin, and which also advised priests on how to go about

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receiving confessions and allotting “tariffs” for them.117 Trying to explain why private penance would have originated in this particular place and time, Rittgers, following McNeill and Gamer, suggests that “The Celts may have been influenced in their predilection toward private penance and private confession by the pre-Christian Celtic tradition of the anmchara, or soul guide, who would dispense spiritual advice on an individual basis.”118 Mortimer, on the other hand, discusses the sorts of theological problems which led to the practice of confession, allowing us to stress once again that confession was not an inevitable response to a pre-existing psychological need; on the contrary, or in reverse fashion, it was a particular response to certain theological problems which led to the practice of confession, which practice over time produced a psychological habit or need. In the seventh century, private penance reached the continent and was spread by Anglo-Saxon missionary monks.119 Somewhat gentler than public penances, this new form of reconciliation took place between an individual and his priest, and required no lifelong disabilities such as abstinence on the part of the penitent or restriction from clerical offices. Unlike in the case of canonical penance, clerics as well as the laity could seek forgiveness and be reconciled, which must have contributed to the ultimate triumph of the penitentiales over canonical penance. Moreover, the reconciliation offered by the penitentiales was repeatable: one could repent as often as necessary for both venial and mortal sins, which was crucial for the development of confession into the habit which it has long since become today. The decision made in the seventh century that confessions could be repeated as often as necessary is the sort of historical accident of which Foucault speaks, which enabled the confessional practices of today to emerge. Confession today seems psychologically necessary, and yet this feeling of necessity may never have developed if medieval theologians had not decided that Saint Ambrose was wrong, and that penance could be repeated after all. Unlike later Christian confession, the penances required in the penitentiales were still extremely severe and thus comparable in their asceticism to canonical penance. A priest would assign a penance of seven to ten years, depending on whether the sinner was a cleric or a layperson, for mortal sins such as homicide, perjury, and adultery, during three of which years the penitent lived off bread and water alone. Even sins such as lust which had not been acted upon drew penalties of forty days to six months of penance, with up to half a year on bread and water, and an entire year without wine and meat.120 What is important to note is that so long as the levels of asceticism were extreme in both canonical penance and in the penitentiales, it was the externally-manifested willingness to undertake these ascetic practices, and the endurance required in order to have completed them, which proved that the sinner had truly repented, that she would be unlikely to repeat her sinful behavior, and which gave her the consolation that she had been forgiven for her sins. As Tentler writes, “One knows he is forgiven because he is willing to perform the

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 49 overwhelming penitential exercises demanded by the church. The consolation of this system lies in its difficulty.”121 As time went on, however, Christians were less willing to undergo years of hardship, fasting and abstinence, and few priests found that they could endorse the harsh penalties recommended in the penitentiales in practice. These lists of sins with their tariffs had become all but irrelevant even before the thirteenth century when confession became obligatory annually for all Christians, and certainly could not be used after 1215 when not only the most zealous of Christians but all Christians were bound to confess on a regular basis. If one confesses annually, one cannot receive penalties each year which endure for many years, without accumulating a surplus of penance too difficult to fulfi ll. As such, it came to be agreed that penances allotted by priests were arbitrary and to be left up to the individual cleric’s discretion, and the extreme forms of asceticism once required were soon replaced by relatively facile undertakings such as prayers, pilgrimages, and payments for masses. In response to these lighter penalties, in the later Middle Ages the experience of genuine sorrow or contrition rather than the willingness to undergo hardship was said to guarantee forgiveness. This is an important shift from a form of penance which was by and large concerned with externally manifested displays of renunciation and punishment to a form of penance in which it is fi rst and foremost a question of an individual’s interior state, her degrees of sorrow and their quality and sincerity. To pick up on Foucault’s concern with shifting forms of truth, truth in penance ceased to be something which one knew in an unproblematic way but had to manifest in public, and came to be something rather mysterious which one sought to know within oneself and which, moreover, was elusive, a truth which one had to seek again and again and of which one could never be certain. Aquinas notes that it is difficult to know the reasons for one’s sorrow and thus if they are pure “because a man cannot easily measure his own emotions.”122 Different forms of contrition were distinguished between: the highest form of contrition was the genuine sorrow experienced for one’s sins which arose from a love of God; a somewhat less admirable form of contrition was a repugnance for the sins in question; and the lowest form of all was a utilitarian regret arising out of fear of damnation and desire for reconciliation. It was debated whether the lower forms of contrition were sufficient for receiving forgiveness, and so it could be of some concern to know the exact nature of an emotion one was feeling, something of which one could never be entirely sure and which could always change, thus requiring ongoing examination. As Bernasconi notes, the intentions and interior states of the penitent were important not only for determining her state of contrition, but also for determining whether or not she had sinned at all, and the seriousness of her sin. Bernasconi observes that early Christian confession, like ancient practices of self-examination, concerned itself with acts and not

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The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

with intentions to the extent that entirely involuntary acts could require penance. In one example that Bernasconi provides, vomiting the host was a sin even if it occurred due to infi rmity. Indeed, “the penance was more severe if a dog happened to lap up the vomit.”123 In absolute contrast, Bernasconi shows that later Christian confession was preoccupied with intentions to the extent that “an innocent act committed in the belief that it was a mortal sin was indeed a mortal sin,” whereas a transgressive act was nevertheless not a sin if the penitent did not know it was a sin. Paradoxically, this meant that confessors should not inform a penitent that her acts were transgressive if they believed that she would not repent and change her ways as a result, for to do so would be “equivalent to providing the penitent with new occasions for sin.”124 What these examples indicate is, in Bernasconi’s words, a “shift from a morality of laws to a morality of intentions.”125 Jumping ahead a few centuries, Bernasconi suggests that when, in the sixteenth century, the confessional box became mandatory for hearing confessions, its introduction: reflected a transformation in the understanding of confession which was itself symptomatic of a transformation in human self-understanding. Sin was becoming less a matter of submission to God’s law and more a question of the sinner’s relation to his or her own conscience, albeit a conscience informed by that law. The confessional box corresponds at an architectural level to that change and allowed penitent and priest to reenact conscience’s own internal dialogue with itself.126 Phillip Cary suggests that we imagine Augustine’s conception of the inner self as a palace courtyard without a roof, in contrast to Locke’s account of the self as a private, dark room. It can be argued that later Christian confession produced Lockean interiority, and, following Bernasconi, the small, dark confessional box in which confessions from the sixteenth century onwards were heard reflected this model of the self. As Bernasconi goes on to argue: “to say that the sacrament of penance was symptomatic of this change in human self-understanding is perhaps not to say enough. Perhaps the sacrament of penance contributed to bringing that change about.”127 According to W. David Meyers, “the entire history of penance until the late twentieth century has been a matter of ‘moving indoors.’”128 While Meyers is writing of the increased privatization of confession, landmarks of which were the inventions of private penance and of the confessional box, following Bernasconi, this moving indoors included a transition towards an interior space of the soul, and that space had fi rst to be invented. With the new emphasis on intentions and introspection upon degrees of contrition, rather than on acts, laws, punishment and satisfaction—which, if Bernasconi is correct, was to have such extraordinary historical consequences—yet another problem arose for the Church: if forgiveness has primarily to do with a penitent’s interior state, it can apparently take place

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 51 between the penitent herself and God, with no need for the intervention of priests, or for confession at all for that matter.129 Once more a theological debate ensued, this time with, on the one hand, theologians such as Abelard, Hugh of Saint Victor, Alain de Lille, and Gratian viewing penance as principally a question of sorrow which could be judged within an individual’s soul by God alone, and, on the other hand, theologians such as Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas arguing that the intervention of priests was necessary to ensure the forgiveness of penitents. Peter Lombard can be situated somewhere between the two camps, wanting to uphold that an internal state of sincere contrition is necessary on the part of the penitent, but that the intervention of a priest is also highly recommended. In the end the Church sided with the position which upheld and justified its powers to inform itself of and to survey the levels of heresy within its flock, and in the famous decree of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 every Christian was commanded to confess to her priest at least once a year, normally at Lent, or risk excommunication. Emphasizing the desire to know and thus to control the laity involved in this legislation, parishioners were obliged to confess only to their own confessor or parish priest, also upon pain of excommunication, unless they had permission from their confessor to confess to another cleric, or unless they were on the point of death and could not access their parish priest.130 Even after the decree of 1215 there was debate as to the exact nature of the priest’s power of absolution. It was unclear whether the priest merely spoke to the penitent about God’s forgiveness, as followers of Aquinas would have it, in which case the priest was simply an intermediary between God and the penitent, or whether the priest actually had the power to forgive and to grant absolution himself, as the followers of Duns Scotus believed. Some theologians argued that the priest’s role was also one of augmenting the confessant’s prayers and sorrow such that enough contrition was experienced between the two of them to justify forgiveness. Yet this still placed too much of the burden of forgiveness on contrition, whereas theologians following Aquinas and Duns Scotus wanted to transform this burden into the power of priests such that their words of forgiveness were all that was required, and were thus absolutely required. While the question of confessants who dissembled their contrition remained problematic, and a minimum requirement that confessants not be asleep, drunk, lying, or joking when they received absolution remained,131 individual contrition came to be somewhat less emphasized and the power of the priests became more fi rmly entrenched: Duns Scotus allows even calculated contrition to be adequate for forgiveness. For Duns, only saints experience perfect sorrow and can thus dispense with confession: for everyone else, confession to a priest, even if accompanied only by contrition of the lowest sort, was required and sufficient for the forgiveness of sins.132 By the late Middle Ages, therefore, permanent forms of punishment such as lifelong abstinence found in canonical penance had long since

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been transformed into the long-term asceticism of penitentiales and fi nally into light and repetitive penances such as prayers and monetary offerings. Similarly, public displays of truth had been replaced by introspection on inner sorrow and then into repetitions of formulaic regrets in the presence of priests. In short, slowly but surely, the chronicle of Christian penance is one in which forgiveness became easy so that confession could become mandatory.133 At the same time, self-governance increasingly gives way to discipline. Also noteworthy, with the transformation from public penance to inner contrition, an interiority was developed outside of the monasteries, but it was not an interiority destined to be left to the introspection of individual penitents. Indeed, as Bernasconi highlights, this ‘move indoors’ is figured by the construction of a confessional box which mirrors the modern conception of the soul; significantly, within this box, the confessant met her priest. In this box, the insistence on absolute contrition was sacrificed to the goal of augmenting the power of priests, and yet interiority and interest in psychic states, once posited, were nevertheless honed through the sorts of confessions required of Christians by canon law, in which confessions had to be “complete” to have any value,134 and in which “aggravating circumstances” (“Who, what, and where, by what helpe and by whose; Why how, and when, doe many things disclose” as well as “How many”135) needed to be accounted for, and in which “motives are also important.”136

SURPRISE, ANXIETY, AND RESISTANCE In The Birth of Purgatory, Jacques Le Goff calls the decree of 1215 “one of the greatest events of medieval history.”137 As he notes, however, This decision [ . . . ] came as a considerable surprise in the fi rst half of the thirteenth century. The habit of confession was not easily acquired, either by laymen or by clerics. How to confess and how to hear confession, what to confess and what to ask, and, for the priest, what penance to impose for those avowals of sin that were neither enormous nor extraordinary but generally modest and routine—all these were questions that needed to be answered.138 Priests, Le Goff notes, were “embarrassed and in some cases even frightened by their new responsibilities, particularly if they were not well educated,”139 and confession manuals, soon to be a prolific genre, had to be furnished to guide them, some of which were provided in several versions to cater to differing levels of education among priests, others ordered alphabetically and with extensive indexes for easy referencing and practical use. While in canonical confession only the gravest of sins required entering into the order of penitents, and for centuries many Christians, however

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 53 devote, would at most have sought penance once in their lifetime, now all Christians were to confess, and would do so at least one time a year, and thus the volume of confessions which priests would have had to deal with increased, perhaps enormously,140 as did the frequency with which clergy themselves had to confess to their superiors. Significant was the theological anxiety around the decree of 1215, which many canon lawyers refused to endorse because there was no biblical source for it, and moreover because forgiveness had already been won by Christ’s sacrifice, making it problematic to suggest that it was dealt out by priests. Most priests in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance would have said that confession was prescribed in the New Testament, and when the sacrament of confession was under attack during the Reformation, Counter-Reformation theology would explicitly claim that confession had been instituted by Christ himself. In fact, however, the closest one can come to fi nding a biblical command to confess in the New Testament is the passage from Luke 17:14, “Go show yourselves to the priests,” which does not say that one needs to confess to them, and James 5:16, “Confess, therefore, your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be saved,” which does not specify that confession needs to be made to a priest, let alone that it be annual and so forth. More unlikely biblical passages were also interpreted as endorsing confession, such as Christ’s command that Lazarus be unbound by the disciples from his cloths and bandages (John, 11:44), which certain medieval theologians interpreted as a command that priests unbind penitents from their sins by receiving their confessions, and even God’s question to Adam, “Where are you?” was interpreted as urging Adam to confess.141 Those theologians who recognized that these searches for biblical sources for the command to confess were farfetched sought instead to ground confession in natural law, foreseeing the naturalization of confession in modern thought.142 It is important to note the “surprise” and general confusion with which Le Goff describes this command to confess, and to confess in such detail, as being met in 1215, as well as what W. David Meyers calls the centuries of “active resistance” to confession which occurred on the part of the laity and some parish priests.143 In many cases parishioners would submit to an annual confession but, in the words of one priest, “the populace shrinks from specific enumeration of sins out of pure stubbornness.”144 Even more significantly, while urged to confess more than once a year, most laypeople stuck to the bare minimum of once annually, and moreover the majority waited until the very last moment of the Lenten period to confess, despite frequent admonishments on the part of their priests to come earlier. This last minute practice of confession meant that so many people flocked to the church to confess on Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, and Easter Sunday that the priest would have to hear as many as three hundred confessions on each of these days. As Meyers observes, this meant that even if the priest worked for twelve hours straight, he would have to hear twenty-five confessions

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an hour and could give less than two and a half minutes per penitent.145 A consequence of these conditions under which the majority of laypeople confessed was that confessions were not only extremely short, but that it was impossible to keep them private: as an unruly crowd of penitents fi lled the church, “undisciplined” parishioners would crowd in on the penitent, blatantly eavesdropping and even interrupting the confession.146 Sometimes things were so noisy that the priest literally could not hear the confessions, and in some cases the priest would resort to the forbidden practice of hearing confessions in his private quarters or in another secluded place. In these assembly-line conditions, a thorough and complete confession was impossible. This, Meyers suggests, is just what the laypeople intended, and the result was that some priests simply gave up and would absolve the crowd en masse. In still other cases, Meyers notes parishes where the laypeople refused to confess at all, and priests again gave in to their parishioners and performed general rather than individual absolutions.147 As Meyers writes: A possible reason for refusing to confess specifics was resentment [ . . . ] the peasantry figured prominently among the defiant. A symbolic act requiring submission to clerical and ecclesiastical authority as well as a fee, confession could have a decidedly coercive character.148 As Alexander Murray demonstrates, the particular stipulation that confession should be made to one’s own parish priest was also very much resisted by the laity.149 One reason for this resistance was that some parish priests were known to be corrupt, seducing women during confession or repeating secrets confessed to them after a few drinks at the inn. Priests were part of the community, and there was a degree of shame and risk in confessing to a person one knew. In other cases, educated lay people preferred to confess to a monk rather than to their uneducated parish priest. In Confession and Resistance, Katherine C. Little considers a more organized form of resistance to confession in the heretical Christian community of the Wycliffites, and the “crisis of self-defi nition that the Wycliffite heresy reflected and generated.”150 Together, all these phenomena of confusion and resistance, ranging from the most chaotic to the most organized, indicates that confession, particularly when one had done nothing extraordinary, was not experienced as a normal requirement of subjects nor as a welcome and long-awaited outlet to an innate psychological need. Moreover, despite frequent attempts on the part of twentieth-century authors to compare medieval auricular confession to modern forms of therapy, Meyers points out that the fact that confession was, for most penitents, so rare and so brief renders such a reading implausible.151 Far from being “pastoral care” or a sort of pre-modern psychotherapy, confession was experienced as something invasive, to be evaded if possible. Foucault urges us to imagine “how exorbitant”152 this decree of Lateran IV must have seemed and, as

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 55 seen, argues that as late as the seventeenth century the Church continued to encounter resistance at the level of the very bodies of the ordained in the phenomenon of possession. What these examples indicate is that, as Le Goff writes, confession was a “habit [. . . . ] not easily acquired,” one which could send the body into fits and convulsions and which could result in chaos and rebellion in the church.

PASTORAL POWER AND THE BIRTH OF SCRUPULOUSNESS Despite these instances of resistance, as of 1215 and on pain of excommunication, all Christians were, in principle, to take on this strange habit, and none more rigorously than the clergy themselves. Until the introduction of the confessional box in the sixteenth century, for the most part penitents confessed kneeling at the feet of their parish priest or, in the monastery, at the feet of their spiritual advisor.153 Christians thus admitted their sins to someone who knew them and could remember their previous confessions and who could, moreover, also identify other persons involved in their confession; these persons could then be better probed during their own confessions, enabling the monitoring of sinners.154 In the legislation of Lateran IV, the power of absolution is fi rmly attributed to the priest and not primarily to the contrition in an individual’s soul and the direct intervention of God. Priests who had formerly said “May God forgive you” now said “I absolve you.”155 Although examination of interior states of contrition never disappeared, regular confession to a priest was rendered necessary for the forgiveness of sins and, if done well, was also sufficient to this end. If the Fourth Lateran Council required the faithful to make confessions, it is significant that it simultaneously forbade priests from participating in trials by combat and ordeal.156 Since clerical presence was mandatory at these events of divine intervention, the decree all but abolished the Teutonic model of legal adjudication in Christendom (oaths, duels, ordeals), contributing instead to the promotion of schools of law modeled after the recently rediscovered Roman canon law, in which confessions were required for most convictions, and could be extracted through torture. Not long before, in 1199, the fi rst inquisitional tribunals had been instituted by Pope Innocent III, in which suspects being interrogated were required to take an oath to answer all questions fully, and refusal of this oath to confess was taken as proof of heresy.157 In the secular and ecclesiastical courts of Lateran IV Europe, therefore, confessions were required and could be extracted through torture, and silence justified punishment and an assumption of guilt, or was taken as a confession such that in either case one had confessed. Simultaneously, in the religious sphere, confessions were required and extracted on pain of excommunication. Beyond its impact on religious life, Lateran IV thus contributed to the centrality of

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confession in law as we know it today. As Peter Brooks and Foucault both observe, confession in law and religion came of age together and have not been disentangled since.158 The interrogation of penitents in religious life, as in early modern courts of law, could be aggressive, and in Tentler’s words “marvelous,” “audacious,” and marked by “guile.”159 As Foucault observes in the fi rst volume of The History of Sexuality, and as Henry C. Lea is scandalized by, confession was also obsessively concerned with sex, such that if penitents did not volunteer to discuss their sexuality, the information was extracted from them by priests.160 Tentler also remarks this trend in confession, noting that sexual interrogations held “a special place in medieval religion.”161 Jacqueline Murray demonstrates that the focus on sex in the confessional applied particularly to female penitents: women are mentioned in confession manuals almost exclusively with respect to sexual sins, whereas discussions of other sins assume male penitents.162 According to Peter Briller, although confession manuals always had a great deal to say about sexual sins, prior to 1400 there was a greater focus in confession manuals on social sins or sins that affected others.163 For this reason confession manuals were preoccupied with sexual sins such as adultery and incest, as opposed to self-affecting sins such as masturbation. This was to change after 1400, however, at which point all sexual sins, including self-affecting ones, took on a greater focus. Jean Gerson’s On the Confession of Masturbation is an example of a late medieval confessional manual which demonstrates both the focus on self-affecting sexual sins and the extreme “audacity” and “guile” which Tentler describes. Clerics are told in this manual to insist that (male) penitents admit to the sin of masturbation, which, as will be seen below, was deemed an even more serious sin than raping a nun, incest, or abducting and raping virgins and wives, however more common and indeed universal (among males) a sin it was assumed to be, judging from the incredulity with which deniers of masturbation were instructed to be met. Gerson advises the priest to ask the man: “Friend, do you remember when you were young, about ten or twelve years old, your rod or virile member ever stood erect?” Should the penitent deny this memory, Gerson tells the priest to insist: “Friend, wasn’t that thing indecent? What did you do, therefore, so that it wouldn’t stand erect?” and advises the priest “let this be said with a tranquil visage, so that it will appear that what has been asked about is not dishonourable or something to be kept quiet, but rather as a remedy against the alleged awkwardness of the aforementioned erection.” Presuming the confessant is not deceived by the priest’s cavalier attitude and still refuses to admit to having masturbated, the priest is told to continue to ask him leading questions: ‘Friend, didn’t you touch or rub your member the way boys usually do?’ If he entirely denies that he ever held it or rubbed it in that state

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 57 it is not possible to proceed further except in expressing amazement and saying that it is not credible: exhorting him to remember his salvation; that he is before God; that it is most serious to lie in confession, and the like. The priest is thus not to accept willingly the answers of the penitent, and persists until the confessant admits to the sin; for instance, if a confession was willfully “incomplete,” the entire confession was annulled, none of one’s other sins were forgiven, and so, if a penitent suspected he had withheld some information from his confession, he had to repeat the entire confession until it was “complete.” But even once the penitent has admitted his sin, the priest is not to be satisfied, and is to ask for further details, saying: ‘Friend, I well believe it; but for how long? An hour? A half hour? And for so long that the member was no longer erect?’ And let this be uttered as if the confessor did not think this unusual or sinful. If the penitent answers that he did so, then there is evidence that he has truly committed the sin of masturbation.164 Medieval theologians recognized that by inquiring in such suggestive detail, and with such leading questions, they ran the risk of teaching sinful behaviors to penitents who had not previously been aware of the full range of sexual possibilities available to them. They deduced, however, that it was worth teaching a few young penitents how to masturbate in order to save the greater number who were already masturbating without confessing to it, and so forth with other sins.165 As in a police interrogation or a torture chamber, so long as the penitent said “no,” the inquiry was not fi nished, and only once he fi nally assented to what he was expected to say was there “evidence” that he had sinned. Particularly remarkable are the instructions that the priest feign a certain casualness, and that he address the confessant with a disarming affection, calling him “friend” and pretending that masturbation is neither sinful nor shameful in order to make the penitent admit to it, insinuating that he can relate to the penitent’s acts—“Friend, I well believe it”—only to then backtrack and condemn the act as sinful and shameful after all. The guile of such confessors foreshadows the good cop/bad cop interrogations that we know today, in which the priest plays both parts. Due to the forms of resistance to confession described above, clearly most laypeople during the Middle Ages would never or only very rarely have been submitted to such intense confessional interrogations as we fi nd described in manuals such as Gerson’s, in which the confessor seems to have all the time in the world. In practice, it was seen that most people waited until the last days of Lent to confess, at which point there was no time for anything approaching the scenario which Gerson describes.166 It

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was only the most devote who submitted to more regular confession outside of the Lenten period and who would have experienced such intense scrutiny as we fi nd routinely described in confession manuals. In general, women engaged in auricular confession more often than men during the Middle Ages (and to this day),167 and the clergy confessed more often than laypeople. Among women, pregnant women in particular confessed often, while among the ordained it was monks who confessed more often than priests, and women in cloisters who confessed the most often of all.168 Meyers thus cautions against seeing confession manuals as a reflection of what most medieval subjects would have undergone, and argues that for the majority of medieval Christians confession was “too easy, not too hard.”169 As such, Meyers surmises that most medieval Christians would not have developed a great deal of spiritual anxiety over confession. According to Meyers’s study, frequent (monthly or weekly) confession did not become common until the late seventeenth century, by which point the scrutiny undergone was nothing like that described by the medieval manuals.170 As shall be seen below, however, confession manuals attest to a problem of overly-scrupulous laypeople who plagued their confessors with an insatiable need to confess, and so there was at least one category of confessants who confessed not too rarely, but too often. For those such as the ordained and the scrupulous who did undergo frequent and rigorous confessional examination, the obligation to confess in circumstances such as Gerson describes for even the most routine and private of sins such as masturbation came to cause anxiety, as did the sense of sinfulness which confessional morality inculcated in devote late medieval and early modern subjects. As seen, early medieval penance was only for grave sins, but now the most mundane of sins could be given excruciating attention. If they had the leisure, medieval confessors might inquire into an overwhelming number of possibilities of sin, extracting detailed self-scrutiny on the part of confessants as to their possible trespasses. Tentler provides lists of the various categories of sin, “including the gifts, doctrines, faculties, virtues, counsels, and laws one can sin against,” into which confessors would inquire. One example is: Ten Commandments Seven Deadly Sins Twelve Articles of Faith Five Senses Eight Beatitudes Six or Seven Corporal Works of Mercy Six or Seven Spiritual Works of Mercy Four or Five Sins Crying to Heaven for Vengeance Six Sins Against the Holy Spirit Four Cardinal Virtues

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 59 Three Theological Virtues Twelve Fruits of the Holy Spirit171

As is clear, each of these categories subdivided into between three and twelve more ways to sin, and in each one of these sub-categories it was possible to sin in deed, word, or thought. Moreover, one also had to search one’s memory and one’s soul in order to distinguish between having experienced temptation and having had sinful thoughts, the latter meaning that one had prolonged the delectation of a temptation and taken pleasure in this prolongation rather than dismissing it immediately from one’s mind. Within any given category, there were further lists and categorizations and hierarchies of sinfulness. So for instance sexual sins, or the varieties of the Deadly Sin of Lust, were ranked in ascending order of gravity in lists such as: Unchaste kiss Unchaste touch Fornication Debauchery Simple Adultery Double Adultery Voluntary sacrilege Rape or Abduction of a virgin Rape or Abduction of a wife Rape or Abduction of a nun Incest Masturbation Improper manner Improper organ Sodomy Bestiality172

For those undergoing rigorous penitential practices, being confronted and questioned regularly on these and other lists of sins is judged by Tentler to have been an “alarming” and “unsettling” experience causing anxiety and even despair, producing what Meyers refers to as “terrorized consciences,” to which the testaments of reformers such as Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli attest. Calvin decried confession as “bind[ing] consciences in snares,”173 while Luther, who felt he could never be sure that he had experienced true sorrow, or that he had confessed thoroughly enough, would write that “The promise of penance [ . . . ] has been transformed into the most oppressive despotism.”174 Sexual interrogations in particular would create and fan the flames of erotic desire, implanting new fantasies in the minds of confessants, as Counter-Reformation doctrine itself came to acknowledge, which desires were new sources of anxiety over one’s sins.

60 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault This anxiety in turn sought relief in the confessional practice which was its cause, and in this way confession slowly became a self-perpetuating and viciously circular need, and thus a longing, and so a naturalized habit for certain Christian subjects. At the same time, although only an annual confession at Lent was officially compulsory, penitents were urged to confess far more frequently. Theologians argued that the obligatory Easter-time confession should not prevent people from confessing at other times of the year, particularly because sins could be forgotten if not confessed quickly, and one could die suddenly with unconfessed sins. Contributing to the trend of more frequent confession, four new circumstances were introduced which required immediate confession: one should confess outside of the Lenten period if threatened by a serious illness; if one worried that one would not have access to a confessor during Lent; if one was going to receive the eucharist, be baptized, or before any other sacrament or religious act; and finally and most vaguely, one was to confess more frequently if dictated to do so by one’s conscience.175 This last reason for additional confessions is particularly open-ended and could result in very frequent confessions indeed. Godesalc Rosemondt and Jacobus de Clusa argue for confessing four to seven times annually176 while the Jesuit Louis Lallement recommended daily confession, and, surpassing even Lallement, the Dominican Henri Lacordaire said he could not even estimate how many times he had confessed because he did so so often.177 While these religious men seem to have been commended for the frequency with which they confessed and the piety of which this was considered to be indicative, the phenomenon of frequent confessions on the part of brooding monks and scrupulous laypeople could became burdensome to confessors, such that Johannes von Dambach complained that “a scrupulous man [ . . . ] well might need to keep a confessor in his purse.”178 If it was a common trope for confessors to compare themselves to physicians, they soon complained that they had to attend to hypochondriacs. For some, confession had became an internalized desire to the extent that, despite the prohibitive fact that confessants had to pay alms in order to confess, confession manuals soon reflect the problem of repeated and excessivelydetailed confessions, of fabricated confessions manufactured by overlyanxious minds, and of priests overworked, exhausted, and exasperated by too many confessions. “Scrupulousness,” or excessive self-examination and confession, became a new sin, a sin that one might (scrupulously) need to confess to, since such meticulous penitents were accused of not having enough faith in the mercy of God, or enough humility to submit to Him without these constant confessional interventions.179 Matthew of Cracow is particularly harsh with respect to persons guilty of scrupulousness because he suspects that they over-confess in order to make the priest admire them for their piety.180 Although, as seen above, confessors were to adopt a disarmingly friendly manner in

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 61 order to conduct their interrogations, this may have resulted in a sort of transference love such that priests had to deal with the problem of confessants who attempted through their confessions to strengthen this friendly relation, seeking their confessor’s approval and admiration and thus being willing to fabricate confessions in order to be loved. Antoninus of Florence’s advice to clerics to make scrupulous penitents wait last in line to confess implies a degree of annoyance with such confessants who came too often. He suggests that a confessor “receive fi rst and most willingly” those who come rarely, strangers, men of high rank, and those to whom confession will be of most use, “And to those who want to confess too often, assign a certain time outside of which you will not hear them; do not make yourself available to them for other conversations; and always use not soft but harsh and severe words with them.”181 Perhaps this scrupulous penitent was fi rst addressed as “friend” and made to feel at ease while simultaneously inculcated with an anxiety-causing sense of his own sinfulness, only to fi nd himself henceforth made to wait last in line to relieve his conscience, restricted to narrow time slots and treated brusquely by his priest, abandoned to the torments which Christianity’s teachings had implanted in his soul. The stipulation that the priest not make himself available to the scrupulous confessant “for other conversations” also suggests that confessional speech had spilled over into discourse produced outside the sacrament itself, or into regular conversations. The phenomenon of scrupulousness shows in a Foucaultian manner that power is never something possessed and exerted over another person or group of persons unilaterally, but is reciprocal, complex, and always in excess of the intentions of those who try to wield it. First, the Church did not want to implant this much anxiety in the souls of its faithful: clearly, although penitents had initially met the demand to confess with reluctance, things had gotten out of hand, and penance took on psychic forms unanticipated by either the Church or the laity. Indeed, if the aim of the Church was to know the truth about its flock, the truth-producing method which it had devised could result in fabricated confessions designed to solicit the approval of priests, untruths in which penitents may or may not have believed themselves. Similarly, while the Church wanted to learn about the sinful desires of its flock in order to extinguish them, it had often produced new desires, including desires for priests, such that confessors needed to be warned to send away female confessants who arrived with their “hair curled, made up, and prettified.”182 Young female confessants were also instructed to kneel at their priest’s side, so that he would look at them less, while male confessants could kneel directly facing the priest.183 This suggests an awareness of the need to control heterosexual desire on the priest’s part, and not only on that of their female confessants. As is apparent, if confession was adopted by the Church in order to give disciplinary power to the clergy over the laity, and to higher church officials over more lowly monks and priests who confessed to

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them, these same church officials were stubbornly resisted by some of their parishioners, while they were besieged and forced to listen to more confessions than they had ever desired on the parts of others. Second, spending excessive and unanticipated amounts of their lives listening to confessions, the discipline and self-discipline of confession, as well as the guilt, anxiety, desire and despair which accompanied it, affected the clergy far more than the laypersons it was most obviously meant to control: the most scrupulous of confessants were to be found among the clergy themselves, including some of the most high-ranking officials and authors of confession manuals. Like the guard in the panopticon described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish, both the priest who surveys his flock and the high church official who surveys the ordained internalize the logic of surveillance and come to permanently self-monitor. The priest, like the prison guard, is the victim of the “bind[ing of] consciences in snares” to a greater degree than laypersons. Much as in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Foucault describes the bourgeoisie as the group which was the most dominated and the first to be dominated by its own bourgeois sexual ethics, so also the clergy was dominated first and most thoroughly by the confessional subjectivity which it was inculcating in its flock for purposes of control. The phenomenon of possession also illustrates the ways in which, as Foucault observes, power will produce its own resistance. Possession was among the unanticipated effects of confession which, as with scrupulousness, occurred most acutely in the midst of the ordained as dramas unfolding primarily between nuns and their confessor-priests. As a form of involuntary resistance to confession, possession was a source of anxiety for the Church, which at fi rst took familiar recourse to witchhunting, this time hunting witches and warlocks in its own midst, among its own clergy and frequently in the persons of the confessors with whom the possessed women appeared to be demonically captivated. As such the Church had to sacrifice its own, and attempted to minimize the damage by developing what Foucault calls “anti-convulsives,” including the de-eroticization of confession, the increased discretion of the speech acts which occurred in the confessional, and fi nally, a century and a half later, by ridding itself of the tenacious problem of possessed women by handing them over to those other confessors, psychiatrists, thus medicalizing what had at fi rst been more accurately identified as a religious problem. The point to be highlighted is that whether confessants were victimized or relieved by the persons hearing their confessions, compulsory confession, which in its extreme forms involved informing penitents of an overwhelming number of manners in which they could sin, implanted desire, guilt and a habit of anxious and ever-inconclusive introspection in certain late medieval and early modern subjects. This production of anxious subjects was combined with exhortations that they should confess more often than was strictly required, and with promises that such a practice would provide them with relief. Like Kafka’s Joseph K., who is insistently told that he is

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 63 guilty despite the fact that the exact nature of his guilt remains elusive to him—or as in the Spanish Inquisition during which suspects were simply asked “do you confess?” without knowing the nature of the accusations against them, and would thus often confess to sins of which the inquisitors never suspected them, and to sins they had never committed—the confessing subject eventually acquiesces to her guilt and even seeks out her own confession, outdoing her confessors in her zeal to confess, or even, as in the case of possessed women, endangering their confessors with their zeal. Joseph K. eventually considers writing a meticulously detailed description of his entire life, and becomes so preoccupied with the thought of this exhaustive confession that he cannot work, despite the fact that no one has asked for such an account. As the practice of confession spread, clerics became alarmed by the confessional subjects which they had made, and which they had become—subjects who, in Gerson’s words, continually felt that “they have been ‘properly’ but not ‘sufficiently’ contrite and confessed (indeed as far as we can see it is impossible for them to be sufficiently contrite for their sins).”184 Confession presents itself as a source of relief for these subjects whose feeling of guilt the confessional has itself produced, but confessional subjects can never feel “‘sufficiently’ [ . . . ] confessed,” and so that relief, and a certain pleasure, remains temporary and always elusive, to be sought after again through further confessions.

REFORMATION AND COUNTERREFORMATION CONFESSION In December of 1520 Martin Luther would publicly burn the Angelica, one of the most important summas for confessors of late medieval Christianity. In the same year he would write The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, in which he critiqued the corrupt practice of Catholic confession, while in the following year he would pen On Confession: Whither the Pope has Power to Command It. Here Luther compares confession to rape, accusing the Pope of being an Antichrist who “breaks open the bridal chamber of Christ and makes all Christian souls into whores.”185 Luther calls Lateran IV “the greatest plague on earth, through which you have bewildered the consciences of all the world, brought so many souls to despair, and degraded and oppressed all mankind’s faith in Christ.”186 Calvin, even more hostile to confession than Luther, called the practice carnificina, “butchery,”187 and rejected it entirely, but Luther would allow confessions to continue in reformed ways: he abolished clerical abuses such as receiving money for confessions and for the masses which were often required as penances, and also insisted that confessions only deal with fully-willed sins such as murder and adultery, or acts which did not require soul-searching to know whether they had been committed. Also deeming intentions irrelevant, Luther would try to abolish the habit of endless introspection, attempting

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The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

to diminish the unhealthy inwardness which Catholicism had cultivated. Also crucially, for Luther priests had no power to absolve the penitent, but only to tell her that God had already forgiven her if she believed in His forgiveness, and thus the disciplinary role of clerics was diluted while the inculcation of scrupulousness was dissipated. For Luther confessions were non-compulsory and they were to be kept short. These succinct confessions were to be general, they were to admit that one was, like everyone else, sinful, but were not to reflect excessively on the individual self or her sins. Finally, Lutheran confession was to be primarily preoccupied with an examination of faith rather than of conscience, or was to be used as an opportunity for instruction in basic theology.188 The Counter-Reformation Catholic Church was quick to respond to these heretical claims which endangered its will to know. On the one hand, it would clean up the sacrament from the clerical abuses for which it had become notorious, and would, in Foucault’s words, “neutralize” the language of the on-going sexual interrogations which it could not abandon. On the other hand, despite these concessions to Reformation critiques, the Council of Trent would only reaffi rm and bolster the importance of confession in the salvation of souls. As the Catechism of the Council of Trent for Parish Priests, Issued by Order of Pius V puts it, “Justly then do the Holy Fathers proclaim, that by the keys of the Church, the gate of heaven is thrown open.”189 According to Beggren, confessional practices would continue to “spr[i]ng up” in Protestant countries and parishes despite attempts to curtail them, from which he once more deduces the primacy of the confessional need. 190 However, according to Meyers’ study of confession in Germany during this period, even parishes which remained Catholic saw high levels of resistance to confession at this time, which he attributes to the Protestant influence. In these Catholic communities “parishioners simply refused to confess specifics,” and preferred general confession to private confession. For instance, “The parish of Aufkirchen contained one thousand communicants, all Catholic and diligent in worship, yet their priests could not bring them to enumerate sins in penance.”191 According to Rittgers, within the Protestant parishes where laypeople had a choice between general absolution and Luther’s reformed version of private confession, most people preferred the former.192 This suggests, again, and contrary to Beggren’s argument, that far from confession being an innate need, even after several centuries of obligatory confession there was still no real desire on the part of most people to confess. If these people could be absolved without confessing, this was the option which they chose. In contrast to most laypeople, however, Luther himself, the once-scrupulous monk, found that an uncorrupt form of confession was consoling; this indicates again that it is the discipliners who were ultimately the most disciplined by the practice of confession. From such subjects as Luther we might infer the difficulty of extinguishing originally Catholic forms

Confession from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation 65 of confession once these had been successfully inscribed onto the soul, rather than inferring, with Beggren, the innateness of this compulsion. For such confessing subjects, even the loss of faith in God and in religion, and hence the original or historical source for their guilt and their desire, did not always remove the longing to confess. One such case is the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German Romantic Clemens Brentano, who wrote to a friend: “When I was still a small boy and pious, and went to confession, I always felt a deep, pleasurable fear before entering the confessional. Though the passing of time was to deprive me of my faith, it could never take from me my need to confess.”193 Brentano would satisfy his desire to confess for a time in his relationships with friends, but eventually these did not suffice, or perhaps he had exhausted the tolerance of his resources, and thus his “craving for confession” eventually led him back to the Roman Catholic Church.194 Later in the nineteenth century, however, subjects such as Brentano would have venues for confession available to them other than religion, for instance the writing of confessional literature, or the sexual and psychological examinations of doctors which, as Foucault describes in the fi rst volume of The History of Sexuality, were quickly superseding those of priests. A century later, presented with options such as psychotherapy, few subjects would feel compelled to return to the Catholic Church to fulfi ll their confessional desires. The following chapter will consider this modern confessional subject, the product of the genealogy of confession examined thus far.

2

Confession and Modern Subjectivity

Confession is not the end of the game. You’ll go on confessing for the rest of your life. —Ladelle McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures1

In the fi rst part of this chapter I will continue discussing the history of confession, starting where the previous chapter left off, or with the beginning of the modern era, the period which concerns Foucault in his critique of confession in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Once more I will follow Foucault quite far in my discussion of modern confessional practices, and yet I also wish to problematize aspects of his analysis and to consider features of confession which he does not examine. In particular, while Foucault situates confession in the history of technologies for producing truth, the second and third sections of this chapter will draw on the writings of Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Peter Brooks in order to examine the close relation between confession and untruth, and the phenomenon of false confessions, particularly in the realm of law. Moreover, while Foucault and much of this chapter will have focused on the problematic pleasures of confession, the fi nal section of this chapter will consider its displeasures.

FROM THE CONFESSIONAL TO THE CLINIC

Secularization and Sexualization Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: An Introduction discusses confession primarily from the Council of Trent onwards, or beginning with the Counter-Reformation’s response to Reformation critiques of confession. The response of the Catholic Church, as noted in the previous chapter, was to underscore the importance of confession, to require confessions more frequently than ever, but to clean up the abuses of the practice and, to use Foucault’s term, to “neutralize” the language of priests, particularly in

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their sexual interrogations. The codification of language did not diminish the interest in sex in Counter-Reformation confession, however, and if anything, according to Foucault, this interest grew as the language with which it could be discussed was circumscribed. What really interests Foucault in the fi rst volume of The History of Sexuality is not sexuality in auricular confession, however, but rather the multiplication of forms of sexual confession in secular discourses and the internalization of the coercion to confess such that it is today experienced as a pleasure and a desire. For Foucault, this transformation into desire masks and inverts our intuitions about the workings of power. Foucault is thus concerned with the manners in which the external and internalized compulsion to confess which had developed within Christianity left the confessional and entered not only into the arts, most notably literature, and even into philosophy2 , but even more insidiously into politics, economics, the sciences, law and pedagogy, and fi nally into the desires and intuitions of the modern soul. This transformation occurred as the result of the will to know about, and thus to produce the truth about, human sexuality. Foucault writes: This technique [confession] might have remained tied to the destiny of Christian spirituality if it had not been supported and relayed by other mechanisms. In the fi rst place, by a “public interest.” Not a collective curiosity or sensibility; not a new mentality; but power mechanisms that functioned in such a way that discourse on sex—for reasons which will have to be examined—became essential. 3 In particular, in the eighteenth century, when the influence of the Church was waning and confessional subjectivity might have diminished with it, the technique of compelling confessions and inculcating a need for them was taken up by other domains. In the modern period “population” became a concern, and with it came new objects of inquiry and control. As Foucault writes: At the heart of this economic and political problem of population was sex: it was necessary to analyze the birthrate, the age of marriage, the legitimate and illegitimate births, the precocity and frequency of sexual relations, the ways of making them fertile or sterile, the effects of unmarried life or of the prohibitions, the impact of contraceptive practices [ . . . ] Of course, it had long been asserted that a country had to be populated if it hoped to be rich and powerful; but this was the fi rst time that a society had affi rmed, in a constant way, that its future and its fortune were tied not only to the number and uprightness of its citizens, to their marriage rules and family organization, but to the manner in which each individual made use of his sex. Things went from ritual lamenting over the unfruitful debauchery of the rich,

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If religious confession was preoccupied with sex, this preoccupation would be carried over into all of the other forms of confessional discourse proliferating in the modern period: “From the Christian penance to the present day, sex was a privileged theme of confession. A thing that was hidden, we are told [Ce qu’on cache, dit-on].”5 Sex, we say, is what we are ashamed of, what we hide: according to the biblical account of the origin of shame, of what needs to be hidden, Adam and Eve hid their sexual organs, their pudenda or shameful parts. As “ce qu’on cache,” sex is what needs to be revealed in order to be renounced in Christian confession, and what needs to be spoken of in order to be freed in certain therapeutic forms of confession. Moreover, sex remained a privileged locus of confessional discourse in modernity because of its crucial role in the manipulation of populations. Scientific inquiries served the interests of developing demographic, political, and economic concerns with population. If populations were threatened by sterile and non-reproductive forms of sexuality, a country needed to know the extent and the nature of these threats. Consequently sciences such as biology, medicine, psychiatry, and psychology transformed themselves and developed such that they could inquire into the threats to populations, requiring confessions and categorizing confessing subjects according to their sexualities (thus coining and distinguishing between “perversions”), sexualities becoming synonymous with identities in a way that would never have occurred to pre-modern subjects, who identified themselves instead by their alliances, family, and blood. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, therefore, though religion was losing ground, the familiar forms of discourse developed in the confessionals were nevertheless taken up anew, but the speakers, and the aims of their inquiries, had changed. Now the interest in the private lives, actions, and thoughts of individuals came not from priests but from economists, demographers, scientists and doctors. In turn, the disapprobation expressed for non-productive and illegitimate forms of sexuality, though still contaminated with the familiar language of traditional religious morality, was now grounded in rationality and public concern rather than theology, and came as medical diagnoses and criminal charges for perversions which had previously not known names. Le Goff noted the “surprise” and even fear that the initial command to confess, and to hear confessions, was received by the Christian laity and clergy in 1215, and describes the confession manuals which were developed to mediate this alarm. We can imagine a similar surprise in the eighteenth century as new and diverse figures took over from priests the extraction of these confessions. Having grown used to confessional inquiries in their religious lives, Foucault suggests that modern subjects would nevertheless

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have felt some discomfort when other authorities, for instance doctors, were found posing the same questions. While we have today become used to doctors questioning us about our sexuality when we come to them with earaches and anxieties, as if all medical and psychological problems which we visit doctors about somehow or other relate to our sexual lives, in the nineteenth century, when psychiatrists, doctors and scientists fi rst began actively interrogating people about their sexuality regardless of the nature of their ailments, patients would not have immediately seen why such intrusive inquiries were scientifically justified. Foucault describes five scientific methods which doctors developed for demanding sexual confessions which quelled these suspicions. The fi rst manner in which doctors would have made their sexual questions seem scientifically acceptable was through what Foucault calls a “clinical codification of the inducement to speak,” which is similar to the “neutralization” of language in the Catholic confessional after Reformation critiques. Against allegations of sexual curiosity, priests were instructed to keep their interrogations into the sexual lives of confessants vague and couched in codified language. While doctors might want the sort of detail which characterized pre-Reformation Christian confession, patients were reassured that the questions were professional and of scientific interest by the use of technical terminology. The second manner in which these new interrogations would have been justified by nineteenth-century doctors and psychiatrists was through “the postulate of a general and diffuse causality.” As Foucault writes, “Having to tell everything, being able to pose questions about everything, found their justification in the principle that endowed sex with an inexhaustible and polymorphous causal power.”6 A striking example of such diffuse causal power being attributed to sexual acts is the case of masturbation.7 In Ingmar Bergman’s description of his childhood in the 1930s, for instance, he recounts that at the fi rst stirrings of puberty his older brother gave him The Family Guide to Health to read.8 From this book penned by a sexual expert Bergman learned that masturbation led to paleness, sweating, trembling, bags under the eyes, diffi culties in concentration, troubles in equilibrium, and eventually led to the softening of the brain, lesions to the bone marrow, epileptic fits, loss of consciousness and premature death. As a sin of youth, masturbation thus threatened to undermine the entire fabric of society, or was a serious threat to population. In this case as in others, private sexual acts took on enormous proportions in the modern imaginary. The positing of such dramatic dangers to a child’s health justified a doctor questioning a child about his masturbatory habits, just as, centuries earlier, the ranking of masturbation as particularly high on the scale of mortal sins permitted intrusive and aggressive soliciting of sexual confessions from adolescents on the part of priests. Dangers were falsely attributed to a wide variety of sexual activities and also to intimate bodily functions such as menstruation, as described by Thomas Laqueur.9

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Menstruation was described by nineteenth-century doctors as both physically devastating—“leaving behind a ragged wreck of tissue, torn glands, ruptured vessels, jagged edges of stroma, and masses of blood corpuscles, which it would hardly seem possible to heal satisfactorily without the aid of surgical treatment,”10 despite women’s claims to the contrary—and as psychologically traumatizing, and was also regularly compared to heat in non-human animals, thus being debilitating to women’s mental and moral faculties. As Foucault writes, “The limitless dangers that sex carried with it justified the exhaustive character of the inquisition to which it was subjected.”11 Given that, in the modern era, sex and the functions of the sex organs were suddenly deemed dangerous to everyone’s health, doctors had every reason to question their patients about them. Today we realize that nineteenth-century doctors were mistaken about the debilitating effects of menstruation, and about masturbation and other sexual acts, but by now we are used to sexual confessions being required of us, and so we give these confessions willingly, and the postulate of a “general and diffuse causality” has done its work. The third justification for inquisitiveness on the part of nineteenthcentury doctors was “the principle of a latency intrinsic to sexuality,” as, in the most obvious example, with the relegation of sexual impulses and desires to the unconscious by Freud. Doctors and sexologists were required to extract confessions because sex was not only dangerous but had a tendency to remain hidden. Similarly, the fourth reason Victorian doctors had to extract sexual confessions from their patients was that sexuality was now seen to be extremely complex, and to require experts to decipher it. Again, we can think of Freud, who could supposedly derive information from his patients’ sexual confessions which they themselves would never have thought of themselves. Finally, having doctors listen to sexual confessions was scientifically justified “through the medicalization of the effects of confession.” That is to say, patients came to believe that just talking about sex with an expert could be therapeutic not only for their sexual problems but for all the other problems to which sex was tenuously linked as well. This is an assumption which Freud and Breuer would elaborate when they wrote about the “talking cure.” In this early work, Freud and Breuer thought that the very act of their patients confessing to them, and of their interpreting their patients’ confessions with their clinical expertise, led to the patients being cured of their various psychological and hysterically physiological ailments. As I will discuss later in this chapter, Freud would later reject the notion of medical confession as catharsis or abreaction, and would realize that talking could repeat rather than heal trauma within a relation of transference with the physician, which transference relation (and not mere talking and interpretation) was also the means through which healing could occur. Despite Freud’s own later and more nuanced view, it is his early and immature psychoanalytic notion of a “talking cure” which has today remained

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influential in popular culture and pop psychology: we believe that speaking is cathartic, or that it helps “to get things of our chests,” that confession is “good for the soul.” The popularization of the notion that talking has a straightforwardly curative or medicinal effect is an enormous incitement to confessional discourse today, even though it was almost immediately refuted within psychoanalytic theory itself. Once a belief in the therapeutic need to confess had been implanted in modern subjects, an external form of surveillance, the extraction of confessions, had been internalized into self-surveillance. Although Foucault does not make this explicit in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, the disciplinary move from surveillance to self-surveillance in the development of confessional subjectivity can be compared to his analysis of panopticism in Discipline and Punish, but now it is not the externally exhibited behaviors of prisoners which are monitored and self-monitored, but rather the internal life of the persons being watched, and who have thus learned to watch themselves, which needs to be verbalized aloud to another. This panoptic structure is apparent in Rousseau’s Confessions, where Rousseau writes: I must present my reader with an apology, or rather a justification, for the petty details I have just been entering into [ . . . ] Since I have undertaken to reveal myself absolutely to the public, nothing about me must remain hidden or obscure. I must remain incessantly beneath his gaze, so that he may follow me in all the extravagances of my heart and into every least corner of my life. Indeed, he must never lose sight of me for a single instant, for if he fi nds the slightest gap in my story [ . . . ] he may wonder what I was doing at that moment [ . . . ] I am laying myself sufficiently open to human malice by telling my story, without rendering myself more vulnerable by any silence.12 Like the prisoner in the panopticon, Rousseau imagines himself to be under constant surveillance by the other, such that he “must remain incessantly beneath his gaze,” and for this very reason proposes to expose every minutiae of his existence for the scrutiny of the reading public. Rousseau believes that by remaining silent on any topic he will make himself more “vulnerable” to the other’s accusations. Feeling himself to be everwatched and judged, Rousseau, like Kafka’s Joseph K., internalizes this surveillance and proposes through autobiography to provide a full record of his life. In so doing, he voluntarily provides his judges with the material he perceives them to be seeking, although Rousseau also recognizes that his self-exposure will furnish his judges with ample opportunity for human “malice.” For Rousseau, autobiography as self-surveillance or confessional truth-telling is at once a means to assert his individualism and to tell his story in defense against the lies of others and an exposure to accusation and judgment, to charges of lying and blame for acts and

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thoughts that the public need never have known about. It is thus a premature legalistic testimony or defense which immediately and unnecessarily gives rise to the very legal investigation it defends itself against. Rousseau feels that the act of confession itself functions as expiation for his deeds and thoughts, while it is in defense against the accusations of untruth that he endeavors to tell every detail of his existence, provide a window “into every least corner of [his] life,” as if the very degree of his vulnerability would prove his honesty and thus protect him. As in Foucault’s model of the panopticon, the exposure of the self opens the subject up to being policed, which in turn leads to paranoia and vigilant self-policing, and thus to ever greater exposure of the self and ever greater vulnerability to judgment and shame. Although this confessional movement as it occurred in the modern period produced multiple new venues for speaking about sex, this period is thought to be one in which silence was imposed on sex or in which sexuality was repressed. Nevertheless, Foucault insists that on the contrary non-reproductive sexualities themselves proliferated in this period, and that this proliferation was directly linked to the manners in which people were being asked to speak about sex more than ever. Discourses on sexuality in fact expanded in the nineteenth century, even if the questions were being asked by new people, and confessants were asked to speak about sex in new ways, as for instance in the codified language of doctors and scientists. Virginia Woolf, a late product of the Victorian era, anticipates Foucault in 1929 by pointing out the incredible proliferation of texts on sexuality that her age had produced when she describes going to the British Museum to do some research on the female sex in particular, and being astounded by the numbers of books she found, such that even an avid reader such as herself could never hope to read them in a lifetime. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf would address her female audience by asking: Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many of them were written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? [ . . . ] Even the names of the books gave me food for thought. Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex—woman, that is to say—also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fi ngered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women. Some of these books were, on the face of it, frivolous and facetious; but many, on the other hand, were serious and prophetic, moral and hortatory. Merely to read the titles suggested innumerable schoolmasters, innumerable clergymen mounting their platforms and pulpits and holding forth with a loquacity which

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far exceeded the hour usually allotted to such discourse on this one subject. It was a most strange phenomenon; and apparently [ . . . ] one confi ned to the male sex. Women do not write books about men—a fact that I could not help welcoming with relief, for if I had fi rst to read all that men have written about women, then all that women have written about men, the aloe that flowers once in a hundred years would flower twice before I could set pen to paper.13 Woolf points out that both professionals and non-professionals, so long as they were men, felt authoritatively positioned to produce books on sex in her age. To some degree, simply belonging to the male sex made these authors feel like authorities, at least with respect to the female sex. It is interesting however that Woolf scoffs at men who do not have an M.A. degree who nevertheless feel qualified to write about sex. It strikes her as at least somewhat acceptable that scientists and doctors and persons with university degrees, preferably above the M.A., would be writing books about sex. In this attitude of Woolf’s we see that sex had become the proper domain of scientists and experts, of specialists, or that the dominant and respected discourse on sex in the modern West had become that of science. The production of data used by the sciences of sex depended on their ability to extract confessions from patients, or to incite them to discourse. So even if sex was silenced in certain contexts in the Victorian age, for instance between teachers and students, parents and children—and the Bloomsbury Group delighted in overcoming these “repressions”—in other ways new forms of writing and talking about sex were invented and proliferated such that, as Foucault writes, “sex became something to say, and to say exhaustively in accordance with deployments that were varied, but all, in their own way, compelling. Whether in the form of a subtle confession in confidence or an authoritarian interrogation, sex [ . . . ] had to be put into words.”14 This last citation raises a crucial point, which is the coercive nature of sexual confessions, and indeed of confessions in general. This needs to be stressed in particular because confessions are understood as medicinal and because they are today often pleasurable and desired, and as such may by all appearances seem voluntary. We may recollect, however, that while religious confessions were originally extracted from penitents upon threat of excommunication, many Christian confessants soon desired confession to degrees that even the Church deemed excessive, and a similar situation in the realm of law is apparent in the phenomenon of false confessions, to be discussed below. It appears that an external compulsion to confess can quickly become internalized as desire, and this phenomenon occurs perhaps most dangerously not in religious, scientific, or therapeutic contexts, but in police interrogations. It is therefore worthwhile exploring Foucault’s explanation of the confessant’s desire for a confession which is nevertheless coerced.

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INCITEMENTS TO DISCOURSE The initial compulsion to confess was clearly an external one—individuals did not begin to come to doctors with their personal narratives any more than to their priests or to their inquisitioners, but rather doctors and psychiatrists, like priests and inquisitioners, fi rst began to ask the persons under their care about their private lives, and developed techniques, or produced threats of divine punishment or risks to health, to extract the confessions which did not come voluntarily. On the one hand, confessants became convinced by the authoritative claims that confessing was good for their spiritual, psychological, and even their physical health, even in penal contexts in which the result of confession was not forgiveness and resolution, but punishment, incarceration, and even death. Moreover, in so far as confessions speak of “what we hide,” the confessant receives what Foucault calls “the speaker’s benefit,” or the satisfaction of feeling transgressive and progressive. Foucault describes our society as one which has been “loudly castigating itself for its hypocrisy for more than a century, which speaks verbosely of its own silence, takes great pains to relate in detail the things it does not say, denounces the powers it exercises, and promises to liberate itself from the very laws that have made it function.”15 Indeed, he argues, it is the attractive hypothesis that we are repressed that has given us a platform on which to be able to confess constantly, inventing new forms and forums for this discourse, and approaching our confessions with great seriousness. It suits us to think that we cannot speak about sex, because this belief gives us a reason to speak about it and to feel that we are achieving something important both psychologically and politically in the process. By speaking about sex with the preconception that one is repressed, one gratifyingly feels that one is acting therapeutically for oneself and that one is being a political agent for a more liberated society in the process. For Foucault, “This explains the solemnity with which one speaks of sex nowadays.”16 Foucault thus sets out to ask not “Why are we repressed? but rather, Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed?”17 Foucault’s aim is not to claim that there have not been discourses which set out to control sex and discourse on sex, but rather to show that these very mechanisms of so-called repression have caused sexualities and discourse on sexuality to proliferate rather than to be silenced, and, moreover, to examine our investment and pleasure in conceiving of ourselves as silenced in order to continue our endless speech. But why would we seek out pretenses such as the repressive hypothesis, which is so difficult to reconcile with our inundation with sexual discourses, in order to speak in the fi rst place? The desire to find such a gratifying hypothesis already assumes an earlier desire to speak, and thus confessional speech is already grounded in a pleasure other than the supposed liberation from repression or the achievement of psychic freedom

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and health that the repressive hypothesis assumes. For Foucault, the desires and pleasures of confession spring from the manners in which confessional speech and the power relations in which it takes place became sexualized in the process of informing themselves about sex. When power became interested in sex, a sexualization of power occurred. As Foucault vividly describes it: The power which thus took charge of sexuality set about contacting bodies, caressing them with its eyes, intensifying areas, electrifying surfaces, dramatizing troubled moments. It wrapped the sexual body in its embrace. There was undoubtedly an increase in effectiveness and an extension of the domain controlled; but also a sensualization of power and a gain of pleasure.18 Doctors, like priests, become objects of desire through their interrogations into the desires and pleasures of their patients, and the whispering subject produces a desire for herself in her listener, and in herself pursues a desire for this desire of the other in her speech. The medical gaze, not despite its objectivity but because of it, is sensualized, and the “spirals of pleasure and power” of confession are multifold: exhibitionist, voyeuristic, masochistic. Stephen Dedalus, in James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, is tempted to become a priest because of the intense sexuality offered by priesthood, despite its vow of chastity, or because of the sexual allure of the confessional: He would know obscure things, hidden from others, from those who were conceived and born children of wrath. He would know the sins, the sinful longings and sinful thoughts and sinful acts, of others, hearing them murmured into his ears in the confessional under the shame of a darkened chapel by the lips of women and of girls [ . . . ] He would hold his secret knowledge and secret power, being as sinless as the innocent [ . . . ]19 Similarly, the psychoanalyst Annie Reich has argued that the decision to become a psychoanalyst is at least partially determined by a curiosity to know peoples’ secrets, including their sexual secrets, even if the desire which these confidences give rise to cannot be acted upon in the clinic any more than in the confessional. 20 In fi lms and television series such as The Thorn Birds and Le confessionel, the sexual tension between young priests and female confessants is played out again and again, while in the recent Confi dences trop intimes psychotherapeutic confession between the beautiful woman who speaks and the man who listens creates a similar powerfraught eroticism that is at least as old as the relationship between Joseph Breuer and “Anna O.” Foucault describes the “double effect” of this sensualization of discourse produced within relations of power:

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The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault [ . . . ] an impetus was given to power through its very exercise; an emotion rewarded the overseeing control and carried it further; the intensity of the confession renewed the questioner’s curiosity; the pleasure discovered fed back to the power that encircled it. But so many pressing questions singularized the pleasures felt by the one who had to reply. They were fi xed by a gaze, isolated and animated by the attention they received. Power operated as a mechanism of attraction; it drew out those peculiarities over which it kept watch. Pleasure spread to the power that harried it; power anchored the pleasure it uncovered. 21

Caught up in these “perpetual spirals of power and pleasure,” confessional speech is now experienced as an internal rather than an external compulsion, while the very fact that confessional speech was coerced, and that coercion became sexualized, came to make confessions erotically desired. As such, the psychic resistance to confess, or our gratifying talk of such resistances, seems an effect of power, and the overcoming of such resistances or repression is experienced as an achievement of freedom. The claim that we feel a resistance to confess becomes an excuse to confess, when in fact the existence of such resistance is undermined by our very pleasure in confessing, such that Rousseau will have to confess in the Rêveries that he took too much pleasure in writing the Confessions, that these confessions had too few impediments, in fact, to overcome. We thus have an inversed notion of the relation between power and speech, according to Foucault, and our belief that freedom is achieved through confession shows that we are “completely taken in by this internal ruse of confession.”22 We desire to be trapped by the frail and transparent ruse of confession, however, and by its inverted notion of the workings of power, because such self-deception allows us to go on confessing. Describing this inversion and deception, Foucault writes: The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature “demands” only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place, the violence of a power weighs it down, and it can fi nally be articulated only at the price of a kind of liberation. Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence; truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an original affi nity with freedom [ . . . ]23 But if we deceive ourselves about both our repression and our liberation because it allows us to confess in a way which is gratifying to us, the next questions to ask are: what are the consequences of this pleasure? Why would this particular form of pleasure worry Foucault, who urges that we proliferate pleasures in general?

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TRUTH AND THE SELF “It is possible,” Foucault writes, “that the West has not been capable of inventing any new pleasures, and it has doubtless not discovered any original vices. But it has defi ned new rules for the game of powers and pleasures. The frozen countenance of the perversions is a fi xture of this game.”24 The mise-en-discours of sex is thus not qualified as a new pleasure, but as a new method of playing the game, and the result is that with the confessions that the scientia sexualis required having transformed themselves into a peculiarly Western ars erotica, pleasures become perversions caught up with identity as never before. The point is not far from de Man’s argument in “Autobiography as De-facement” that autobiography will create life rather than life creating autobiographies: de Man writes: “We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of its medium?”25 For Foucault, confession has become the manner in which subjectivity is produced in the modern West, to the extent that Peter Brooks can claim that there would be no modern self without confession. 26 In the now classical example which Foucault provides, homosexuality as act, desire, or pleasure, already existed before people engaged in it became compelled and enticed to talk about it, but now that they confess, pressured libidinally, psychologically and politically to “come out of the closet” and affi rm who they are by means of this speech, the act becomes the defi ning trait of their being: “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”27 Replacing early modern forms of identity based in family, allegiance, or bloodline, “The truthful confession was inscribed at the heart of the procedures of individuation by power.”28 Confession is assujettisement “in both senses of the word.”29 In an identity-obsessed society in which identity is produced through confession, modern “man,” for Foucault, has become a “confessing animal,”30 and having long-since left the confi ned space of the confessional, the domains of discourse in which this animal confesses are almost all-encompassing. As Foucault writes: The confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites; one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell. One confesses in public and in private, to one’s parents, one’s educators, one’s doctor, to those one loves; one admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain, things it would be impossible to tell to anyone else, the things people write books about. 31

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Although sins and particularly sexual sins interested Christian confessors, and although sexuality remains privileged in the many forms of confession we produce today, it is clear from this passage that we now nevertheless confess to everything to do with the “self,” and not just to our sins and our sex lives. We confess to our childhoods, for instance, and to the power dynamics of our families, in ways which would not have interested Renaissance priests. The problem for Foucault is that all this confession is involved in a hermeneutics of the self which involves a particular form of truth production, constructing the truths of selves in its quest to “reveal” them, while truth is always a product of power. As Foucault writes: “truth is not by nature free—nor error servile—[ . . . ] its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power. The confession is an example of this.”32 Within relations of power we are compelled, and internalize the compulsion, to search out and bring into the light of day the truth of our selves, but in the process we create these truths, and create selves as products of power. In confessing to our childhoods, for instance, we create and remain that child, for Foucault, rather than reveal and overcome her, as a certain popularized version of psychoanalysis would have it. To illustrate his point about the productive power of discourse, Foucault uses the controversial example of a nineteenth-century French peasant named Jouy. Jouy was “a bit simple-minded,” and paid young girls in the village for sexual favors because older girls would not provide him with them. 33 Although, as Foucault presents it, it was the force of his circumstances that made this peasant have sex with young girls rather than women his own age, and in earlier eras the community would have thought little of this, Jouy had the bad luck to live in an age in which sexualities and sexual perversions were being categorized and studied with great zeal, and so what were, for Foucault, harmless and meaningless sexual activities on Jouy’s part were taken an interest in, and he was arrested and placed in the custody of doctors and psychiatrists. These doctors made Jouy speak and made his confessions an object of science. Because sexuality in the modern period had come to be seen as the key to a subject’s identity, the sexual acts that Jouy had engaged in did not appear to the doctors and scientists who investigated his case to be the result of his circumstances, but an expression of his essential being, and investigating his case was an opportunity to understand the nature of pedophiles in general. In Foucault’s terms, Jouy was individualized by power in the process of his interrogations. He was not a pedophile before he began confessing, but he was given and took on an identity as pedophile because scientists viewed him as such and made him speak in these terms. As pedophile, Jouy was attributed with a set of characteristics which would apply to all aspects of his being and not merely to his sex life. In the case of Jouy, an “everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality”34 was treated as and thus incorporated by the subject as “a singular nature.” This “nature” was assumed to be “written immodestly

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on his face and body”35 such that the doctors would go so far as to measure Jouy’s brainspan, study his facial bone structure, and examine his anatomy for the source of his degeneration and perversion, as they would for homosexuals and other “perverts.” In an effect of the sciences of sex which is remarkable today, we see that as sex became essential to identity, law came to think of interfering with the very body and brain of the criminal (chemical castration therapy for instance). An individual’s sexual practices have ceased to be seen as something that could change with circumstances, and “perversions” are now seen as permanent, not to be overcome, and sex offenders are hence thought to be (and are thus constructed to be) bound to repeat their crimes, as was not the case in pre-modern legal thought, when sexual crimes, unlike theft for instance, were taken little interest in and not deemed bound to an offender’s character or to repetition. 36 Jouy, however, living in the age which he did and thus having the significance of his sex acts construed as intrinsic to his identity and thus to repetition, spent the rest of his life institutionalized in the hospital of Maréville. Sex has become viewed as destiny, and thus that destiny was enforced, as in Jouy’s case, or was produced through the extraction of confessional discourse and through the workings of coercive power. Today it seems true that sex offenders are prone to reoffend unless their bodies are tampered with, but for Foucault this was not always and need not have been the case, and historical research into sex crimes in premodern times would seem to affi rm this. 37 What is clear for Foucault is that the confessional discourse which produces sexuality, including socially transgressive sexualities, is not given freely, whatever pleasure it brings, and the result of it is not liberation from repressive power but rather a submission to it and a fi xation of identity and thus a loss of freedom, as is seen quite literally in the case of Jouy. If sexual confession brings us narcissistic and erotic pleasure, it also deprives subjects of pleasures set outside the margins of their particular categories of individualization. As such, for Foucault, the multiplication of pleasures, rather than the further multiplication of the pleasures of confessional discourses on pleasure, could be a truly political or liberatory act.

THE PRODUCTION OF TRUTH, AND FALSE CONFESSIONS It has been seen that Foucault considers confession a form of truth-production, a procedure which our society has developed for producing the truth, and the truth of sex and of human subjectivity in particular. The Church and the inquisitional tribunals which it created wanted to know the truth about the acts and thoughts of the laity, and modern science wanted to know the truth about the private lives of populations, and inciting confessional speech was a disciplinary method of producing this truth. That confessions are particularly authentic cases of truth-telling has a wide acceptance, and

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Philippe Lejeune has argued in “Le pacte autobiographique” that the fact that the author’s name appears as both the proper name of the character in her story and as signature to the text functions as a quasi-legalistic contract, giving the text the authoritative status of truth. 38 Similarly, Brooks notes that “from early in the Romantic era onward, Western literature has made the confessional mode a crucial kind of self-expression that is supposed to bear a special stamp of sincerity and authenticity and to bear special witness to the truth of the individual personality.”39 Foucault nuances the belief that an authentic self is simply being born witness to in autobiographical writing, arguing that a disciplined self is rather being produced. While a confessing subject may tell the truth about what she has done or thought, this truth is spoken and understood not simply as relating to the circumstantial acts or arbitrary thoughts of the speaking subject, but much more significantly as being the truth of her inner self, and that truth of the inner self is produced for Foucault through this form of discourse. Such speech acts do not simply refer to the past of the individual, therefore, but are determining factors in her future as well. As such, truth is a product of power and is constraining rather than freeing. Truth, for Foucault, or at least the truth he is interested in—e.g. not mathematical or geometrical truths, and not the fact that an event occurred, but rather what is understood from its occurrence—is a thoroughly political construct with no ontological existence prior to relations of power. What is assumed throughout Foucault’s writings on confession, despite his attention to the coercive effects of power and desire, is that what the confessant says about her acts and thoughts is true to begin with, or is propositionally true. What “truth” means for Foucault is a complicated question. Foucault is known for making claims such as “Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history.”40 The “truth” referred to here is a socially constructed one, and yet the fact that Foucault calls this truth an error suggests that there exists a more objective truth in relation to which socially constructed truths can be deemed errors. C. G. Prado has identified five “faces of truth” in Foucault’s work, which he labels the ‘criterial notion of truth,’ the ‘constructivist notion of truth,’ the ‘perspectivist notion of truth,’ the ‘experiential notion of truth,’ and the ‘tacitrealist notion of truth.’41 The fi rst three notions of truth are inter-related and are the notions of truth for which Foucault is most well-known, as in the citation above, and which most alarm his critics. The ‘criterial notion of truth’ refers to the relativistic mechanisms for distinguishing between truth claims which are particular to specific societies and times. The ‘constructivist notion of truth,’ which is the notion of truth most prevalent in Foucault’s work and which I have been discussing so far, argues that truth is a production of power. The Nietzschean, ‘perspectivist notion of truth,’ according to which there are only interpretations, and thus that every event and every claim has multiple meanings, is also relativistic.

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Somewhat differently, the ‘experiential notion of truth,’ in Foucault’s examples, are truths derived from tests, trials, torture, or through experiences which challenge our beliefs and values. Prado offers further examples of experiential truths, such as truths resulting from the loss of religious or political faith, or from the betrayal of a friend. This is a notion of truth which Foucault describes as “repugnant to both science and philosophy,”42 because derived from events personally experienced rather than from reason. In this category we might place performative or therapeutic truths. For Freud, if an interpretation of a symptom led to the relief of that symptom, this indicated that the interpretation was true. Similarly, one can confess to an act which one did not, in fact, commit, but in telling this story repeatedly it can become part of who one is, how one understands oneself and is seen by others, and how one goes on to act. In this sense, the claim becomes true of oneself through its performance. In cases such as these, the demonstration of truth occurred through experience, not rational deduction. Experiential truths are proven to “work,” not entirely unlike medieval épreuves. Although medieval trials and therapeutic truths both arguably draw on an experiential notion of truth, that a twelfth-century subject would resort to walking over hot coals to experience truth whereas a twentieth-century subject is satisfied with the “truth” of a narrative constructed in therapy because it helps her to make sense of her life, shows that experiential truths draw on mechanisms available to the subject depending on her social context. In other words, experiential truths are also constructed, perspectival, and criterial. Finally, what is being called the ‘tacit-realist notion of truth’ arises, Prado acknowledges, very infrequently in Foucault’s writings, and refers to ahistorical truths. Prado argues that Foucault’s own tacit understanding of his genealogical writings is that they are true in a realist sense, whereas the histories which his own genealogies refute are deemed perspectivist, constructed, and criterial. For Prado, that Foucault has a tacit-realist notion of truth is contradictory to his project. Prado’s claim that Foucault viewed his own genealogical claims as truths of the tacit-realist sort is, however, inaccurate, as Foucault explicitly and repeatedly acknowledged that his own genealogies were as perspectivist as any other history, but were different in being self-conscious of their perspectivism.43 Not all truth claims are equal, however, for instance the claim that millions of Jews and others died under National Socialism is propositionally true in a way which the statements of a Holocaust denier are not, based on accepted methods of verification. Beyond the basic claim that events such as deaths under National Socialism occurred, however, every value we attach to events, and the fact that we remember these events rather than others, are, for Foucault, perspectival, and since his own genealogies do involve value judgments, these histories are self-consciously perspectival. What interests me is that when Foucault discusses confession, he considers confessional truths only as criterial, constructed, perspectivist,

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and, importantly, experiential. He does not, however, consider whether or not confessions are propositionally true, which is not irrelevant in the case of legal confessions. Even when Foucault makes references to practices of extracting confessions through torture, he does not consider the case in which one confesses to something which, in fact, one never did, never desired, or never thought about before the moment of confession, and whether such statements also become true of the self or are experientially and constructively true. While we know that false confessions exist in all confessional realms— in religious confession, in psychoanalysis, in autobiography, in criminal interrogations, and in private confessions—it may be thought that Foucault does not discuss them because they are atypical of confessions, and in general one confesses to what one has actually experienced, or what is true in a propositional sense of the word. As has been seen, Foucault in fact defi nes confession as “To declare aloud and intelligibly the truth of oneself,” 44 and thus it might be thought that false confessions simply are not confessions, or perhaps that they become true of the inner self of the confessant through the very practice of confession. In other words, confessions which are false in terms of propositional content may become experientially true. The following section will argue that false confessions are not, however, atypical, and moreover that confessional discourse, far from being true by defi nition, may tend towards untruth by its very nature as pleasurable, as shameful, as excusatory, and as coercive. If in the process of being confessed false confessions become true of the subject in a performative or experiential sense, we need to think about what kinds of subjectivities are confessed to in false confessions. In particular, while fiction or other aesthetic practices (including, perhaps, psychoanalysis) that make use of but abuse the autobiographical mode may in some cases be seen as self-transformative in a positive way, false confessions made in a legal context may be particularly prone to bear witness to, fulfill, and produce a self-destructive subject, and can result in material harm (incarceration, stigmatization, death) for the speaking subject.

PLEASURES In the 2004 fi lm by Patrice Leconte, Confi dences trop intimes, a woman hoping to make an appointment with a psychiatrist mistakenly knocks on the door of the psychiatrist’s neighbor, a tax lawyer. The tax lawyer assumes that the woman is requesting an appointment to go over her fiscal affairs with him, and only when the consultation is underway, and the woman begins to speak to him about her private life, her marriage and her unhappiness rather than about her income and expenses, does he realize that a mistake has been made, at which point, however, he is too embarrassed to interrupt her. When the woman returns the following week for

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her next appointment the tax lawyer has decided to clear up the misunderstanding as soon as she arrives, but fi nds he is not given the opportunity to do so as his confessant immediately takes up her intimate speech once more, making it increasingly awkward for him to interrupt her with his own confession of mistaken identity. Part of him also does not desire to bring these strange meetings to an end through such an admission, as he is intrigued by his beautiful confessant and by the narrative she is telling, which is certainly more interesting than his other consultations. When he does at last inform her of the mistake, however, he learns that she had realized the error after their fi rst meeting but had decided to return anyway, having taken pleasure in making her confessions to him. The two therefore agree to continue their weekly meetings, during which the woman tells her confessor about her handicapped and abusive husband, her sexual dissatisfaction, and her sexual desires. The tax lawyer is soon passing his time between visits in restless anticipation of their weekly meetings, and the confessional scenes are presented as erotic seductions of the confessor by the confessant. Increasingly preoccupied by the meetings, the tax lawyer visits the psychiatrist next door and confides in him what has occurred, asking his advice on the woman’s case. In the process of advising him, the psychiatrist plants the seed of doubt in the lawyer’s mind that the woman’s confessions might be untrue. At this point in the fi lm, the viewer more or less assumes that the woman’s stories are seductions rather than truths. One day, however, the tax lawyer gives in to his intrigue and suspicion and follows the woman home after their meeting, only to discover that she does in fact live in the sort of place she has described to him. Soon after, he is visited by the woman’s husband who, to the viewer’s surprise, does in fact exist and is exactly as the woman had described him. In the course of his threats to the tax lawyer, the husband moreover confi rms the confessions his wife has made. The surprise of the fi lm is that the confessions are true. The psychiatrist, the tax lawyer, and the viewer have all been suspicious that the confessant’s tales be deceptions, and the fact that they are true thus strikes one as counter-intuitive, perhaps even disappointing some viewers in the plot. Having anticipated the woman’s exposure and the confessor’s response to the discovery that he has been manipulated by a woman’s sexual fantasies, the viewer may actually feel let down by the banality of the story as it concludes: the tales were true, there is less psychological complexity than anticipated, and so, once the woman has left her husband, there is no impediment to the attraction and love which has grown between confessant and confessor. We are left, against all our expectations of French fi lms, with psychological transparency and a neat and happy ending. On further reflection, however, what is precisely so interesting about Confi dences trop intimes is that by foiling our expectations it shows that we are intuitively suspicious of confessions. Indeed, there were no factual clues leading us to doubt the woman’s honesty, no empirical hints that her

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story might have been false. Rather, what raises the viewer’s suspicions, as it raises those of the psychiatrist and of the tax lawyer himself, is that the confessional sessions are pleasurable. As erotic performances and as seductions of the listener it seems that desire, rather than an accurate description of facts, is the end of the words spoken. The gratifying nature of the relation between confessant and confessor makes the content of the confessions too good to be true. As seen, Foucault has described the “perpetual spirals of pleasure and power” involved in the confessional relation, and this spiraling is apparent in Confi dences trop intimes: if originally the situation is one in which the woman is in psychological need and is vulnerable as a result of her confessions, while the confessor is in a position of power as the one who hears and witnesses the woman’s self-exposure, this situation is quickly reversed and complexified. The confessor now has to confess to his confessant that he is not a psychiatrist, and that he did not interrupt her immediately to tell her this, but received her confessions as an impostor, having had no right to learn the things about her private life that he did. Seduced by what she has said, desiring the continuation of their relation, he is not indifferent to how she will respond to his self-exposure of guilt. The confessor is quickly under the sway of his confessant, living in anticipation of her visits, libidinally and emotionally invested in the pleasure of hearing her speak. In this complex bond between confessant and confessor, the viewer quite naturally assumes that truth will be left by the wayside and that what the woman decides to say will have more to do with sexual fantasy and seduction, with a prolongation of a mutual pleasure and with the incitement of desire in her listener, than with a devotion to historical fact. If the form of confessional pleasure apparent in Confi dences trop intimes is voyeuristic and exhibitionistic, another form of pleasure which confession brings, and which also endangers the truthfulness of what is said, is masochistic. According to Theodor Reik’s psychoanalytic study of confession, confession is “a call for punishment, a plea to a parental figure to punish the child in order that the child may be reintegrated into parental love,”45 and, as in the case of erotic confessions, the desire for punishment from a parental authority may lead the confessant to make false confessions of guilt for the pleasures that they produce. Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, for instance, admits to taking pleasure in the humiliation of confession to a parental authority such that he is willing to fabricate deeds to confess to, and then feels genuinely ashamed of them. He is thus capable of deceiving himself to the extent of feeling shame over acts he only lied about having committed, while the semi-conscious awareness of his selfdeception provides an additional locus for pleasurable shame, and thus the need for more confession, for confessing to having confessed falsely, and for having taken pleasure in this shame. In an example of such a confession to a false confession, he writes:

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How can one, after all, have the slightest respect for a man who tries to fi nd pleasure in the feeling of humiliation itself? I’m not saying that out of any mawkish sense of repentance. In general, I couldn’t stand saying ‘Sorry, Papa, I’ll never do it again.’ [later he says he is an orphan] And it wasn’t at all because I was incapable of saying it. On the contrary, perhaps I was only too prone to say it. And you should’ve seen under what circumstances too! I’d get myself blamed, almost purposely, for something with which I’d had nothing to do even in thought or dream. That’s what was most disgusting. But, even so, I was always deeply moved, repented my wickedness, and cried; in this, of course, I was deceiving myself, although I never did so deliberately.46 Many descriptions of confession admit that the confession was experienced as a pleasurable form of shame. In other cases, satisfaction seems to be derived from a self-destructive gratification of guilt which longs for punishment and exposure. Rousseau’s Confessions, like those of the Underground Man, demonstrate this masochistic pleasure in confessing, and the ways in which this form of pleasure, as in the case of erotic pleasure, undermines the truth-telling function of the confession. Rousseau claims in his Confessions: “I have presented myself as I am” (“Je me suis montré tel que je fus”) 47 and “I have unveiled my interior” (“j’ai dévoilé mon intérieur”).48 This account of his “enterprise” is consistent with Foucault’s analysis of modern confessional subjectivity in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction in that the confessant wants to tell the truth of his “inner self.” Moreover, in desiring to unveil his interior self, Rousseau immediately discusses his sexuality in a manner which, for Foucault, is characteristic of modern confession. This seems a bit peculiar if one keeps in mind that Rousseau’s supposed incentive for writing his Confessions was his exposure for having abandoned all of his children and then having had the audacity to offer child-raising advice in Émile. One knows that Rousseau had in fact already begun drafting his confessional writings before his exposure by Voltaire, however, and thus that the revelation of his abandonment of his children functioned merely as an excuse for the continued writing and publication of the Confessions. 49 Nevertheless, as a nod to this excuse we might have expected that Rousseau would begin with his confession of these abandonments, and yet a discussion of them occurs only quite late and then briefly in the Confessions. The crucial thing to explain, it seemed self-evident to Rousseau, was his self and thus his sexuality, and his children, or their memories, were thus once again abandoned or set aside. In fact, by explaining his sexuality, Rousseau may have thought that he was explaining all of his later deeds, including the abandonment of his children, given the centrality of sexuality to a person’s entire identity, which to a pre-modern or early-modern subject would have seemed a strange logic indeed.

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The sexuality to which Rousseau confesses is, famously, a masochistic sexuality, and he describes at the outset of his Confessions the pleasures he took in being physically punished by his aunt and the desire he felt for a repetition of this punishment, desire which he nevertheless never dared admit to any of his lovers and hence never again had fulfi lled. We might note here that right away, in these fi rst pages of the Confessions describing Rousseau’s aunt and the masochistic desires she supposedly implanted in him, there are several “errors” in fact: for instance Rousseau claims that his parents and his aunt and uncle married on the same day when their weddings were in fact some years apart, and he also says that on the occasion that he was disciplined by his aunt he was eight and she was thirty, whereas really he was eleven and she was forty. Similar discrepancies are found throughout the Confessions, as has often been noted. Peter Brooks argues that these sorts of errors in autobiographical writings may not be significant to the truthfulness of an autobiographer’s project judged on its own terms, however, since the autobiographer aims less to tell propositional truths than to tell the truth of his inner self. With respect to the truth of Rousseau’s character, accuracy regarding ages and dates may not matter. A confession about guilt over stealing an apple, for instance, may not be true in demonstrating that the confessant actually stole an apple, but it may be true in so far as it indicates that the confessant feels a certain guilt which requires some outlet, some narrative of guilt, for which the apple-story is a more or less arbitrary solution. As Brooks writes, “The false referentiality of confession may be secondary to the need to confess.”50 Moreover, confessing to the stolen apple, and perhaps consequently being punished for the theft, may actually serve a performative or therapeutic truth-function: as noted, for Freud the truth of the memories he retrieved from a patient’s unconscious was proved by its effectiveness in curing symptoms, and so psychic effectiveness may indicate a therapeutic truth, even if it cannot be identified with an historical event. A suspect confessing to a crime may similarly feel purged of his guilt, even if he did not commit the crime, unless he simply feels more guilt for having lied in his confession and as a result of the pleasures he experienced in being punished. Returning to Rousseau, it does not really matter that he was really eleven and his aunt was really forty when the disciplining incident occurred (if it occurred), just as it does not matter narratively if the Underground Man invents the story of having confessed to his ‘Papa’ deeds he never committed (if indeed he is not an orphan). What matters is that Rousseau is getting masochistic pleasure from the shame of confessing to his masochism, and the Underground Man from the shame of describing his abjectly false confessions, and this is true, whatever the ages of Rousseau and his aunt at the remembered time, and whether or not the Underground Man ever really had a father to whom he could make false confessions in the hopes of punishment. The interesting connection

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between the confessant’s masochism, his need for shameful exposure, and his lies, is not the content of any particular lies, but is rather the way in which masochistic confessional desire produces the need for lies precisely because the propositional truth or falsity of what is said is less important than expressing and providing an outlet for the confessant’s pleasurable shame and guilt. Truth may be an impediment to the fulfi llment of a confessant’s desire and motivation in confession, and is thus not part of the confessional mechanism. As such, whether or not the incident with Rousseau’s aunt ever occurred at any age is beside the point, because the purpose of the Confessions is less to tell the truth about what happened in historical fact, and is more about the performative exposure of the truth of Rousseau’s self and, for Rousseau, about the masochistic pleasure with which this performance in fact provided him.

SHAME In “Excuses (Confessions),” de Man underscores the pleasure Rousseau takes in recounting moments of shame, and particularly with respect to the incident of the stolen ribbon. In the confession of the stolen ribbon, Rousseau tells his reader that he stole a ribbon while working as a servant in order to give the ribbon to another domestic in the household, Marion. When the stolen ribbon was discovered in his possession, Rousseau writes that he blamed the theft on Marion, saying that she had given it to him, and repeated his incrimination of the maid under further interrogations. Both Rousseau and Marion lost their jobs, but while Rousseau, as a man, simply continued in his travels, he imagines that Marion might have been condemned to a life of prostitution once her honesty was cast into doubt, rendering her unhireable for other domestic jobs. This is purportedly the moment in his past which caused Rousseau the most regret and shame, and indeed inspired him to write his Confessions. Although for this reason the ribbon episode is supposedly painful for Rousseau to describe, de Man points out that it is in fact written “with special panache” and “relish,”51 or with apparent pleasure. De Man notes the “obvious satisfaction in the tone and the eloquence of the passage,” noting “the easy flow of hyperboles (‘ . . . je la craignois [la honte] plus que la mort, plus que le crime, plus que tout au monde. J’aurois voulu m’enforcer, m’étouffer dans le centre de la terre . . . ’), the obvious delight with which the desire to hide is being revealed [ . . . ].”52 De Man goes on to claim that Rousseau’s shame “is primarily exhibitionistic.” Rousseau’s exhibitionism is perhaps anecdotally confi rmed, elsewhere in the Confessions, by his episodes of sexual exhibitionism, as he tells us that he enjoyed exposing himself to young girls, risking the shame of being exposed in his pleasure in exposure, as indeed eventually happens. De Man’s point here is more damning, however:

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The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault What Rousseau really wanted is neither the ribbon nor Marion, but the public scene of exposure which he actually gets. The fact that he made no attempt to conceal the evidence confi rms this. The more crime there is, the more theft, lie, slander, and stubborn persistence in each of them, the better. The more there is to expose, the more there is to be ashamed of; the more resistance to exposure, the more satisfying the scene, and, especially, the more satisfying and eloquent the belated revelation, in the later narrative, of the inability to reveal. This desire is truly shameful, for it suggests that Marion was destroyed, not for the sake of Rousseau’s saving face, nor for the sake of his desire for her, but merely in order to provide him with a stage on which to parade his disgrace or, what amounts to the same thing, to furnish him with a good ending for Book II of his Confessions. The structure is self-perpetuating, en abîme, as is implied in its description as exposure of the desire to expose, for each new stage in the unveiling suggests a deeper shame, a greater impossibility to reveal, and a greater satisfaction in outwitting this impossibility. 53

It has been seen that Foucault writes that “The confession is a ritual of discourse [ . . . ] a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has to surmount in order to be formulated.” The claim that one is overcoming resistance and shame in order to tell the truth, makes the gesture of confession an act of bravery, a quasi-heroic and emancipatory act, and thus pleasurable in virtue of its very claims about pain and shame. The “gratifi cation” of confession, the “speaker’s benefit” which Foucault has described, depends on the pleasures of shame, the pleasures of overcoming shame, of confessing despite this shame. As de Man points out, however, the confession also produces more shame, and thus the need for more confession, and so forth en abîme in what Derrida has described as an almost machine-like functioning, such that it is predictable that Rousseau would confess to the stolen ribbon episode again in the Rêveries. For Foucault, claiming that confession is difficult, expressing one’s “scruples” before one gets around to confessing, provides one with an excuse to confess. These “scruples,” resistances, make confession a feat which one can afterwards congratulate oneself on accomplishing, rendering confession into a pleasure, mixing or replacing shame with pride, or as de Man says, “the greater satisfaction in outwitting this impossibility [of confessing].” This satisfaction is problematic, however, as it effaces the supposed shame and difficulties which were said to be the motivating factors of the confession in the fi rst place. One gets pleasure in confessing because it is said to be difficult, and yet if it is too pleasant, it ceases to be difficult, and one loses one’s excuse to confess. And, as de Man notes, if it was for the pleasure of its future revelation that Marion was destroyed, rather than for the reasons Rousseau’s excuses put forth, the crime is bleak indeed,

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and thus the excuse for confession (resistance/pleasure) may well render that which is confessed to inexcusable. De Man continues, “shame used as excuse permits repression to function as revelation and thus to make pleasure and guilt interchangeable. Guilt is forgiven because it allows for the pleasure of revealing its repression. It follows that repression is in fact an excuse, one speech act among others.”54 We have already seen that Foucault is also less interested in repression’s existence than in the way it is mobilized as a reason to confess. Similarly, we are close to Deleuze’s point in Difference and Repetition that, “We do not repeat because we are repressed, but rather we repress, and disguise, in order to go on repeating.”55 Repression indeed functions as a justification, the aim of de-repression furnishing the confessor with a reason to confess. And we want to confess, to go on repeating the confession, and so we repress, or claim to be repressed, make much of this repression as preface to our confessions, in order to go on speaking, to have the pleasure of speaking of ourselves and our exquisite shame. The supposed overcoming of repression is understood as emancipatory, cathartic (even though, as de Man notes, it is the very opposite of cathartic, reproducing itself interminably), and, so far as it is supposed to be difficult, a form of penance for the original crime. Rousseau argues that however much he may have harmed Marion, she has been avenged by what he has suffered since, not only at the hands of her innumerable “avengers,” but in the throes of his own guilt and shame in memory, not least of all experienced in his act of (twice) confessing publicly to his crime. If his original crime against Marion was to conceal his shame, he effaces this crime in the counter-act of revealing it, suffering the penance of his shame belatedly but in a magnified fashion, or before a greater public than that of the original Turin household. The pleasure which he takes in this revelation, however, negates it as a suffering of penance, not allowing it to function as exculpation. Moreover, in producing more shame, the confession does not serve the purpose of doing away with the need for confession, but instead produces more of this need. Rousseau thus rightly worries, at the end of the Fourth Rêverie, over the too great pleasure he took in writing his Confessions. He must now confess to having enjoyed confessing, to the shame of having enjoyed exposing his shame, and yet the problem is that this second shame is but another pleasure. In “Typewriter Ribbon,” Derrida in a manner exculpates Rousseau of having destroyed Marion by insinuating that the theft and the scene of accusation may never have taken place. Although this would salvage Rousseau’s innocence with respect to Marion, who may never have existed, it would at the same time culpabilize Rousseau for fabricating a story which is central to the Confessions and which reoccurs in the Rêveries. The guilt and shame experienced as a result of the stolen ribbon episode, as noted, are said to have been the very motivating factor for Rousseau’s writing of the Confessions, and hence the falsity of this story might undermine

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Rousseau’s project more than some of the other untruths which we know are strewn throughout the text. Although he never goes so far as to insist that the ribbon episode was fabricated, Derrida expresses amazement at the observation that Rousseau, like Augustine, confesses to a theft, and moreover to a theft supposedly occurring when he, like his predecessor, was sixteen years old. In both cases the theft is of a useless object, and in both cases the confession of this theft takes place at the close of Book 2 of the respective Confessions. In Augustine’s case it is pears, while in Rousseau’s it is the ribbon, although, closer to his predecessor, he also admits to stealing apples. Derrida notes that there are no archives other than Rousseau’s two confessions of the event to prove that the theft and lie about the ribbon ever took place. No trace remains of Marion, no descriptions from witnesses to the event. “Will one ever have access to the truth of this story [ . . . ]?,” Derrida wonders. And: every hypothesis is possible, although I will abstain here from making any, regarding a pure and simple invention of the episode of the theft out of a compositional concern: at sixteen years old and in the second book of his Confessions, like the great ancestor of the Confessions, Augustine, with whom, in the ligneous lineage of the same genealogical tree bearing forbidden fruit, it would be a matter of sharing the titles of nobility. The same tree, the same wood, the same paper pulp. A delicate and abyssal problem of conscious or unconscious archivation. 56 Derrida’s suspicion that Rousseau would invent a central story such as the ribbon episode simply to inscribe himself in the tradition of Augustine is supported by the fact that Rousseau confessed to other incidents of shameful guilt in the Confessions which have been cast into serious doubt, confessions which do not even bind Rousseau to Augustine, and which are hence even more gratuitous and surprising. For instance, early in the Confessions Rousseau tells of walking in Paris with M. de Francueil, who invites him to the opera. According to Rousseau, M. de Francueil paid for Rousseau’s ticket, they entered the opera house, and fi nding themselves submerged in a crowd, Rousseau turned around, refunded his ticket, and absconded with the money, realizing afterwards that his friend would have discovered his absence the moment people took their seats. Through his second marriage to Aurore de Saxe, M. de Francueil would become George Sand’s grandfather, and the latter writes in her autobiography that her grandfather always denied that this story ever happened. 57 If indeed the story is fictitious—and it is hard to imagine why M. de Francueil would deny it if it were true, since it is not unflattering to him—it is equally difficult to see what Rousseau’s incitement was to invent it, as it is not directly relevant to the rest of his work, and seems in no way advantageous to tell. The story of the refunded ticket thus seems to be a mere

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product of Rousseau’s exhibitionist pleasure in shame, such that, like the Underground Man, he is willing to invent shameful stories to confess to for the sheer pleasure that the shame brings him. If Rousseau’s story of his theft of and lie about a ribbon is similarly untrue to that of the opera ticket—and the coincidence Derrida notes seems suspiciously remarkable—the false confession not only brings Rousseau shame, but also functions as a means for him to inscribe himself in a tradition of great Confessions. In her study of Rousseau, Ann Hartle also notes the fact that stories of minor theft conclude the second books of both the Confessions of Saint Augustine and of Rousseau, and moreover that this is but one in a series of structural similarities between the two works. In addition to the similarity which Derrida observes, Hartle points out that both texts also describe a conversion in Book 8, and both works devote the fi rst nine books to the past, and the fi nal two or three books to the present. From these structural similarities, Hartle draws a different conclusion from Derrida: according to Hartle, Rousseau is not trying to inscribe himself in the tradition of great Confessions, but is mimicking the structure of Augustine’s work in order to challenge him, or to make evident his difference from the earlier author with respect to philosophical questions of selfreflection and self-knowledge. Rousseau’s Confessions, Hartle argues, are a self-conscious reply to Saint Augustine, making it a philosophical project which was not intended to be autobiographical, and which therefore need not necessarily be truthful about Rousseau’s life. Whatever the motivation for the confession, one wonders if Rousseau went on to sincerely be tortured by the memory of the lie within the lie, of the lie which may not have taken place: the blaming of the theft on Marion. He confesses to it again, after all, as noted, many years later in his Rêveries, apparently still preoccupied with the “memory” which he hoped, at the time of the Confessions, to never speak of again. He feels tormented for the lie he perhaps never told, rather than for the lie of lying that he had lied. As in a theme which Ingmar Bergman has explored in several fi lms in which destructive, heartwrenching confessions turn out to be untrue and even superfluous (The Silence, The Passion of Anna, Private Confessions), we see that the line between deception and self-deception in Rousseau’s case and possibly in all cases is impossible to discern, and thus, as Derrida notes, we cannot necessarily know whether someone’s confession is a lie or a self-deception. The fact that Rousseau confesses to the ribbon episode a second time in the Rêveries suggests an ongoing guilt and thus that the confession of the theft and lie, if untrue, served as an outlet to that guilt, but may also have produced more guilt, in the en abîme or machine-like structure of desire and shame and guilt producing confessions which in turn produce more desire and shame and guilt and hence more confession. Peter Brooks writes that such false confessions are possible “precisely because the false referentiality of confession may be secondary to the need to confess.” He continues:

92 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault This need [is] produced by the coercion of interrogation or by the subtler coercion of the need to stage a scene of exposure as the only propitiation of accusation, including self-accusation for being in a scene of exposure. Or, as Talmudic law has recognized for millennia, confession may be the product of the death-drive, the production of incriminating acts to assure punishment or even self-annihilation, and hence inherently suspect because in contradiction to the basic human instinct of self-preservation. Or, as Freud would have it, unconscious guilt may produce crime in order to assure punishment as the only satisfaction of the guilt. 58 We might want to resist Brooks’ projection of a notion of the death drive onto the millennia-old Talmudic law, and instead see the masochistic drive that Freud fi rst theorized as descriptive of the confessional tendencies he found (and helped to inculcate) in the modern subjects he analyzed. Whatever its historical roots, Brooks concludes, “Guilt can in any event always be produced to meet the demand for confession, since there is always more than enough guilt to go around, and its concealment can itself be a powerful motive for confession.”59 If de Man is right and Rousseau purposely stole the ribbon and lied that Marion had given it to him out of the desire for the scene of exposure and the confession which he eventually gets, this would be an instance of guilt being “produced to meet the demand for confession” as Brooks describes it. Similarly, even if, as Derrida suggests, the ribbon incident never took place, the very act of confessing, and perhaps believing in the confession once it was made, and moreover the shame of having enjoyed making this confession, would also have produced more guilt and thus the need for or the excuse for the confessions of the Rêveries. What is clear is that in this continual production of shame, guilt, and pleasure, truth, and certainly propositional truth, is often and perhaps even necessarily lost to the fulfillments of the confessional machine’s desires. If truth is nevertheless being produced in that the confessions indicate and inculcate a certain truth about the speaking subject—that he feels guilty, that he desires shame, exposure, and punishment—the constructed and experiential truth being produced, and the form of subjectivity being produced, is a masochistic one. Confession may in fact produce masochism and not merely, as in Reik’s analysis, reflect it.

EXCUSES De Man begins “Excuses (Confessions)” by noting the relation between confessional or autobiographical texts and political texts. While Rousseau’s political text, The Social Contract, is to be understood in terms of the performative speech act of the promise, his autobiographical text, the Confessions, is defi ned by the cognitive speech act of confession, which

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in turn is shown by de Man to be related to the performative function of excusing. The aim of “Excuses (Confessions)” is to explore this move between cognitive confessions and performative excuses, particularly with respect to the episode of the stolen ribbon as it occurs in the Confessions and “Fourth Rêverie.” Confessions are said by de Man to be cognitive because they purport simply to establish facts. They aim to tell the truth of an event, and thus refer to something verifiable, or are referential. This is true, de Man argues, even when the act confessed to is a verbal event: one may confess to saying or writing something, and these acts may at least in principle be checked. Excuses, on the other hand, deal with the “inner feelings” which accompany the acts which are confessed to. Here, de Man stresses, what is being described cannot be confi rmed, and we may only take the person’s word for the veracity of an excuse. While confessions may or may not refer to verbal events, the excuse is always purely verbal, with no proof beyond itself or its power to persuade. The excuse which Rousseau offers for having stolen the ribbon and for lying that Marion stole it, in both cases ultimately involves a certain reference to a machine-like functioning of sounds and events which functioned beyond his control. Initially Rousseau claims that he told the lie, and maintained it, because he feared shame more than punishment, out of a timid rather than malicious character. Already, by referring to his inner feelings of fear and shame, and by persuading the reader of his fundamentally sympathetic character, we are in the realm of excuses. Further, Rousseau tells us that it occurred to him to blame Marion for stealing the ribbon because he intended to give the ribbon to her, and thus she was associated with the ribbon in his mind. As de Man notes, love, for Rousseau, is related in Julie to being able to substitute for the other, with reciprocity and inter-changeability. Thus, since Rousseau loved Marion, stole the ribbon to give to Marion, it was easy for him to slip into saying that Marion stole the ribbon to give to him, thus implying that Marion loved him, since, as object of his love, she ought to have been substitutable for him in her reciprocal love. In a way, when asked “who stole this ribbon?,” by answering “Marion” Rousseau thought he was answering “Jean-Jacques.” De Man asks, “and who would be a dour enough literalist to let a little property stand in the way of young love?”60 We are thus being verbally persuaded to believe in claims about inner feelings, this time of love and a kind of ontological confusion, which would once more excuse Rousseau. The most interesting of Rousseau’s excuses, however, is when he shifts from saying that he said “Marion” because she was in his mind as object of his love, associated with the ribbon as its intended recipient, to claiming that he acted as a kind of marionette, in a machine-like or arbitrary manner, and that “Marion” was, as de Man says, a “free signifier,” simply the fi rst word that came into his mind at the moment that he happened to be being asked who stole the ribbon. As de Man explains,

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Rousseau claims that he “was making whatever noise happened to come into his head; he was saying nothing at all, least of all someone’s name.”61 In the “Fourth Rêverie,” de Man points out, Rousseau argues that a lie occurs when what is said is signifi cant, and does some injustice or harm to the self or others. If a statement is strictly speaking untrue, but useless and harmless, it is not a lie but rather a fiction. De Man argues that in claiming that “Marion” was simply a noise that he happened to utter at the moment he was being questioned about the ribbon, it was a useless, arbitrary sound. Its utterance, however, did cause harm and injustice (if we believe that the event ever occurred), and yet this was not Rousseau’s intention, but rather a regretable consequence of having been misunderstood. If the listeners had not misinterpreted the word “Marion” as an answer to their question, had they recognized its real meaning, or rather meaninglessness, no harm or injustice would have been done, and thus, as far as Rousseau is concerned, no lie was told, but merely a fi ction. That injustice ensued was no fault of Rousseau’s, but the result of a misunderstanding. That Rousseau then went on to suffer guilt for years over this mishap, even renders him an innocent victim of events, more so perhaps than Marion, who was at least avenged, Rousseau assures us, by his later sufferings, however unbeknownst to her. Similarly, just as the word “Marion” was uttered in a machine-like, arbitrary or unmotivated way, so the theft of the ribbon itself was random and unintentional. As de Man explains, Rousseau “took the ribbon out of an unstated and anarchic fact of proximity, without awareness of any law of ownership.”62 Thus, just as the lie was really a fi ction, so the theft was merely an innocuous gesture, another fait oiseux, which only became a crime because its meaning was mistaken. De Man writes, “The fi rst thing established [by Rousseau’s account of the stolen ribbon in the Confessions] [ . . . ] is that the Confessions are not primarily a confessional text.”63 Confession, for de Man, aims merely to tell the truth, to establish the facts of what happened. Rousseau, however, does not stop at admitting to having stolen a ribbon and lied that it was Marion who stole it. Rather, the bulk of his account, as seen, is concerned with explaining why he acted in this way, or with offering excuses, with excusing himself, such that he emerges blameless, indeed victimized by the course of events as they mechanistically unfolded. By claiming that “the Confessions are not primarily a confessional text,” de Man implies that not only in the Marion episode, but in general, Rousseau is more concerned in the Confessions with excusing himself than with the pure truth-telling of verifiable events, and this indeed seems to be the case. The excuse surrounding the ribbon episode is not an isolated slippage from cognition to performative, but rather Rousseau consistently exceeds the mere description of occurrences with in-depth accounts of his personality and motivations, and this is indeed crucial to his project of showing the truth not only of his actions but of his inner self.

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Strangely, however, de Man calls the interruption of confession by excuse at this point in the Confessions an anacoluthon, which he defi nes as “a shift, syntactical or other [ . . . ] It designates any grammatical or syntactical discontinuity in which a construction interrupts another before it is completed,” which, he notes, may have “striking [ . . . ] epistemological implications.”64 He calls the anacoluthonic occurrence of excuse in the Confessions “a localized disruption” which becomes “disseminate[d]” in the Rêveries. 65 Despite the earlier claim that the Confessions are not primarily confessional, but, by implication, are predominantly concerned with excuses, the idea here seems to be that the excuses offered for the ribbon incident constitute an isolated interruption in the Confessions, which are, then, still primarily confessional, while the Rêveries are preoccupied with excusing their author. That de Man sees the Confessions as basically confessional and the Rêveries as excusatory or apologetic is Derrida’s reading of “Excuses (Confessions),” although he also admits to being “perplexed” at this point in de Man’s “difficult” explanation,66 and expresses doubt as to “if [he has] understood correctly,”67 and writes, “this series of affi rmations does not seem to me always clear and convincing.”68 Derrida goes on in “Typewriter Ribbon” to destabilize distinction between the confessional and apologetic or excusatory modes, arguing that confessions are always simultaneously excuses, or apologetic, or that the cognitive and performative moments are inseparable and undecidable. First of all, Derrida notes, if all I am doing is reporting the facts of something that happened, even if that event could be deemed to be a fault of mine, I am not confessing. Derrida observes that I can inform you that I murdered someone without confessing this, for instance if I am pleased with my act (perhaps we are gloating together over the death of our mutual enemy). For this to be a confession, there must also be an aspect of “excusing oneself, repenting, asking forgiveness, converting the fault into love, and so forth.”69 Especially if one is confessing to God, Derrida notes, who already knows everything, merely informing the other of the facts cannot be the main function of confession, but rather one must seek forgiveness at the same time. Derrida uses the term “apologetic confession,” as he explains, “to use two de Manian notions that are here indissociable, always indissociable. And not only in Rousseau.”70 In the case of Rousseau it is clear that Derrida is right that the confessant is always simultaneously making excuses, and at some points Rousseau himself becomes self-conscious that he has shifted from confessing to excusing himself, as when, describing the abandonment of the third of his five children, he writes, “I promised my confession, not my justification; as such, I will stop at this point”71; but of course, he does not stop at this point or at any point, but continues to justify himself or to provide excuses for the confessions he has made, and this is necessary to his project of “unveiling” his interior self. If we follow Derrida’s claim that confessions always excuse the confessant, then de Man’s claim is even weaker. In either case,

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the point to stress is that no anacoluthon occurs when Rousseau offers an excuse for lying about the stolen ribbon, because, as Derrida argues, the entire Confessions and perhaps all confessions are given in the “apologetic confessional” mode. One of the reasons that this point is important is that if all confessions are excusatory, and as de Man says all excuses are unverifiable, then far from confessions being simple “truth-productions,” we can in fact never know whether or not any confession is entirely true. We may be able to affi rm that the act confessed to is true, but so far as we always also want to understand the confessant’s motivations, as Foucault has shown in the case of criminal trials72 , thus requiring that the apologetic-excusatory aspect of confession be present, confessions will never be fully verifiable. Moreover, as Derrida will make clear in “History of the Lie,” if no confession can be verified or known to be true, all confessions should be distrusted. This point is similar to Brooks’s argument about the form of truth involved in confessions. For Brooks, although one can always fi nd untruths or errors in confessional texts with respect to events and facts, this does not necessarily mean that the author failed to be truthful within the context of his enterprise. In the case of Rousseau, for instance, although he is apparently not always trying to tell the truth about historical facts (or else is frequently self-deceived about them), he may very well be consistently telling the truth of his “inner self.” The confession, even if factually false, could be performatively, narratively, therapeutically, or emotionally true of the confessant’s inner soul or as expressions of his psychological needs. Or it may not be. How can we know? Such a claim will always be unverifiable, as is the entire realm of excuses for de Man, and hence the entire realm of confessions for Derrida, since confessions always involve excuses, are excuses, slip into excusing what is confessed to. As such, we have to distrust confessions, but we cannot exactly say that they are lies, nor even if they are true or false. As Derrida points out in “History of the Lie,” knowing if a person has lied requires not only knowing whether the claim is true or false, but also knowing whether the speaker knew about its truth or falsity. A confession is impossible to prove to be a lie since such a proof would necessarily involve knowing not only the truth of a verifiable event as well as the truth of the speaker’s knowledge of that event, but also knowing the speaker’s intentions, or the state of his inner soul at the time that he acted and at the time that he spoke of his act. And as Aquinas noted long ago with respect to the difficulty of judging the sincerity of confessional sorrow, “a man cannot easily measure his own emotions.”73 It is for these reasons, it seems, that Derrida will say even of his own confession, “You would have every right to distrust it, as you would with any confession.”74 In the section above on confessional pleasures it was shown that we do in fact tend to distrust confessions because of the suspicious pleasures that they bring, while in this section we have seen additional reasons for which

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Derrida thinks we “would have every right to distrust [ . . . ] any confession”: because they are always excusatory, and hence unverifiable. The next section will show why Judge Byron White, dissenting in Miranda, will note a similar distrust of confessions, this time on the part of the law. Judge White claims that “The obvious underpinning of the court’s [Miranda] decision is a deep-seated distrust of all confessions.”75 It will be shown that the court would have had good reasons for this distrust, beyond those shown by Foucault, Derrida, and de Man, and indeed should distrust confessions far more than it in fact does.

COERCION AND THE LAW As seen, Foucault argues that all confessions are coercive because they are the products of disciplinary power, and that all truths produced through confessions are products of this power and thus not free. The previous section has shown that the truths produced in confession may also not be true in propositional content, and that their truth status can never be fully ascertained. This section will consider the ways in which the coercive nature of confession, and the tendencies of confessions to untruths, should undermine our faith in confession as authentic proofs of crime in the realm of law. Foucault explores the effects of coercion in confession in terms of their pleasurableness. This pleasure is itself part of what compels confession and what masks the manners in which power is functioning, or in which confessions are compulsory even if gratifying. Rousseau and Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man provide examples of confessional subjects for whom the psychological portrait is even more complicated because caught up with additional psychic affects such as guilt and shame, of pleasure which is also painful, humiliating, for which affects Foucault does not account. For a Foucaultian or a Freudian this admixture of pleasure, guilt and shame, combined with an account of how external coercion can be internalized as desire and inner compulsion, is enough to make us conclude that such confessions are not expressions of a free and rational decision on the subject’s part. There is a sense in which confessions are historically, socially, and psychologically compelled, even in cases such as Rousseau’s or that of the Underground Man in which there is no apparent or external compulsion, where no one is asking for the confession, and indeed where no one wants it. As Brooks notes, “even the most indisputably ‘voluntary’ confession may arise from a state of dependency, shame, and the need for punishment, a condition that casts some doubt on the law’s language of autonomy and free choice.”76 As Brooks suggests, however, where the coerciveness of confessions really becomes an issue is in the context of police interrogations and courts of law. Here, the context seems even more coercive than in the case of a

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Rousseau or an Underground Man writing in his solitude. Here, someone is actively asking for a confession, and hence the confessional compulsion is even greater, and yet, in Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s words, legally acceptable confessions need to be “the product of a free and rational will.”77 From what has been said so far, it would seem that no confessions should be legally acceptable if the requirement for them is that they be free and rational, and yet, as Brooks notes, for pragmatic reasons police interrogators and court judges feel that they cannot make use of a Foucaultian or a Freudian model of the subject and need “a model of human agents as free and rational decision-makers, even in the confession of guilt.”78 Despite Justice O’Connor’s argument that legally-acceptable confessions need to be “the product of a free and rational will,” American and Canadian courts have regularly accepted the confessions of persons who could not possibly fit such a description, not only because of the coercive nature of confession in general, and not only because of the additional police coercion at play in these cases, but also by virtue of the mental state and capacities of the individuals in question: Brooks discusses the case of an American court accepting as voluntary the confession of a delusional schizophrenic,79 while a similar case has recently occurred in Québec. Simon Marshall, a mentally handicapped man with a known history of psychological problems, confessed in 1997 to multiple counts of sexual assault for crimes occurring in Saint-Foy, a suburb of Québec City. Marshall’s family, feeling that Marshall was incapable of the crimes described, asked that a DNA test be taken, and one of Marshall’s supposed victims testified that Marshall could not be her rapist. Nevertheless, based on the assumption that confessions are by their very nature authentic, that no one would confess to a crime he had not committed, even if he is mentally handicapped and disturbed, the police felt no need to take a DNA test after the confession had been made, the court did not require it, and even the suspect’s lawyer assumed his client’s guilt and did not demand further proofs. Consequently, Marshall was convicted based on his confession and served five years in prison. Once out of prison Marshall soon confessed to several more incidents of sexual assault, and this time DNA tests were taken which showed that he was innocent of the more recent crimes, fi nally raising the suspicion that the earlier confessions might also have been false. Indeed, when tests were at last run on the previous assaults they proved that Marshall was innocent of the crimes for which he had served five years. Brooks discusses many similar cases, and particularly disturbing is the case of Paul Ingram, a singularly confessional individual who would claim to remember and then would confess to anything that was suggested to him. Accused by his daughters who had “recovered” memories through psychoanalysis of incest, Ingram would “remember” and sign confessions for all of the stories that his daughters’ lawyers presented to him. Growing suspicious of the ease with which Ingram confessed to everything suggested to him, a psychoanalyst began inventing and presenting Ingram with stories

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that Ingram’s children had in fact not “recovered,” such as that Ingram had made his children have sex with each other while he watched. Ingram quickly confessed to these incidents as well and signed the confessions provided for him. Ingram, a devote Christian, also confessed to participating in satanic rituals during which he sacrificed scores of infants whose corpses he allegedly buried on his property. Although his property was dug up, no such bodies were ever found, nor were there reports of dozens of missing infants in the area. Although clearly Ingram’s confessions were unreliable and many of them were false, what is extraordinary is that the court nevertheless convicted him based on the selected confessions which affi rmed his daughters’ accusations, although there was no evidence for these crimes other than his daughters’ “recovered memories” and Ingram’s own highly questionable consent to these accounts. The accusations were deemed to be true since the suspect confessed to them, because confession is viewed as the most authentic of proofs, even, apparently, when the suspect is clearly willing to confess to anything. Ingram has now taken back his confessions to having raped his daughters, but nevertheless serves his prison time willingly because he is convinced that it is divine punishment. Here is a case of a man who feels a general sense of guilt, inculcated through religious faith, and is thus willing to confess to any act to which that guilt can be fi xed. Whether or not that act occurred is less important than the psychic need Ingram feels to find objects for his guilt, to confess and to be punished. As Brooks observes, Talmudic law did not allow persons to be incriminated through their own confessions, recognizing that they could be untrustworthy testaments, and moreover seeing such self-destructive confessions as unnatural, abject, contrary to the human instinct to live and to protect oneself. Maimonides comments on this aspect of Talmudic law when he writes: It is a scriptural decree that the court shall not put a man to death or flog him on his own admission [of guilt] . . . For it is possible that he was confused in mind when he made the confession. Perhaps he was one of those who are in misery, bitter in soul, who long for death, thrust the sword into their bellies or cast themselves down from the roofs. Perhaps this was the reason that prompted him to confess to a crime he had not committed, in order that he be put to death. To sum up the matter, the principle that no man is to be declared guilty on his own admission is a divine decree.80 The Miranda ruling (leading to the Miranda warnings: “you have the right to remain silent. . . .”), a ruling meant to protect the Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate oneself, makes reference to this Talmudic law, and thus protects what is seen as a natural instinct, and hence a natural right, to guard oneself from harm, even if this is to legalize an obstruction to justice. American Supreme Court Justice Jackson, similarly, agrees with

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Maimonides when he writes that, within a legal context, “It probably is the normal instinct to deny and conceal any shameful or guilty act.”81 If not confessing is “normal” and “instinctual” for Jackson, it would seem that to confess voluntarily in a police interrogation and trial would be a sign of a sickly nature. Jackson continues: Even a ‘voluntary confession’ is not likely to be the product of the same motives with which one may volunteer information that does not incriminate or concern him. The term ‘voluntary’ confession does not mean voluntary in the sense of a confession to a priest merely to rid one’s soul of a sense of guilt. ‘Voluntary confessions’ in criminal law are the product of calculations of a different order, and usually proceed from a belief that further denial is useless and perhaps prejudicial. To speak of any confessions of crime made after arrest as being ‘voluntary’ or ‘uncoerced’ is somewhat inaccurate, although traditional. A confession is wholly and uncontestably voluntary only if a guilty person gives himself up to the law and becomes his own accuser. The Court bases its decision on the premise that custody and examination of a prisoner for thirty-six hours is ‘inherently coercive.’ Of course it is. And so is custody and detention for one hour. Arrest itself is inherently coercive, and so is detention.82 According to Jackson, therefore, a “normal” person would only confess if he calculated that denying his crime was of no use, and that confessing might actually lead to greater clemency in his case. Justice John Marshall Harlan, dissenting in Miranda, cites Justice Jackson’s argument that no confession made after arrest or detention is voluntary or uncoerced, and argues that “the role of the Constitution has been only to sift out undue pressure, not to assure spontaneous confessions.”83 Justice Harlan is thus using the argument that all confessions by suspects are coercive to argue against the Miranda attempt to discount coerced confessions since, logically, this would mean discounting almost all confessions which are used in courts of law. Although this was what worried Justice Harlan about Miranda, Brooks demonstrates that “there is much post-Miranda evidence indicating that the police quickly learned to play by the new rules and that they produced as many confessions as before.” 84 Brooks goes so far as to offer the “cynical interpretation” that the Court simply “cut the Gordian knot of the problem of voluntariness by saying to the police: if you follow these forms, we’ll allow that the confession you obtained was voluntary.”85 The Miranda warnings, far from preventing coerced confessions, simply provided a means for the American legal system to continue producing and making use of coerced confessions without needing to worry their consciences about them since the confessant had been forewarned. For the American legal system, in a country where condemnations of suspects by their own words are so desired that 92%

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of felony convictions are by guilty plea,86 confessions seem too useful to do away with, as even Brooks seems to agree.87 Nevertheless, at least one Justice in the Miranda case, Justice Warren, suggests that the police might use other methods to solve crimes other than the “cruel, simple expedient of compelling [confessions] from [the suspect’s] own mouth.”88 The American justice system has clearly dismissed such an idea, however, and Brooks notes that “Few other nations are as dependent as ours on proving guilt from a defendant’s own mouth.”89 Other countries depend on confessions, and thus extract them, far less than in North America, and, according to Brooks, German courts, like Talmudic law, require that confessions be confi rmed by other evidence, and will not convict suspects based on confessions which are not otherwise “convincingly substantiated.”90 And of course, the refusal to convict criminals based on their confessions has not led to rampant crime in Germany in comparison to the United States. In countries such as the United States and Canada where we consider confessions the “queen of proofs,” desired in every conviction, and thus actively seek them, we do not even need a Foucaultian or a Freudian model of subjectivity, nor even the arguments of Justices Jackson or Harlan, to say that many if not all confessions used in law are coerced. We also do not need Reik to say that confessions “reveal pathetic dependency and a kind of infantile groveling,” because police interrogations regularly and self-consciously put suspects into this state through psychological manipulation, psychic torture, and lies. Brooks recounts the “chilling” police interrogation techniques as they are described in police interrogation manuals and the “dramas of humiliation, deception, and coercion played out behind the locked door,” in which everything is done to put the suspect at a disadvantage, to make him psychologically dependent upon his interrogators, to exhaust him, to convince him that his guilt is already proven, telling him that the interrogation will not stop until he confesses, that not confessing is useless.91 Police interrogators are permitted to lie to their suspects, telling them that DNA evidence, eye-witnesses, and the confessions of other suspects have already incriminated them, that their fates are already sealed, and thus that all they can do is confess and hope that this confession will bring them clemency. This can result in confessions such as the following one, given in the statement of the defendant in North Carolina v. Alford (1970): “I pleaded guilty on second degree murder because they said there is too much evidence, but I ain’t shot no man [ . . . ] I just pleaded guilty because they said if I didn’t they would gas me for it [ . . . ] I’m not guilty but I plead guilty.” 92 This confession was adequate for the court and the defendant was pronounced guilty as charged. Even while lying to and threatening suspects in the manners to which this confession refers, police interrogators also create a relationship of psychological dependency between the distraught suspect and the police officer questioning him. In one poignant case of such psychological dependency, an eighteen-year-old named Peter Reilly discovered his mother’s violently

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murdered body and called an ambulance and the police, but immediately found himself being interrogated as the prime suspect in his mother’s death. The officer who interrogated him told Reilly, after hours of questioning following directly upon the suspect’s traumatic discovery of his mother’s body, and during which Reilly denied the crime, that unless he confessed “we’ll take you and we’ll lock you up and treat you like an animal.” In response, Reilly asked his interrogator whether he could live with the police officer’s family now that he had lost his mother, his only living relative, and had no where else to go. Beyond illustrating the psychological dependency which interrogation creates, such that the suspect may confess as if to an abusive parent in order to please him and to bring the interrogation to an end, Reilly’s case also shows the tactic of lying to the suspect that his fate is already sealed, for the Lieutenant who took over his interrogation told him, “We have, right now. . . . Without any word out of your mouth, proof positive that you did it.”93 As a result of these interrogation methods, Reilly gave in to his interrogator’s insistence that he confess, and was thus condemned for murder, only to be proven innocent years later. Because the problematic nature of these recorded interrogations contributed to the eventual acquittal of Reilly, the Indiana police decided to stop recording their interrogations, or only turn on the tape recorder when the suspect is ready to confess.94 It has been argued that in general even the most apparently voluntary confessions are, as Brooks puts it, emotional rather than factual,95 bearing witness more surely to an emotive or performative truth than to a propositional truth, and thus, in Brooks’s words, allowing “psychotherapeutic truth” to function “as putatively legal truth represents a dangerous category error, a confusion of realms.”96 Indeed, what we want is never merely a confession to acts, which can be ascertained to be true or false, but, to use Derrida’s terms, a statement given in the “apologetic confessional” mode, an excuse or explanation as well as an admission of acts. We want the criminal to not only admit to what he did, but to provide insight into his motivations, a psychological explanation for his crime. In “The Dangerous Individual,” Foucault argues that if the court today does not receive confessions in the apologetic-excusatory mode, it grinds to a perplexed halt. Foucault considers a contemporary case in which a serial rapist refuses to provide psychological explanations for his acts, although he has freely admitted to having committed the crimes of which he is accused. Foucault describes the questioning of the accused by the judge: “Have you tried to reflect upon your case?” -Silence “Why, at twenty-two years of age, do such violent urges overtake you? You must make an effort to analyze yourself. You are the one who has the keys to your own actions. Explain yourself.” -Silence.

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“Would you do it again?” -Silence. Then a juror took over and cried out, “For heaven’s sake, defend yourself!”97 Foucault observes that one hundred and fi fty years earlier this could never have happened during a trial. Prior to the birth of psychiatry, a court only needed to established that the accused had committed a crime and pass the sentence which corresponded to that crime. Two factors were thus involved: the crime and the punishment. Today, however, there is a third factor: the criminal. In particular, the motivations of the criminal must be understood, and consequently the accused must answer the question: “Who are you?,” or the court cannot proceed. The chaos which arises when a criminal fails to confess—or confesses to a crime but not to his motivations—is also seen in the case of Pierre Rivière, to be discussed in Chapter Five, in which the criminal’s refusal to engage in self-examination resulted in a multitude of conflicting psychiatric reports and reversals of sentences. In another instance of the stand-still that trials come to following failure on the criminal’s part to provide psychological discourse, Foucault discusses the example of a man who risked being executed for murders to which he had admitted, but for which he had not explained his motivations, despite psychiatric interrogations. Drawing on this lack of knowledge of his client’s psyche, the defense lawyer asked the jury: “Can one condemn to death a person one does not know?”98 These examples show that without selfexamination on the part of the accused, without confession not merely to the crime but to the criminal’s state of mind when he committed the crime and afterwards (contrition or lack thereof), the law can no longer process criminals or perform its role as this has come to be defi ned. Given that legal confessions need to explain not only acts but motivations, the truths that confessions can provide, if they can provide any assurance of truth at all, are not the kinds of proofs that the law requires, and moreover most confessions cannot meet the standard of having been produced by free and rational minds or of being voluntary. This is particularly true of confessions given after arrest, as even a few Supreme Court Justices have seen. The lack of voluntariness involved in such confessions, the “overbearing of the will”99 such that it breaks beneath the pressures of its own psychic affects and the manipulations of its interrogators, should cast into doubt the truth of confessions in the realm of law. We should question the assumption that confessions are the “queen of proofs” and think that they may on the contrary be the least stable of all proofs, and that we should in practice rely on and thus seek them out far less than we do. If we gave up the assumption that confessions bear a special stamp of authenticity, or at least that they bear witness to the authenticity of propositional truths, then police interrogators would seek confessions with less zeal and would thus avoid placing additional coercions on an already inherently coercive form of discourse.

104 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault The suggestion being made is not that confessions, including excuses and apologies, should never be heard in a legal context, but that they should never be considered sufficient proof of a suspect’s guilt. If other proofs were required to convict a suspect, Simon Marshall’s confession to multiple counts of sexual assault in Saint-Foy would have been taken as evidence but not as definitive proof of guilt. As such, the police would have had to take a DNA test and would have realized that he was innocent of the crimes to which he had confessed. If in some cases not accepting confessions as proofs in themselves resulted in guilty persons being set free, in many other cases innocent persons would be spared prison time for crimes they had not committed, and in still other cases police would be required to continue their inquiries and would find other proofs, or counter-proofs, and thus convict the right person, whether that person turned out to be the confessant or not. In Marshall’s case, after all, a false confession being accepted as incontestable truth not only led to the conviction of an innocent person but also took police off the track of the truly guilty party or parties. As such, a rapist or several rapists remain unapprehended in this case in what is perhaps a direct result of the law’s credulity in confessions as proofs of propositional truth. If we return to Foucault’s notion that confession is to tell the truth about the self to another, and argue that this occurs in a narrative or therapeutic or emotive sense of truth in the case of false confessions, the truth told is arguably nevertheless one that becomes determinative of the speaking subject, and so we might want to ask what kind of subject such false confessions are producing. If the confessant in Confidences Trop Intimes had turned out to be making a false confession to her confessor, perhaps in her case she would have been producing herself in his eyes and in her own as someone more interesting and erotically empowered than she experienced herself to be in her real life. Although this may have been harmful for her confessor who became emotionally invested in her confessions, we may think it was not a negative self-construction on the part of the confessant, but was positively self-transformative. If she had written about herself autobiographically in a similarly transformative manner, we might think there was no harm done at all, and perhaps even a gain for the woman writer had taken place, an instance of aesthetic self-fashioning. In other cases, however, in psychotherapeutic and autobiographical confessions to false guilt and to false victimization, and in all cases where the confessant confesses to a false guilt and false victimization in the realm of law, it would seem that the self being produced is a self-destructive one.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SPIRALS OF DISPLEASURE AND DESPAIR In the fi rst section it was seen that Foucault writes of confession in terms of “perpetual spirals of pleasure and power” as well as truth-production.

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Having nuanced his arguments about the truth of confessions, in this section I would like to question his claims about confessional pleasure. This section will look at autobiographical writings in order to argue that the perpetual spiralings of confession may be spirals of displeasure and despair, and not only of pleasure and power. The significance of this attention to the spiraling displeasure of confession is that it shows the ways in which confession fails to bring about the catharsis and psychic health which it is often promised to provide, in which it betrays the speaking subject and leaves her in despair. The repetitive or spiraling nature of confession is apparent in de Man’s and Derrida’s readings of the ribbon incident in Rousseau. Confession was described as a mechanistic production of shame, guilt, and pleasure. Shame and guilt require confession, while confession produces more shame and guilt and pleasure in this shame and guilt, and hence the need and the desire for more confession. This “desiring machine,” as Derrida, borrowing from Deleuze, has called it, functions en abîme, as one can confess even to the pleasures one took in one’s confessions, to taking pleasure in shame, and to inventing confessions in order to produce this pleasurable shame. A similar spiraling confessional mechanism which shows its discontents as well as its pleasures is described by Freud and Breuer in their study of hysteria and description of the “talking cure,” even though, in this very early work Freud and Breuer would like to argue that confession is curative and hence not inclined to spiral on forever. As Breuer writes of Anna O., for instance: “I have already described how completely her mind was relieved when, shaking with fear and horror, she had reproduced these frightful images and given verbal utterance to them.”100 Anna O. is described after a session of “chimney sweeping” or the “talking cure” as “amiable and cheerful.”101 Nevertheless, a day later she would be “more irritable and less agreeable,” and two days after chimney sweeping she would be “positively ‘nasty.’”102 As Breuer explains, “Her moral state was a function of the time that had elapsed since her last utterance,” and as such, although confessing is described as cathartic and therapeutic, Anna O. always needed to confess again, producing new symptoms that needed to be confessed away as quickly as Breuer could relieve her of them. The talking cure indeed seems to fail in the case of Anna O. not only because it needed in this way to be constantly renewed, seemingly interminably, with new traumas and symptoms continually being produced if not talked off again, but because even when, so far as Breuer could tell, nothing was left “‘stuck’”103 in her psyche, she nevertheless continued to deteriorate, becoming suicidal as well as hysterical. The talking cure did not cure Anna O., but so long as she remained in Breuer’s care and thus in the confessional mode, the need for confession was self-perpetuating and coincided with her psychic deterioration. While the confessional relation between Anna O. and Breuer brought initial pleasure to both parties—and this is where Foucault leaves off—the pain or displeasurable effect of confession in Anna O.’s case is also apparent.

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While this is where Foucault leaves off the discussion of confession, Freud pushes further. Although he would consistently refer back to the case of Anna O. as if it had been a success104, Freud in fact quickly came to realize that the problems and ultimate failure which arose in this treatment characterized the supposedly cathartic cure generally. He recognized that the simple act of confession did not result in catharsis and cure, or that neurotic symptoms could not so easily be “talked off.” As in Anna O.’s case, symptoms persist and may be exasperated following confession, or are continually replaced with new symptoms, and patients may degenerate in the course of confessional treatment, producing various forms of resistance to their cure. Following these realizations, Freud would write in “Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear” that he had long since “abandoned the abreaction theory,”105 and as early as “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” he would remind the reader that psychoanalysis had changed profoundly since its early days in which it had assumed a theory of catharsis or abreaction.106 By 1914 Freud distances himself from this initial “phase of catharsis” by passing it off as Breuer’s practice alone, and describes his own method of engaging not primarily with the patient’s past but with her resistances to treatment in the present.107 Although Freud still maintained that the causes of neuroses were to be found in a patient’s earliest years, and that infantile sexual development and relations with parents were crucial, he no longer tried to make his patients remember the past directly or through hypnosis and suggestion. Rather, he saw that through the repetition compulsion patients repeat whatever troubling event had been repressed in the past, and repeated this repressed event not only in their current relationships and activities but in their relationship with the analyst himself. As such, Freud did not need to have patients remember what had been repressed in the past because it was being articulated through the patient’s behavior towards him in the present, and thus he could deduce it directly from the analysand’s clinical responses. In other words, patients could be made to recognize what they were saying and doing by way of the performative processes of resistance and transference which were manifested in the course of analysis, and Freud could thus use the patient’s current behavior to explain what he suspected to be true of her past. Because the repetition compulsion and transference are resistances to being cured, showing the patient’s ongoing attachment to her neurotic behavior and pattern of relationships, Freud had initially seen these interrelated phenomena as obstacles to psychoanalytic treatment, as expressions of self-destructive impulses or the death drive.108 However because repetition and transference also gave Freud access to repressed material as it was being reactivated in the present, he soon realized that the repetition compulsion and transference were not only obstacles but also the means to the patient’s cure. According to post-“talking cure” Freudian theory, therefore, patients are not getting rid of their past traumas by talking about them,

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but can simply talk about the present and interact with their physician and in so doing can be observed repeating and reactivating the past in their present relationships and, crucially, in the course of therapy itself. As such, the patient does not necessarily remember what she has repressed, but she acts it out. The analyst can then explain her acting out to her, and then in the continued course of analysis what has been deduced in this way can be interpreted and “worked through.” Within this more sophisticated notion of the psychoanalytic cure, confession is no longer seen as therapeutic in itself. In fact, confession, as a means of repeating the past, may resist catharsis, returning in a masochistic, death-driven manner to the source of psychic harm. However remembering and catharsis are still the eventual aim of psychoanalysis, and Freud has simply realized that the path to these desideratums is longer and more circuitous than he had initially assumed. It was not enough, for instance, to simply have the patient remember by either hypnotizing her or by informing her of an interpretation and achieving her consent. Rather, the patient must recognize the manners in which she is continuing to act out the past, and this richer form of remembering must be worked out through ongoing analysis. Confession is thus no longer a miracle cure, but nor is it eliminated from psychoanalytic practice altogether. As Freud writes in “A Short Account of Psycho-analysis”: “The cathartic method was the immediate precursor of psycho-analysis; and, in spite of every extension of experience and of every modification of theory, is still contained within it as its nucleus.”109 Most post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory continues to uphold that confession in itself is not straight-forwardly therapeutic, and that confession, if not interpreted and worked through correctly, may result in downward spirals of displeasure rather than in instantly gratifying healing. Confession is understood in psychoanalysis to be only one aspect of a cure which takes place through a more complicated and time-consuming process of transference and its interpretation. Confession is neither the start nor the end of the psychoanalytic cure, but is situated as an intermediate stage between acting out and working through. It is nevertheless Freud and Breuer’s earlier notion of “chimney sweeping” and the “talking cure”—or of confession as instant pleasure and cure—which characterizes the modern understanding of confession, which is endlessly used as a justification for the publication of confessional memoirs, for public testimonials to various forms of trauma, and for confessional talk shows, among other phenomena. It is also worth noting that the term “repressed” is necessarily understood in contemporary versions of the “talking cure” such as these in a strictly non-psychoanalytic sense. “Repressed” now simply means anything which we desire/hesitate to talk about, or of which we are ashamed, but of which we are nevertheless aware and to which we can therefore confess if we simply muster up the strength. This is quite different from the use of the term in Freud, for whom the “repressed” refers strictly to material located in

108 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault the unconscious.110 Psychoanalytic terms such as catharsis and repression are thus mobilized as scientific or medically-sanctioned excuses to confess, and yet this usage involves a gratifying misunderstanding of psychoanalytic theory and terminology. It is often this popular use of the term “repression,” and not the technical psychoanalytic use, which Foucault describes in his discussion of the “repressive hypothesis.” The notion that confession has an immediate medicinal effect, clearing out the psyche, allowing it to forget and to move on, abreacting its neuroses, or unburdening the mind of its difficult but not unconscious memories, is a kind of “common sense” notion that not only perseveres long after Freud’s rejection of it, but also precedes Freud. According to Appignanesi and Forrester, “a medicalized version of the Aristotelian cathartic theory of tragedy” was “very much in fashion in Vienna in the early 1880s: the purifying (Aristotle’s ‘cathartic’) function of tragedy was seen to be directly curative of the body.” 111 Finding an outlet to emotion was understood to have a medicinal effect upon the body, and as such a general notion of the “talking cure” would have been intuitively compelling in the nineteenth century. Bertha Pappenheim, her mother, Breuer, and Freud simply tapped into this notion in their first attempts to theorize psychoanalysis. The idea of “chimney sweeping” through confession is already present, though also already refuted, thirty-five years prior to The Studies on Hysteria, in Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground, while, despite psychoanalytic developments, it perseveres in contemporary autobiographical practices. Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground suggests but then rejects a catharsis theory of confession. The Underground Man writes that “there are things, too, that a man won’t dare to admit even to himself,” and he wonders if in expressing and confronting these memories in writing he will be able to rid himself of them. He writes: It is possible, too, that the very process of writing things down will relieve me somewhat. Today, for instance, I’m particularly oppressed by an old memory. It came back to me clearly a few days ago and, since then, it’s been like an exasperating tune that I can’t get out of my head. But I must get rid of it. I have hundreds of such memories, and from time to time, one of them detaches itself from the mass and starts tormenting me. I feel that if I write it down, I’ll get rid of it. Why not try?112 Later the Underground Man writes: Even now, after all these years, this memory remains strangely vivid and unpleasant. I have many unpleasant memories, but [ . . . ] why not stop these notes right here? I feel it was a mistake to start writing them in the first place. However, I’ve at least felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story, so it isn’t literature, but a punishment and an expiation.113

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The humiliation of confession is related to a quasi-religious penance, an expiation, the idea seeming to be that by confessing to his shameful deeds, the Underground Man will rid himself of them. And yet, in the same breath, the Underground Man is saying that he might as well stop writing his confessions, and so apparently this expiation is doing nothing to relieve him of his torturous thoughts. Similarly, when the Underground Man humiliates the prostitute Liza, he soothes his guilty conscience by writing that her humiliation will at least serve as a “purification” for her.114 A moment later, however, he writes, “I must also add that I was very pleased with my phrase about the beneficient effect of insult, humiliation, and hatred, although I myself, at that time, almost fell sick with despair.”115 Humiliation, for instance the humiliation of confession, is thus argued to be redemptive or expiatory in these two passages, purifying the person who suffers it, and yet, as is immediately apparent in both cases, it does not actually work in this way, and there is very little pleasure involved in the Underground Man’s notes: the narrator nearly falls sick with despair over his mortification rather than being cured or purified by it, and so he suggests that he might “stop these notes right here.” Nevertheless, the Underground Man goes on confessing, humiliating himself. Although he claims to regret what he has written so far, saying, “But that’s enough, I’ve had enough of writing these Notes from Underground,” the discoverer of his confessions adds a note: “Actually the notes of this lover of paradoxes do not end here. He couldn’t resist and went on writing. But we are of the opinion that one might just as well stop here.” 116 As such, we see that the narrator confesses despite his attempts to resist, and despite his realization and acknowledgement that confession serves neither as catharsis nor as purification, but merely makes the writing or speaking subject sick and despairing, as Anna O. deteriorated even as she went on confessing in her belief in a talking cure. The fact that the Underground Man goes on confessing despite his realization of its effect on him, without audience, without cure, presents confession as a repetition compulsion, a failure to resist: “he couldn’t resist and went on writing.” More contemporary autobiographers have equivocated in a way similar to Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man with respect to the ability of confessional writing to console tormented souls, and have ultimately observed and demonstrated the same failure of confession to bring relief or closure, and its tendency instead to cause repetition and despair. The contemporary French author Annie Ernaux, for instance, writes confessional books which she consistently describes as painful to write and shameful to expose to the public. She describes herself as needing to believe that she will accidentally die before the book becomes public in order to bear the mortification of exposure,117 the publication of books which she says will make the regard of the other impossible to her,118 and which she sees as having shamed her family and even her region of France as well as herself.119 At the end of Passion simple, Ernaux writes that ending the book causes her anxiety

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because it means that she will now have to let others judge her actions, making her ashamed: “To continue,” she writes, “is also to push back the anxiety of giving this to others to read. So long as I was in the necessity of writing, I did not worry about this eventuality. Now that I am at the end of this necessity, I look at the written pages with surprise and a kind of shame.”120 The writing of these books is described by Ernaux as “difficult,” “dangerous,” and “hazardous,” as requiring courage to write and to make public,121 and yet is also described as written through an inner compulsion, as though she had no choice but to write and expose them, or lacked the strength to resist. We see, for instance, that she writes of the “necessity of writing,” and presumes that it is equally necessary to publish, although she tells us that fi nancially she is not required to.122 Given the pain which writing and publishing her writings evidently causes her, Ernaux has frequently sought to explain her confessional compulsion and the effects which this writing has on her. In Se perdre, for instance, Ernaux writes: “Writing was only to fi ll the emptiness, to be able to say and to bear the memory of 58, of the abortion, of parental love, of all that was a story of flesh and love.”123 Writing is seen as enabling Ernaux to bear memories which might otherwise have been intolerable. Later, she writes, “I know too well that what makes me write is that, this bottomless lack of realization of love.”124 She thus perceives herself as writing because she lacks love, as if writing replaced love, and, as she says later: “I write in order to be loved.”125 The confession is sometimes understood as a gift by Ernaux, a gift of love, and writing confessionally is a means of giving to the other in order to receive love in return. We see this again in Ernaux’s repeated tellings of her father’s attempted murder of her mother, which confession forms the basis of La honte: Ernaux tells us both in La honte and in Se perdre that, prior to writing the book, she had offered this nearlyunspeakable memory only to three men whom she had loved, and that “This confession was a sign of my love,” despite the fact that the confession was undesired and received badly by the men she told, an unsolicited and unwanted gift: “Each of them became quiet after having heard me. I saw that I had committed an error, that they were unable to receive this thing.”126 In each case, the lover is made uncomfortable by the offering of Ernaux’s confession, and yet she persists in telling it to her next lover, and fi nally in publishing it, in the hopes of receiving love in return for her confessional offering. She does so, despite her former regrets over telling this story and her recognition that it has functioned only destructively in the past. Having told a third lover of her father’s act, for instance, she records in her journal: “I have the impression of having done today all that should not be done, pushed by my old taste for destruction [ . . . ] Something to frighten him. In any case, he left right afterwards.”127 The confessions of others are similarly recognized by Ernaux to be selfdestructive and to bring judgments of shame upon them, and yet this recognition does not succeed in preventing her from making her own confessions

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public: for instance, in Passion simple, Ernaux describes a woman at the hairdresser’s who admits that she is being “treated for nerves,” and the manner in which the people in the salon distance themselves from the woman after her confession.128 Ernaux worries at the time that if she similarly admitted to strangers the degrading and self-destructive passion for a man that she is experiencing, far from being loved, she will find herself to be similarly estranged, and yet she publishes the account of this humiliating passion as well as the diaries from the period. In alternative explanations for her compulsion to write her memories, Ernaux claims that she writes to forget and to sever herself from past events and people. For instance, she writes, “What will this notebook bring me? I want to keep S. and to write, is it possible?,”129 as if by writing about him she will necessarily be unable to keep him. Like Rousseau who claimed that “memory only serves me so long as I need to rely on it; as soon as I commit its burden to paper it deserts me; and once I have written a thing down, I entirely cease to remember it,”130 Ernaux assumes here that the act of writing will entail an involuntary forgetting, despite the fact that, like Rousseau, she will frequently return to the subject described and thus the claim to forget upon writing is obviously false. According to Ernaux, “Knowledge always frees,”131 and as such in writing she will understand, and consequently be freed of the lover and of the memories which painfully torment her. At one point in Se perdre, she states, “I have ceased to want to write for him, I want to write to forget him, to detach myself from him.”132 Previously we saw that she had been writing for a lover, or to be loved, believing, for instance, that “A.” is attracted to her because she is a celebrated author. In La place and Une femme, furthermore, Ernaux writes in order to retain her deceased parents and her memories of them. In this instance, writing is once more seen as a means to get and to keep the elusive other, whether a distant lover or a deceased loved one, and yet now we see that she also writes to achieve a form of therapeutic catharsis, to get rid of rather than to get, to sever herself from the object of her unhappy love. How this process of writing to forget and to detach is believed to function is elaborated in La honte: Perhaps the narrative, all narratives, renders normal any act, including the most dramatic. But because I have always had this scene in me like an image without words or phrases, beyond those that I told to lovers, the words that I have used to describe it seem strange to me, almost incongruous. It has become a scene for others.133 In a process familiar to trauma theory, we see that by telling or writing a memory, it is said to be externalized and brought under control, which allows the subject to contain and separate herself from the event and subsequently to begin to heal.134 The attempted murder scene described in La honte is called by Ernaux “the terror without words”135 while her debilitating obsession for

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“S.” in Se perdre is repeatedly referred to as “the terror without name”136: in both cases, we see that something without words or name is terrifying, just as trauma is said to be experienced as outside of language, and healed through it. According to Ernaux, writing, a process of finding names and words for experiences, renders something that seemed beyond language, and hence extraordinary, into something containable, externalized, and, to some degree, normal. In Passion simple, however, written after Se perdre, Ernaux casts doubt on the idea that writing has helped her to forget. She writes: “writing does not prevent me, the minute I stop, to feel the absence of the man whose voice, whose foreign accent, I no longer hear, whose skin I no longer touch, who leads an existence in a cold city that is impossible for me to imagine.”137 Similarly, at the end of Se perdre, Ernaux puts the assumption that expression heals, shared by proponents of art therapy and trauma theory, into question when she writes: “I am no longer even sure that freedom exists in writing, I even wonder if it is not the domain of the worst alienation, where the past, the horrors of what has been lived return.”138 Writing, in this fi nal analysis, may only force the author to revisit a trauma repeatedly, reopening and inflaming wounds rather than healing them. Judging from a study of Ernaux’s autobiographical works, this last explanation would seem to be the case. For instance, telling the attempted murder confession of La honte to several lovers did not function to heal it, since Ernaux felt the need to tell it again in book form, in which she describes it as remaining traumatic and unutterable despite the previous confessions. While we may think that this need to tell the story again is explained by the fact that her confession was repeatedly received badly by her lovers, and thus had not satisfied the need for expression, the case of Ernaux’s similarly repeated confession of her abortion seems to prove wrong the suggestion that fi nding good listeners could stop Ernaux from confessing again. In L’événement, we fi nd that Ernaux compulsively confesses her abortion to friends and classmates, to a doctor (after the point at which his services could be required), and to a priest.139 Although in these cases she does not always receive a satisfying reception to her tale, in the end she fi nds a male classmate who admires her for her courage to abort, which seems to be what she requires. She writes, “When he realized the meaning of my words, he ceased to move, his eyes dilated on me, captured by an invisible scene, prey to a fascination for my memory which I always rediscover in men. He repeated, disoriented, ‘hats off, my friend! Hats off!’”140 Ernaux also has the opportunity to discuss her experience with another woman who has also illegally aborted at the peril of her life. Ernaux writes, “We compared our abortions with jubilation.”141 Nevertheless, Ernaux goes on to publish Les armoires vides, thus making her family and community aware of what they could only suspect was an autobiographical account of her abortion. Having confessed to authorities and to family, to friends and admirers, and in the traditional forum of the Catholic confessional, and having at times

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found good listeners, we see in Se perdre that Ernaux nevertheless continues to have nightmares related to the death of the fetus. Moreover, she confesses the abortion to her current lover, who once more causes Ernaux to regret her act of confidence. Despite her claim that men are always fascinated by her abortion story, this man immediately leaves in such a manner that Ernaux experiences her compulsion to confess as self-destructive, and admits that she has experienced it as such before. Nevertheless, she goes on to publish a second and more obviously autobiographical account of the abortion in L’événement. While these cases can hardly be conclusive in refuting the early and pop psychoanalytic model of a talking or writing cure, one cannot help but be struck in reading Ernaux’s journals by the very frequency with which this singularly confessional subject notes that she is repeating the experiences of her life, not only in writing and telling them but in her actions, and that she has not changed over time: in other words, Ernaux draws attention to the fact that although each book claims to have been a process of healing, later books show that the wounds are not healed and the patterns of behavior are not left behind. She admits that she has continued to behave and feel the same way, reliving and reconstructing the same painful experiences. If indeed confessional expression such as self-writing, in which Ernaux engages almost exclusively, truly functioned to liberate and to heal, this self-avowed repetition can only be deemed surprising, and we might wonder if confession is not after all, as Brooks suggests, a manifestation of the death drive, a desire to return to a prior state. To take but a few examples, Ernaux writes: “I make the same mistakes as before”142; “the same atrocious tension. Since the age of sixteen, I have been familiar with this.”143; “I haven’t changed, I am that girl who believes in happiness, who waits and suffers.”144; “The cycle begins again.”145; “So little changed. [ . . . ] So little changed”146; “I am in the depths of despair, as in Sées, as in London, in 60, or at P.’s, in 84. I cry vaguely.”147; “I haven’t changed; tonight, I feel as after Saint-Hilaire-du-Trouvet, the same phrase came to me, ‘this fatigue which is a bit of him,’ which will disappear”148; “I would be ready to fall again into the same favola, perhaps, for someone else.”149; “It needs no doubt to be said one day how much a woman of forty-eight to fi fty-two years feels close to her adolescence. The same waiting, the same desires, but instead of moving towards the summer, one moves towards the winter.”150 Finally, Ernaux goes so far as to schematize the pattern which she consistently follows: (I feel so badly that I search my memory for similar moments, and it is 58, 63, which return, inexorably. [ . . . ] My relations with men follow this invincible path: a) initial indifference, read disgust b) more or less physical “illumination”

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The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault c) happy understandings, fairly controlled, with even some periods of boredom d) pain, bottomless lack And there comes the moment—I am there—where the pain is so pregnant that the moments of happiness are nothing but future pains, increasing the pain. e) and the last stage is separation, before arriving at the most perfect: indifference.) 151

We might thus take seriously Ernaux’s doubt that writing in any way liberated the writer from the memory and pattern of events written, any more than it proved successful in attaining love for her, and any more than confessional speech helped Anna O. or the Underground Man.152 Nelly Arcan, who describes her years as a prostitute in Montréal in the confessional récit Putain, comes to similar conclusions in her second book, Folle, where she writes: “It is often said that confessions soothe. Nevertheless, I have not felt it to this day.”153 Later, she makes the point more emphatically: “It seems to me that one liberates nothing at all in writing, one alienates oneself instead, one puts the noose around one’s neck.”154 Like Ernaux, Arcan suggests that she may have used her confessional writing as a means of attaining love for the self exposed, but that this eventually fails. Ernaux feels that her lover A. is attracted to her because she is a famous confessional writer, only to fi nd later that he is repelled by her confessions, while in Folle the success of Arcan’s previous confessional work, Putain, makes her known to her lover before she meets him, and, she imagines, contributes to her attractiveness in his eyes. She writes: “When you saw me that evening at Nova I had an advantage over you because you already knew who I was, you knew me by reputation. You knew that I had been a whore, you also knew that I’d written a book and that it had sold [ . . . ].”155 Describing leaving Nova with him that night, she writes: “You also found me beautiful, you were happy, you had Nelly Arcan at your side.”156 But if her confessional writing and persona is thought initially to win her love, Folle is about the destructive loss of that love, and Arcan frequently underscores the manners in which too much confession, beginning with what her lover knew about her from her confessional book Putain, contributed to this destruction and loss: “Later I told myself that at Nova you must have thought about whores including ex-whores like me the same thing as everyone else, that in front of a whore you can say anything [ . . . ]”157; “At Nova we talked a lot and perhaps too much, the information created confusion between us. People who say too much don’t think about what they say [ . . . ]”158; “Both of us talked too much. We exposed our insides, we showed each other our interior ugliness [ . . . ] You said things which are not made to be said [ . . . ]”159 As

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for Ernaux, confession in Arcan’s work is shown to repel the other when it is meant to seduce. While I have been focusing on the repetitions and displeasures of confession for the confessant in order to undermine the assumption that confession is cathartic or consolatory, as Freud himself quickly realized, Ernaux’s and Arcan’s texts also raise a fi nal point according to which Foucault’s account of the “perpetual spirals of pleasure and power” needs to be nuanced. That is: it is not the case that confession is always a pleasurably spiraling relation for the confessor any more than it is for the confessant. Not only may confession lead to the speaker’s displeasure, humiliation and despair, but it may also be displeasurable and undesirable for the one who listens, for the one who may be made to bear witness to confessional scenes which are often, as Brooks argues and as Dostoyevsky perhaps shows best, abject. In “A silkworm of one’s own,” Derrida writes that he is “fatigued like truth, exhausted from knowing it, for too long [ . . . ] explications, complications, explications of its revelations or unveilings. If you only knew how fatigued I feel at these revelations and unveilings, how many I have had to put up with, how badly I put up with them [ . . . ].”160 The situations which Ernaux and Arcan describe, in which their confessions are used as seduction attempts which go terribly wrong, show the manner in which we may believe what Foucault writes about the seductiveness and erotic pleasures of confession at our peril, only to fi nd out too late that we have not intrigued the other but repelled her, or exasperated her in the way which Derrida suggests, and this spoils our own pleasure as well. The workings of power, including the spiralings of power involved in confession, are indeed, as Foucault would have it, in excess of any attempts to predict or to control them. As such, even Foucault’s own predictions of the workings of confession as bound up with pleasure and seduction are shown in these and in many cases to fail or to be exceeded, leaving the confessant, the would-be seducer, in a state of shame.

3

Psychoanalysis

L’art de vivre, c’est de tuer la psychologie [ . . . ] Si on ne peut pas arriver à faire ça dans la vie, elle ne mérite pas d’être vécue. —Michel Foucault, “Conversation avec Werner Schroeter”1

This chapter will consider what Foucault sees as among the paradigmatic causes and activities of the “confessing animal”: psychoanalysis. A critique of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, or of the diffuse effects of the psychological disciplines on all aspects of modern occidental society, discourse and subjectivity, runs through almost all of Foucault’s works, including his studies of confession, and Todd May has stated that the “critique of psychology is a leitmotif in Foucault’s texts.”2 Nevertheless, although psychoanalysis is frequently mentioned in passing, unlike psychiatry it is never discussed in depth. In many of Foucault’s books psychoanalysis is mentioned only in the fi nal few pages of the work, and then only in the rhetorical flourishes of his concluding remarks. Freud puts in an appearance only on the second to last page of The Birth of the Clinic, for instance, and in the last five pages of Maladie mentale et psychologie, while in Madness and Civilization Foucault leaves off just at the moment in history when psychoanalysis is born and Freud begins, and thus, with the exception of a few passing remarks, Freud is discussed only in the fi nal three pages of the work. Foucault’s ongoing critique of psychoanalysis is most explicit in the fi rst volume of The History of Sexuality, and yet even in this book Foucault rarely mentions Freud or any other psychoanalytic theorist by name: Freud is named eight times, including, once more, in the last few pages of the book, and Wilhelm Reich is mentioned twice, but the discussion is each time fleeting and superficial. Despite the significance of the notion of a “repressive hypothesis” in this work, Foucault does not engage with psychoanalytic texts on repression and the unconscious, drawing less on Freud’s metapsychology than on the manners in which a more general understanding of these notions has been deployed throughout modern occidental society. While psychoanalysis is apparently treated marginally in works such as Madness and Civilization and The History of Sexuality: An Introduction,

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it is arguably also central to both of these books, for it is to Freud that Foucault addresses his fi nal words and thus psychoanalysis which is the end point of these and other studies. The marginal but central positioning of psychoanalysis in Foucault’s works is arguably characteristic even of the fi nal two volumes of The History of Sexuality in which psychoanalysis is not mentioned at all, but in which non-Freudian models of subjectivity and sexuality are explored. Finding alternatives to the psychoanalytic subject and psychoanalytic discourses on sexuality—or, what is almost the same thing, to modern subjectivity and discourses on sexuality—is the motivation behind Foucault’s last two works, and thus the Freudian subject is perhaps their impetus even if Freud is this time not even named. Although Foucault seems more concerned with psychiatry than psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis is consistently described throughout Foucault’s career as a logical extension of psychiatry, or as an even more subtle and pervasive form of psychological discipline, and is thus perhaps the more dangerous of the two. As the concluding figure of several of Foucault’s books, psychoanalysis is presented as the culmination and epitomization of the genealogy of the modern subject that Foucault has provided, the ultimate product of all the problematic disciplinary practices he has described, including Christian confession. The subject of psychoanalysis consequently has the position of being the problem to which Foucault’s books are often addressed, whose contingency has been shown, but which, oddly, Foucault declines to discuss in any depth. In “Foucault and the Freudian Subject,” John E. Toews acknowledges that “Foucault’s focus on the problem of subject construction within the discourses of the human sciences and science of sexuality has proven enormously illuminating in situating psychoanalysis within its own time and culture.”3 However, given the often silently privileged position of psychoanalysis in Foucault’s work, Toews adds that Foucault’s critique of psychoanalysis “operate[s] at a very high level of abstraction, and there is a danger in that. The self-reflective and critical dimensions of psychoanalytic texts are often lost, or perhaps denied, in this reduction to discursive regularities.”4 Toews goes on to argue that: The great lack in Foucault’s historicization of psychoanalysis lies in its failure to provide a clear view of ways in which these larger issues work themselves into the reading of specific Freudian texts, and particularly how the assimilation and reproduction of the inherited ‘apparatus’ of power/knowledge relations was actually ‘problematized’ and reconstructed in the thinking and writing of the processes of textualization. Because of his constant struggle to integrate psychoanalysis as a scientific discourse and a set of institutionalized practices into the confi nes of a world that could now be mapped from the outside, Foucault paid little attention to the particular differences through which the Freudian texts established their own discursive reality, and thus to the cultural

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The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault formation of psychoanalysis as a critical reflection and transcending, transformative action in relation to its own various contexts. 5

Despite the fact that, as Toews points out, Foucault discusses psychoanalysis somewhat reductively, the subject theorized by psychoanalysis, and the institutions through which it is constructed, is, as noted, a crucial outcome of disciplinary power for Foucault and the form of subjectivity to which he strives to explore alternatives in his studies of ancient Greece and Rome. In the fi rst volume of The History of Sexuality, the psychoanalytic subject is the epitome of the “confessing animal,” and is thus the privileged vehicle of confession as instrument of disciplinary power. In this chapter I will therefore present the various problematizations of psychoanalysis in Foucault’s works, and will suggest reasons for which Foucault chose not to engage with specific texts in psychoanalytic theory, despite his abiding interest in destabilizing them. I will then consider Toews’s critique of Foucault (which Toews himself does not pursue), exploring the question of whether developments in psychoanalytic theory and practice addressed some of Foucault’s concerns with the discipline and institution, and the relevance of Foucault’s generalized critiques to later Freudian and postFreudian theory. While Toews suggests that psychoanalysis has already transformed itself in order to address Foucault’s concerns, Todd May argues that it has not yet done so, but that this does not mean that such a transformation is impossible. He writes: It should be emphasized [ . . . ] that the genealogical critique, while focusing upon existing psychological practice, does not necessarily apply to all conceivable psychological practice. Foucault’s histories show that the practices of psychology in our culture, in combination with other practices of our culture, have had onerous political effects. This does not imply that any psychological practice in any culture—nor even that any psychological practice in our own culture—must be oppressive. There is strong reason to believe that alternative practices labeled ‘psychological’ will, in the historical moment in which we fi nd ourselves, contribute to the problems already raised by existing psychological practice. That is because the general focus upon the self which psychology fosters has become deeply entwined with the projects of normalization and discipline. The argument, however, is not an a priori one. The problem is not with the nature of psychology but with the practices that go under its name and with the perspective to which those practices—from school psychology to personnel management to personality theory to self-development—have given rise.6 In response, the second half of this chapter will consider whether Foucault’s critiques of psychoanalysis are in fact not a priori, as both Toews

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and May suggest. I will attempt to ascertain whether non-disciplinary and non-normalizing forms of psychoanalysis have already developed or if, as May argues, they remain to be seen. Notwithstanding Foucault’s unfailing suspicion of psychoanalysis, I will examine the question of whether some forms of psychotherapeutic practice might function as cares of the self. I will thus take up Foucault’s own argument that practices of discipline, which he has shown psychoanalysis to be, are always also technologies of the self, and that subjects often have some leeway in adjusting the balance of self-governance and domination that is at play. Although Foucault himself only considers psychoanalysis as a manner in which subjects are fashioned by a disciplinary society, I will examine the extent to which subjects may fashion themselves through certain forms of psychoanalytic practice.

FOUCAULT’S CRITIQUES OF PSYCHIATRY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS In Chapter Two at least three critiques of confession which arise in Foucault’s fi rst volume of The History of Sexuality, and which can also be said to be critiques of psychoanalysis, were described. We may schematize these as: 1) a popular understanding of psychoanalysis encourages a habit of confession in subjects by convincing them that confession functions as a therapy, catharsis, and cure, when in fact, to the contrary, it discursively fi xes identities; 2) psychoanalysis solidifies the modern notion that sexuality is the essence of individuals, which limits rather than liberates the bodies and pleasures of subjects speaking about sexuality; and 3) the doctor-patient relationship is one of disciplinary power. In Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic Foucault was also concerned with the problem of power between doctors and patients, which he explores at length in Madness and Civilization with respect to psychiatry, suggesting briefly that it continues in much the same fashion in psychoanalysis. In this earlier work and again in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Foucault questions the idea that psychiatry and psychoanalysis liberate the subject. Additionally, in Madness and Civilization Foucault raises at least two other significant critiques of psychoanalysis: 1) psychoanalysis, like psychiatry, is normalizing, exploiting medical or quasi-medical authority in order to dominate subjects and to perform what is in fact a purely moral and political task; 2) psychoanalysis, like psychiatry, presents a teleological story of its own history, and a universalizing, transhistorical story of the psyche, consequently presenting its “cures” as scientific progress and truths, when in fact psychiatry and psychoanalysis produce and solidify the uniquely modern experiences which they aim to cure. Foucault reframes this last point, that psychological disciplines present a historically contingent discourse as transhistorical, in The Order of Things.

120 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault Here Foucault argues for the historicity of psychological discourse, not this time in terms of its social institutions, as he had done in Madness and Civilization, but in terms of psychology’s relation to a network of knowledge, to the epistēmē of the modern era, and to other empirical sciences of its time. Psychology, although it claims to discover essential features of the human psyche and to discover objective knowledge which was up until then hidden, could only be thought in the period in which knowledge for the fi rst time tried to grasp the knower as well as the known. This epistemological shift did not so much allow human beings to know themselves for the fi rst time as they had always been, but rather constructed “man” as the being who knows himself. Man was born with the epistemology of man, Foucault claims, and, he predicts, will disappear again with it. The Order of Things considers psychology only as a discursive practice, unlike Madness and Civilization and The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, in which psychiatry and psychoanalysis are considered as both discursive and non-discursive activities. Having noted this epistemological point from The Order of Things, in this section I will focus on Foucault’s arguments that psychoanalysis is normalizing and disciplinary as these unfold in Madness and Civilization and in later writings and interviews, because I wish to focus not only on psychoanalytic theory but on psychoanalytic practice, or how psychoanalysis has in fact functioned. Because Foucault only mentions psychoanalysis in these works by associating it in passing with his more extensive critiques of psychiatry, it is not possible to consider psychoanalysis in isolation; instead, it is necessary to consider Foucault’s arguments about psychiatry fi rst, and then the manners in which psychoanalysis is seen as taking the problematic features of psychiatry further.

THE BIRTH OF PSYCHIATRY In Madness and Civilization Foucault traces the shifts in the manners in which madness has been understood and treated from the period of the Middle Ages to the present, showing the contingency of understanding madness as an object of study and treatment for psychiatric science. Foucault argues that in contrast to today, during the Middle Ages and Renaissance the madman was an eschatological figure, a reminder of death in life, and of the futility of our earthly aspirations. For the medieval and renaissance subject, “Death’s annihilation is no longer anything because it was already everything, because life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells. The head that will become a skull is already empty. Madness is the déjà-là of death.”7 As such the madman was tragic but also a figure of truth, possessing a pathetic nobility. Reminders of this conception of madness are the Fool of the tarot and the truth-telling madmen and fools of medieval and renaissance literature. Shakespeare’s King Lear and Cervantes’s Don

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Quixote are some of the last representations of the medieval and renaissance perception of madness. Appropriate to the age which was coming to an end when these works were written, Quixote and Lear wander the countryside in their madness, while Foucault describes the practice of exiling the mad from the cities during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. While the ships of fools represented in medieval and renaissance art may never have existed, their appeal to the imaginations of medieval and renaissance artists and patrons, like that of Quixote and Lear, indicates the association of the mad with wandering, and especially with being lost on the dark and dangerous, chaotic and amorphous body of the sea. Because the mad men and women of the Middle Ages and Renaissance were figures of truth, there was no notion of rehabilitating them. All of this was to change with the early modern period: madness no longer spoke an eschatological truth but was an error, and moreover an error that could be corrected. As such in the seventeenth century the mad ceased to be exiled and to be associated with a particular geographical freedom but were, on the contrary, confi ned to workhouses for the purposes of reform. These workhouses were not specifically intended for the mad, but for all those who created scandal, set bad examples for others, and did not work. In what Foucault calls “the Great Confi nement,” within a few months following a general edict in 1656, 1% of the French population came to be interned, and a similar phenomenon occurred throughout Europe. In each case, the insane were locked up along with people who were disturbing the peace of their families, couples living outside of marriage, prodigal and spendthrift sons, criminals, beggars and panhandlers. The logic behind associating these assorted groups, Foucault suggests, was that none of them worked, and not working was considered to be a source of vice. In the houses of confi nement the internees were forced to be productive. If they did not work well, they were punished with more work. If they worked with zeal, this behavior indicated that they had been morally reformed and could eventually be released. As Foucault argues, the workhouses functioned to turn unproductive citizens into productive ones, to remove spectacles of poverty and vice from the public sphere, to circumvent potential crime, and to contain the populations which would participate in popular uprisings. The houses were not economically or politically successful, however, as greater unemployment (and hence poverty and crime) spread outside of the houses as a result of the work which was accomplished within, and the cost of upkeeping the houses outweighed what they earned. For Foucault, however, the main motivation behind the establishment of workhouses was not economic productivity, but moral reform. Insanity, it was thought, like other vices such as sloth and lust, arose from inoccupation and could be corrected through labor. By the middle of the eighteenth century the view of madness was once more to change. With the Age of Reason, the insane ceased to be human beings who had simply erred through inactivity. Unlike their criminal and

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poor companions, the mad came to be seen as inhuman. Foucault cites Pascal, who writes: “I can easily conceive of a man without hands, feet, head (for it is only experience which teaches us that the head is more necessary than the feet). But I cannot conceive of man without thought; that would be a stone or a brute.”8 Of these two options, men and women without thought—or rather, without reason—were deemed to be brutes rather than stones, and were treated in the same inhumane ways that animals of the past and today are made to suffer. The mad were kept naked or nearly naked, and up to thirteen internees would be crowded into eight foot square cells which dripped with water, sleeping on soaked straw in their own excrement in dungeons which flooded when the sewers overflowed and which were over-run by rats. The insane were thought to not suffer from cold and other forms of pain the way humans do. It was remarked that they could endure sleeping in rooms which were sixteen degrees below freezing with barely a rag to cover them.9 While the poor and criminals could be rehabilitated and reintegrated into society, their insane companions, like animals, could only be trained to behave better. The insane were thus brutalized to be obedient brutes, and Foucault describes one eighteenth-century Scottish farmer who used madmen as beasts of burden on his farm, beating them if they attempted to revolt.10 Similarly, in the houses of confi nements the mad were beaten for bad behavior until they grew docile.11 Perhaps most telling of all in this shift toward bestialization which had occurred in the perception of the mad, while the principle in the seventeenth century was to confi ne all those who did not work in order to rehabilitate them, but moreover to remove the negative spectacle of vice which they represented from the public view, in the eighteenth century up until at least 1815, the mad were put on public display as a source of entertainment and revenue.12 For a few pennies one could visit the asylums and view the mad as one would go to a zoo or a circus to see curious animals. During these visits from the public the mad men and women might be made to perform acrobatics with fl icks of a whip from the attendant or from other madmen. Whereas during the Middle Ages and Renaissance the mad were a source of anxiety, reminding the sane of the demise which threatened all human beings, and whereas during the seventeenth century the mad were simply like the poor and criminals, men and women who were mistaken in judgement but could be reintegrated into society, with the Age of Reason a complete disidentification with the insane occurred. No longer was the sight of the insane a reminder of what would or could eventually befall the viewer, and no longer did a fear of contagion worry administrators and onlookers. The mad were so thoroughly bestialized, so othered from their sane spectators that the sight of them could serve as entertainment which gave rise to neither pity nor anxiety. Madness was not linked to medicine, any more than animals could be cured of their bestiality through medical intervention.

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In the last years of the eighteenth century “the Great Confi nement” would come to an end and the poor, the mad, libertines, and the criminal, who had lived together promiscuously for a hundred years, would be redivided.13 To begin with, economists realized that it had been a mistake to incarcerate the poor. Poverty was not a spectacle of vice which risked contagion. On the contrary, the poor were virtuous: a country needed poor people in order to be rich since the poor worked hard but consumed little. The poor needed to be set free because it was on their backs that the wealth of the nation depended. At around the same time, libertines and other troublesome relatives incarcerated through the use of lettres de cachet were released. Finally, the propriety of making the criminal and the mad cohabitate was cast into doubt. First there was indignation on the part of criminals (who were, after all, still men) that they were forced to live with brutes who kept them awake at night and made the workplace dangerous by day. A bit later the reverse objection was raised, and it was argued that the mad, who were innocent, should not be forced to live with criminals. In the fi rst move, when confi nement with the mad was deemed an injustice to criminals, the response was that the threat of cohabitation with the insane was a disincentive to crime, and that living with madmen was part of the punishment for lawbreakers. In this discourse, Foucault argues, madness came to be the very symbolization of confi nement, and the punishment of criminals was that they should have to share temporarily in the life of confi nement which followed by nature for the mad. When the mad and the criminal were separated, madness remained linked “more fi rmly than ever to confi nement.”14 It was never doubted that the mad should be confi ned, it was only contested whether they should be confi ned with criminals, and to whom the injustice was done when criminals were made to live with the insane. The result of these debates was that asylums exclusively for the mad were formed. With the new asylums and the birth of psychiatry madness was medicalized, viewed for the first time as a disease of the nerves or an “excess of sensibility.”15 This meant that madness was once again a moral fault, and medicine and morality would contest each other and be intertwined as domains.16 With the re-humanization of the mad, the material conditions of confi nement would at least improve and the insane were deemed to be curable once more. The move of the mad from the prison to the asylum was considered a “liberation” of the mentally ill, and the fi rst doctors to argue for this move and to run the new asylums, Samuel Tuke in England and Philippe Pinel in France, were seen and continue to be seen as philanthropist “liberators.” In his study of the birth of the prison, Discipline and Punish, in which gruesome spectacles of torture and execution are described as being replaced in the late eighteenth century by prisons as sites of forced labor, and eventually by prisons as places of rehabilitation, Foucault argues that prison reform and the psychiatric reform of criminals did not take place because

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human beings became more humane, even if this rhetoric was used at the time and continues to be used today, but rather because reformers realized that the new systems of punishment and rehabilitation were more effective at dealing with the social problem of crime. Forced labor and psychiatric treatment for all criminals in the modern period reintegrated normalized, disciplined citizens into the workforce, while the ancien regime practice of slaughtering or mutilating a few criminals, spreading resentment against the bloody power of the king even while letting the majority of lawbreakers go free, had proved neither economical nor effective. Although the modern prison is apparently kinder to the prisoner’s body, Foucault argues that its disciplinary target is the more productive site of the inmate’s soul.17 As shall be seen, a similar argument occurs in Madness and Civilization with respect to the mad.

ASYLUMS Psychiatric reform, including the removal of the mad from dungeons to asylums, made the physical existence of the majority of the insane more humane, although prison cells and instruments of torture would not disappear entirely. Madmen and women who did not behave might now be punished with ice baths and cold showers, solitary confinement, and other inventive instruments which Foucault describes (such as the “famous ‘rotary machine’”), and later with electrotherapy and lobotomies, while Charcot would persist in putting madwomen on display and inciting them to perform. However, with the move from the prison to the asylum, the majority of the mad were no longer flogged and kept in dungeons and chains. For Foucault the explanation behind these changes, as in the case of prison reform, is not that the species grew kinder or more enlightened (despite its lingering cruelties), but that it had developed more efficient means of disciplining the human body and soul, and psychiatry would be a privileged tool of normalization in both the prison and the asylum. As such, Foucault stresses that “No medical advance, no humanitarian approach was responsible for the fact that the mad were gradually isolated, that the monotony of insanity was divided into rudimentary types,” and attributes the division instead to “A political more than a philanthropic awareness.”18 In Tuke’s asylum, the Retreat, work was once more viewed as a form of rehabilitation for the mad, and patients were made to work less for the economic than for the moral gains of their labor.19 In addition, religion was central to Tuke’s treatment: the insane were schooled in religious principles and religious fear was exploited. 20 Tuke would write that “The principle of fear [ . . . ] is considered as of great importance in the management of the patients.”21 Another thing that the mad feared was a return to imprisonment and chains. As such, instead of having the patients in chains to begin with, Tuke would exploit their fear by menacing them with chains

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and punishment if they continued to manifest signs of madness. At the fi rst perceptible indication of insanity the patients would be threatened with punishment and chains, and if they continued to behave madly they were to be punished swiftly but calmly, and Tuke would explain to the patients why they were being punished. In this way the mad were made to feel responsible for their behavior and to feel shame for their own punishment. At the same time the doctor who was ordering or executing the punishment was not put in the role of tormentor, but rather of gentle but fi rm father figure who punishes the mad individual for his or her own good and not, as in the house of confi nement, for the pleasure of the spectacle. As a result, the mad came to fear not the psychiatrist but the manifestations of their own madness. It was their madness which brought them punishment, not the psychiatrist who had the job of carrying it out. Fearing their own madness rather than the doctor, patients would learn to monitor and control themselves and to be passive to punishment when it came. With the diminishment of physical or external coercion, constraint was internalized as guilt and responsibility. Although the insane appeared to have been liberated, being free to wander about the asylum grounds so long as they behaved, it was their souls which had been imprisoned: “Tuke created an asylum where he substituted for the free terror of madness the stifl ing anguish of responsibility; fear no longer reigned on the other side of the prison gates, it now raged under the seals of conscience.”22 While the insane inmates of prisons had been displayed as spectacles of animality, Tuke made his patients conscious that they were being observed for signs of madness. It was no longer the flamboyant bodies of the mad which were being looked at, as in the prison, but rather the mad were aware that they were being watched for indications of their inner states. Tuke would for instance invite his patients to tea parties where they were to act like strangers, and these parties functioned as tests for the mad to see if they could behave like “normal” guests. In this manner the insane were normalized, taught to self-monitor because they knew they were being monitored by others. The point was to teach the mad to keep their madness silent and to behave like normal people. In Pinel’s asylums of La Salpêtrière and Bicêtre, similarly, Foucault argues that madness was silenced, not to be spoken about, and if it was spoken about it was met with a discouraging silence on the part of the doctor. As in Tuke’s Retreat, Pinel’s patients were made aware that they were being judged, and were taught to judge the other patients as absurd. Eventually patients at La Salpêtrière and Bicêtre would recognize that they themselves were behaving like their ridiculous companions, that they were being judged too, or that they, Louis XVI, were no different from the other six patients who thought they were Louis XVI, and that they were all equally absurd. In this manner the mad came to see themselves through the eyes of reason, learning to judge themselves by judging others, or to see themselves through the mirror provided by other internees and held up by doctors.

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In these new asylums, Foucault stresses, the relationship between the doctor and the patient was recognized as crucial. However, while a medical certificate was necessary from the end of the eighteenth century onwards in order to commit a patient to an asylum, Foucault insists that medical knowledge was never usefully drawn on in the treatment of the mad. The intervention of the doctor was moral rather than medical, and Tuke and Pinel recognized the technical irrelevance of their medical training. Tuke for instance notes of one of the fi rst doctors at the Retreat that “the medical means were so imperfectly connected with the progress of recovery, that he could not avoid suspecting them, to be rather concomitants than causes.”23 Fifteen years after Madness and Civilization Foucault would continue to argue that the function of psychiatry is moral rather than medical. In “Psychiatry, Confi nement, Prison,” he argues that asylums were called “hospitals” as a form of “cover operation”: Psychiatry immediately perceived itself as a permanent function of social order and made use of the asylums for two purposes: first, to treat the most obvious, the most embarrassing cases and, at the same time, to provide a sort of guarantee, an image of scientificity, by making the place of confinement look like a hospital. The renaming of the place of confinement as a hospital was a way of declaring that the practice of psychiatry was indeed medical—since it, too, like medicine, had a hospital. 24 Having an institution and calling it a “hospital” is an “operation of justification” for what psychiatrists are really occupied with, which is “public hygiene.”25 Indeed, in this article Foucault argues that the medical certificates of doctors took up where lettres de cachet had left off. He observes that, contrary to a common understanding, it was not only aristocrats who were victims of lettres de cachet; ordinary people such as cobblers’ wives and fishmongers could go to public writers who practiced at street corners and dictate their complaints, that their husbands were scoundrels or their wives were “filthy whores,” in order to have these troublesome family members locked away. The ability to have one’s relatives locked up was considered a right during the eighteenth century, and was “sorely missed during the Revolution. And during the whole Revolutionary period this problem was posed constantly: a means must be found for families to be able to confi ne lawfully those individuals who are a nuisance to them.”26 This was a means which the medical certificates of psychiatrists would soon fulfi ll, and as protectors of public hygiene, Foucault argues, psychiatrists were perfectly content to sign a certificate to confi ne a woman as mad because she had been a fi lthy whore, or a man for being an alcoholic spendthrift scoundrel. Despite the purely moral function of psychiatrists, the possession of a medical degree was significant in bringing about the “cure” of patients

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because it gave the doctor an aura of authority and thus functioned as a moral and juridical guarantee, indicating to the internee that the doctor was a reasonable man possessing a body of objective knowledge, someone to be respected and obeyed. Patients believed that the directives of the doctors adhered to a body of medical knowledge, and nineteenth-century doctors themselves would come to see their task in these terms, despite the greater lucidity of Tuke and Pinel. While in the prisons of the early modern period the mad might obey their keepers out of pain and fear, they did not respect their goalers as moral authorities, whereas in the asylum the patients learned to respect and desire to please their doctors, and this proved to be a more efficient way of controlling them than whips and chains. In the prisons the mad were often made to guard each other, and sometimes it was the mad who would display the mad to their sane spectators, flicking each other with whips. In this environment, unreason spoke with unreason, the atmosphere was one of madness and pain, and power was, in Foucault’s words, “faceless and abstract.”27 In the asylum, in contrast, power is a figure with whom the patient is in an intimate relation, and unreason is made to speak with reason and to speak on reason’s terms. Patients recognized their doctors as figures of reason and respected their moral and juridical authority as such, at which point, for Foucault, madness had already been conquered because it had recognized the superiority of reason and submitted to it, silencing itself. Reason had been internalized by the mad as a norm—even if a norm that they were still struggling to achieve—and this norm was personified by the doctor. Physical constraints were normally unnecessary in these conditions because the patients’ respect for reason and for their doctors was the most effective constraint of all. The mad had for a long time had the legal status of minors but they had not lived as children in the prisons and the prison had not been conceived as a family home. In contrast, Tuke explicitly understood the members of his Retreat as a family, with the keepers as adults, the doctors as fathers, and the mad as children. The mad accepted their status as minors in the father-child relationships which developed between doctors and patients. As in the bourgeois nineteenth-century family, the father was the judge and executioner, and so in the asylum the doctor’s power to decide punishments and to execute them immediately, without appeal, was accepted within and without the asylum walls. For Tuke, the family milieu was the antithesis of madness, an environment in which insanity would necessarily dissipate. A return to sanity meant an adjustment to and acceptance of the norms and values of the bourgeois family. As such, at the Retreat patriarchal family values were inculcated in the mad as sanity, norms and truths. While at Tuke’s asylum the Quaker religion was used to facilitate this integration into the values of the bourgeois family, at Pinel’s asylums in postRevolution Paris, although religious morality continued to be cultivated, the iconography of religion was removed and faith was treated only as a symptom of madness to be monitored for fanaticism.28 Indeed, religious fanatics

128 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault could be banned from the asylum, returned to dungeons and chains, particularly if they tried to spread their faith, precisely because they refused to accept the authority of their earthly fathers, the doctors, prioritizing instead the authority of God, for Whom they might take themselves to be, and because they might teach other inmates to follow.29 Foucault notes that “For the nineteenth century, the initial model of madness would be to believe oneself to be God, while for the preceding centuries it had been to deny God.”30 With psychiatry, madness was understood as a refusal to recognize paternal authority, and paradigmatically to see oneself as an authority not bound to moral limitations, i.e. to see oneself as God. Sanity, on the other hand, taught in the asylum, was submission to an earthly father’s law.

PRODUCING OEDIPUS Because of the self-conscious manners in which the mad were taught to see themselves as children and their doctors as fathers to whose moral instruction they must submit, Foucault argues that asylums cultivated a “parental complex,”31 and this parental complex in which the father is the law and in which the only language which can be spoken is his own would be internalized as truth and norm. Later, according to Foucault, psychoanalysis would come along and “discover” this Victorian patriarchal bourgeois “parental” or, more specifically, “father” or “Oedipal complex” and describe it as the destiny of all civilization as well as the source of all neuroses, when in fact this family structure was rather recent and had been implanted in subjects at least partly by psychiatry itself. Resistance to psychiatry and psychoanalysis was now seen as a resistance to the father, so that what was once a cosmic conflict between reason and unreason was reduced to a mere family quarrel. Foucault suggests that in the beginning father complexes had been produced between doctors and patients as a form of cure, rather than reflecting and repeating earlier and inevitable relations which were the sources of the patients’ madness. By obliging patients to submit to psychiatric treatment, doctors would understand themselves as overcoming resistance to paternal authority, training patients to accept patriarchal norms as the path to reason. But for Foucault madness was not always about family complexes or inabilities to adjust to the necessities of family life, and the mad might have initially been resisting reason, not merely their fathers or father-substitutes. Psychiatry was a practice which disseminated father complexes, transforming madness from unreason into a more manageable need for paternal discipline, and which then posited father complexes as the source of pathologies. Reason was thus embodied by the doctor, the father, and later the Symbolic, language, the law, and, the mad must be persuaded to see this paternal law as the only viable option. The alternative to the father’s law, as even late twentieth-century Lacanian feminists such as Kristeva would accept,

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is Semiotic matriarchy, madness, chaos, silence, and death—an impossible alternative which can only be drawn upon sparingly to trouble patriarchy without ever actually endangering it. 32 “Cured” individuals are thus those who have been thoroughly normalized (or, for Kristeva, at least partially normalized, and heterosexualized) into the patriarchal family values of the doctors. 33 As Pinel and Tuke would stress, their cured patients were the best of workers, the most devoted of spouses and most loving of parents. The asylum produced good citizens, obedient wives, and moral and social homogeneity. Pinel would point out that marriage prevented madness in women, and bachelorhood, laziness, promiscuity and drunkenness led to insanity in both sexes. 34 Nineteenth-century psychiatry thus presented its own morality as a universal norm and imposed it on the insane. Lack of sex could cause madness, but so could sex outside of marriage: reproductive sexuality within marriage was the universal path to reason. Not to conform to Victorian family values was to be insane, and to submit to those values was to be cured, and the task of psychiatry was thus not a medical one but a “moral synthesis,” particularly with respect to sexual mores. 35 While most of the mad were liberated from their material chains through psychiatry, those who resisted the assimilating practices of the asylum were returned to their material bonds. Pinel’s asylums still included dungeons which were reserved for religious fanatics who did not recognize the doctor’s authority, for women who stole, and for those who refused to work. As Foucault notes, disobedience, theft, and laziness were the “three great transgressions against bourgeois society,” demonstrating a subject who would not be assimilated into this society’s particular (although presented as universal) values. 36 Punitive treatment of the mad would continue even in late twentieth-century psychiatry, as Foucault would stress in later interviews, in order to enforce moral and social norms on those who resisted synthesis and who represented political dissent. In “Confi nement, Psychiatry, Prison,” Foucault argues that the cooperation of psychiatrists with the KGB in the U.S.S.R. was not an abuse of medicine, but was simply an overt case and “condensation” of psychiatry’s “inheritance,” an “intensification, the ossification of a kinship structure that has never ceased to function.”37 Foucault observes the use of psychosurgery such as lobotomies in the United States and the Soviet Union for “political purposes,”38 and the Soviet use of Pavlovian reflexology to “cure” homosexuals: gay men would be given photos of men to look at along with injections that made them sick, and then photos of women to look at and injections which induced pleasure. 39 Foucault’s interviewers comment that the working class, Jews, blacks, and women make “great patients,” and of course the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century surgical intervention (hysterectomies and lobotomies) of psychiatrists to “cure” feminists, lesbians, and women discontent with maternity and patriarchy is well known. Also indicating the “kinship structure” shared by the police and psychiatry, Foucault discusses the participation of psychiatrists as well as a psychoanalyst in police interrogations

130 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault involving torture in Brazil.40 The psychoanalyst, like the psychiatrist, functions, Foucault observes, quite literally in this case as a “torture-advisor.” These are not just cases of a few bad apples, for Foucault, but reveal something structural about psychiatry and psychoanalysis. In the fi nal few pages of Madness and Civilization Foucault again argues that psychiatric methods were simply continued and refi ned in psychoanalytic practice, despite some differences. Beginning with the differences, Foucault writes that Freud would “liberate” the mad again, this time from the asylums and their silence. Freud’s patients were not forced to silence their mad thoughts, to contain them from any external expression. On the contrary they were asked to speak, to describe their madness, to say what had been repressed. However this would take place as the speaking of transgressions, as confessions accompanied by guilt and shame, within a hushed ambiance of the secret and in a discourse which presupposed the authority of the listener and with the assumption that the “unreasonable” and “abnormal” patient had transgressed. Psychoanalysis always already took place on reason’s terms with reason embodied by the analyst. Analysis thus occurs only in the psychoanalyst’s language, even if it is now the patients who speak and the doctors who remain silent. The psychoanalyst scarcely needs to speak because what he has to say has already triumphed, for madness can only be spoken with a prior acceptance of reason’s authority. When Freud “liberates” the mad for the second time, allowing them to speak, it is already decided what they will say, according to what rules their speech will be structured, that they will only say what Freud is prepared to hear, or that there will be no surprises. Foucault writes: The absence of language, as a fundamental structure of asylum life, has its correlative in the exposure of confession. When Freud, in psychoanalysis, cautiously reinstitutes exchange, or rather begins once again to listen to this language, henceforth eroded into monologue, should we be astonished that the formulations he hears are always those of transgression? In this inveterate silence, transgression has taken over the very sources of speech.41 Importantly, while Freud abolishes silence for a monologue, and abolishes as well the observations and punishments of the asylum, he nevertheless accepts from Tuke and Pinel the significance of the doctor-patient relation, and indeed, according to Foucault he collapses all the power of silence, punishment and observation, the entire structure of the asylum, into this relation, and he “exploits” it. In the fi nal lines of Madness and Civilization, and in one of his only extended discussions of Freud, Foucault writes: And it is to this degree that all nineteenth-century psychiatry really converges on Freud, the fi rst man to accept in all its seriousness the reality of the physician-patient couple, the fi rst to consent not to look

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away nor to investigate elsewhere, the fi rst not to attempt to hide it in a psychiatric theory that more or less harmonized with the rest of medical knowledge; the fi rst to follow its consequences with absolute rigor. Freud demystified all the other asylum structures: he abolished silence and observation, he eliminated madness’s recognition of itself in the mirror of its own spectacle, he silenced the instances of condemnation. But on the other hand he exploited the structure that enveloped the medical personage; he amplified its thaumaturgical virtues, preparing for its omnipotence a quasi-divine status. He focused upon this single presence—concealed behind the patient and above him, in an absence that is also a total presence—all the powers that had been distributed in the collective existence of the asylum; he transformed this into an absolute Observation, a pure and circumspect Silence, a Judge who punishes and rewards in a judgement that does not even condescend to language; he made it the Mirror in which madness, in an almost motionless movement, clings to and casts off itself. To the doctor, Freud transferred all the structures Pinel and Tuke had set up within confi nement. He did deliver the patient from the existence of the asylum within which his “liberators” had alienated him; but he did not deliver him from what was essential in this existence; he regrouped its powers, extended them to the maximum by uniting them in the doctor’s hands; he created the psychoanalytical situation where, by an inspired short-circuit, alienation becomes disalienating because, in the doctor, it becomes a subject. The doctor, as an alienating figure, remains the key to psychoanalysis.42 For the author of Madness and Civilization, psychoanalysis is thus simply the most economical form of “that gigantic moral imprisonment” which we call the “liberation of the insane,”43 the form in which submission to normalization in the hands of a paternal authority has been crystalized and made to be everything. In “Confi nement, Psychiatry, Prison,” having observed the overtly shared kinship structure between politics, the police, and psychiatry in the U.S.S.R., the latter both working as protectors of public hygiene and Soviet political mores, Foucault notes that lobotomy having eventually been made illegal, it was not coincidental that the fi rst Congress of Psychoanalysis was about to be held in the Soviet Union, thus stressing again the logical continuation of psychiatric moral and political methods in psychoanalysis. He notes: all the psychoanalysts will be foreigners, but they are being brought in. Why bring them in, if not because it is suspected that what they have to say may be of some use? And I’m sure they are being brought in as “sexologists.” That’s to say, there’s a real need—which is probably not very

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The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault clearly realized. I don’t think there’s a little Machiavelli behind all that. Fundamentally, there is a need felt for a “normalization” of the individual’s behavior through forms of authority that are no longer the administrative and police authorities of the KGB, but something more subtle.44

Up until this point, Foucault suggests, the normalization of sexuality was controlled in the U.S.S.R. simply through lack of privacy: People are held in place by simple means, whether housing conditions, mutual observation, several families sharing one kitchen and one bathroom. [ . . . ] When people have their own space and consequently find it easier to escape or ignore the political apparatus, or to hide from it, how will they be caught? They’ll be caught on the couch, in psychotherapy.45 Psychotherapy is thus presented by both the early and later Foucault as a trap in which one is caught, and “trap” is precisely the word Foucault uses in a passage from his introduction to “I, Pierre Rivière . . .” in which he writes: As to Rivière’s discourse, we decided not to interpret it and not to subject it to any psychiatric or psychoanalytic commentary [ . . . ] If we had done so, we should have brought it within the power relation whose reductive effect we wished to show, and we ourselves should have fallen into the trap it set. 46 The only way in which Foucault suggests that he and his co-authors can avoid the traps of psychoanalysis is to not engage in its discourse, and this is perhaps the reason for which psychoanalysis is so little discussed in Foucault’s works, even if it is always haunting their margins.

NIETZSCHEAN LAUGHTER In an interview Foucault states: “I have never been a Freudian, I have never been a Marxist and I have never been a structuralist [ . . . ] Madness and Civilization, written between ’55 and ’60 [ . . . ] is neither Freudian nor Marxist nor structuralist.” Foucault continues, “Now, as it happened, I had read Nietzsche in ’53 [ . . . ].”47 Foucault inscribes his book on the emergence of psychiatry and psychoanalysis not, notably, in readings of Freud, who provides multiple accounts of the birth and development of psychoanalysis, but in his reading of Nietzsche. But what does Nietzsche mean for Foucault? In another interview, Foucault states: In relation to academic philosophical discourse [ . . . ] Nietzsche represents the outer frontier. [ . . . ] [I]n relation to philosophy, Nietzsche has all the roughness, the rusticity, of the outsider, of the peasant from

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the mountains, that allows him, with a shrug of the shoulders and without it seeming in any way ridiculous, to say with a strength that one cannot ignore: “Come on, all that is rubbish . . .” Ridding oneself of philosophy necessarily implies a similar lack of deference. You will not get out of it by staying within philosophy, by refi ning it as much as you can, by circumventing it with one’s own discourse. No. It is by opposing it with a sort of astonished, joyful stupidity, a sort of uncomprehending burst of laughter, which, in the end, understands, or, in any case, shatters. Yes . . . it shatters rather than understands.48 It was seen in Chapter One that Nietzschean genealogy “cuts” rather than “understands,” while here an even more destructive Nietzschean “shattering” is privileged over comprehension. As such, Foucault does not challenge psychoanalytic theory, or psychiatry for that matter, by working within that theory, refi ning it, trying to understand it, looking at how it refi ned itself, or by providing close analyses of its texts and attempting to nuance or challenge its theories on its own terms. Foucault does not counter psychoanalysis with psychoanalysis, theory with theory, or philosophy with philosophy. Rather, he steps outside of philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, declining to work within the logic of these systems of thought, and instead attempts to circumvent them, to cut and to shatter with other kinds of discourse. One example of an alternative discourse would be the memoir of Rivière, to be discussed in Chapter Five, a “stupid” text perhaps, the text of a “village idiot” and “madman,” but which Foucault considers brilliant because it manages to break out of an apparently inevitable way of thinking and resists disciplinary power. Foucault notes that the parricide Pierre Rivière was described by witnesses as laughing strangely, and this laughter was taken as a sign of his madness, a rejection of norms. When asked in an interview why he had published Rivière’s memoir, Foucault said it was presented as a challenge “à messieurs les psys en général,”49 thinking that they would have nothing to say in response, daring them to analyze it. Only one psychoanalyst took up his challenge, arguing that Rivière represented a case of Lacanian paranoia: Foucault simply laughs, calling her a “sotte,”50 and thus, like Nietzsche and Rivière, has the “strength” to simply laugh and to say, “Come on, all that is rubbish,” even if, elsewhere, he will acknowledge that psychoanalytic theory is more “subtle” than such dismissive treatment implies: in “Les mailles du pouvoir,” for instance, Foucault acknowledges that “Freud’s thought is in fact much more subtle than the image that I have presented here,”51 and yet he declines to elaborate on this point. Stepping outside of psychoanalysis’s own self-understanding, Foucault looks at psychoanalysis not as a series of discoveries or as an unfolding of truth, not as a means of helping individuals, not as a body of continually evolving theories, but from the outside and in toto, like the peasant who comes down from the mountain and shrugs his shoulders, dismissing it

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as relations of power and demographic control. It is these relations and concerns, and not Breuer’s treatment of Anna O. as described by Freud, which gave birth to psychoanalysis for Foucault. As such, Foucault does not provide refutations of psychoanalytic texts and nor does he look at how they developed over the years, as Toews would have him do, but looks instead at how a society invested in psychoanalysis developed and how psychoanalytic theory functions institutionally and in terms of relations of disciplinary power. With respect to the notions of repression and the unconscious, for instance, Foucault does not debate whether there is psychic repression or whether there is an unconscious, but rather asks how the ideas of an unconscious and of sexual repression work in terms of disciplinary power. If we believe that there is an unconscious, and that we are thus at least partially inaccessible to ourselves, and that our sexuality in particular is inaccessible to us, this implies that we need experts to analyze us and to tell us who we are, that we should tell them about our sexuality in particular, and thus that we should voluntarily put ourselves in relations of disciplinary power. With respect to repression, again the question is not whether psychoanalytic theory is correct about repression, or whether we are in fact repressed, but how the generalized notion of repression has been mobilized as an incentive and an excuse to confess, and how confession functions in terms of truth and power. The point is to observe the increase in discipline that occurs when we believe in these theories and practices. The disciplinary shift of which psychoanalysis is part has meant that power is no longer in the hands of sovereigns but occurs in relations such as those between patients and doctors. It also means that power has become diffuse and disguised as scientific knowledge and humanistic care, and it has meant that we set ourselves willingly into relations of disciplinary power, and that we are oblivious to how power works. Instead of engaging in psychoanalytic texts, Foucault explains the series of accidents through which these concepts and their institutions emerged, the development of historical conditions which were necessary for these concepts to be thought at all. This development which culminates in a diffusion of psychoanalysis across the culture of the West, and across its social institutions, is not a progress in knowledge, a discovery of what was always the case and which is only now being articulated, but is a birth of something new but which appears inevitable. Psychoanalytic theories may or may not be true today, but other truths would have emerged if these theories, practices, and truths had not, and hence truth in itself is no justification. For Foucault, something being true does not mean that it had to emerge, that it had to be, or that it need be in the future. Truth in itself does not explain existence, and Foucault would stress that he did not want to say that psychoanalysis was mistaken. 52 Instead, he wanted to bracket this question and to change the perspective. Instead of saying that psychoanalysis is wrong, Foucault situates psychoanalysis in a history of relations of knowledge and power.

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What Foucault is showing is that despite the apparent progress which the birth of psychiatric science represented—for instance, it means that we now “treat” prisoners and the mad instead of torturing or simply confi ning them—it was not benign. To reject psychoanalysis would not mean to return to the past, to the torturing of prisoners and the insane, nor even to the obsessive self-mastery of the ancient Greeks, but to be able to conceive of something new, a form of power which is neither sovereign nor disciplinary, an aesthetics of existence which can also think about the pleasure and the freedom of the other. Following Nietzsche, Foucault’s books would have us burst into laughter, to shatter and to change, rather than chart the development of psychoanalytic theory in a search for its errors, as, again, Toews would have wished. These repeated references to a laughter which shatters recall Foucault’s earlier description of explosive laughter in The Order of Things. Upon reading Borges’s citation from the Chinese encyclopedia, Foucault yet again burst into laughter, laughter which disturbed the present way of thinking: This book fi rst arose out of a passage in Borges, out of laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought [ . . . ] breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. 53 As with Aristotle’s distinction between universal categories and particular instances which is abolished by the Chinese Encyclopedia, psychoanalytic concepts appear to us as common sense. But what we need is another Chinese encyclopedia, exposure to another way of thinking which shocks our own, not in order to take it up instead of psychoanalysis, but to convince ourselves that other ways of thinking and being are possible. For Foucault, this was the function of many of the non-psychoanalytic, non-philosophical texts which he brings into his works. Rivière’s memoir, the practices of the self of Ancient Greece and Rome, the gruesome torture of Damiens described at the beginning of Discipline and Punish, and the Chinese encyclopedia all show us that there are other ways of thinking and being than those of the Freudian subject. Importantly, this laughter is a corporeal response, and we might also respond physically rather than only intellectually to other examples of Foucault’s, such as his description of the torture of Damiens or the abuses of psychiatry. This is important because the work of discipline also works at the level of the body and thus can be undone only through the body, through shifts in its pleasures and affects and practices, and not merely through the acceptance or examination of philosophical ideas. Ladelle McWhorter makes a similar point in Bodies and Pleasures when she argues that because discipline targets the body rather than the intellect, it is best

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combated through corporeal practices and not only through rational convictions or philosophical arguments. She writes: Power in the institutions that developed through the nineteenth century tended to act not so much on the mind and its representations as on the body and its gestures, not so much on reasoning as on doing. What if Foucault is right about this? Insofar as power still operates that way, would we not then always be doomed to fail if we always combat power networks solely or even primarily at the level of ideas? Might we not need to practice, rather than to reason, our way out of whatever it is that causes us debilitating pain? [ . . . ] In the second volume of his History of Sexuality Foucault makes some important remarks that support my contention that it is practices, not ideas, that his writings address and seek to change. 54 This might go some way in defending Foucault from the charge that his few remarks about psychoanalysis and many of his criticisms of psychiatry function at an ad hominem level, presenting examples of abuse rather than engaging with theories. Because Foucault is responding against the workings of discipline on the body, it might in fact be most effective for him to find texts which make him, and his readers, laugh—or, alternately, to feel visceral abhorrence—rather than to convince himself or his readers through rational arguments. This would also be one reason for which Foucault thinks that the discovery of new pleasures would be politically subversive, and for which he does not engage with psychoanalysis at the level of its theories, but instead through examples which may cause the reader to respond at the level of her body. As has been seen above, Foucault’s target is not as narrow as Freud or his followers, but aims rather at the diffuse effects of the “psy-” disciplines in society, of which Freud would be but a late and particularly eloquent representative. Foucault’s project is to expose and problematize the normative and disciplinary effects of psychiatry and psychoanalysis on various institutions (the prison, the hospital, the school, the family) and consequently on modern subjectivity itself. For Foucault, to engage with psychoanalytic texts on their own terms, to discuss whether they are true or false, like engaging in psychoanalytic practice itself—which was a decision and a temptation which, somewhat surprisingly, Foucault himself struggled with throughout his life55—means doing so on psychoanalysis’s own terms. Foucault decides not to enmesh himself in psychoanalytic discussions or in psychoanalytic practice, but to show that the entire field of theory is accidental, not a necessary evolution in knowledge, and that it is normalizing and a means of internalizing disciplinary power, and thus concludes that it is better to do without it, both in the living of one’s life and in the writing of one’s texts. As seen, however, at the end of his life Foucault would say that he had over-emphasized discipline in his works, and turned to the manners in

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which subjects can govern and fashion themselves. He never considered whether he had over-emphasized discipline in his discussion of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in particular, however, or whether these specific practices could be examples of self-governance and self-care, or at least of the ways in which practices of discipline and self-governance are intertwined. In the next two sections I will therefore consider whether the problematic traits of psychoanalysis which Foucault has described indeed characterize psychoanalytic theory and practice, despite the years of self-critique to which Toews points, or whether Foucault has over-emphasized the role of discipline in these practices. To the extent that I will fi nd the problematic traits to which Foucault points present in psychoanalytic theory and in the history of its practice, I will question whether these characteristics are structural to psychoanalysis, as Foucault seems to suggest, or whether they can be, and in some instances have been, overcome. It will be argued that while Foucault’s critiques of psychoanalysis apply to different stages in Freud’s thought and to some forms of post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, they are not all intrinsic to psychoanalysis and thus that we need not follow Foucault in dismissing all forms of psychotherapy, even if Foucault should have succeeded in making us wary. While it will be argued that psychoanalysis can easily function as discipline and domination, I will also consider whether it may be appropriated as a practice of self-fashioning as well as a form of care for others. In the next section I will return to Foucault’s critiques of psychoanalysis in Madness and Civilization, while in the fi nal section I will consider the quite different critiques raised in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction.

NORMALIZATION, DOMINATION, AND TOTALIZATION

Normalization Many of the features of psychiatry and psychoanalysis which concern Foucault in Madness and Civilization—that it is normalizing, that it presents a totalizing history, that it involves a relation of domination—are apparent in both Freud’s early and late thought, but have been critiqued within psychoanalytic theory which was contemporary to Freud and which followed him. To be fairest to Freud, I will draw primarily on his latest and thus most mature writing, and particularly on his 1937 paper “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” in considering the validity of Foucault’s critiques, before turning to post-Freudian psychoanalytic thought. To begin with Foucault’s main critique of psychoanalysis in Madness and Civilization, that it is normalizing, Freud’s essay defi nes psychoanalytic therapy in precisely these terms, as “the freeing of someone from his neurotic symptoms, inhibitions, and abnormalities of character.”56 Psychoanalysis is said to achieve “for neurotics [ . . . ] nothing other

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than what normal people bring about for themselves without its help.”57 Although Freud will assure the reader near the end of this essay that “Our aim will not be to rub off every peculiarity of human character for the sake of a schematic ‘normality,’ nor yet to demand that the person who has been ‘throughly analysed’ shall feel no passions and develop no internal confl icts,”58 it is apparent that Freud intends that successfully analyzed patients will conform to accepted social norms and not behave disruptively, even in circumstances of extreme loss. For instance, Freud describes the successful analysis of a wealthy young Russian who later returns to Vienna as a destitute refugee: having followed this patient’s life for twenty-five years after the analysis terminated, Freud notes with satisfaction that “since then the patient has felt normal and has behaved unexceptionably, in spite of the war having robbed him of his home, his possessions, and all his family relationships.”59 Freud also describes his successful treatment of a fellow-analyst, Ferenczi, in the following terms: “This critical illumination of his own self had a completely successful result. He married the woman he loved and turned into a friend and teacher of his supposed rivals.”60 Among the main indications that this analysis was successful is that Ferenczi entered into an institutionalized heterosexual relationship soon after, or followed the normal path that his society prescribed. An unmarried female hysteric with whom Freud was less successful, in contrast, “saw every hope of happiness in love and marriage vanish” and “remained abnormal to the end of her life.”61 In A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Freud would also refer to the unmarried state of Bertha Pappenheim (‘Anna O.’) in similar terms: “In spite of her recovery, she has remained to some extent cut off from life since that time; for although she has remained healthy and active, she did not take up the normal career of a woman.”62 Freud goes on to suggest that Pappenheim was permanently “set back” by her neuroses to an earlier, infantile stage of life: “a period in childhood, even, absurd as it may sound, the period of existence as a suckling infant.”63 Freud lets it be understood (falsely) that Pappenheim recovered due to Breuer’s treatment of her, but claims that she had nevertheless not been an entirely successful case because she had never married and had children. As shall be discussed in Chapter Five, some years after her treatment by Breuer ended, Pappenheim began a remarkable intellectual, philanthropic, and political career, publishing and translating prolifically, and bringing about real social change, helping numerous poverty-stricken women and children. All this goes unmentioned by Freud, who only says that she has been “active” but that her choices foresook womanhood and were thus inferior to the more typically feminine choices of marriage and motherhood. Perhaps it was Pappenheim’s decision to care for other women, rather than for a husband and (preferably male) children which leads Freud to conclude that Pappenheim had regressed to a suckling, infantile state. Normality and success are thus measured by Freud, for both male and female patients, in

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terms of the analysand’s submission to patriarchy and ability to enter into an institutionalized, heterosexual relationship, as was also the case for the nineteenth-century psychiatry of Tuke and Pinel. Foucault calls the normalizing process of psychiatry and psychoanalysis a “moral synthesis,” and Freud writes that “the analytic situation consists in our allying ourselves with the ego of the person under treatment, in order to subdue portions of his id which are uncontrolled—that is to say to include them in the synthesis of his ego,”64 which in “The Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy,” Freud calls an “assimilation” of the patient to what he hears from the analyst.65 According to Foucault the analysand is able to normalize patients by making them submit to the paternal law and to the authority of an apparently objective reason (or, in Freud’s words, to “sound arguments”66), and the medical certificate of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts went a long way in accomplishing these results. As seen, Foucault argues that the medical degree was a guarantee of the doctors’ wisdom and respectablity and thus functioned as a “cover operation” for their moral task. As such, while psychiatrists and psychoanalysts are not drawing on their medical knowledge in their treatment of patients, but are simply enforcing their moral values onto others, the analogy between medicine and psychiatry and psychoanalysis must be insisted upon. Throughout “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” Freud makes comparisons between psychotherapeutic cures and medical treatments and vaccinations for organic illnesses such as scarlet fever and smallpox, even though his cures aim at ends such as converting lesbians to heterosexuality and not at saving lives.67 Because, unlike Freud, not all psychoanalysts are medical doctors or have the moral guarantee which this education purportedly provides, it is crucial for Freud that psychoanalysts exhibit other signs of authority to their patients. He writes: “It is therefore reasonable to expect of an analyst, as a part of his qualifications, a considerable degree of mental normality and correctness. In addition, he must possess some kind of superiority, so that in certain analytic situations he can act as a model for his patient and in others as a teacher.”68 Psychoanalysts must themselves have been successfully normalized if they are to normalize others, and Freud asks: “how is the poor wretch to acquire the ideal qualifications which he will need in his profession? The answer is, in an analysis of himself.”69 Once more, psychoanalysis is the path to normalization, for analysts as well as analysands. Beyond undergoing an initial analysis and continual self-analysis, Freud suggests that psychoanalysts undergo therapy every five years, noting that this means that the psychoanalyst’s own analysis will be “an interminable task.”70 The analyst is to undergo analysis in order to be “normal,” and thus to be able to safely “assimilate” the ego of the analysand into his own normality. Freud notes, however, that “The ego, if we are to make such a pact with it, must be a normal one.”71 This suggests that in many cases the person under analysis may very well already be more or less “normal,” or may at least have a fairly normal ego, which makes it apparent that at least some of Freud’s

140 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault patients were not entirely abnormal to begin with. As such, even while describing psychoanalysis as a normalizing procedure, we see that “normal” egos were also under analysis. This makes sense because everyone can use some normalizing, and Freud acknowledges that normality is something of a “fiction”: “Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on average.”72 For Foucault this recognition that everyone is somewhat abnormal does not make psychoanalysis less pernicious, gentler, or more forgiving than we might have otherwise supposed. On the contrary, the claim that everyone is abnormal simply expands the net of psychoanalysis such that no one is immune. While not everyone was a candidate for nineteenth-century insane asylums and the normalization which took place there, and as such these asylums could only take care of what Foucault calls “the most embarrassing cases,” everyone can plausibly require psychoanalysis since no one is entirely “normal.” In his “Short Account of Psycho-Analysis” Freud would stress again that even the day to day lives of ordinary people could use some expert deciphering, and that psychoanalysis should be used not only for the criminal or the insane but in hospitals where people with organic complaints are being treated, and in education and in the home: “educationists too, cannot avoid making use of the hints which they have received from the analytic exploration of the mental life of children,” he writes, and “we may express our expectation that psychoanalysis [ . . . ] will enter into the cultural development of the next decades as a significant ferment.”73 As the psychoanalyst Joseph Sandler observes, this is precisely what has happened. Sandler comments on “the increasingly rapid growth of psychoanalysis in different parts of the world” and its infiltration into aspects of culture beyond the analyst’s clinic: “Psychoanalysis has had the good fortune to be an international discipline almost from its inception, thereby anticipating what has become a global perspective in all areas—intellectual, cultural, and commercial.”74 With the move from psychiatric asylums in which only seriously disruptive individuals were forced to undergo treatment, to psychoanalysis in which everyone, including psychoanalysts themselves, can undergo normalization and in which this therapy should be repeated and is even “interminable,” and where therapy infiltrates into the home, the workplace, and the schools, we have a transition which can be compared to the shift from early Christian penance—which, to recall, was arduous, meant only for extreme sinners, and could only occur once—to the annual and even more frequent confessional practices which followed the Council of Trent.75 Like the progress of Christian confession, the move from psychiatric treatment to psychoanalysis is one in which therapy becomes increasingly gentle (from prison to asylum to couch) but also more pervasive. Through this development, psychotherapeutic confession, like Christian confession, became a desired habit for everyone rather than an ordeal for a few. Although from a Foucaultian perspective this transition is worrisome, it is not, as Foucault notes, a Machiavellian plot. The transition from

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sovereign power to the normalization of populations through the deployment of discourses such as psychiatry and psychoanalysis was not a decision made omnisciently by anyone in particular, and there is no sovereign who orders psychoanalysis but who is himself immune to the workings of disciplinary power involved. On the contrary, just as priests who hear confessions have to confess even more regularly themselves, and run a greater risk than laypeople of becoming scrupulous, so the psychoanalyst is herself a subject of continual, repeated, and interminable psychoanalysis, thinking constantly of her own psyche as she unravels the riddles of others, and submitting to the normalizing analyses of her peers.

Domination In his account of his analysis of Ferenczi, Freud writes that the other man “made himself the subject of an analysis by someone else whom he regarded as superior to himself.”76 As Foucault suggests, analysands enter psychoanalysis, much as patients entered Tuke’s and Pinel’s asylums, with an understanding that the doctor or analyst is an authority to be respected and that they should submit to his advice. Freud writes that a patient beginning psychotherapy “may have brought along with him a certain amount of confidence in his analyst, which will be strengthened to an effective point by the factors of the positive transference which will be aroused in him.”77 Foucault states at the end of Madness and Civilization that Freud would “exploit” the power of the doctor-patient relationship, or would take advantage of the patient’s trust and positive transference in order to normalize him. From Freud’s perspective, however, although psychoanalysis aims to normalize the analysand, and may resort to threats and even “blackmailing”78 to do so, and will take advantage of transference, this “is to secure the best possible psychological conditions for the functions of the ego.”79 Foucault and Freud agree that domination takes place, but for Freud, unlike for Foucault, this domination is for the patient’s own good: it enables the analysand to adjust to the expectations of society and allows for her psychic well-being. Freud does observe that there are “dangers of analysis”80 in which the analyst will exploit his authority in order to dominate the patient for his own ends, or for his own neurotic psychological gratification, rather than for the good of the analysand. In making this observation Freud may be engaged in a critique not only of his peers, but also of his own earlier treatments. In Studies in Hysteria and in his case study of “Dora,” Freud describes threatening his patients in order to oblige them to consent to his interpretations, as well as coercing them in various ways to agree with him, thus confi rming interpretations which in retrospect we, Freud’s followers, and perhaps even Freud himself, could identify as resulting not from an objective consideration of the patient’s

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own good but from counter-transference, although Freud seems to have been unaware of the problems of counter-transference at the time. 81 Counter-transference has been defi ned by psychoanalysts in various ways: sometimes it is discussed strictly as an unconscious response of the analyst to the transference of the patient, while at other times it is viewed as any transference on the part of the analyst (not necessarily transferences which respond to the patient’s transference); sometimes counter-transference is limited to unconscious and irrational or abnormal responses on the part of the analyst, while at other times any kind of emotional, non-scientific or non-objective response on the part of the analyst is considered a counter-transference, even if this response is quite “human” or “normal,” for instance when the analyst feels hatred towards anti-social patients. By the time of “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” Freud had long since become aware of the phenomenon of counter-transference and writes: “Such an event may justify the words of the writer who warns us that when a man is endowed with power it is hard for him not to misuse it.”82 For Freud, if counter-transference becomes involved in a treatment, the analyst’s own unconscious fears, anxieties, and desires will become reasons to manipulate the analysand or to be blind to the correct interpretation of her case. According to Freud this means that the analyst is himself still excessively abnormal, or that he has not been sufficiently analyzed. Once again, Freud stresses that an analyst must be normal in order to normalize patients, and if he fails in his treatment of patients through counter-transference interference, this means that he must undergo further treatment himself. At least two aspects of Freud’s view of counter-transference can be questioned: fi rst, we see that Freud thinks that using authority to coerce patients is only problematic when it involves the analyst’s abnormal fears, desires, and anxieties. On the other hand, so long as the analyst is using his authority to coerce the patient to consent to “normal” interpretations, or to “objective” analyses which do not engage the analyst’s own unconscious complexes, this use of domination is not considered to be counter-transference and is deemed acceptable. For Foucault, in contrast, psychoanalytic domination is worrisome regardless of whether the patient is being coerced to soothe the doctor’s socially abnormal desires or to conform to socially “normal” expectations and values. Although Freud recognizes the problem of domination, then, and engages in self-critique, this recognition is, for Foucault, only partial, not problematizing domination in general, but simply so-called “abnormal” or “irrational” impulses to dominate. Second, Freud thinks that counter-transference can be eliminated from an analysis, however it is clear that psychoanalysts beginning with Freud are not always aware of their own counter-transference, and will see their perspective not as an abuse of power but as an exposure of the truth. Analysts will thus not recognize “abnormality” or “irrationality” on their own parts even when it interferes with the treatment, as many commentators have argued happened in Freud’s own treatment of “Dora.” Indeed,

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Benjamin Wolstein suggests that since Freud’s theories are based on selfanalysis which he then insisted on having confi rmed in his analyses of others, and which he also required that his followers extract from their patients, all Freudian theory is a counter-transference on Freud’s part which is simply projected as scientific doctrine. According to Wolstein: to require that all psychoanalysts exclude their counter-transference is to require, in effect, that all except Freud do so. The metapsychology he had proposed to interpret his own dynamic psychic experience was supposed to guide interpretation in every psychoanalytic therapy. [ . . . ] Freud had it both ways: Not only did he not exclude his singular interpretation of counter-transference from his own practice, but he also thought it would dominate the practice of all other psychoanalysts. It thus follows that he thought other psychoanalysts should both keep their own counter-transference in check and pattern theirs after his. 83 Wolstein thus argues that Freud insisted that his counter-transference be confi rmed in his own analyses and in those of his followers, whereas all counter-transferences on the part of others were to be contained in order to let Freud’s counter-transferences dominate. It was seen that for Foucault the psychoanalyst, like the psychiatrist, establishes himself as a father-figure and exerts patriarchal power over his patients, and that for Freud, likewise, the analysand will ideally submit to the analyst as to a “father-substitute,”84 perhaps through paternal transference, and will thus submit to the analyst’s counter-transference or to the theories which the analyst desires to see confi rmed as recognitions of himself, or which he fears and is anxious will be disproven by obstinate patients. It became apparent, however, that some patients saw their analysts in a variety of roles, and not only as father-figures. The analyst was often projected as a mother-substitute, for instance, and in the case of “Dora” Freud may even have repeated the role of “Frau K.,” or may have been a lesbian lover/sexual confidant-substitute for his patient.85 Needless to say Freud was far less comfortable seeing himself in these roles, and far less adept at recognizing himself in them than at understanding himself as a father-substitute. One of his patients, Hilda Doolittle, records that Freud said to her: “I do not like being the mother in transference—it always surprises and shocks me a little. I feel so very masculine.” Doolittle asked Freud if others besides herself had taken him as a mothersubstitute, and notes that he replied “ironically and I thought a little wistfully, ‘O, very many.’”86 In “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” Freud nevertheless (or perhaps consequently) only describes the analyst as a figure of paternal transference. Freud argues in this essay that negative transference arises consistently when male patients feel that submitting to the psychoanalyst’s authority threatens their masculinity since it entails being

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in a passive relation with another man, not exploring the possibility that he could be being substituted for a woman in the analysis.87 Here, the analyst is said to be the “active partner,” and the analysand, whether male or female, is obliged to be the “passive partner,” despite the fact that it is the analysand who speaks.88 Speaking is thus passive, a submission, indicating that Foucault is right that for Freud this speaking could only take place on Freud’s terms and as an abdication to his authority. If undergoing analysis entails a certain passivity or feminization, for Freud it also means infantilization: if, as Freud desired, the analyst is in the role of a father, the analysand is placed in the position of a transgressive child. This, once again, was presumed to be easier for his female patients than for his male patients. As such, much as Foucault notes the minority status of patients within the asylums of Tuke and Pinel, Freud describes his patients who resist his authority as behaving towards him “exactly like a child who does not like the stranger and does not believe anything he says.”89 To not agree with Freud was to be childish and irrational. As father-figures, the doctors in Tuke’s and Pinel’s asylums were also seen as embodying reason, and resistance to their authority was not only a “parental complex,” but also a refusal to listen to reason. Likewise, of the patient who behaves “exactly like a child,” Freud writes: “If the analyst tries to explain to the patient one of the distortions made by him for the purposes of defense, and to correct it, he fi nds him uncomprehending and inaccessible to sound arguments.”90 While Freud saw such incomprehension as a form of resistance to paternal authority, his patients may simply have been refusing to see him as a father. If Freud seems to have remained more or less oblivious to the manners in which counter-transference interfered with his own interpretations, and of the manners in which he exploited his position as a “father” to force these counter-transferences not only onto his patients but onto his followers, and resistant to the ways in which his patients might situate him in roles other than a father, this is not the case for later psychoanalysts. Ferenczi and Rank would write as early as 1923 that “the analyst plays all possible roles for the unconscious of the patient [ . . . ] Particularly important is the role of the two parental images—father and mother—in which the analyst actually constantly alternates [ . . . ].”91 Ralph M. Crowley would argue that in counter-transference it is often the patient who is in the role of the father for the analyst, or is a substitute for the analyst’s paternal transference,92 while Julia Kristeva draws analogies between maternity and the role of the analyst. Ferenczi and Rank also recognize that it may be more difficult than Freud supposed to suppress counter-transference, since, as occurred in Freud’s treatment of “Dora,” the “narcissism of the analyst [ . . . ] provokes the person being analyzed into pushing into the foreground certain things that fl atter the analyst and, on the other hand, into suppressing remarks and associations of an unpleasant nature in relation to him.”93

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Later psychoanalysts would go even further than Ferenczi and Rank, and would argue that counter-transference was inevitable in analysis, that it should be acknowledged to patients, and could moreover be a positive component in the cure. These theorists argue that counter-transference, whether acknowledged by both analyst and analysand or simply used by the analyst, can, like transference, become a fruitful component of the treatment rather than an obstacle to be eliminated. Annie Reich, for instance, recognizes that counter-transference may give rise to domination and abuse, as when, in Mabel Blake Cohen’s words, it reflects “permanent neurotic difficulties of the analyst, in which the patient is often not a real object but rather is used as a tool by means of which some need of the analyst is gratified.” 94 However Reich also argues that “counter-transference attitudes are a necessary prerequisite for analysts”95 without which they would have no curiosity about the lives of others. For Crowley, the existence of counter-transference responses simply means that analysts are human, that they have an unconscious and emotions like their patients, and thus counter-transference cannot be avoided without dehumanizing the analytic encounter. Moreover, for Crowley avoiding counter-transference would not be desirable even if it were possible, since counter-transference can “facilitate analytic understanding and progress.”96 Any interpretations of an analyst which do not engage counter-transference are bound to be limited and “mediocre.”97 Edward S. Tauber elaborates on Crowley’s position, following Freud in believing that the unconscious of the analyst understands the unconscious of the analysand. As such, the analyst can interpret his own unconscious responses to the patient in order to understand aspects of the analysand’s unconscious to which he would not otherwise have had access.98 For this reason, Clara Thompson argues that the personality of the analyst is crucial to her ability to interpret the symptoms of her patients, and some analysts may be better able to treat certain patients than others given that their unconsciences can relate to some patients better than to others.99 This argument undermines the idea that analysts are objective scientists whose personalities are irrelevant to their work. The analyst-analysand relation is emotive and interpersonal rather than objective and scientific, and the personalities of the partners must be compatible for the relation to be fruitful. By the 1950s, an increasing number of analysts rejected Freud’s view of counter-transference and came to see it as an inevitable presence and useful tool for analytic interpretation. However most analysts continue to uphold the view that they should keep their counter-transference responses from their patients, interpreting their own attitudes and drawing on these interpretations without revealing the sources of their insights to their patients.100 Some analysts, however, argue that unless contraindicated, therapists should reveal their emotional responses to their patients, and that together the analyst and analysand can discuss and interpret these attitudes and their unconscious sources in the analyst’s psyche. For Margaret Little, for

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instance, such revelations humanize and deauthorize the analyst, showing her honesty and good will to the analysand. This makes the patient trust her analyst and facilitates the treatment, allowing her to open up and speak more freely and with greater confidence.101 Analysis seems to be theorized here as a journey which two psyches undertake together, and in which both gain insight into their selves and into each other. Little reflects an egalitarian, democratic, anti-authoritarian, and interpersonal trend in neo-Freudian American psychoanalysis, which is quite different from the original Freudian model according to which the analyst must represent an objective authority figure for his patient.102 Many psychoanalysts report cases in which they revealed their emotional responses to their patients, and also explored interpretations for their responses with their patients. One analyst who began to weep while her patient described her father’s death, told the patient that she was reminded of her own father’s death as she listened. Analysts also report informing patients of their dreams, including romantic dreams involving the patients, and even of their hostile feelings (including hate) toward the analysands, as Winnicott advises as early as 1949.103 The manner in which patients react to the analyst’s revelations is itself a situation which the analyst and analysand can reflect upon, being indicative of other interpersonal relations in the analysand’s life. By allowing a two-sided interpersonal relation to exist between analyst and analysand, the two partners in analysis have a relationship which they can both freely witness and interpret, without the analyst having to keep up the pretences of objectivity and disinterested authority. In Les nouvelles maladies de l’âme, Julia Kristeva agrees with Melanie Klein and Paula Heimann that far from counter-transference being an obstacle to interpreting the transference and symptoms of patients, it is “indispensible” to their cure, allowing the analyst to feel identification and empathy, and to explore her own intuitions about the analysand. For Kristeva, the analyst-analysand relation is ideally very far from the authoritarian relation that Freud imagined between doctor and patient. Indeed, along with the mother-child relation, the psychoanalytic relation is theorized by Kristeva as a paradigm of the ethical encounter. Along with artistic practice, practicing psychoanalysis is described by Kristeva as an ongoing ethical, aesthetic, and political project. The patient in psychoanalysis is theorized as the other, and far from wishing to assimilate the patient into the self, or from assuming similitude at the level of unconscious processes, for Kristeva the analyst’s task is to respond to and “welcome” the patient’s alterity in an interpersonal relation of two subjects who are both in-process and in which, if anything, the patient is dominant. It is the analyst and not the analysand who must, for instance, “suspend her desire at the same time that she experiences it for the sake of the other.”104 Kristeva nevertheless has a notion of a “healthy subject” which is the desired outcome of analysis, and has been critiqued by Judith Butler for what this “healthiness” entails. For Kristeva, as for Tuke, Pinel, and Freud,

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the successfully analyzed subject is one who can love and be productive. It would seem that for Kristeva, unlike for her predecessors, the patient is cured if she can love and be productive in her own ways, and not only within the context of a marriage, and yet Kristeva does tend to prescribe heterosexuality and maternity for women, and lesbianism and the decision to remain childless are presented as less healthy alternatives than reproductive heterosexuality.105 However adamantly Kristeva may argue that the analysand is other and that the analyst “welcomes” the patient’s alterity, her psychoanalytic practice, in aiming at her own subjective notion of a cure, may still tend towards reproducing certain social norms in the name of supposedly objective (but in fact homophobic and patriarchal) standards of psychic health. If counter-transference is inevitable and reflects unconscious responses, it is arguably very difficult for analysts to avoid manipulating their patients to recognize their own psychic needs, to fulfi ll their desires to see certain psychoanalytic theories and worldviews affi rmed, and to soothe their anxieties about being deauthorized. While it is easy to problematize Freud’s desire to have patients affi rm his often unlikely interpretations, and to conform to patriarchal and homophobic values which are increasingly outdated, it should also be said that other analysts may manipulate their patients to conform to values which are liberal and even radical and progressive, but that this is still an abuse of authoritative power. In a case which Ian Hacking discusses, an American psychiatrist who was informed by his patient in 1921 that her father had molested her used hypnotic suggestion “to convince her that no such thing had ever happened.”106 This patient suffered from an early case of Multiple Personality Disorder. In contrast, in the 1970s and 80s, with a rise of consciousness about child abuse, feminist psychiatrists argued for a causal link between early experiences of sexual abuse and Multiple Personality Disorder, a mental disorder with which women are now diagnosed in ninety percent of cases.107 From this point onwards, rather than hypnotizing patients to believe that they had not been molested by adults in their lives when they claimed that they were, Hacking shows that it is far more common for psychiatrists to convince patients with no memories of childhood sexual abuse that such abuse has occurred and that these memories have been repressed. Psychiatrists now actively “recover memories” to confi rm their theories. While analysts in the past would hypnotize patients to believe that they had not been molested since sexual abuse was not at that time part of their theory of mental disorders, today analysts will lead susceptible patients to believe that molestation did occur, because now the trend in psychiatric thinking, as well as what is permissible to discuss in contemporary society, has moved in this direction. Psychoanalysts and psychiatrists today will thus seek out certain kinds of memories, asking certain questions rather than others, to fi nd confi rmation of the theory in which they are personally and politically invested, or which is currently a social norm: today, exposing sexual abuse is a socially and

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politically laudable activity, particularly for feminists, whereas in the past it would have been more acceptable to deny sexual abuse. In either case, whether the norm is patriarchal or feminist, or whether it has the conservative aim of concealing the molestation of girls or the feminist desire to expose it, patients continue to be coerced through unacknowledged affective relations of transference and counter-transference to say what their analysts want them to say, and thus domination and normalization persevere in contemporary therapeutic practice in ways of which analysts are for the most part unaware. This is true despite years of critiques of analytic abuses of authority, and despite self-conscious desires on the part of analysts to make the analysand-analyst relation egalitarian and ethical. Because counter-transference desires and anxieties are unconscious, and because values and political beliefs are so easily understood as objective truths, it would appear that this problem is intractable.

Totalization A third critique of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in Madness and Civilization is that doctors and therapists present their own views or the dominant norms of their society as universal values. Psychoanalysis, according to this argument, describes the states which it inculcates in subjects as human destiny, and presents its cures as truths, and thus provides a totalizing history of the human psyche. That Freud saw his theories as discoveries of transhistorical truths about the psychological characteristics of human beings, true of all human societies, is apparent. He concludes “A Short Account of Psychoanalysis” with the statement: “If these contributions often contain the essence of the facts, this only corresponds to the important part which, it may be claimed, is played in our lives by the mental unconscious that has so long remained unknown.”108 Freud’s theories are presented as a progress in knowledge, new discoveries of what has always been true but of which humans had previously remained ignorant. To demonstrate the transhistorical truths of his theories, Freud projects the psychological traits which he has discovered in himself and (perhaps) in his late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century patients onto myths from ancient Greece, arguing for instance that the universal equation “beheading = castration” means that Medusa’s head represented castration anxiety for the ancient Greeks.109 The Oedipal complex is also not seen as true only of persons growing up in families structured after the manner of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European bourgeoisie which, it would seem, would be necessary for such a complex to flourish. Instead, the Oedipal complex is assumed to have characterized even the psyches of the ancient Greeks (the author and viewers of the original Oedipus Rex, for instance), as well as those of the renaissance Hamlet and Leonardo. In works such as Totem

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and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, Freud would look even further back in history for the origins of his totalizing history. The parental complex which Foucault thinks was inculcated in patients in nineteenth-century psychiatric asylums is seen as inevitable Freud. Moreover the drives and instincts which he theorizes are considered biologically inherited traits of all humans (or, in some cases, of a family, nation or ethnic group), rather than contingent and acquired through social processes unique to the individual or to her historical era.110 Dreams, like myths, are assumed by Freud to reveal universal desires and to include transhistorical symbols, whereas Foucault would show that the same dreams would be given drastically different meanings in ancient Greece, and not, for Foucault, simply because the Greeks did not understand themselves as well as Freud would understand them: for instance, dreaming that you had sex with your mother in ancient Greece was interpreted as quite obviously indicating that you would succeed in a career as a magistrate, since the mother is the symbol of the city or the country.111 In this context, Oedipus’s relation with his mother would simply have been associated with his kingship, rather than revealing something about his, Freud’s, and everyone else’s unconscious desires. That Freud saw his own values and those of his society as characteristic of objective psychological health, that he saw the complexes and desires which the modern family structure produces as characteristic of all human psyches, and that he presented these values, complexes and desires as biological characteristics of the human psychological apparatus, also seems to be true. For instance, although he will observe that homosexuality was accepted in ancient Greece as it was not in his own day, this does not lead him to believe that homosexuality is only an abnormality or perversion within his own frame of reference. Rather homosexuality is presented as occurring when something goes wrong in an analysand’s psychic formation and is a state which needs to be “cured.”112 Later psychoanalyts such as Kristeva will also see homosexuality as indicative of a problem in an analysand’s psychological development,113 for instance as a refusal on a girl’s part to commit “matricide” and identify with the paternal Symbolic, thus positing heterosexuality as an objective standard, value, or norm which psychotherapy (and maternity) can help the subject to achieve. Perhaps most infamously of all, in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (as elsewhere) “femininity” as it was constructed in late nineteenthand early twentieth-century Europe is deemed by Freud to be the “biological field” and “underlying bedrock” of psychoanalysis, and gender is explicitly formulated as “destiny.”114 Although Freud is somewhat progressive in so far as he recognizes that “masculine” attributes such as intelligence, objectivity, and not being “dominated by passion” are “conventional rather than scientific,” 115 and frequently argues that we need to be careful to distinguish between social and biological characteristics of gender, he perseveres in seeing activity as biologically masculine and passivity as the natural

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feminine attitude, and the superiority of the penis is taken as a self-evident biological fact. In “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” it is taken as a truism that men and women and boys and girls will all want to be men, to be masculine, and to have a penis, because masculinity and penis-possession are inevitably recognized as objectively superior to being a woman and lacking a penis. Thus Freud described it as natural that men will fear being passive, since passivity is feminine and the fate of women, and that girls and women will temporarily resist their fate, futilely envying men’s penises and wanting to have the masculine role. In a “normal” woman, however, “the appeased wish for a penis is destined to be converted into a wish for a baby and for a husband, who possesses a penis.”116 Here it is not only heterosexuality, or a heterosexual sexual relationship, but marriage and the birth of a child (preferably one with a penis) which is presented as the “destiny” of women, their “normal” role, and indeed their biological end. Each sex has a “proper”117 attitude, according to Freud, and maternity and marriage and passivity defi ne the attitude which is “proper” to women. Consequently femininity is naturally feared by “normal” men and eventually accepted by “normal” women, who compensate for their innate inferiority through marriage and motherhood.118 As a normalizing practice, Freudian psychoanalysis aims to “educate” both genders into their proper attitudes. Among other things, this means instructing women that they cannot have penises. Freud notes that this “is the source of outbreaks of severe depression” in women undergoing analysis. This depression owes “to an internal conviction that the analysis will be of no use and that nothing can be done to help her.” Freud goes on to say, “And we can only agree that she is right, when we learn that her strongest motive in coming for treatment was the hope that, after all, she might still obtain a male organ, the lack of which is so painful to her.”119 As many feminists have noted, if we understand the phallus not simply as a bodily organ but as a symbol of power and prestige, this means that one of the primary roles of psychoanalysis is to tell women that they cannot have what the penis represents in society: authority, independence, activity, a different life from that which was available to women. To be made “normal,” women must adjust to the society in which they live, which is here represented as inevitable, a consequence of biological facts. Freud notes Ferenczi’s argument that making women adjust to their lack of a penis is “a requirement” which must be “mastered” “in every successful analysis,” although Freud observes that this is “asking a very great deal.”120 Ferenczi, and to some extent Freud, would thus see the task of making women realize that they should get married and have a baby as a crucial element in the analysis of female patients. Such patients need to be convinced to give up their hopeless striving for male privilege. Writing in 1937 in a period following the flurry of feminist activity between the wars, this would be a conservative political task, but Freud presents it as a simple outcome of biological facts. Public hygiene and moral synthesis are once more passed off

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as medicine, and a medical degree and knowledge of biology is exploited to present purely ideological messages as anatomical destiny. A related and important manner in which Freud attempts to obliterate any possibility of social and political critique on his patients’ part is by situating the cause of all psychic disturbances in the fi rst years of life and in the relation of an infant or young child to her parents, and in this he is followed by almost all psychoanalysts. Freud writes that “There can be no doubt” that “every alteration of the ego [ . . . ] is acquired during the defensive struggles of the earliest years,” and describes these years only in terms of relations between children and their caretakers and family members, thus denying that the cause of mental disorders can be social rather than familial. This means that Freud makes it impossible in advance to argue that sexism, racism, homophobia, social prejudice against disability and age and so forth that occur at a society-wide level can be the cause of mental disorders such as depression, and not only in so far as these prejudices occur in the family and in the early years of life. A patient in analysis with mental disorders caused by the constraints placed on her by living in a racist, sexist, ageist, or homophobic society, constraints which may only have become apparent after childhood, will be “educated” to see the source of her disorder in an Oedipal complex, to reflect only on the power dynamics of her immediate family and long-gone years, and thus to not challenge the norms, values, or attitudes of her society as a whole and in the present. The aim will be to make the patient adjust to society, to neutralize her discontent through reflections on the past, and thus to prevent the patient from challenging the status quo of the present. As seen, Freud notes that many of the women whom he educated in feminine destiny fell into “severe depression” upon learning of the hopelessness of their transgressive desires. Today women continue to fall into severe depression at far higher rates than men,121 much as African Americans fall into depression at higher rates than white Americans,122 and the guarantee that they will nevertheless behave, like Freud’s Russian patient who had every reason to be sad, “unexceptionally” or non-rebelliously, is provided by the pharmaceutics industry. Despite the fact that it is women and black people who fall into depression more often than men and white people, psychiatrists insist on seeing depression as hereditary, at most “triggered” by an event in adulthood, and therefore oblige their patients to seek the sources of depression in family genes and history rather than in broader social causes such as sexism and racism. If depression is hereditary, or if it is determined by one’s childhood, it can only be treated by drugs, and social change is not at issue. Patients on this view cannot change to overcome their depression but can only be tranquilized to behave normally. If psychoanalysis, which privileges childhood years, results in social reform at all, it will most obviously be of the family and not of society more generally. That social, political, and personal transformation is made to appear impossible by totalizing histories is the most problematic and conservative

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aspect of theories such as Freud’s, and such trends continue in contemporary psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Relating a patient’s depression and even disorders such as anorexia to heredity prevents patients from seeking political or social change, and the psychiatric, psychoanalytic, and pharmaceutical treatments of psychiatric patients today continue to function in this fashion: in a recent episode of Dr. Phil dealing with the case of the Jena Six, Dr. Phil McGraw repeatedly expresses exasperation with the black guests who wish to consider the Jena case as racial or political, asking instead how the teenagers involved have been raised and how their parents are responding to their behavior in the home.123 Once again I would stress that the question is not whether or not theories of biological determinism and familial influence are “true,” but, rather: what are the political and social effects of believing that these claims are true, what other truths are being masked by these truths, and why did these truths emerge now? It is not coincidental that arguments which limit the causes of psychic discontent occurring predominantly in oppressed groups to the family home, universalizing and infantalizing them as parental complexes, or else as genetic, arose at a moment in history when women and racial and ethnic minorities were struggling for equal rights at a societal level.

POST-FREUDIAN REVISIONS Although Foucault’s “totalizing history” critique seem to be fair of nineteenth-century psychiatry and of Freud and of many later psychoanalysts as well, it does not seem to be a necessary characteristic of either psychiatry or psychoanalysis. As early as 1952, in Black Skin, White Masks, the psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote: Freud, through psychoanalysis, demanded that we take account of the individual factor. He substituted the ontogenetic perspective for the phylogenetic thesis. We will see that the alienation of the Black is not an individual question. Beside the phylogenetic and the ontogenetic, there is the sociogenetic [ . . . ] let’s say that it has to do with a sociodiagnostic.124 In this work Fanon drew on psychiatry and psychoanalysis in order to critique totalizing histories which intersected with norms such as whiteness, and to problematize and offer political solutions to the manners in which blacks are dominated and normalized in order to be assimilated into white society, or to internalize the white “collective unconscious” of their oppressors. In The Wretched of the Earth, similarly, Fanon would use psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and would draw occasionally on Freud,125 in order to critique colonialism. In the latter work, Fanon raises many critiques of psychiatry and psychoanalysis which are similar to Foucault’s, and this time the critiques come from a practicing psychiatrist, or

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from within a psychological discipline and without entirely rejecting it. For instance Fanon, like Foucault, draws parallels between psychiatrists and psychoanalysts and the police and army, writing that the police and army in Algeria serve the same function as “counselors” and “professors of morality” in Europe.126 Similarly, Fanon draws attention, as Foucault had done, to the use of psychologists as torturers.127 At around the same time as Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth were written, Marxist psychoanalytic theorists such as Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, and critical theorists would also draw on but reinterpret Freudian theory in order to mobilize it to bring about change, this time class change. Later, the Lacanian-trained psychoanalyst Félix Guattari would also challenge the dominating, normalizing, and totalizing tendencies in psychoanalytic practice, arguing that psychoanalysis is unacceptably authoritarian in its privileging of the analyst as the locus of truth, and functions as “the best capitalist drug” by keeping the analyst’s desires confi ned to the safe space of the clinic, rather than militantly engaged elsewhere. In contrast to the totalizing stories of subjectivity which have often characterized psychoanalytic theory, in Chaosmose Guattari asks: “How to produce it [subjectivity], collect it, enrich it, reinvent it permanently in order to make it compatible with mutant Universes of value?”128 Guattari redefi nes neuroses not as abnormality but as a manner in which capitalism maintains normality: mental illness is not a state which requires normalization but an effect of normalization. With concepts such as “schizoanalysis,” Guattari pursues micropolitical means of subverting capitalism, in which Freudian analysis, for Guattari, is embedded. Another and more recent exception to the totalizing trends of psychoanalytic theory is Kelly Oliver’s work in the philosophy of psychoanalytic theory. In The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression, Oliver develops psychoanalytic theory in order to explore experiences of alienation, depression, and shame as direct consequences of historical and contingent social oppression, and theorizes paths toward psychic healing through processes such as sublimation and idealization, individualization, and forgiveness. In her study, Oliver, like Fanon on whom she draws, will diagnose society rather than individuals as pathological. As Oliver points out, while other theorists have applied psychoanalytic theories to social phenomena, and have often noted the limitations of this approach, they have either ended up simply pointing out the insufficiencies of psychoanalytic theory or have combined psychoanalysis with social theories such as Marxism and feminism. In either case psychoanalytic theory is not fundamentally revisioned. Moreover, such approaches still fail to move beyond the most proximate relations of the individual such as the family. As such, while these theorists may consider influences on children such as the gender of care-givers, and challenge these in ways which Freud did not, they still do not take into account the larger social and economic context in which subjectivity is formed. Oliver’s

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undertaking is hence more radical in that it seeks to transform rather than to apply psychoanalysis so that it is adequate to the task of explaining and healing the affects of social oppression, and also to develop a new model of subjectivity, one grounded in sociality, forgiveness, and ethics rather than in oppression and alienation. In Oliver’s model of psychoanalysis, the relation between analyst and analysand is not theorized as one of domination but of ethics, response, and forgiveness, drawing for instance on the ethical philosophy of Lévinas. The analyst responds to the analysand in this model of psychotherapy rather than “assimilates” her, to use Freud’s word. The purpose is not to normalize the patient into a sexist, racist, and homophobic society, or into a new politically-correct norm either, but to respond to the individuality and uniqueness of the analysand’s story. In such a process, the totalizing histories of sexism, racism, and homophobia are cast into question rather than perpetuated by analysis. Of course, something like this is also described as Kristeva’s objective in ethical psychoanalysis, but we saw that Kristeva nevertheless falls into repeating homophobic and patriarchal norms, and into attempting to inculcate these norms in her patients in the name of an objective standard of psychic health. Because Oliver only writes generally about a non-oppressive and ethical psychoanalytic practice, and does not practice psychoanalysis herself, we cannot know whether, if she were to practice, she would not also fall into the familiar traps of manipulating her patients to conform to her values, even if, as in the case of feminist psychiatrists “recovering” memories of incest in Multiple Personality patients, these values might be liberal, anti-colonial, and feminist rather than sexist, racist, or homophobic. Similarly, while Fanon is laudable for his anti-racist approach to psychiatry and psychoanalysis, Oliver points out that he reproduced sexist values and desires in his writings, and probably also in his practice, describing women as childish, instinctual, imitative, and unable “to measure the gravity of events.”129 What the works of Kristeva, Fanon, Guattari and Oliver demonstrate is that psychoanalytic theory has, as Toews observes, undergone years of self-critique, and many of these critiques have addressed concerns which Foucault raised. Certain strands of psychoanalytic practice have consequently attempted to transform themselves so that they are ethically responsive rather than authoritative and disciplinary, so that they may challenge the norms of society rather than reinforce them, and so that they may undermine the claims of universal and oppressive histories rather than present their moral and political claims as biological facts and medical truths. It nevertheless seems that these supposedly non-normalizing practices may simply have adopted more liberal norms, norms which to the left-wing analyst and reader seem like objective standards of psychic health, just as Freud’s norms appeared liberal and objectively true to him and to his followers. In fact, however, these norms may maintain traces

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of sexism, racism, and homophobia in some cases, or may attend to one form of oppression only to perpetuate another (sexism, for instance, in the case of Fanon, or homophobia in the case of Kristeva). In these cases analysts may continue to manipulate patients to confi rm their moral, political, theoretical, or unconscious and personal anxieties and desires. Foucault’s critiques of psychoanalysis in Madness and Civilization are thus found to have been true of early psychoanalytic theory and practice, and to also be true of contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice despite years of self-critique, changes in norms and values, and the best of intentions. Nevertheless, the problems of totalization and normalization are arguably far less acute in an analyst-analysand relation in which domination is less pronounced, or in which the relation is not established as an authoritarian one. If the relation is understood by both sides as an interpersonal and ethical relation between equals, or as a relation in which it is perhaps even the analysand who dominates, despite the effects of transference the analysand is less likely to be assimilated into the desires and expectations of the analyst, less likely to accept the views of the other as scientific truths. Assimilation may still exist, but this is arguably true of all human relations, between parents and children, teachers and students, and it is less likely to be harmful in cases in which the subject is not being dominated or has a greater ability to resist. Foucault does not think we can eliminate discipline and domination altogether, but that we should cultivate practices in which autonomy can prevail. The current trend to deauthorize the analyst, even if it is today still marginal, is thus crucial in that it at least partially prevents the harm of the more intractable dangers of psychoanalysis, namely normalization and totalization. However, as shall be seen in the next section, this de-authorization of the analyst through her admission to counter-transference is also an extension of confessional subjectivity, such that the analyst as well as the analysand must now avow her transference. REPRESSION, CONFESSION, AND IDENTITY

Repression By the time Foucault wrote the fi rst volume of The History of Sexuality, the arguments that Freudian psychoanalysis is politically reactionary and socially normalizing were common and even beginning to grate on Foucault’s nerves. Having raised versions of these critiques himself in 1961, by 1976 Foucault seemed tired of hearing about psychoanalysis’s conservatism and normalizing potential, and criticizes something not entirely dissimilar to his former critique: “It is very well to look back from our vantage point and remark upon the normalizing impulse in Freud,”130 Foucault states, and proponents of the repressive hypothesis are parodied as speaking in the following terms:

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The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault Perhaps some progress was made by Freud; but with such circumspection, such medical prudence, a scientific guarantee of innocuousness, and so many precautions in order to contain everything, with no fear of “overflow,” in that safest and most discrete of spaces, between the couch and discourse; yet another round of whispering on a bed [ . . . ] Thus, one denounces Freud’s conformism, the normalizing functions of psychoanalysis [ . . . ]131

According to this view, a view which Foucault is now critiquing, Freud took some steps towards overcoming sexual repression, but also upheld that repression, and this fortification of repression occurred in the name of normalization: one could not liberate the desires of the id, or encourage one’s patients to satisfy them, without ending up with decidedly abnormal (actively incestuous, for instance) analysands. This portrayal of Freud is not inaccurate on Foucault’s view, it is just getting a bit old and has been put to ill use. As Freud himself makes clear, although analysis might aim to bring repressions to light, its ultimate goal is not to abolish all repressions but to eliminate only a select few, while fortifying the rest. In other words, Freudian analysis aims less to liberate sexual instincts than to domesticate them, tends less to allow sexual drives to be satisfied than to strengthen the psychic dams which contain them.132 The objective of analysis is described by Freud as a “‘taming’ of the instinct”: “the instinct is brought completely into the harmony of the ego, becomes accessible to all the influences of the other trends in the ego and no longer seeks to go its independent way to satisfaction.”133 For Freud, civilization depends on sexual repression, even if sometimes repression can makes patients sick. In these cases, the point is to make what is unconscious conscious, but not to allow instincts to be satisfied, but in most cases to reaffi rm their repression. Foucault’s critique of the “repressive hypothesis” aims not primarily at Freud, but at a discourse of sexual liberation which is now dispersed throughout society. So far as Foucault targets a psychoanalytic theorist by name, this is Wilhelm Reich, and we might think that he also has Herbert Marcuse in mind. Reich and Marcuse would reject Freud’s argument that sexual repression is necessary for society to function and are examples of proponents of what Foucault calls the repressive hypothesis. Reich and Marcuse understand repression not only in Freud’s sense but also as “oppression”—Marcuse writes that “‘Repression,’ and ‘repressive’ are used in the non-technical sense to designate both conscious and unconscious, external and internal processes of restraint, and suppression”134 —and use psychoanalytic tools to critique rather than to bolster repression/oppression on an individual and societal level. Foucault will criticize psychoanalytic theorists of repression because, even in its most sophisticated form (Lacan), such theories involve a misunderstanding of how power works today.135 Repression, as a legalistic and linguistic

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model of power which sees power as something which says no (whether this results in repression, as for Freud, Marcuse and Reich, or in the production of desire, as for Lacan), misses the complex, extra-legal, extra-linguistic manners in which disciplinary power in fact works, for instance in the relations between analysts and patients. In Foucaultian terms, psychoanalysis, both in its Marxist-Freudian and Lacanian forms, assumes an anachronistically sovereign model of power, even while it is itself a deployment of disciplinary power. Moreover, by convincing patients that they are sexually repressed, and that sexuality is identity, the repressive hypothesis subtly coerces patients to put themselves in a relation of disciplinary power. In his discussion of the “repressive hypothesis” Foucault is most interested in criticizing MarxistFreudians, for they accept Freud’s hypotheses that we are sexually repressed, and that sexuality is identity, and thus that we need sexual analysis, even while they criticize Freud for his conservatism. Proponents of the “repressive hypothesis” insist that psychotherapy should liberate desire rather than bolster its repression, but they do not see how positing repression places subjects in relations of disciplinary power, and nor do they question the notion that sex is identity and destiny. As such, when Foucault criticizes the repressive hypothesis, demonstrating the self-deception and hypocrisy involved in its claim, he is not primarily criticizing Freudian psychoanalysis, but those who accuse Freud of not going far enough. Beyond Reich and Marcuse, other psychoanalysts maintain and indeed profit from the pervasive belief in the repressive hypothesis, and, like Reich and Marcuse and contrary to Freud, see themselves as liberating individuals from sexual repression through confessional speech. Foucault writes that the hypothesis of repression, explains the market value attributed not only to what is said about sexual repression, but also to the mere fact of lending an ear to those who would eliminate the effects of repression. Ours is, after all, the only civilization in which officials are paid to listen to all and sundry impart the secrets of their sex: as if the urge to talk about it, and the interest one hopes to arouse by doing so, have far surpassed the possibilities of being heard, so that some individuals have even offered their ears for hire.136 The service provided by psychoanalysts is here described as merely accommodating a supposedly sexually-liberating confessional phenomenon which exceeds it. The desire to tell the secrets of one’s sexuality inundates discourse to an extent that there are now more mouths speaking than ears available to listen, and as such listening to confessions can be commodified. Psychoanalysis may have helped to inculcate the desire to confess one’s secrets, but by the 1970s this desire had gone beyond the bounds of the clinic and needed no further inculcation, and psychoanalysis—at least superficially purified of Freud’s prudishness—is but one outlet among

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others for this discursive flood, profiting on the sexual revolution whose self-deception Foucault exposes. What this discussion of The History of Sexuality: An Introduction shows is that while the later Foucault does not deny that Freudian psychoanalysis is normalizing and politically conservative, he is no longer preoccupied with these critiques and is instead targeting those who situate themselves as politically liberal and anti-conformist or engaged in a project of antinormalization, and who thus speak out against Freud and for the liberation of sexuality by adopting the repressive hypothesis. Foucault argues that, contrary to appearances, this talk of sexual liberation is not a radical break with Freud or with even more conservative tactics in the deployment of sexuality, but is merely a redirection of this deployment. Foucault’s primary target within the psychoanalytic tradition is thus Marxist-Freudians who take up and de-technicalize the repressive theory, presenting it under the more alluring guise of sexual freedom. Of one such theorist of anti-repression and sexual liberation, Foucault argues that Reich’s historico-political critique of sexual repression has “always unfolded within the deployment of sexuality, and not outside or against it.” Consequently, The fact that so many things were able to change in the sexual behavior of Western societies without any of the promises or political conditions predicted by Reich being realized is sufficient proof that this whole sexual “revolution,” this whole “antirepressive” struggle, represented nothing more, but nothing less [ . . . ] than a tactical shift and reversal in the great deployment of sexuality.137 This problem with Reich is, in contrast to some of the problems discussed above, a critique which Foucault would make of all psychoanalysts, whether politically reactionary like Freud, or liberal like Reich and Marcuse: in either case, the function of psychoanalysis, which is intertwined with confession, is the production of sexuality as the secret of identity and an impulse towards identity-fi xing introspection. It will be seen below, however, that some forms of psychotherapy and psychoanalytic theory exist which neither focus on sexuality nor aim to discover identities, but rather theorize subjectivity as in-process.

Confession It was seen at the beginning of this chapter that one critique of psychoanalysis is that its theories of repression and the unconscious place patients in a relation of disciplinary power, dependent on analysts to tell them who they are since they believe that they are inaccessible to themselves. As seen earlier in this chapter, the normative and disciplinary aspects of the

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analyst-analysand relation have been critiqued and transformed to some extent within the history of psychoanalytic theory and practice, particularly when analysts are willing to deauthorize themselves by acknowledging counter-transference. Such an acknowledgement is, however, but a confession on the part of the analyst, an admission of a lack of scientific objectivity which is considered shameful, even if psychoanalysts are now “liberating” counter-transference from its history of “repression.” In confessing counter-transference, the analyst interprets her own responses by introspecting on her past and her complexes. By confessing to counter-transference the analyst will not only better understand herself, but will also understand the analysand and will enable the analysand to confess to transference, or will ease the other’s counter-confession. In terms of the confessional critique of psychoanalysis, the admission of counter-transference seems to exasperate the problem, even as it addresses the issue of domination. A second critique of psychoanalysis in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction is that it holds out the misleading promise that confession functions therapeutically, and this is taken to hold true both inside and outside the clinic, thus disseminating the compulsion to confess. As noted in the previous chapter, this critique is only fair of the very earliest work by Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria. In this work it is argued that while most memories are subject to a “fading away” process, the reminiscences of hysterics, because never expressed in words, remain “attached to the memory.”138 According to Breuer and Freud, while language can be a way to “‘blow off steam’” or to express an injury, “‘suffering in silence’” is experienced as a “‘mortification’ [Kränkung],” literally making patients ill.139 In order to heal, injuries thus require an “adequate reaction.”140 Freud describes a patient who, with the exception of one occasion during which she told a series of stories, simply wept during each session under hypnosis, apparently responding belatedly through tears to whatever traumas she was silently reliving. Language can usually substitute for actions, however, and “by its help, an affect can be ‘abreacted’ almost as effectively.”141 Speaking, the doctors write, is an “adequate reflex, when, for instance, it is a lamentation or giving utterance to a tormenting secret, e.g. a confession.”142 If this confession or putting into words did not occur at the time of the memory, the experience could lead to an hysterical symptom—for instance when Anna O. determined not to speak about something, she lost the ability to speak at all (in her native German at least), or when another patient was forced to “swallow” an insult, swallowing in general (food, drink) became painful. At last speaking of what had disturbed her, or responding to the insult she had originally “swallowed,” these patients were purportedly healed. Thus not confessing can be the cause of an illness, and confessing is, aptly, the remedy.143 Although the charge that psychoanalysis presents confession as an instantaneous cure, and that it inculcates a habit of confession in subjects

160 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault through the promise that it will be therapeutic, is true of this very early work, it was also seen in Chapter Two that the idea that confession functions as a “talking cure” is a notion which was quickly dismissed within psychoanalytic theory itself, beginning with Freud, who soon distanced himself from the theory of “abreaction” described above. Pychoanalysis is not responsible for the theory of confession as cathartic, for this idea, as seen in Chapter Two, both preceded Freud (in nineteenth-century appropriations of Aristotle and in Dostoyevsky, for instance) and persevered despite his rejection of it. At the same time, it is also true that Freud never removed the practice of confession from psychoanalysis, and indeed maintained its centrality, while analysts who confess to counter-transference simply take this confession further by rendering it mutual. Freud’s patients were not “allowed” to keep any secrets from him, or were forbidden to refuse to confess anything. Absolute disclosure was one of the primary “rules” of psychotherapy, and Freud would decline to treat patients who resisted confessing everything to him, even if this required breaking oaths to not disclose political or state secrets.144 Confession was no longer a cure in itself, but it was a crucial component of the cure, and today, in some “egalitarian” versions of psychoanalysis, the confession of the analyst is also deemed therapeutic to the patient. So the questions are: Can confession in psychoanalysis be reconceived such that it is divested of its normative and normalizing functions? Or, can analysis of the subject occur which does not embark on the quest to “discover” her “true self”? And, does the quest for one’s “true self” always need to deploy discourses of sexuality?

Identity In fact, it is quite clear that patients usually undergo psychoanalysis because they are unhappy with some aspect of themselves or their lives, and thus enter analysis in the hopes of transforming their selves, and not only to “discover” their selves, sexual or otherwise. As the psychoanalyst Lucia E. Tower writes: “The patient comes to the analyst for the purpose of being changed, and he values the procedure only if he feels changes are under way.”145 Learning the truth of oneself is nevertheless usually understood as necessary for such change, and so one works on knowing who one is even if this is to change who one is. Moreover, this changing of the self is often understood in psychoanalysis not as a real transformation of the subject into something new, but as self-recovery or re-discovery, as “finding” one’s “true” self. The psychoanalyst Janet MacKenzie Rioch, for instance, writes of analysis as helping to “discover” and “fi nd” the “real self” of the analysand which has been repressed—and this true self is the normal, happy one. For instance she writes of one analysand:

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But there remained, despite the necessity for the rigid development of the patterns towards the mother and father, a deeply repressed, but still vital experience of self, which most closely approximated the fullest realization of her potentialities. This, which one might call her real self, although “snowed under” and handicapped by all the distortions incurred by her relationship to the parents, was finally able to emerge and become again active in analysis.146 Through analysis, Rioch writes, “reality gradually becomes ‘undistorted,’ the self refound in the personal relationship between the analyst and the patient.”147 With the help of the analyst, another patient “found his repressed self [ . . . ] and it is a real discovery, the repressed elements of his own personality.”148 For Rioch, the “end” of analysis “is achieved when the patient has rediscovered his own self as an actively and independently functioning entity.”149 The “real” self is only said to emerge when it fits this predetermined description, and any non-active, non-independent self is deemed “unreal.” Rioch therefore has a fi xed notion of what kind of subject the analysand should become through analysis, and so, once more, the analysand will be directed to achieve the analyst’s notion of normality. Moreover this achievement will not be understood as the becoming of a new self, but as a recovery of the analysand’s original or “real self.” The essence of the self is assumed to be hidden in psychoanalysis, inaccessible to the analysand, who must therefore undergo analysis in order to know who she has been all along, and to become what she always already was. Psychoanalysis on Rioch’s terms can once more be criticized for its normalizing aim, but even if we approve of Rioch’s notion of normality and her practice of helping her patients to attain it, we might question why this cannot be understood as an invention of something new, a transformation of the analysand into something that she was not before, a positive creative production undertaken by both partners in the analysis. Why must analysis be understood as “fi nding oneself”? The answer, it would seem, is that in helping analysands discover their “real selves,” the analyst is merely a facilitator of a natural process which has been inhibited, an enemy of negative socialization and psychologically crippling repression. If, on the contrary, analysts were understood as turning patients into new and more “normal” entities, this more active image of the analyst would more readily be seen as a kind of social cloning. The language of “self discovery” thus functions to mask the process of normalization and moral synthesis. Cressida Heyes has shown that not only psychoanalysis but various other professions which alter the bodies and minds of individuals to make them fit a normalizing ideal are presented today not as changing subjects but as allowing them to be as they “really” were all along: dieting is thus presented by Weight Watchers as freeing the dieter’s true, thin self, and cosmetic surgery and sex change surgery are couched as liberations of the patient’s beautiful or otherwise sexed “real self,” rather than enabling her

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to be other than what she was and what she desired instead to be.150 The language of self-discovery, assuming an essential and hidden self, is mistaken from a Foucaultian perspective, and facilitates discipline, but at the same time the confusion and juxtaposition of the language of self-change and self-discovery show the interweaving of technologies of domination and practices of the self. The patient in Rioch’s care consents to her notion of what a “normal” self is, and wishes to believe that such a self is inherent in her, and at the same time changes herself through ongoing practice in order to achieve this desired self-transformation. As such, she consents to a notion of normality in the belief that attaining it will make her happier. She actively pursues this vision of a “normal” self in her decision to undergo analysis with the psychoanalyst of her choice. Psychoanalysis here is disciplinary but it is also a technology of self-care. John Toews has also argued that psychoanalysis can be a care of the self. He writes: Foucault seemed to have no great confidence that the resources and perspective for an investigation of the contingent ‘descent’ of psychoanalytic ‘truth,’ and for reflective self-awareness of the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of self-definition or self-making, were available within psychoanalytic theory and practice. It was the fashioned rather than selffashioning subject that Foucault identified with psychoanalysis.151 Despite Foucault, Toews suggests that we need to think about psychoanalysis in terms not only of the archaeological and genealogical works, but in terms of the fi nal works on self-governance as well. Theorizing psychoanalysis through Foucault’s so-called “return to subjectivity” would be “a return with a difference” and “indelibly marked by its passage through laborious procedures of archaeology and genealogy.”152 Toews would thus like to think about historicizing psychoanalysis ‘after Foucault’ in such a way that accounts for the archaeological and genealogical works, but also situates psychoanalysis in terms of self-fashioning practices. While Foucault’s fi nal works on the care of the self explored alternatives to psychoanalytic subjectivity, Toews would like to theorize psychoanalysis itself as a technique of self-care. In “An Ethics of the Self,” similarly but more concretely, Helen O’Grady also argues that psychotherapeutic practices can be understood as practices of self-care. While some forms of psychoanalysis can be disciplinary, O’Grady argues that other forms of psychotherapy can undo discipline. O’Grady works as a counselor in women’s health, and following other Foucaultian feminists such as Jana Sawicki argues that women are particularly prone to practices of disciplinary self-policing, which in the case of women can result in relentless self-criticism and obsessive rumination on self-denigrating thoughts. O’Grady sees some forms of therapeutic practice aimed at correcting these forms of debilitating psychological behavior as freeing

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women from the constraints of self-policing. She also argues that women— and some women more than others—are socialized to be more concerned with the care of others than with the care of themselves. Feminist forms of therapy such as those that she is engaged in, O’Grady argues, can teach women to practice care of themselves, and are themselves a practice of self-care and a care of others. Notably, O’Grady theorizes and practices psychological forms of therapy which aim to change gendered identities which are understood as products of socialization, and not to “discover” sexual identities understood as hereditary or innate. Finally, other exceptions to the tendencies of psychoanalysis to posit and “discover” a hidden “real self” include Guattari, who theorized a form of psychoanalytic theory and practice which cultivated a fragmented subject, and practiced collective forms of analysis which did not introspect on the specificities of individual participants. Kristeva also theorizes both partners involved in analysis as subjects in-process, and, like Guattari, sees psychoanalysis as disturbing rather than discovering identity. For Kristeva, psychoanalysis is an on-going aesthetic practice, a work of self-creation, and in this respect is close to Foucault’s idea of an aesthetics of the self.

PSYCHOANALYSIS VERSUS POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT Like Kristeva and Guattari, Fanon also contests psychiatric and psychoanalytic arguments which posit essential identities, and, like Foucault, points out their often political motivations. Fanon considers arguments which explain psychopathological behavior on the part of colonized peoples through recourse to heredity. Rather than seeing antisocial behavior as a consequence of colonization, psychiatry has used that behavior as a justification for colonization. Psychiatric arguments thus give scientific pedigree to racist beliefs in the superiority of Europeans over their colonized subjects. For instance, Fanon discusses psychiatric writings which relate the alleged criminality of Algerians to their heredity or biology, and which describe revolts on the part of the colonized as the expression of unconscious frustration complexes.153 Fanon exposes and refutes such uses of psychiatry and psychoanalysis for unacknowledged politically conservative ends.154 While other psychiatrists, supporting the colonization of Algeria, disguised their political desires as medical scholarship, Fanon is explicit that his own use of psychiatry is political rather than scientific, and is on the side of revolution. He thus prefaces a description of psychiatric case studies he undertook in Algeria with the declaration: “It is superfluous to mention that we are not providing a scientific work.”155 Importantly, in each of the case studies which Fanon goes on to describe, the cause of the mental illness is obvious, and in each case it is colonization. In no case does Fanon describe the patient’s childhood, or make any reference to the patient’s sexuality,156 or describe innate or universal

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psychological complexes or desires, or attempt to discover and liberate the patient’s real self. In each case the patient has been made ill not in early childhood, not by her parents, and not by repressing her sexual instincts, but either by being colonized or by being a colonizer. In many cases, more specifically, the mental illness arose either from being physically tortured or from working as a torturer. In none of the cases does Fanon suggest a psychiatric or psychoanalytic cure. The cure which is required is nevertheless clear, and Fanon spells it out elsewhere in The Wretched of the Earth: an end to colonization. The torturer is not going to get better unless he gives up torturing and goes home, and the tortured will only heal when they remove the cause of their illness by expelling their colonizers. For Fanon, the Algerians must end their colonization by themselves, for they are psychically eaten up by their repressed anger, resentment, and aggressivity—and not, notably, by their repressed sexuality—and these affects will not be given an outlet if the colonized do not bring about decolonization by themselves and through action. The repressed hostility of the colonized has found temporary outlets in frenzied dances and in violence against one another, Fanon notes, but none of these outlets solves the problem once and for all, for the aggressivity involved has been misdirected and does not remove the cause of neurosis, and thus the symptoms always return and require a new outlet. Only by acting against their colonizers, Fanon argues, or by acting politically, will the Algerians decolonize their psyches and cease harming one another once and for all. With the liberation movement, Fanon argues, some such results have already been achieved in both Algeria and France.157 As such, when psychiatrists argue that North Africans are hereditarily pathological, as demonstrated by their pointless and ruthless violence against one another, Fanon responds that their violence is actually on the right track from a psychological perspective, but has simply taken the wrong target as a result of the internalization of colonization which inhibits the colonized from attacking their colonizers. Such an attack, however, is the only cure for the affects of colonization. Far from advocating discursive or confessional practices as therapeutic, therefore, Fanon repeatedly underscores that the Algerians have no use for discussion, for words, for talk of equality and human rights, that all these terms strike them as vacuous while only their own actions will heal the debilitating psychic affects of colonization. Consequently, when hearing the discourse of the colonizer, Fanon says that the colonized subject will pick up his machete, or at least make sure it is ready at hand.158 The language of colonization has not been reason but corporeal violence, and thus the cure must also take place through bodily action and not through discussions or ideas. This is somewhat similar to the argument seen above regarding Foucault’s description of normalization: it is the body which is disciplined, and thus the work of discipline will not be undone through rational discussion, but only through physical practices. Fanon argues that the subject will only change her situation and change who she is through

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action, and not through introspection or “discovery” of an innate self. Crucially, the cause of mental illness is described by Fanon as political, and the cure is political action, and the function of psychiatry and psychoanalysis is, likewise, political, whether it is used to preserve colonization, as in the cases Fanon cites, or, as in his own use of psychiatry, to aid the process of decolonization. It has been seen that Fanon rejects confession and the deployment of sexual discourses as much as he rejected totalization, normalization, and domination. As such, Fanon is arguably the most complete example of a figure within psychiatry and psychoanalysis who raises the problems with these disciplines which concern Foucault. Ultimately, however, Fanon is not advocating psychotherapy or reforms which remain within the confi nes of the psychiatric sciences, and in the end Fanon abandoned his psychiatric position in Algeria in order to participate in the FLN, although he continued to practice psychiatry in Tunisia and to see his political and psychiatric activities as intertwined. While obviously more radical, like O’Grady and Kristeva, Fanon writes within a psychological discipline in order to advocate self- and politicalchange rather than the discovery of (sexual) identities, and, like Guattari, dismisses individualizing confessional practices in favor of action, showing that, as Toews indicates, all of Foucault’s critiques of psychiatry and psychoanalysis exist within the psychological disciplines themselves, however marginally. Some of these “self-critiques,” such as those of O’Grady, Oliver, and Kristeva, have managed to stay within the discipline of psychoanalysis and the confi nes of the clinic, transforming these from within. In contrast, Fanon argues for a cure which psychoanalysts and psychiatrists cannot provide, or which must be undertaken through the subject’s own actions within a political movement. While O’Grady and Kristeva see psychotherapy as a care and an aesthetics of the self which can counter social oppression, Fanon uses his psychiatric and psychoanalytic training to explain why psychoanalysis and psychiatry are not the answer to the psychic affects of oppression, and why action is required rather than words—and as Freud wrote of the psychoanalytic cure: “Nothing occurs but talk.”160 At the same time, such “talk” can be conceived of as a practice, and for Kelly Oliver “talk” is necessary to change the self, and it is necessary to change the self in order to change society.161 For Fanon, on the other hand, the changing of society must come fi rst in order to bring about transformed selves. The racialized subject discussed in Black Skin, White Masks cannot change himself or rid himself of the internalized affects of racism through discussion, introspection, or a one-on-one relation with an analyst, and Fanon argues that group political action rather than psychoanalysis is in order. Although these arguments confl ict as well as overlap, what they show is that psychiatry and psychoanalysis have raised the same critiques of their disciplines as arise in Foucault’s writings, and in the process have

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(in however marginal ways) transformed themselves such that practices of self-care may be integrated into what Foucault has shown to be disciplinary technologies. For Foucault, as said, discipline is always intertwined with techniques of self-care, but some practices are more intractably disciplinary than others. Like all disciplinary practices, therefore, psychoanalysis is also a technology of the self, and the question has simply been whether in the practice of psychoanalysis discipline inevitably dominates over self-care, as seems to have been Foucault’s belief, or whether psychoanalysis has transformed itself—or can at least potentially do so, as Todd May argues—such that it can function as an aesthetics of the self. Responding to these differing views, the first half of this chapter considered Foucault’s reasons for seeing psychoanalysis as disciplinary rather than as a technology of the self, while the second half of the chapter has considered whether, as Toews and O’Grady suggest, psychoanalysis may also function as a practice of self-care. I have agreed with Toews that the critiques of psychoanalysis which Foucault raises exist within the psychological disciplines themselves, sometimes in relatively mainstream psychoanalytic thought—as in the increasingly common acceptance of non-authoritarian models of psychoanalysis—and sometimes in more marginal critiques such as those of Fanon and Guattari. Ultimately subjects must decide for themselves how to practice self-care, and according to Foucault they will draw on the resources of their cultural field in order to do so. In our cultural field, forms of psychotherapy such as psychoanalysis are among the most prevalent options which subjects have to choose from, and Foucault, and this chapter, have simply shown the high risks entailed by this choice.

4

Confessing the Other

. . . la soif d’aveux. La faim d’autrui . . . —Andreï Makine, La femme qui attendait 1

I confess my mother, one always confesses the other. —Derrida, Circumfession 2

Following Foucault, the previous three chapters have been concerned with the domination and disciplining of the speaking subject, and have attended less to the manipulation of the one who listens. These chapters have focused primarily on the inculcation of a desire to confess in the subject, or the confessant’s compulsion to speak. As is evident, however, this has not been separable from a discussion of the confessor’s desire—or lack of desire—to hear the confession, whether the confessor is a lover, a priest, a psychoanalyst, or a police officer. A rebounding form of discipline has been observed, as for instance when priests themselves grew scrupulous, or when the analyst’s desire became implicated in his confessant’s story. The one who listens, as in the case of the scrupulous priest or the counter-confessing analyst, may become the one who speaks, internalizing the desire to confess which he aims to inculcate in the other. The current chapter will diverge from Foucault’s interests by concerning itself with the ethics of the relation between confessant and confessor, and on the pressure exerted on the listening other to respond. This chapter will focus on the desire of confessional subjects not to tell their own confessions, but to hear the confessions of others. This desire for the other’s confession occurs not only in the hopes of an immediate reciprocation and recognition of one’s own confession, but more generally in the “memoir biz” which has exploded in recent decades not only because so many authors wish to write autobiographies, but because so many readers want to read them. The focus of this chapter thus entails a shift away from the subject of confession to the confessional other, and away from an analysis of the confessant’s desire to speak to an examination of her desire to hear

168 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault a response. Correspondingly, this chapter will draw less on Foucault than previous chapters have done, and more on considerations of confession in the writings of Sartre, Butler, Lévinas, Hegel, and Derrida. To be considered in this chapter are thus the confessant’s need for a confessional response from the other and her desire to control that response, as well as the manners in which the counter-confessional response of the other is viewed as necessary for mutual recognition and forgiveness. The subject is understood as requiring the other’s confession as recognition of their shared humanity, to feel forgiven by the other, and moreover to forgive her. The other’s forgiveness and one’s own opportunity to forgive are both deemed necessary for the subject’s peace of mind and for community. Confession as giving rise to a bond of humanity, to community, and to reciprocal forgiveness and psychic peace, present the expectation of the other’s confession as an ethical demand. Nevertheless, it will be argued that the demand that the other confess, or that she reciprocate a confession and counter-confess, is very often a request that she do violence to her alterity. Moreover, it will be seen that when the other resists doing this violence to herself, so great is the desire for confession that she may fi nd herself confessed for, assimilated or “translated” despite herself into the desires of the confessing subject, and this will also be argued to be a violence to the other.

THE CONFESSIONAL OTHER, OR THE SAME In “Reading Spaces,” Nancy K. Miller responds to charges of “nouveau solipsism” and “moi-ism” directed against herself and other academics who have engaged in “autocritography” or academic autobiography. 3 In her defense, Miller argues that “the writing autobiographical subject [ . . . ] always requires a partner in crime. Put another way, it takes two to make an autobiography, to perform an autobiographical act.”4 Miller is not only involving the other in her “crime” in order to spread the blame, but in order to argue that if “it takes two” then autobiography is about relationality, and that this in itself makes autobiography ethical. As seen, Foucault also stresses the necessary presence of an other in confession when he writes: “one doesn’t confess without the presence, at least the virtual presence, of a partner who is not simply an interlocutor but the agency that requires the confession, imposes it, weighs it, and intervenes to judge, punish, pardon, console, reconcile.”5 Judith Butler repeats Foucault’s point almost verbatim when she states that “An account of oneself is always given to another, whether conjured or existing,” but like Miller and unlike Foucault Butler adds an ethical assumption when she continues: “and this other establishes the scene of address as a more primary ethical relation than a reflexive effort to give an account of oneself.”6 As in the case of Miller, Butler assumes that confession is ethical in

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virtue of the necessary presence of another person, even though that other person may simply be “conjured” by the self. The need for another in confession has been seen in previous chapters. In the case of Augustine, it was noted that the question of the other for whom he writes is a matter of anxiety, as Augustine did not know whether he wrote for himself, for God, or for other human beings. In so far as Augustine wrote for other people to read, he specifies that they should be Christians, or other “worshipers,”7 others like him, or more of the same. Augustine’s stipulates this desire for the same because he fears that non-Christian readers would mock him, and thus he tries to control the response of the other who hears his confession. In the case of Rousseau, it is even clearer that the confessant is writing to be read by others. Pontalis states that the desire to write autobiographically “is correlative to the existence of Rousseau, traversed from one end to the other by the desire less to know himself than to be known.”8 If Pontalis is right, Rousseau does not write for himself but for the relationship between himself and another person, although this is a relationship which he hopes to have entirely on his own terms. Discussing confession in Dostoyevsky, Mikhail Bakhtin has similarly argued that the subject’s relation to the other is crucial, and that Dostoyevsky’s subject is never alone, but can only reveal himself through addressing another: “to portray the inner man, as Dostoevsky understood it, was possible only by portraying his communion with another.”9 Nonetheless, as Bakhtin observes, this other, the subject’s sounding board, is a generic other, an other who does not respond in ways not already provided for by Dostoyevsky’s confessing subject. As noted, while the other in the confessional relation is described by Foucault as an active agent, she may nevertheless be merely “virtual” or, to use Butler’s word, “conjured” by the self, a projection of the confessant herself or, as in the transference relations that Butler discusses, a re-creation of her past. In Dostoevsky, according to Bakhtin, there is the hero and there is “the other” or “all others.” Some other must stand in for “everyone else,” in other words, and all others are collapsed into an undifferentiated role of recipient of the hero’s self-revelations.10 When the other speaks in Dostoevsky, her function is merely to voice one aspect of the hero’s internal dialogue, one part of his conflicted self, rather than to be a distinct or truly other subject voicing different concerns. Like Augustine, Dostoevsky’s confessional subjects do not want “strangers” in their conversation. As such, the Underground Man addresses himself to another, but, as he acknowledges, there is no other, and this is just “a matter of form” that makes it easier for him to write, enabling him to pursue his private self-explorations. In each of these cases, we see that another person is necessary for confession, but that the confessant wants to determine the response of the confessor, to control or manipulate her, perhaps to recast the other according to a pattern of relations in her own life, and that the otherness of the other is an impediment to the confessing subject’s desires.

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Perhaps the most explicit contemporary expression of this manipulation of and imposition of sameness on the confessional other is found in Annie Ernaux, who argues that when she writes about her self, she writes with a “je transpersonel,” or that she is writing for others at the same time.11 Ernaux writes: “What bothers me about the term ‘autobiographical’ is that one always has the impression in the strict sense that one will be talking about oneself and one’s life.”12 Ernaux claims that in confessing her own life she is describing that of others, and tries to assert herself as a representative or exemplary subject and thus impose her experiences as a generalized truth, and in particular to impose her “woman’s” truth on all women, even when this involves denigrating certain groups of women such as lesbians.13 Ernaux occasionally recognizes that she is able to speak for all women not so much because her own experiences actually characterize those of others, but because if they do not she will try to impose those experiences upon others, on their bodies and their souls. She writes, for instance: “And the real end of my existence is perhaps only this: that my body, my sensations and my thoughts should become writing, that is to say something intelligible and general, my existence completely dissolved into the minds and the lives of others.”14 Ernaux’s autobiographical aim is thus a form of psychological colonialism, to project herself onto others and to have her flesh and thoughts internalized as theirs, integrated into their bodies and minds. This goal is manifested in Ernaux’s desire to fi nd readers who identify with her experiences, who counter-confess or share their commonality with Ernaux, and in her wish to speak and write for them rather than to explore, and to permit, their difference. Ernaux is not interested in other people, but she requires their confessions as recognition of her own. When Miller claims that memoirs “always require a partner in crime,” she is arguing that autobiographies are always written in a “relational mode” or concern not only the autobiographer herself, but her relations with others. Although Miller argues that this is true of both male and female autobiographers, she also notes that memoir writing is associated with and predominantly practiced by women, while relational identity has been presented by feminist scholars as particularly characteristic of women’s senses of self and women’s ways of writing.15 Claims about women and relational subjectivity have been put forth to argue for a feminine or feminist ethics distinct from traditional masculinist ethical concerns with autonomy and individualistic rights and freedoms. As such, Miller is casting autobiographical writing as ethical in a feminine or feminist register, even as she implies a grand narrative or totalizing history of autobiography as universally, always and necessarily relational for both men and women when she writes: “It became clear to me [ . . . ] that this relational model binding self to other historically has shaped the narrative of most autobiographical experience, beginning with St. Augustine and Monica.”16 As such, memoir writing is “not about terminal ‘moi-ism,’ as it’s been called, but rather a rendez-vous, as it were, with the other.”17

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Miller is surely right that one can fi nd mention of some other, whether human or divine, in all autobiographical or confessional writings, including the apparently narcissistic writings of Rousseau and Ernaux or even of the isolated Underground Man. This is inevitable since the lives of humans always involve others, or at least the painfully felt lack and absence of others. This, however, does not in itself mean that the genre of memoir is fundamentally and transhistorically concerned with relationality, and moreover not every act which necessarily involves others is relational in a positive ethical sense. Although ethics must involve some account of relations with others, not all relations with others are ethical or entail ethical acts. The fact that it would be hard to describe one’s life without mentioning other people does not mean that describing one’s life is necessarily an ethical task. It would also be difficult to commit murder or rape without the involvement, however passive or involuntary, of another person. Murder and rape are thus inherently relational, and yet we would not argue that this makes them ethical acts. The majority of Miller’s article is not about the relationality of autobiographical writing, however, but about autobiographical reading. Miller attempts to explain not only why we write so many autobiographies, but why we read them, or why they sell. Miller argues that the “relational mode” extends not only to writing memoirs but to reading them, and that we read autobiographies out of a desire to meet the other. As Miller describes it, however, this rendez-vous is not an encounter with alterity but a means of identifying with the other, no matter how exotic one’s taste in memoirs is, or how unlike one’s own life the memoir may appear. Miller calls this “allo-identification.”18 As she writes, “what seems to be going on between memoir writers and their readers is a relational act that creates identifications.”19 As such, “When you read the lives of others, you can’t help but remember your own: your parents, your love affairs, your ambitions.”20 Miller argues that memoir-reading is an aide-mémoire, a means to remember one’s own life, and calls this “collective memorialization.” Apparently assuming American autobiographies, she claims that reading memoirs provides “building blocks to a more fully shared national narrative.”21 What is assumed in advance is a collectivity, a shared narrative. This is not “navel-gazing,” Miller argues, since the navel is shared: one is gazing at other people’s navels to see how much they are like one’s own. 22 Miller explores in depth memoirs by two other “nice Jewish girls” like herself who also grew up in New York in the 1950s as examples. These are autobiographies by women writers who lived within blocks of Miller and went to the same New York schools and universities, and Miller describes moments in reading when she could exclaim and scribble in the margins “Keith Gibbs! [ . . . ] I knew him too! I dated his brother!,”23 and “we both shopped at the same store in the East Village.”24 Nevertheless, Miller also claims to identify with the memoirs of writers to whom she is less obviously connected. For instance, she describes reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s

172 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault description of growing up Chinese-American and poor in post-war California in the following terms: Maxine Hong Kingston puts the problem this way: “when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, to insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?” How, I ask myself in translation, can I separate the story of my life from that of any nice Jewish girl who grew up middle-class in New York in the 1950s?25 According to Miller, memoir reading does not function like a mirror, but as translation, 26 however in this case we see her translating Hong Kingston’s life into a mirror of her own, translating Chinese-American into Jewish, California into Manhattan, and poor into middle-class. This is not a very accurate translation, since poor and middle class, for instance, mean very different things. Memoir-reading is thus a process of putting another person’s life into one’s own language, for Miller, but in such a way that Hong Kingston’s descriptions of being Chinese-American and poor are written over, and instead are the reader’s own notions of middle-class and Jewish in New York. “[H]owever hellish the lives,” Miller writes, “told in memoirs they give you just what your unrecorded history lacks [ . . . ] a narrative through which to make sense of your own past.”27 One’s own life is remembered, and comes to make sense, through comparisons with the other’s life, of paths taken and not taken, or through identifications and disidentifications. In either case, one reads the other’s life in order to think about one’s own. As such, Miller writes that one reads oneself “across the body or under the skin of other selves.”28 Miller’s description of memoir-reading may be accurate. Although it is hard to say how everyone reads memoirs, it may be true that in reading about the lives of others we are likely to reflect upon our own, whether it is because we have had similar experiences or dream of having them, or feel content in our own lives for having avoided them. Perhaps one likes best the memoirs which one can either relate to or which describe a life one would like to have had. In either case, the reader brings it back to the self. This seems like narcissism, however, an egocentric reading practice, however harmless, and yet Miller describes it as ethical because it involves a relationship between self and other, even if the other is merely a path back to the self and her difference is only an opportunity for comparison with the reader herself. As such, “I inserted myself into the memoirs of others for a good cause,”29 Miller writes, and “Memoir paradoxically is the most generous of modern genres.”30 And yet, one might respond again that not all relations with others are ethical—that rape is not the most “generous” of crimes, “a good cause,” simply because it always involves another person—and moreover it might

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not be generous to the other to identify with her, particularly when this identification means obliterating all that is particular to her and replacing it with one’s own life, as when Miller “translates” Hong Kingston’s sentence. Hong Kingston might well feel that far from having been read or rendezvous’d with generously, Miller has missed her point, has refused to read her, has obliterated her difference, assimilated her into the same, and has not responded to her ethically or otherwise. What Hong Kingston has been trying to describe has been erased, and her experience, her uniqueness, has been subsumed into the life of the reader through a series of identifications which obscure the specificity of the other. The confessional subject, which Miller acknowledges that she herself is, desires the confessions of others, but desires them as more occasions to reflect on herself, or in order to spark further confessional self-reflections. Modern “man” being a “confessional animal,” we do not only want to confess, we also want to hear confessions. However we do not necessarily want to hear the confessions of others out of a genuinely ethical interest in them, but, as Miller shows, out a sustained interest in ourselves. Even our voyeurism is narcissistic. This explains “the market” for the “memoir biz,” or the desire for a proliferation of confessions on a cultural level, for talk shows and reality T.V. as well as literary confessions. However, beyond this diffuse desire for confessions which fuels the market, we also expect and solicit confessions in a more immediate way, as direct responses from the person in whom we have ourselves confided. We confess in intimate conversation and then await the other’s reciprocation, not in all cases because we are interested in her life, but because the other’s response recognizes our own confession and allows us to go on confessing. We listen to the other’s confession for an opportunity to say “me too” or “not I,” and then to elaborate on this identification or disidentification, to confess again. Peter Brooks notes the manner in which confession can be a manipulation of the other in an expectation of reciprocation when he writes: “Confession on this account turns into a subtle act of aggression, a demand for self-judgement and counter-confession on the part of the interlocutor, a demand for a kind of common transparency in the assumption of generalized guilt.”31 Brooks discusses the manner in which Clamence, in Camus’s The Fall, confesses in order to invite the other to do the same, to have the other “go one better.”32 Clamence tells his confessor, “Do try. Be assured that I will listen to your own confession with a great feeling of fraternity,” thus assuming in advance that the confession of the other will be a brotherly one, a counter-confession which will recognize Clamence as akin, just as Augustine, Rousseau, Dostoyevsky’s characters, and Ernaux each wish to fi nd affi rmation from their brotherly or sisterly audiences, and Miller will “translate” the confessions of others into her own terms, thus creating the recognition that she desires but which the other’s story may not immediately provide. Recognition can most easily be given through a counter-confession which echoes and confi rms the generalizable truth of

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the original confession but, as Miller shows, even when it does not echo the subject’s confession, it may be “translated” as such. Although Brooks calls this a “perversion” of confession, the fact that it reoccurs in so many of the cases of confession discussed above and in the previous chapters suggests that a manipulation of the confessional other is in fact common, and thus not perverse in a statistical sense. In some cases, it is the confessant who manipulates the response of her listener, while in other cases, such as the religious, legal, and psychoanalytic forms of confession discussed in the fi rst three chapters, it may be the confessor who manipulates the confessant to admit to what he wants to hear. Confession is often a dialogue in which both parties try to extract an echo from the other, and may “translate” difference into echo and mirror if the need should arise. It seems that an aggressive tendency to assimilate occurs frequently in the confessional relation rather than being a perversion of it.

CO-CONFESSIONS

Champions of Sincerity Jean-Paul Sartre calls the person who demands confessions from others “the champion of sincerity.”33 In the example that Sartre explores, the champion of sincerity asks a friend who has had homosexual experiences to confess that he is a homosexual. In Sartre’s example, the friend who has had homosexual experiences but has not confessed that he is a homosexual is in bad faith because he is denying his homosexuality in the sense that he thinks his past has nothing to do with himself, that he is “not a homosexual” “in the sense in which this table is not an inkwell.”34 And yet the champion of sincerity is also in bad faith because he wants his friend to admit that he is a homosexual in the sense that an inkwell is an inkwell, or to admit to homosexuality as an in-itself identity that denies the possibility of transcendence. As Sartre realizes, the champion of sincerity would thus be fi xing the other in an identity which would rob him of his freedom to be otherwise. Although this is not true of Sartre’s example, the scenario of championing the sincerity of others occurs frequently following confessions on the parts of champions of sincerity themselves. For instance, “confessed” homosexuals demanded that Foucault should likewise declare his homosexuality, and Jean-Paul Aron condemned Foucault for not having “confessed” that he was dying of AIDS, as Aron himself had done. One demands confessions of others, and especially confessions which one has made oneself. Such confessions which repeat one’s own bring with them a desired sense of recognition, of shared humanity, of affi rmation, community, or forgiveness. In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler argues that while it is in fact ethical to ask the other “Who are you?,” we cannot expect the other’s

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answer to provide us with a notion of her identity as something fi xed or knowable. Butler writes: As we ask to know the other, or ask that the other say, finally or defi nitively, who he or she is, it will be important not to expect an answer that will ever satisfy. By not pursuing satisfaction and by letting the question remain open, even enduring, we let the other live, since life might be understood as precisely that which exceeds any account we may try to give of it. 35 As we kill desire by satisfying it, we kill the other if we make her fulfi ll our desire to know her once and for all. For Butler, as for Sartre, if we seek the fulfi llment of our desire to know the other, we would be willing that the lack, alterity, and thus the freedom or vitality of the other be extinguished. The ethical relation, for Butler, is thus a desire to know the other, to ask, as Augustine repeatedly asks God, “Who are you?,” but without expecting a response or a fulfillment of one’s desire. For most of Giving an Account of Oneself, however, Butler is less concerned with how we ask the other who she is, or how we listen to what she says, but with how we tell her who we are, whether or not she has asked, and yet the presence of the other is crucial for Butler. It was seen that for Butler, as for Miller, all of our autobiographical practices involve others. Unlike for Miller, however, for Butler the necessary intervention of the other in the stories we tell about ourselves introduces alterity rather than sameness into our confessions. According to Butler, the other “interrupts” our stories in at least three ways: fi rst, our accounts of who we are necessarily involve how we came to be subjects, as subjectification occurs through social processes and contexts which precede us and of which we are not entirely aware; second, our stories always involve relations with others whose actions we do not necessarily understand: the intentions of others escape us, and so part of the explanations for our own lives escapes us as well; third, our stories also involve the person to whom we tell the story and as such will vary in each telling. For each of these reasons, our stories of ourselves will always relate to other people and will always lack coherence and closure. Butler thus argues that we cannot expect consistent and coherent, fi nal and defi nitive self-narratives from ourselves or others, and contests forms of narrative therapy in which an analysand constructs a story of who she is once and for all. Consequently, Butler would never ask her friend to say he is a homosexual in the way that an inkwell is an inkwell, and would never make such a confession herself. While this seems fair, Butler goes on to state that the necessary incoherence of our narratives of our selves “in no way exonerates me from having to give an account of myself,”36 and thus argues that while confessions need not be coherent, they are nevertheless obligatory. In the fi rst chapter of Giving an Account of Oneself, the notion of “accountability” resembled

176 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault Lévinasian ethical responsibility, and the account expected of the subject functioned as a response to allegations that she has caused the suffering of others. Giving an account of oneself, in the fi rst pages of Butler’s book, thus acknowledged at least potential responsibility for the suffering of another. In this sense the refusal to “exonerate” the subject of her accountability indeed sounds like an ethical claim, and is one which may be justified. However Butler quickly sets aside this model of “accountability,” arguing that we are not only responsible for giving an account of ourselves in legal, judicial, or penal contexts in which we are charged with harming others, or must defend ourselves against or accept accusations of guilt. Butler argues that we need to explore “other interlocutory conditions in which one is asked to give an account of oneself,”37 and it is these other conditions with which her book is primarily preoccupied. Problematically for her argument, Butler’s primary model for giving an account of oneself is psychoanalysis. The problem is that psychoanalysis is not an example of “other interlocutory conditions in which one is asked to give an account of oneself.” On the contrary, in psychoanalysis one is asking another to hear one’s unsolicited story. If one is asked in psychoanalysis to give an account of oneself, it is only because one has paid the other person to ask that question, not because one is responding to an original ethical demand on the other’s part. In psychoanalysis one is thus not responding to the other’s desire to know so much as to one’s own desire to tell. One is not reacting to the other’s request that one speak or to her suffering, but is making a request of the other to listen, and usually to listen to one’s own stories of suffering. As such, the ethical responsibility involved now seems to be in the other person’s court, and yet Butler treats the role of the analysand in psychoanalysis as if it were a quasi-Léviniasian response to an ethical demand, as if going to psychoanalysis were a response to the other’s call. And yet as Butler herself writes: “One goes to analysis, I presume, to have someone receive one’s words,”38 and the analyst, Butler also makes clear, may not be encountered or responded to as she is, but may be made to perform roles from the analysand’s past, or to conform to the analysand’s transference desires. Nevertheless, bewilderingly, the “ethical” dilemma which interests Butler is how to account for oneself in this context. While one can make sense of Kristeva’s and Oliver’s arguments that the role of the analyst is an ethical one of responding to the other, it is harder to understand Butler’s description of the analysand as engaged in an ethical task, or her description of giving an account of oneself within psychoanalysis as ethical engagement, and moreover as an instance of an ethical obligation of which one may not be exonerated. Surely psychoanalysis is a luxury which most people cannot afford rather than an ethical obligation. Butler’s argument that we are ethically obliged to give (unsolicited, nonjuridical) accounts of ourselves is not justified or explained, and it seems that for Butler, as for Miller, it is simply being assumed that any act which is intrinsically connected to others, as she shows “giving an account of

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oneself” to be, is ethical, and is thus ethically required. This, however, requires several problematic assumptions. As was said above, not every act which necessarily involves others is ethical. Moreover not every act which is ethical is ethically required. It seems that “giving an account of oneself” was fi rst established by Butler as ethical by considering it as a response to accusations from the suffering other, and then this ethicality continued to be assumed even though the model of “giving an account of oneself” had radically altered to entail not only juridical responses to the other but psychoanalysis and, in other examples Butler mentions, telling one’s life story to a friend “over wine.” If it seems quite gratifying to think that describing one’s life to another on a couch or over wine is an ethical responsibility, this might make us recall what Foucault calls the “speaker’s benefit.” Foucault writes of the speaker’s benefit to describe the illusion of confessants that they are politically engaged, whereas in Butler’s case the speaker’s benefit seems equally illusory, but now it is an illusion of ethicality rather than political engagement. In the context of Butler’s assumption that we are not “exonerated” from giving an account of ourselves to others, and that how we give this account is a fundamentally ethical question, Foucault’s refusal to confess is problematic, although not mentioned in this work. Looking back to Butler’s earlier work, Gender Trouble, however, we fi nd that, yet again, a refusal to confess has led to at least the suggestion of a confession made by another, for Butler insinuates that there is a confession in Foucault’s work even while acknowledging that he did not intend to give it: describing Foucault’s publication of the memoir of Herculine Barbin, Butler writes, “Foucault, who gave only one interview on homosexuality and has always resisted the confessional moment in his own work, nevertheless presents Herculine’s confession to us in an unabashedly didactic mode. Is this a displaced confession that presumes a continuity or parallel between his life and hers?”39 It is worth noting that Foucault’s “one interview on homosexuality” to which Butler refers never discusses his own homosexuality, but discusses the gay movement and lifestyle at a more general level, never becoming personal. In Barbin’s very detailed and personal account of herself, Butler would thus be seeking a far more intimate confession from Foucault than could be derived from his interview. But why would Foucault’s didacticism in his introduction to Barbin’s memoir, if indeed he is didactic, imply that an unintended confession is at stake? Although I have been arguing that confessants desire the agreement, reciprocation, recognition, or assimilation of the other, or that confession attempts to incite the other to follow suit, here Butler is making an even stronger argument: not merely that confession is didactic, but that all didacticism betrays confession. The champion of sincerity in Sartre’s discussion decides to provide the other with the confession that s/he refuses to make. He states: “He’s just a pederast.” As Sartre writes of such confessions made for others:

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The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault Who cannot see how offensive to the Other and how reassuring for me is a statement such as, “He’s just a pederast,” which erases a disturbing freedom with one sweep and which aims at henceforth constituting all the acts of the Other as consequences following strictly from his essence. That is actually what the critic is demanding of his victim—that he constitute himself as a thing, that he should entrust his freedom to his friend as a fief, in order that the friend should return it to him subsequently—like a suzerain to his vassal. The champion of sincerity is in bad faith to the extent that in order to reassure himself, he pretends to judge, to the extent that he demands that freedom as freedom constitute itself as a thing. We have here only one episode in that battle to the death of consciousnesses which Hegel calls “the relation of the master and the slave.” A person appeals to another and demands that in the name of his nature as consciousness he should radically destroy himself as consciousness. . . . 40

As seen, Butler warns that although we might ethically pose the question, “Who are you?,” we should not expect our desire to know to be fulfi lled. Unfortunately, Butler’s reading of Barbin’s memoir, as presented by Foucault, seems to be a case of championing the sincerity of an other, of extracting or providing a confession which was not given. Nevertheless, Butler makes clear in her later work that demanding a confession of another which would fulfi ll our desire to know him, to fi x him once and for all and thus obliterate his freedom and end our restless desire, is a form of “quick death.”41 Sartre describes this death as a “victimization” of the other, a request that he should “radically destroy himself,” that he should give up his freedom for my comfort. In being the champion of the other’s sincerity I ask that the other enslave himself in order to satiate my desire for recognition and mastery, and this in a scenario which calls an episode from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit to mind.

RECOGNITION AND FORGIVENESS In “To Forgive,” Derrida focuses on another episode from the Phenomenology, criticizing Hegel’s analysis of confession and forgiveness in the beautiful soul dialectic as “a sort of narcissism,” and as a “logic of identification with the other that is assumed by the scene of forgiveness.”42 In this section of the Phenomenology, acting conscience confesses only because she has realized that the judging conscience is also guilty, and thus because she assumes that her confession will be reciprocated, that the two of them will co-confess and thus recognize one another as the same. She thinks that her confession is also a confession for the other person. The agent is confessing for himself and for the other, despite the fact that the other person does not consent to this confession and at least initially refuses to make it for herself.

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Moreover, Hegel thinks that it is only because the agent assumes she can subsume the other person into her confession and confess for their mutual guilt that she confesses at all. She confesses because she perceives that the other is the same as her and because she expects reciprocation and recognition in return. Confession and forgiveness for Hegel take place as a means of identification, of subsuming the other into the same, even if this is a sameness of mutual singularity, and despite the fact that both parties are in fact transformed by the act of recognition. Butler argues that although the subject is accused of assimilating the other into the same by requiring her recognition, the subject is always altered in Hegel by her encounters with the other, or that recognition is always ecstatic. However the fact that I am myself changed when I assimilate you into me, or that colonialism effects both colonizer and colonized, does not seem to make the “imperialism” of which Hegelian thought is so often charged any more ethical.43 In confession as Hegel describes it, one confesses to one’s singularity, to one’s particular bias or flaws, or, in Foucault’s words, one is “individualized by power,” and yet this singularity or individualization is not allowed to be ethical difference or unique to the subject, the alterity of an other. Rather, since we require that each of us confess to her singularity and individualism as a sign of a shared humanity, we universalize singularity through mutual confessions. Confessed singularity proves that the other is the same, just as Hong Kingston’s individualizing story of being poor and Chinese American in California is read by a middle class New Yorker as making her alike: look, she is different too, just like me, just like us all. We are all different or particular, as our individualizing confessions show, but in Hegel this only makes us the same, part of a universally singular humanity, as for Foucault the process of being individuated by power normalizes the subject into yet another docile body. Much as he assumes that one will only confess because one assumes the confession of the other, Hegel assumes that one would only forgive the other if one realizes that one is similarly guilty. Consequently, if the beautiful soul forgives, Hegel believes that this is a tacit confession that she is also guilty, and so one only co-forgives just as one only co-confesses. Confession in Hegel assumes in advance that the other will confess to the same thing—that is, not to the same specific act, but to the same guilt of singularity, imperfection, or sinfulness. The acting conscience is thus shocked when the beautiful soul does not reciprocate, when she resists identification and subsumption into this logic of sameness, or “repels this community of nature.” Although, for Hegel, the beautiful soul will eventually give in and admit that she is like the other in their mutually evil singularity, or will forgive her, which for Hegel is the same thing, what is interesting is the moment when the other does not reciprocate or does not provide the confession which is expected of her, and what the subject does in this situation. So long as the beautiful soul does not confess, Hegel thinks she will waste away in her isolated asociality, estranged from others, and she is hence socially compelled

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to confess. If she repels the community of nature, the community will repel her, and thus, in a way, compel her to confess. The confession of the other must be had one way or another, and will be extracted through social and psychological pressure if no longer through physical torture, and, in Derrida’s analysis of Hegel, this expectation of confession as co-confession or as recognition of sameness from the other is a violence to alterity and moreover cannot allow for true forgiveness since it is situated in an economy of exchange: your confession for my granting you social re-integration. In a talmudic reading entitled “Toward the Other,” Emmanuel Lévinas makes explicit the argument that one cannot confess for the other person and cannot even solicit her confession. Lévinas, like Derrida in “To Forgive,” is writing in response to Jankélévitch’s thoughts on pardoning, or not pardoning, the Germans: “Toward the Other” was fi rst given in October of 1963 at a colloquium of French Jewish intellectuals on the subject of forgiveness, opened by Jankélévitch and preoccupied with its application to contemporary Germans. Lévinas is discussing passages from the Mishna and Gemara that consider Yom Kippur, the day “when faults committed against God are forgiven.”44 Trespasses are divided into faults against God and faults against other people. While faults that are only against God need only be forgiven by Him, faults against neighbors must be forgiven both by the persons offended and by God, in that order, for the Gemara states, “‘If a man commits a fault toward another man and appeases him, God will forgive.’”45 God forgives crimes against other people only, it seems, if forgiveness is fi rst sought from the offended persons directly. Forgiveness must therefore be asked for in order to be received. Lévinas writes: “No forgiveness is possible without having obtained the appeasement of the offended!”46, “It is thus a very serious matter to offend another man— forgiveness depends on him. [ . . . ] There can be no forgiveness that the guilty party has not sought! The guilty party must recognize his fault. The offended party must want to receive the entreaties of the offending party.”47 The offended party may refuse to appease the offender: “The other can refuse forgiveness and leave me forever unpardoned.”48 Significantly, the pardon Lévinas describes must clearly be asked for by the offender himself and from the offended party personally, and thus there could not be confessions or acts of forgiveness for nations or groups of people, as for instance the confession of Mitterand for France, or of a pope for the Catholic Church, but only innumerable face-to-face relations. Some pardons, moreover, will never be received, since the dead are dead and cannot request or grant them. Lévinas’s reading of the Mishna and Gemara underscores the radical impossibility of both confession and forgiveness without openly avowed contrition by the person immediately responsible made face-to-face with the person harmed. A story from the Gemara illustrates this point: Rab has been offended by a butcher. At Yom Kippur, he waits for the butcher to come asking for appeasement. When the butcher does not come, Rab decides to take the

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other man’s responsibility onto his own shoulders by going to the other man to facilitate his seeking of appeasement and thus aid him in fulfi lling his duty on the Day of Atonement. Rab is thus going to the butcher to offer him the opportunity to confess and to encourage him to do so, which decision to confess Lévinas thinks ought to be the responsibility of the butcher himself. On his way to the butcher, Rab encounters one of his students, who tells him he will commit “murder” in offering the butcher the opportunity to confess. Perhaps this “murder” refers to the murder of the other person’s freedom and responsibility to decide to confess for himself, or perhaps it is a murder of his alterity, including his assertion of alterity in not confessing when Rab would have him do so. Rab goes to the butcher despite this dire warning. The butcher refuses to confess but continues about his work, and, sure enough, hammering on an ox head is killed by a chip of bone lodging in his throat. Lévinas writes that this is not a story about a miracle performed by God, but remains a lesson within the interhuman regarding the “enormity of the responsibility which Rab took upon himself” when trying to force the opportunity for confession and forgiveness on the other.49 The point of this story, according to Lévinas, is that there can be no “reversal of obligation”50: the offended cannot forgive the other if the other has not confessed, and no one can take on the responsibility of the other’s confession, even by trying to incite it, however good one may think this confession will be for the other person’s soul, and whatever need and desire one may have for that confession oneself. Lévinas would write later in Otherwise than Being that we are “accused of what the others do or suffer, or responsible for what they do or suffer.”51 In this later work, it seems that there is no problem with “reversals of obligation” from other to subject, nor with taking on the “enormity of the responsibility” of the other, of taking on his obligation of guilt, of being guilty for him and for what he does. In Lévinas’s talmudic reading, however, it seems we nevertheless cannot take on the responsibility of confessing for other people, of inciting their confession, or of forgiving them without it. Being responsible for the other’s doings and sufferings may require that I confess to that responsibility—to my guilt for what she has done—rather than that I confess for her. For Lévinas, it would seem that to confess for the other person would deny the freedom of the other to not say what is expected of her, would strip her of her freedom and her responsibility for her own forgiveness. If it were the case that we could speak for others and even for groups of other people, as in the case of mass confessions and pardons, we universalize confession and forgiveness despite the freedom and the resistance of some persons being confessed for and on the part of whom forgiveness is being offered, and thus deny the inter-human and the face-to-face, the very possibility of ethics for Lévinas. In the context of the paper Lévinas is giving, this would mean that the Germans as a group cannot be forgiven, nor even forgiven individually without prior expressions of contrition. Each German must be considered one by one, according to

182 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault his or her confession. Lévinas writes: “One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger,”52 Heidegger whom Lévinas would have liked to hear confess, but who could not be confessed for, whose silence needed to be accepted even if, as Hegel deems the silence of the beautiful soul, it is evil. For Lévinas, whatever the evil of the other’s silence, one may not confess for him.

POLITICAL CONFESSIONS Returning to Derrida, the theme of confession occurs in many contexts, and in the contexts in which he has been discussed so far he seems to view confession most often negatively. Reflecting Foucault’s insight that modern man has become a “confessing animal” and hence confesses rather a lot, it has for instance been seen that Derrida expresses exasperation with the surplus of confessional discourses he is confronted with. In “A silkworm of one’s own,” as cited previously, he writes that he is “fatigued like truth, exhausted from knowing it, for too long [ . . . ] explications, complications, explications of its revelations or unveilings. If you only knew how fatigued I feel at these revelations and unveilings, how many I have had to put up with, how badly I put up with them [ . . . ].”53 In a similarly negative vein, it has also been seen that Derrida demonstrates the structural proclivity of confessions towards lies in works such as “Typewriter Ribbon.” Derrida shows that confessions are structurally prone to deception due to their relation to pleasure in narcissistic self-exposure and masochistic shame, and due to their pragmatic and strategic functions, and finally due to their obligatoriness in legal, penal, religious and psychoanalytic contexts, such that they must be produced, true or not. In “History of the Lie,” considering political rather than private confessions, Derrida writes of state confessions as always “impure,” “theatrical,” strategic and calculated, to be approached warily. Derrida has moreover repeatedly defended the decision to not confess on the part of his friend Paul de Man, defending de Man’s silence, in contrast to Lévinas’s response to the silence of Heidegger. In addition, Derrida has for the most part approvingly examined de Man’s analyses of the structure and impossibility of confession in the latter’s studies of Rousseau. Finally, Derrida has also criticized the public response to the “de Man affair,” comparing the requirement of confessions in such cases to the extractions of admissions of guilt through torture in previous ages. Like Foucault, therefore, Derrida would be acknowledging that we continue to torture people for confessions today, producing the confessions that we think we need, but that we now produce them through the workings of internalized psychological mechanisms rather than through the mechanics of physical machines. Given this overall negative view of confession in Derrida’s thought, we might have anticipated that Derrida would follow Lévinas in condemning

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all cases of confessing for other people. Confessing for oneself is problematic enough for Derrida, and so confessing for other people would seem all the more so. Nevertheless, Derrida appears to have several positive accounts of confession and, against Lévinas’s talmudic reading, at at least four points seems to suggest that one may, in fact, be ethically responsible for the other’s confession and may provide it for the other if she does not speak. I will argue however that this is only the case in what are considered political confessions, as for instance those made for a community by the leader of a nation or a religious group, and that such avowals should be categorized as testimonials rather than confessions. First, in “Circumfession,” as cited in the beginning of this chapter, Derrida states that one always confesses the other. As the title of this text suggests, despite Derrida’s apparently mixed feelings about the discursive genre of confessions, he has himself published several “confessional” works. In addition to having written “Circumfession,” Derrida calls his Memoirs of the Blind “the confessions of a blindman,” and includes autobiographical material in the text. In “Circumfession,” Derrida even seems to delight in presenting himself as a singularly confessional philosopher, outdoing even Augustine and Rousseau by being, he claims, the fi rst philosopher to have discussed his own penis in print, although in fact Louis Althusser had already achieved this claim to fame in both L’avenir dure longtemps and Les faits. At the same time, Derrida warns us that we should distrust all confessions, including his own, and thus the fact that he confesses himself does not indicate that he sees confessions as benign. For instance, in “History of the Lie,” Derrida prefaces his “confessions” with disconcerting references to the possibility that he might be lying, even as he denies that he is doing so: “I will now try to begin—and without lying, believe me—by telling a few stories”54; “allow me to make two confessions. Which I must therefore ask you, without waiting, to believe”55; “I must make a second confession. You would have every right to distrust it, as you would with any confession.”56 Second, and more significantly, in “History of the Lie,” Derrida discusses state confessions, such as Marayama’s confession to Japan’s colonial crimes, or Chirac’s confession that France participated actively and willingly in National Socialist crimes against humanity, as a grief expressed “at once personal and vaguely, very confusedly, that of the nation and the state.”57 It has been seen that Derrida writes that these state confessions are always “impure,” “theatrical,” strategic, calculated, and to be distrusted. Nevertheless, he also says that they, and the fact that they exist today when they would never have occurred to anyone to make before, are “a ‘sign’ toward a perfectibility, toward the possibility of a progress of humanity.”58 Here, then, in the strongest of terms, Derrida is approving of the avowal of an individual for an entire nation, for the living and the dead, for people who might agree with the truth claim and for people who might not, for persons experiencing contrition and for persons who feel none at all, and for crimes which the speaker may not in every case have been personally

184 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault involved in. As such Derrida has petitioned politicians such as Mitterand and Chirac to make such confessions, and expresses disapprobation for politicians such as Mitterand and Clinton who declined to confess to the injustices committed by their nations. Here, then, is one case of confessing for others—very different perhaps from those occurring in the contexts discussed so far—of which Derrida approves. Third, despite his defense of de Man’s decision to not confess, Derrida, like other persons close to de Man, also seems to seek confession in de Man’s writings, and to provide interpretations which extract the desired contrition which was never explicitly expressed. He writes, “Now it is not unthinkable that [ . . . ] ‘Excuses (Confessions),’ also presents the excuses and confessions of the author, de Man himself, if I can put it that way, on some subject or another.”59 Later, more adamantly, Derrida states that de Man’s texts “can and should be read as also politico-autobiographical texts.”60 De Man is thus defended for having not confessed, but then is found to have confessed, or is desired to be found confessing, obliquely, after all. Moreover, Derrida, with others, immediately decided to publish all the material on the so-called “de Man affair” once he was aware of it. This was perhaps done to confess for him, or to make the confession known which de Man chose not to make, or to make explicit the confession which Derrida thinks is tacit in de Man’s academic texts but for which we would not otherwise have known to look. This publication of course led to a public outcry, what Derrida has called the most “vulgar form of media violence,” requiring more explications on Derrida’s part in place of de Man. Finally, in “‘Le parjure,’ perhaps,” Derrida considers another case of providing a confession for another person, which once more relates to the “de Man affair.” This essay deals with the novel entitled Le parjure, which title means both “the perjury” and “the perjurer.” Here, Derrida tells us that one day in the 1970s de Man told Derrida to read Le parjure if he wanted to know a part of his life. The book was written in 1964 by Henri Thomas, who was a friend of de Man, and was inspired by de Man having been accused of perjury in the 1950s. It tells the story of a professor of literature named Stéphane Chalier who, like de Man, worked on Hölderlin and emigrated to the United States from Belgium. In the novel, Stéphane Chalier abandons a wife and two children when he emigrated from Belgium to the United States, and later would marry another woman in the United States without having divorced the first wife in Belgium, thus perjuring himself. The perjury case against Chalier threatens the prominent intellectual and university professor with public disgrace. Somewhat uncannily, since Thomas was writing in the early 1960s and did not know about what would one day become known as the “de Man affair,” Thomas writes of the character representing de Man: “What was known about his years before America?” Thomas’s novel is narrated by a close friend of Stéphane Chalier. When Stéphane receives a letter telling him that he is being investigated for bigamy and perjury, his friend, the narrator, is present. Witnessing his friend’s

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situation, the narrator tries to intervene with the committee investigating his case, which leads the committee to request a written confession from Stéphane. Confronted by this demand for a confession which his friend’s interference has provoked, Stéphane asks his friend to write the confession for him, suggesting that his friend is responsible for writing the confession since it was his interference which provoked the demand for it. The narrator’s response to being asked to write a confession for another person, and moreover being deemed responsible for it, is initially surprise and refusal. He states that he is not the other man, he is not the one who has perjured himself. Slowly, however, he comes around to the idea and begins drafting ideas for the other man’s confession in his mind, thinking that as friend, as acolyte, companion, follower, and witness, and as the one who has interfered, perhaps he is responsible for speaking for the other man after all. At the same time, he comes to feel guilty and, as Derrida writes, “is constantly tormented by a disturbance of identification. He wonders at what moment and even whether he will ever have had the right to say ‘us.’”61 Derrida considers the narrator guilt. It does not arise from having committed bigamy himself, but perhaps from “having wanted to defend [his friend], of having intervened in his favor, of having been a witness for the defense, a witness for him, and for having thereby provoked the demand for a confession on the part of the committee [ . . . ]”62 The parallels with Derrida’s intervention in the de Man affair are apparent, and Derrida tells us we “are free to make all the transpositions possible between the protagonists of the “Chalier affair” and those of the “de Man” affair,” in which Derrida himself was a protagonist.63 Returning to the novel, we find that Stéphane quickly forgets the idea of having his friend write the confession for him, and also realizes that it is impossible for him to write the confession himself. Like de Man, Stéphane understands that confession is impossible. For Stéphane, confession is impossible because whether confessing for another person or for oneself, confession is perjury and anacoluthon, a change of subject, a syntactic shift. This is perjury because one is never the one who did the things to which one confesses, one is never identical with the person who did the acts in the past. Stéphane’s objection to confession is thus similar to Sartre’s, who writes: How can we in conversation, in confession, in introspection, even attempt to be sincere since the attempt will by its very nature be doomed to failure and since at the very time when we announce it we have a prejudicative comprehension of its futility?. . . . But what does this mean if not that I am constituting myself as a thing?. . . . Is this not to veil from myself at the moment what I know only too well, that I thus judge a past to which by defi nition my present is not subject?64 As both Sartre and Derrida note, all confessions regarding things which happened in the past are dépassé, one is always confessing for something

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someone else did, even if it is one’s own past self. For Sartre, therefore, the one who confesses, like the “champion of sincerity” who demands the confession from another, is in bad faith.65 At the same time, as Derrida suggests earlier in “‘Le parjure,’ perhaps,” all forgetting is also perjury, a betrayal of the past, of one’s duty to remember everything at every moment, an impossible task. In Sartre’s terms, the one who denies and seeks to forget his past is as much in bad faith as the one who confesses to the past as what he is. Remembering and confession are both impossible responsibilities. Faced with this dual impossibility, instead of confessing Stéphane simply disappears, like de Man disappeared without giving his confession. As noted, if the story of the “Chalier affair” is very similar to that of the “de Man affair,” the story of the narrator’s interference in Stéphane Chalier’s case is very similar to Derrida’s interference for de Man. It is Derrida who, with others, decided to make public the information about his friend’s wartime journalism, thus provoking the outcry for a confession-report, a confession which de Man himself could no longer give, just as in the novel, Stéphane, who is going blind, and who then disappears, can no longer write his own confession. Derrida even asks whether the perjury to which the book’s title refers is not the perjury of Stéphane’s second marriage, but is rather the perjury involved in writing the novel itself, the perjury of the friend, of the narrator’s confessing for another man, telling his story for him when he could not tell it himself. Derrida, in turn, like the narrator, and like Henri Thomas, in telling de Man’s story would also feel guilty of perjury, of speaking for the other person, of disavowing him even while intervening for him, of speaking of an “us” in defending his friend, as Derrida does when he writes in “Typewriter Ribbon” of “our common innocence” and of “the best intentioned of all our machinations.”66 Here, Derrida writes of a commonality between himself and de Man, as if both had been accused, as if they were an “us,” a “we,” accused together, the perjurer and his acolyte, the acolyte who perjures himself in speaking for his friend. So, in such a case, the peculiar question arises once more in Derrida’s writing: can one confess for the other person? Thomas and Derrida seem to suggest that this is impossible, but only in the way that all confession is impossible, anacoluthonic, perjurous. One wonders if this is not the sort of impossibility which is the aporetic grounds of possibility for Derrida. The narrator in Le parjure does not in the end write the confession-report, but he does go on to narrate the story we read in Le parjure, and so he does not leave things alone either. Similarly, Derrida intervenes repeatedly in telling stories about the life of de Man, publishing his documents and bearing witness for him, confessing and excusing him, defending his innocence as well as putting forth the evidence of his guilt, just as the narrator never doubts that his friend is, of course, guilty. At the end of Le parjure the narrator says, “if I don’t leave things there, that’s because I am not Chalier, merely someone close to him, and because I can offer an explanation to the extent that my situation is not altogether

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his—it will thus be only an approximate explanation.”67 He then exclaims, “How right Chalier was when he said that it was my responsibility to write the [confession-] report! He was more right than he thought [ . . . ].” So the confession is not written because it is impossible, and yet this impossibility grounds the responsibility to write the impossible confession, the writing of Le parjure itself. Likewise it is impossible for Derrida to confess for his friend, and yet it is also his responsibility to not “just leave things here.” He must speak for the other, and speak of an “us,” and yet, as Derrida makes clear, this is not the Hegelian “us”—he writes: “This us will never be the us reached by a phenomenology of mind in the figure of a knowing-itself of absolute knowledge.”68 The “us” Derrida speaks of when he says that he and de Man are commonly innocent and when the narrator of Le parjure says that “Now I can say ‘us’” depends on the narrator’s realization that he is not Stéphane, that Derrida is not de Man, that knowing the other is not knowing the self, that I am not the other whom I follow, que je ne suis pas l’autre que je suis, I am not the other for whom I am responsible, and though I am perhaps responsible for his confession, it will only ever be an approximate explanation and not his own. The anacoluthonic moment of perjury, of speaking for the other, is not here a subsumption of the other into the same, as would worry both Derrida with respect to Hegel, and Lévinas with respect to all confessions made for other people. Rather, this anacoluthonic perjury is a shift from “he” to “us,” a taking of responsibility for the other, which is grounded in and made possible by the realization of not being him, of there being no Hegelian “us.” Anacoluthon is not a synthesis of pronouns, therefore, but is an interruption of syntax, a selfconsciously perjurous substitution. If this seems to be the conclusion Derrida reaches, he nevertheless ends his essay on Le parjure with further complications, conditional sentences and hesitations, referring to Kierkegaard’s claims that one cannot repent for another. There indeed seems to be no clear answer to the question of whether confession for the other can take place in Le parjure or in “‘Le parjure,’ perhaps,” if it is impossible in an impossibility which grounds possibility or if it is impossible tout court. In “History of the Lie,” discussing the case of state confessions, however, it has been seen that Derrida had nevertheless been more assertive in his affi rmation of the possibility of confessing for others. Although Derrida’s claims about confession appear inconsistent or at least undecidable, I would argue that Derrida is consistently suspicious of personal revelations or private confessions including his own. In these cases, he is concerned with the same sorts of confessions which Foucault problematizes: discursive acts which attempt to reveal the truth of an individual’s inner self. On the other hand, the case of “confession” which Derrida clearly advocates, that of political or state confessions, is not confession in Foucault’s sense. In political confessions, the leader is not speaking of a private or personal truth of the inner self, his own or that of another, and

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he is not avowing something which is hidden and essential to any individual or to the nation or group as a whole. On the contrary, he is telling the truth about historical events, and in most cases, as Derrida notes, these “confessions” are strategic in that the facts of the events in question are already known or becoming known. Mitterand refused to “confess” for France because at this time it was still just barely possible to deny the role of the French in collaborating with the National Socialists. Chirac, on the other hand, “confessed” because denial was no longer feasible and was, moreover, prejudicial. Importantly, what is being admitted is not avowed as a revelation of national character, an essential truth, but as something which happened but which should not have, need not have, and which must not happen again. As such, the truth which is admitted to is not personal or introspective, is not secret or hidden, and is not essential to the self or to the group in whose name the leader is speaking. Such political “confessions,” if we can call them confessions at all, are in fact closer to testimonial than confession as Foucault describes it. Testimony is to be distinguished from confession, as Foucault defi nes it, because confession for Foucault is about revealing the truth of one’s inner self, whereas testimony is about changing the self and changing society: the individuals testifying to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa, for instance, speak of healing, rehumanizing their oppressors and rehumanizing themselves. In these cases of testimony, a transformation is aimed at, whereas for Foucault confession aims not to change the self but to reveal it. Confession exposes a supposedly hidden truth of the self, whereas testimony tells the truth about the past in the hopes that in the process this past will be surmounted and will not be reproduced. Testimony should not aim to reveal a hidden and essential truth of an inner self or of a given group. Rather, testimonials should bear witness to what has been or is, in ways which are self-conscious that this need not have been and need not be in the future, and that it is not specific or inherent to the testifying individual or to her group. Such speech should function as a process not of self-reification and discovery but of self- and social-transformation. In the testimony given to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, again, subjects bore witness not to innate or psychological truths of their selves or of their racial or national identity, nor of their victimizers or those that they had victimized, but rather, in an atmosphere of change, healing, and hope, spoke of what had been but which would no longer be.69 In the case of Derrida’s speaking for de Man, it has been seen that Derrida is far more ambivalent than he is in either his negative view of personal confessions or in his positive view of testimony or state “confessions,” and this may be because de Man’s case, particularly for Derrida who was his friend, falls into a nebulous space between the private and political. The confession which is demanded by the public has to do with de Man’s individual life, and demands an explanation which inevitably proceeds through an analysis of his intentions, feelings, character, childhood, familial relations (that he was

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orphaned, that he saw his collaboratist uncle as a father figure, and so forth). Consequently, this would be a personal, introspective confession (and, as de Man would point out, one that becomes an excuse) to the essential and secret self of Paul de Man, and on these grounds Derrida rejects it. On the other hand, the confession in question deals with a figure of some authority who collaborated with National Socialists, and thus it is also political, and had Derrida decided to not expose the secret once he learned of it, this would also have been a political decision, and hence Derrida felt the need to make that story known. As such, Derrida would be arguing that in the case of political confessions alone, or of testimonials, confessions can be demanded from others and made for others. To be clear, however, there is a sense in which all confessions are political for both Derrida and for Foucault, since, as feminists have often put it, the personal is political. By speaking of “political confessions” here, I do not mean to imply that private confessions are apolitical, but mean to refer to confessions which do not introspect on an individual, but which concern the history of an individual, a nation or a group. The “political confessions” to which I refer are thus not introspective confessions, and as such I am also not referring to those increasingly common confessions made by politicians dealing with their own private lives, as for instance in the confessions that were demanded of Bill Clinton—that he had smoked marijuana, that he had had intercourse with Monica Lewinski—confessions which he, like the judging consciousness, declined to make but eventually had publicly and abjectly extracted through social, legal, and political pressure—or the confessions given voluntarily by the Born Again George W. Bush, which, because given voluntarily, like those of the acting consciousness, gained him popularity, showing that he was “human” like the rest of us, admitting that he shared in our universal and flawed humanity, forgiving us and receiving our forgiveness through his politically strategic self-exposure. If, with Derrida, we conclude by arguing that only in the case of state or non-introspective “confessions” can we demand and make avowals of and for others, and that these are in fact testimonials rather than confessions, what do we say about the two apparently ethical grounds for demanding the other’s confession which we have seen? In the fi rst case, Derrida will simply reject the need for Hegelian recognition and for the “us” of synthesis, grounding responsibility for the other instead in an “us” which recognizes that I am not the other and that confession for her is thus always an impossible responsibility. In the second case, contra Lévinas, Derrida will deny that we need the other person’s confession in order to forgive, and in fact, in the case where we exchange our forgiveness for her confession, and insist on her confession as payment for the forgiveness that we give, we are not forgiving at all. In “To Forgive,” Derrida suggests that we must “make silence the very element of forgiveness, if there is such a thing [ . . . ].”70 In silence there is no economy of exchange and thus it is in the

190 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault silence which makes forgiveness impossible that forgiveness may actually take place. Ethically speaking, it is thus in the silence of the other’s failure to confess, and in our refraining from confessing for her, that forgiveness may occur, if forgiveness can exist at all.

CONFESSING FOR OTHERS This chapter has argued against the tendency to elicit the confessions of others and to confess for others. Beginning with a discussion of confessional authors such as Augustine, Rousseau, Dostoyevsky, and Ernaux, and of confessional readers such as Miller, it has explored the desire of confessing subjects to hear confessional responses from the other. As confessional subjects, we desire the confessions of others as well, whether in the immediate context of the reception of our own confessions, or more generally through the media, as attested to by our appetite for what Miller calls the “memoir biz.” In particular, we look for confessions which recognize our own, whether very specifically, e.g. when “confessed” homosexuals insist that others confess to the exact same thing, or more generally, as when confessions to any flaws or singularities bring us pleasure because we ourselves are flawed and singular. Following Sartre, Lévinas, and Derrida, this chapter has moreover argued that although confessions asked from others are often charged with ethical value—recognition, love, community, forgiveness—they are in fact unethical to the other, abolishing her alterity for the subject’s peace of mind. Following Derrida, I would argue that we do not need recognition in the form of a universal “us” which counter-confessions strive to provide, and that forgiveness which requires reciprocation is not forgiveness. Following a reading of the diverse discussions of confession in the writings of Derrida, it has been argued that political avowals to the historical guilt of individuals and nations, as opposed to confessions to a politician’s private life and to the micro-politics of personal confessions more generally, are desirable and even necessary, but that they are to be placed in a separate category from personal confessions and are better understood as testimonials.

5

Alternatives to Confession

The transformation of one’s self by one’s own knowledge is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting? —Michel Foucault, “An Ethics of Pleasure”1

It was argued in Chapter One that the purpose of genealogy is to show the contingency of one historical mode of subjectification in order to indicate the possibility of alternative forms as they have existed in the past and may exist in the future. Genealogy undermines totalizing histories so that alternatives to those histories may be thought. Chapters One through Two have hoped to function as a genealogy of confession, or to show the accidents which gave rise to confessional subjectivity, while Chapters One through Four have each aimed to examine some of the detriments of confessional subjectivity for both the self and the other. As such, these chapters have intended not only to show what is problematic about confession as a disciplinary practice of the self and as an ethical relation with the other, but, by indicating that the confessional form of subjectification which characterizes the modern West is both contingent and negative, to suggest both the possibility and the need for alternative forms of subject formation. Following this genealogy and problematization of confession, this fi nal chapter will examine alternatives to confession, strategies for transforming the self which contrast with the self-fi xing or disciplinary practices of confession. In the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, and in his seminar lectures and other shorter writings from this period, Foucault sought to develop a theory of the manners in which individuals are not only governed and disciplined into subjects, but in which they govern and discipline themselves, fashioning themselves within the confi nes of their historical field. More precisely, he explores ancient aesthetics of the self as possible resources for discovering models of self-constitution to contrast with the subjectification that occurs under disciplinary power. As he writes in the introduction to The Use of Pleasure:

192

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes of some people it might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity—the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself?2

As Todd May notes, “To become someone else: that is the ultimate goal of the ethical writings. Not to become Greek, or Roman, or Christian; but, through creating a distance between whoever one has been taught that one is and who one could have been, to open up the possibility that one might become someone else.”3 For Foucault, the study of what other people have been in other eras and other places allows us to recognize the contingency of what we are, and thus to be able to conceive of becoming other than what we are. This idea was already seen in the fi rst volume of The History of Sexuality when Foucault compared theWestern sciences of sex to erotic arts in the East. The suggestion was that although the sciences of sex purport to give us the truth about our sex, other ways of knowing about sex or of experiencing bodies and pleasures have existed. The point is not that we should take up these particular alternatives, but only that the very existence of an alternative demonstrates that our own ways of being and knowing are not inevitable, that the possibility exists of becoming other than what we are. We might, therefore, not simply try to discover who we are, as the Western human sciences have long aimed to do, but instead work on changing what we are. How do we do this? The Ancient Greeks and Romans, with their technologies of the self, provide some examples not only of other ways of being, but of ways of changing the being that one is. Foucault would also say that technologies of self-governance are always intertwined with technologies of discipline. As such, even in our contemporary disciplinary society, technologies of domination will be entangled with forms of self-care, as was seen in the case of psychoanalysis. For Foucault, although technologies of discipline and self-care co-exist, the balance shifted toward discipline with Christianity, or during the Middle Ages. While in the Renaissance there was a resurgence of technologies of the self, we are once more in an era in which subject-formation is primarily disciplinary. Nonetheless, if selfcare and dominance are always intertwined, then there exist contemporary forms of self-care which can be cultivated, and it is not only in the past that we can fi nd strategies, tools, and inspiration. This chapter will be concerned with non-confessional practices which I will interpret as technologies of the self and as alternatives to confession. First, I will consider autobiographical silence, or the refusal to engage in

Alternatives to Confession 193 autobiographical discourses at all, as a practice of freedom. Second, I will examine Foucault’s studies of autobiographical writing, beginning with his discussion of the self-writing practices of the ancient Greeks and early Christians. I will then take up Foucault’s claim that artistic practice, and painting in particular, can be a practice of self-transformation, through a discussion of what have been understood as the post-trauma paintings of the seventeenth-century artist Artemisia Gentileschi, while a consideration of recent feminist art historical, fictional, and artistic interpretations of Artemisia’s life and work will serve as examples of contemporary technologies of the self. I will next look at Foucault’s publication of the nineteenth-century memoirs of Pierre Rivière and Herculine Barbin, arguing that Foucault’s discussion of the two nineteenth-century memoirs are useful for theorizing ways of reflecting on one’s experiences without confessing to or reifying them. In the subsequent section I will consider political action, and feminist political practice in particular, as other non-confessional and self-transformative practices. Finally, I will suggest that Foucault’s own writings can be understood as examples of such non-confessional discourses, the writing and reading of which were and are practices which transform the self. The examples of self-care that I will consider in this chapter differ from those of Foucault in at least two ways. First, while Foucault readily accepts that women did not practice technologies of the self in antiquity, and thus sets aside the question of women’s self-care4 (much as Stephen Greenblatt, in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, also only considers the self-fashioning practices of men), many of the historical and contemporary examples which I have chosen to explore describe technologies developed and practiced by women, suggesting that there is a history of women’s practices of self-care. 5 Second, in the technologies of self-governance which I will consider, unlike those discussed by Foucault and derived from the ancient Greeks and Romans, autonomy as independence from others is not posited as an aesthetic ideal, and in the examples of feminist technologies of the self, self-care and autonomy occur within a political and group movement. In the case studies which I present, the subject cares for herself in ways which reverse the workings of discipline and cultivate autonomy while continuing to fashion herself in relation to others.

SILENCE AS PRACTICE OF FREEDOM It was seen in Chapter Two that, for Foucault, silence can be a means to resist discipline. Foucault discusses the case of the criminal who declined to confess to his motivations, although he had admitted to his crime. To cite again, Foucault describes the courtroom scene beginning with the judge’s question: “Have you tried to reflect upon your case?” -Silence.

194

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault “Why, at twenty-two years of age, do such violent urges overtake you? You must make an effort to analyze yourself. You are the one who has the keys to your own actions. Explain yourself.” -Silence. “Would you do it again?” -Silence.6

In cases such as these, culminating with an emotional outburst from the jury, silence is presented as a practice of freedom despite conditions of constraint, or of resisting disciplinary incitements to speech. Foucault also observed other positive forms of silence, which occurred under less coercive conditions than that described above, as when he speaks of a friendship which developed between himself and the fi lmmaker Daniel Schmidt: [W]e discovered after a few minutes that we really had nothing to say to each other. So we stayed together from about three o’clock in the afternoon to midnight. We drank, we smoked hash, we had dinner. And I don’t think we spoke more than twenty minutes during those ten hours. From that moment a rather long friendship started. It was for me the fi rst time that a friendship originated in strictly silent behavior.7 Such a friendship is surely unusual, even for Foucault, who notes that our society is remarkable in that silence has “unfortunately been dropped from our culture.” 8 Unlike Japanese, Greek, Roman, and Native North American societies, he remarks, “We don’t have a culture of silence.” Foucault goes on to say that he is “in favor of developing silence as a cultural ethos,” and that “Silence may be a much more interesting way of having a relationship with people” than the confessional exchanges which we currently engage in.9 Silence is thus presented by Foucault as an alternative to confession, as a means to resist the disciplinary incitements to confessional discourse under conditions of coercion, and, under less coercive circumstances, as a positive way in which to experience the self in relations with others. At fi rst glance, it would thus seem that a Foucaultian philosophy would recommend silence as the solution to the problems which have been explored thus far. This interpretation would seem to be lent credence by the well-known silence that Foucault himself kept, and particularly in which his life ended. In the same interview in which he advocates a cultural ethos of silence, however, and before making these remarks, Foucault notes that he had realized as a child that “there were many different ways of speaking as well as many forms of silence. There were some kinds of silence which implied very sharp hostility and others which meant deep friendship, emotional admiration, even love,” and that one of his reasons for admiring silence is that he had been obliged to speak as a child.10 The silence which Foucault

Alternatives to Confession 195 admires, therefore, and around which he would develop a cultural ethos, is one which demonstrates a freedom from coercions to speech—for instance those explored in the previous chapters—such that silence can express friendship, autonomy, and love, whereas there are other forms of silence which function otherwise, as Foucault makes clear both in this interview and in other writings. To simply say that silence is preferable to speech for Foucault, even with respect to autobiographical matters, would hence be an over-simplification, as would be such a reading of the silence around Foucault’s own death. It is clear that some silences are just as “troubling,” to use Peter Brooks’s term, as confessions. To raise at once the most obvious trouble with an advocation of silence: many groups of historically marginalized and oppressed people consider that they have gained access to speech for the fi rst time, and that their uses of autobiographical discourses in particular have been a source of empowerment, therapeutic healing, consciousness-raising, liberation, and bringing about social awareness and change. Foucaultian critiques of confessional discourses could be misused as a form of reactionary re-silencing of the already oft-silenced in our society. For this reason, as shall be seen below, several Foucaultian feminists have been quick to argue that Foucault’s analysis of confession does not apply to all instances of autobiographical discourses such as feminist consciousness-raising,11 while I have argued above that we need to distinguish between confession and practices such as testimonials. It is thus necessary to explore the extent to which a Foucaultian critique of confession extends to discourses surrounding identity politics and practices of bearing witness to oppression, and particular autobiographical forms of writing and speaking deemed to be political tools by historically marginalized groups. That silence can be the effect of domination and oppression is a point not lost on Foucault, who has often written of and listened to those who were marginalized by social discourses without having a privileged access to them. In an interview, Foucault says: [T]hose who, for once in their lives, have found a new tone, a new way of looking, a new way of doing, those people, I believe, will never feel the need to lament that the world is error, that history is filled with people of no consequence, and that it is time for others to keep quiet so that at last the sound of their disapproval may be heard. . . .”12 Foucault is thus invested in allowing those who have historically been silenced to “find a new tone,” to speak, while those who have dominated may now be quiet. In 1961 Michel Serres described Foucault’s Madness and Civilization as “a cry” through which “circulates” a “profound love,” “almost pious,” “pour l’autre soi-même”—“voici le livre de toutes les solitudes,” Serres writes, the book of all the solitudes of the other.13 Foucault has also published a little-known book, Désordre des familles, on persons imprisoned by lettres

196 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault de cachet under the Ancien Régime, silenced in dungeons at their families’ requests. Moreover, while writing on the prison in the modern period, a study of which Discipline and Punish would be part, Foucault interviewed and published the words of contemporary prisoners whose experiences and discontents would not otherwise have been heard, as well as lost voices from the past such as those of Pierre Rivière and Herculine Barbin, to be discussed below. Part of Foucault’s genealogical task is to unearth the voices which once spoke in the past, but which were not heard, and which might have continued to speak, if the story which came to be totalizing had not dominated, and also to challenge the present such that new voices can be raised. The silence to which Foucault tries to give voice in writings and political practices is thus one which results from domination and enclosure, whether of the criminal or the mad or of those who lost in the power struggles of history, and yet, as seen, in later works he is also suspicious of claims about silence resulting from repression, and particularly from sexual repression. Significantly, Foucault’s interest in Discipline and Punish and in his first volume of The History of Sexuality lies less with the silence of these marginalized and constrained persons in the modern period than with the manners in which they were made to speak. Certain ways of speaking were indeed silenced, but the dominated subject was not left in her quietude, but was made to produce other forms of discourse. Although this is not to deny that silence or, more particularly, silencing, is a problem, for Foucault the greater problem is perhaps the ways in which we speak and make others speak. We therefore need not simply to speak more, or to speak about and make others speak about what we think is repressed. Rather, we need to choose to speak or to remain silent in ways which cultivate autonomy and subvert the workings of discipline. As such silence is not necessarily the mark of oppression, and different kinds of silence, forms of speech, and incitements to discourse need to be differentiated between. Silence is not, then, always the fate of the oppressed, and the marginalized of society may in fact be forced to speak confessionally, or may speak confessionally out of either an apparently innate or a political desire which is in fact but an internalized affect of their oppression. Speech is not always a form of liberation from the oppressions of silence, but may be a result of domination and constraining of the speaking subject rather than liberating, much as, quite literally, the suspected criminal will be urged to confess for the sake of his psychological liberation, to be “helped” by the criminal psychiatrists, when in truth that speech will result in his material and psychological constraint: in the second case of a criminal who refused to confess to his motivations discussed in Chapter Two, Foucault points out that the confession was desired because the court could not order the execution of a man whom it had not understood, and thus confession may be sought as a sanction to kill. In a different vein, Foucault’s work on sexuality also shows an awareness of silence not as an effect of domination but as a strategy of oppression and power; to cite again, he writes: “the agency of domination does not reside in

Alternatives to Confession 197 the one who speaks (for it is he who is constrained), but in the one who listens and says nothing.”14 Although silence has been treated in recent scholarship purely negatively, as a symptom of oppression to be overcome through liberating access to language, Foucault perceives that silence can also be a position and strategy of power, and that this manipulation of power relations can both be a way of constraining the other and a means of releasing the self from the other’s constraints, which is the freedom that he strives to theorize. In turn, not being able to remain silent, whether this inability comes from an external or an internal compulsion to speak, is a consequence of domination. In short, contrary to most contemporary discussions of the topic, silence is complex: silence can be a position which reflects one’s oppression or which demonstrates one’s freedom, or it can be a means of oppressing the other, while speech can manifest a deprivation of freedom as well as an assertion of it. Foucault notes that silence and secrets as strategies are no freer of relations of domination and power than is verbalization, and that discourse can be just as much a strategy of resistance to power as silence and secrecy can be. Indeed, rather than opposing silence and speech, Foucault writes of discourse, secrecy, and silence as similar acts within the same process, each being simultaneously possible effects of power and forms of resistance. He writes: Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it, any more than silences are. We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumblingblock, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it. In like manner, silence and secrecy are a shelter for power, anchoring its prohibitions; but they also loosen its holds and provide for relatively obscure areas of tolerance.15 As this discussion makes clear, there are many forms of silence, as well as many forms of speech, some of which, as already seen, resist power, but others of which shelter it, and some of which do both. Consequently, rather than embracing all speech as liberating and condemning all silence as harm, as has been the tendency in recent decades, we need to distinguish between forms of silence and speech.

BOOKS OF LIFE Foucault’s essay “Self-writing,” which was briefly discussed in Chapter One, is characteristic of his final work on subjectivity in that, without offering any explicit evaluations, he describes forms of self-writing in the practices of the ancients which can be viewed as alternative practices of subject-making

198

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

which we may contrast with those of the early modern and modern confessional practices described in the first volume of The History of Sexuality. In this article, Foucault describes three kinds of writing which, along with meditation, reading, listening to others, control of diet, and exercise, appear among the various ancient “arts of the self.”16 The latest to emerge historically, but the first that Foucault discusses, is the practice of keeping a written record of one’s actions and thoughts of that day. The idea is that just as one would not commit sinful acts in the presence of others, and would not say sinful thoughts aloud for others to hear, if obliged to write down all of one’s deeds and thoughts occurring in private, one will protect oneself from sin. A person is less likely to commit sinful acts or pursue sinful thoughts if she must record them, and writing can thus function as a witness, replacing the surveillance of another in moments of solitude when one cannot depend on others to produce the requisite sense of self-consciousness and shame. Foucault goes on to contrast this early Christian practice of self- writing with two pre-Christian uses of writing as self-governance, the hupomnêmata and correspondence. The correspondence which interests Foucault is the practice of daily exchanges of letters between ancients in which all of one’s activities and thoughts are once more recorded, the only difference being that they are now given up to another’s gaze. Foucault distinguishes this form of self-writing from the books just described, particularly in terms of the replacement of a virtual other with an actual reader. Nevertheless, both of these practices can be contrasted to the panopticism described in Discipline and Punish in similar ways: while both practices of self-writing involve a form of surveillance, imagined or real, which is to be internalized through habituation into self-surveillance, in both cases the subject chooses to submit his life, as told in his writing, to the surveillance of another, and thus to internalize that surveillance. The subject’s decision precedes surveillance, and the subject also chooses what to write, or what to submit to the surveillance of the other. He chooses to do so out of a concern for himself, or as a self-conscious practice of self-care. This is quite different from the manners in which surveillance and discipline are internalized in the modern period, as Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish, because in our own era discipline precedes us and comes from outside, not from a decision of one’s own. Today it is no longer a desire to monitor oneself and thus to care for the self which gives rise to a voluntary submission to the surveillance of another. On the contrary, we fi rst fi nd ourselves monitored, without having chosen to be, and then we internalize this surveillance. Though buried between his accounts of the ascetic’s diary and correspondence, the most interesting of the three types of self-governing writing is the hupomnêmata. The hupomnêmata is a “livre de vie” in which one collects citations, fragments of works one has read, impressions of actions one has witnessed or read about, reflections of one’s own or which one has heard. These books were ways of remembering bits of wisdom, which one could later meditate upon, and which one could also share with others: Foucault

Alternatives to Confession 199 describes a case in which Fundanus asks Plutarch for advice on “agitations of the soul,” and Plutarch, not having time to respond by writing an original treatise on the subject, simply sends Fundanus his hupomnêmata to reflect on, which contained Plutarch’s collection of reflections and citations on the subject of the tranquil spirit. Such books, one’s own and those of others, were meant to be read and reread, reflected and meditated upon repeatedly, as exercises for the soul, ways of working on one’s life, of cultivating the sort of subjecthood one desired to have, and the life one wanted to live. These are not, Foucault stresses, “des journaux intimes,” and nor are they places to record one’s personal experiences and spiritual struggles à la Saint Augustine. One does not describe one’s self or one’s experiences here, but collects fragments of observations by others or of one’s own of the external world. One does not seek to reveal in these books a selfhood which pre-exists them but remains “hidden”—as in confession and contemporary confessional autobiographies—but rather, through meditated selection of citations and reflection on them, actively and self-consciously constitutes one’s self as in process. The de Manian and Foucaultian point that writing constitutes life rather than being constituted by it is taken up, but does not now result in a flight into silence, but in an active appropriation of that writing as self-aware and self-constitutive practice. It is possible for the author of “Self Writing,” therefore, that a self is formed through acts of rational will. As Foucault writes, the hupomnêmata “have to do with constituting oneself as a subject of rational action through appropriation, unification, and subjectification of an already-said which is fragmentary and chosen.”17 While Foucault looked to antiquity to find examples of these books of life, other philosophers have argued that certain books which contemporary subjects read and write also function as hupomnêmata: Marianne Valverde describes The Prophet and Chicken Soup for the Soul as modern hupomnêmata,18 while Cressida Heyes describes the leaflets handed out at Weight Watchers meetings (in which dieters find not only advice on dieting and success stories from other dieters, but are encouraged to note their own dietary intake and observations) as combining the functions of discipline and of the hupomnêmata.19 After having considered early modern and nineteenth-century practices of the self in the following sections, in the final part of this chapter I will return to Foucault’s notion of “books of life,” and will consider his own books and that of the Foucaultian philosopher Ladelle McWhorter as other contemporary examples of hupomnêmata, examples which successfully shift the balance of power away from discipline and towards self-care.

BAROQUE SELF-FASHIONINGS: RE-PRESENTING THE SELF IN ART/HISTORY In an interview cited at the beginning of this chapter, Foucault extends a discussion of philosophical work to include other creative practices, and

200 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault art-making in particular, when he asks: “Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting?”20 It could be argued against Foucault that at least some artists create paintings, and, in the paradigmatic case, self-portraits, not to change who they are but to explore, reveal, and affirm who they are, or as confessions in the Foucaultian sense. Taking up this view, Derrida has argued that every self-portrait in the Christian tradition is a confession. 21 In this section, however, I would like to examine Foucault’s observation that painting can at least in some cases function as a self-conscious transformation of the artist, or as an alternative to confession, by exploring the example of the Baroque Caravaggista Artemisia Gentileschi. As is well known, the Roman artist Artemisia began her career in scandal. Agostino Tassi, an artist who was hired to teach Artemisia perspective drawing, was charged by Artemisia’s father with having raped his daughter. Following the rape by Agostino, Artemisia continued to sleep with her rapist for several months in the hopes that he would keep his promise to marry her, now that, in her own words, he had “dishonored” her in a way which only marriage could amend. Although this may seem strange to the modern reader, Guido Ruggiero’s studies of rape in Renaissance Italy document that it was an entirely standard pattern of behavior.22 Consensual sexual relationships frequently followed rape and culminated in marriage in this period, due to the fact that marrying their rapists was the only means raped women saw to rectify their situation and to avoid a worse fate. The stories of the Sabine women and of the Amazons, who were raped and later married to their abductors and rapists, were frequently depicted in medieval and early modern art, commemorating this deeply engrained pattern of sexual relationship. As emerges in the records of the rape trial, Agostino’s friend Cosimo Quorli also attempted to rape Artemisia both before and after her rape by Agostino. On one occasion, when she successfully rebuffed him, Cosimo told Artemisia that he would spread rumors that he had had her, which threat he carried out. 23 Artemisia ascribes Agostino’s withdrawal of his pledge to marry her to Cosimo’s lies. 24 Agostino was a sordid character and a multiple sexual offender: previously imprisoned for incest, and rumored to have murdered his wife, he told contradictory and impossible tales in his trial testimony, denying having slept with Artemisia—although he had already told multiple witnesses that he had—while accusing not only Artemisia, but her mother and aunt of being “insatiable whores,”25 although he could not have known either of the latter women. Agostino even accused Artemisia of having had sexual relations with her father. During the trial, although the judges admonished Agostino for bearing false witness and were openly skeptical of his testimony, it was Artemisia and not Agostino who was tortured with the sibille, or fi ngerscrews, risking her artists’ hands, and who was examined by midwives. According to the trial records, while the ropes were tightened around Artemisia’s fi ngers in Agostino’s presence, she said to him: “This is the ring that you give me, and these are your promises!”26

Alternatives to Confession 201 Despite the fact that it is Artemisia’s testimony which seems credible in the trial records, while Agostino contradicted himself, was contradicted by his friends, and was openly disbelieved by the judges, the case appears to have been dismissed, as was common for this period, in which rape was almost never brought to trial and usually came to nothing when it did.27 Agostino must have been deemed guilty, however, even if, as was conventional for the time, guilt for this particular crime was rarely punished, since he spent a total of eight months in prison, including one month after the end of the trial. He was nevertheless back to work for his wealthy patrons at the end of that month, while it was Artemisia’s reputation which was so damaged that a hasty marriage had to be arranged for her in Florence to remove her from the site of her disgrace. Despite this marriage, which she would eventually abandon, Artemisia would never escape the scandal surrounding the trial. Exasperated by her international success in a man’s profession, Artemisia was forever masculinized in the public’s mind and was consistently presumed to be promiscuous. Being involved in a rape trial in the Baroque invoked a permanent suspicion regarding a woman’s sexuality, such that even twentiethcentury (male) art historians continue to insert gratuitous comments about Artemisia’s lax sexual mores, while expressing skepticism about whether she was actually raped, in their accounts of her paintings. Such art historians engage in a style of scholarship which is unheard of in academic studies of the works of male artists, and do so despite the fact that there is no historical evidence for these claims other than the rumors originally circulated by Agostino Tassi and Cosimo Quorli.28 During the period leading up to the trial, Artemisia painted one of her earliest works, a version of Susanna and the Elders dated 1610, 29 [Figure 1]. While in early Christian and medieval paintings of this Old Testament tale, multiple episodes from Susanna’s story would normally be depicted, and Susanna was always presented as a symbol of purity—sometimes even representing the Church, threatened by the two wolves of paganism and Judaism30 —by the time of the Renaissance depictions of Susanna almost always focused exclusively on the scene in which she is found bathing naked in a garden, and functioned more as occasions for male painters and patrons to depict and view the nude female body than as opportunities for moral reflection, as in Tintoretto’s particularly beautiful version from 1555–6. In many early modern interpretations, diverging from the Old Testament version of events, Susanna is shown gazing coquettishly at the Elders, while positioned to display her body to its full advantage for the viewer, as in Annibale Carracci’s etching from 1590, [Figure 2]. In Rembrandt’s version, Susanna looks furtively over her shoulder, as if conspiring with the elders, [Figure 3]. The viewer is implicitly male and is meant to identify not with Susanna’s plight but with the visual pleasures of the Elders: one art historian describes Rubens’s version, for instance, as “a gallant enterprise mounted by two bold adventurers.”31 [Figure 4]. The space in which Susanna bathes is usually depicted as an Edenic paradise, a site of sensuous pleasure.

202 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault Artemisia’s version of the story is strikingly different from those of her male contemporaries. There is no garden in Artemisia’s painting, but only a stone wall. As Griselda Pollock notes, there is also “very little space in the Susanna,” which places the viewer too close to the victim and creates a claustrophobic atmosphere, contributing to the emotional intensity of the work. 32 Rather than displaying the erotic appeal of the naked female body, Artemisia shows Susanna’s body twisting awkwardly as she defends herself from the Elders who, in the only known case of this iconography, are whispering to one another in a conspiratorial manner. This whispering pose is suggestive of the manner in which two other men, Agostino and Cosimo, conspired to rape Artemisia, and threatened to launch a whispering campaign to ruin her reputation should she refuse them, just as the Elders threatened the biblical heroine with slander. As in the case of Susanna, the accusations against Artemisia’s honor were indeed made and believed, even if in the end it was the Elders and Agostino who gave contradictory testimony and were deemed guilty by judges. Most striking about Artemisia’s version of Susanna and the Elders, however, is her absolute refusal to depict the heroine as seducing the Elders, the indisputable manner in which Susanna attempts to reject them, and the credible depiction of anguish on her face. In the case of Artemisia’s painting, the viewer is more likely to empathize with Susanna’s distress than with the Elders’ desires. Painted near the time of her rape and when she was threatened by slander by two men, art historians have frequently interpreted Artemisia’s Susanna and the Elders as an autobiographical work, even if the depiction of Susanna is not a self-portrait.33 If autobiographical, clearly this work is not a confession but a defense, an eloquent declaration of Artemisia’s version of events. In addition, Artemisia’s Susanna may be read as a rebuttal and critique of the depictions of Susanna painted by her male contemporaries. Not a painting of Artemisia harassed by Agostino and Cosimo but of Susanna being threatened by the Elders in ancient times, this work has been read as a statement about the sexual victimization of women in general and not only of Artemisia, not only in their vulnerability to rape, but in the trials, rumors and self-serving revisions to the story that follow and in which it is the victims who must defend themselves again. The work, however autobiographical, has frequently been taken up by feminist art historians as an act of protofeminist activism, and as not merely about Artemisia herself. A similar story can be told about the art historical development of depictions of Lucretia as has been sketched for the paintings of Susanna. In this case, another innocent heroine is threatened with slander by a rapist. This time, however, as in Artemisia’s case, the threats culminate in an actual rape, and the heroine submits to the rapist to protect her reputation, much as Artemisia continued to have sexual relations with Agostino in the hopes that he would mend her honor through marriage. Beginning with Augustine, commentators have doubted that Lucretia was really raped, and have suggested that she experienced some pleasure with Tarquin. 34 Augustine

Alternatives to Confession 203 argues that Lucretia committed suicide out of guilt regarding her own pleasure rather than to save her honor. Had she cared about her honor, he states, she would have preferred to be killed by Tarquin than to be raped. As in Artemisia’s case, the testimony of a rape victim is cast into doubt. As with depictions of Susanna, medieval and early renaissance representations of Lucretia portray multiple episodes from her story in which Lucretia’s innocence is never doubted, and in which her rape is never eroticized, as, for instance, in Botticelli’s and Lippi’s cassone panels. In contrast, increasingly misogynist renaissance and baroque versions of the story focused on eroticized representations of the scene of rape, as in several versions by Titian, [Figure 5]. In addition, baroque artists frequently represented Lucretia as compliant to or even as seducing her rapist, as in one seventeenth-century version by Giovanni Biliverti in which Lucretia writhes on the bed in order to display her entire body to the viewer while pushing Tarquin away with one arm and pulling him towards her with the other, smiling as she does so, [Figure 6]. In contrast, Artemisia’s version from 1621—which this time is a selfportrait—declines to depict the moment of Lucretia’s rape, and does not eroticize the female body. Instead, painting a decade after her own rape, Artemisia represents the aftermath of Lucretia’s rape: her suicide, [Figure 7]. As such, Artemisia highlights the manner in which with rape it is often the victim who suffers throughout or with her life, just as it was Artemisia who was damaged by the legacy of scandal, while Agostino soon went free. By choosing to depict herself as Lucretia, a virtuous heroine of Roman legend who has been threatened with slander, the Roman artist once more declared her innocence in the face of persistent rumors. Against Derrida’s generalization that all self-portraits in the Christian tradition are confessions, this is an autobiographical painting which is not confessional but which arguably functions as a self-defense and a re-presentation of the artist against the lies which were being told. In what is perhaps her most famous work, Judith Beheading Holofernes, from 1612, Artemisia draws again on an Old Testament story, as she had done with Susanna and the Elders, [Figure 8]. As in the painting of Lucretia, Artemisia paints a self-portrait of herself as the heroine of her work. During the Italian Renaissance and Baroque, it was common for male artists to paint their own features on the decapitated heads of Holofernes, St. John the Baptist, and Goliath, as in Donatello’s sculpture, David and Goliath, and in two paintings by Caravaggio. In some of these cases, artists would paint their mistresses’ features on their depictions of Salomé or Judith, presumably making a purely secular point, while in Donatello’s work, the feather on the decapitated head of Donatello/Goliath caresses the beautiful young David’s thigh, functioning as a confession of homosexual guilt and desire. In other works, however, the identification of male artists with guilty and the suffering figures seems to have served not as erotic innuendo but as an expression of contrition and religiously-inspired fear: Michelangelo, for instance, late

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in his life and increasingly devote, painted his features on the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew in the Sistine Chapel’s Last Judgement, while in one of his last works, Titian painted himself as King Midas, sadly observing the flaying of Marsyas, regretting his own artistic hubris as he awaited his death by the plague. In each of these cases, the male artist identifies with a guilty, humiliated, dying or dead male body, at a time in life when he has set aside earthly pleasures and come to fear the final judgement of God. In contrast, in her version of Judith and Holofernes, Artemisia depicts herself not as a guilty and suffering figure but as the virtuous and active heroine. As in the Susanna, Artemisia creates a triangular configuration of three figures, two of whom lean over a third figure who is in excruciating anguish. Now, however, it is two women who decapitate a man rather than two men who threaten a woman. Also as in the Susanna, and in contrast to depictions of the decapitation of Holofernes by other artists, we are uncomfortably close to the protagonists who are unusually near to the picture frame. Sensationally, the head of Holofernes is thought to be a portrait of Agostino Tassi, which would have been recognizable to Artemisia’s peers. Once more, feminist art historians have argued that Artemisia portrays herself as an innocent heroine against the rumors which continued to circulate. Following this interpretation of the work, we might say that Artemisia refused to be disciplined by the blame-the-victim misogynist discourses of the early modern period, discourses which were reflected in contemporary depictions of Susanna and Lucretia and which arose during and following Artemisia’s own rape trial. Instead, drawing on her historical field and the canon of her culture, Artemisia tells her own version of events, and in her Judith re-presents herself not as another passive victim, as in the Lucretia and Susanna, but as an active heroine. She thus does not confi ne herself to what was, or to what her society said must have been, but to what she insisted could have been. Artemisia’s depiction of Judith’s maid, Abra, is noteworthy. While according to the biblical version of the Judith story, Abra remained outside the room while Judith killed Holofernes, it was standard in baroque compositions to depict Abra standing beside the bed. However Abra was conventionally represented as an old woman whose passivity contrasts with the activity of the younger woman. In Artemisia’s painting, in contrast, Abra is young and strong, vigorously collaborating with her mistress. Mary Garrard has suggested that Artemisia’s unusual depiction of the killing of Holofernes as an act of female solidarity is wistful: Artemisia was the only daughter in a motherless home, living with her father and four brothers. She did, however, have one close female friend, her neighbor Tuzia. So close were Tuzia and her daughter to the Gentileschi household, and to Artemisia in particular, that they moved together three times. Tuzia was, however, also close friends with Agostino Tassi, and during the trial Artemisia would accuse Tuzia of having acted as a procuress for Agostino, plotting with the latter and giving him access to Artemisia against her will. Tuzia, for her part, chose to

Alternatives to Confession 205 take Agostino’s side during the trial. Betrayed by her female companion and bereaved of her friendship, henceforth to live in the male-dominated world of professional painting, Garrard suggests that Artemisia fantasized a female solidarity in her art which she had not found in life. 35 Even more so than with depictions of Susanna and Lucretia, the story of Judith was a contentious one. The depiction of a woman outsmarting and killing a man, and this as a heroic rather than a shameful deed, caused considerable unease and difficulty in representation. Indicative of this discomfort with the theme, in renaissance Florence a sculpture of Judith with the Head of Holofernes was removed from the masculine sphere of the main piazza, to be replaced with a more agreeable sculpture of Perseus with the Head of Medusa. In other attempts to negotiate the representation of a man’s outwitting and decapitation by a woman, artists downplayed the violence and eroticized Judith, as in Caravaggio’s depiction of the scene from 1598, to which work Artemisia’s version is often compared. [figure 9] In Carravagio’s painting, a lovely, young, delicate, fashionably dressed, bejeweled and feminine Judith is shown drawing away from the decapitation of Holofernes as if in disgust, her brow furrowed and her lips pursed, while Abra is an elderly woman who seems disgusted by the beheading and has nothing to do with the scene she witnesses. A few clean and unconvincing spurts of blood flow from Holofernes’s neck in Caravaggio’s work, and Judith wields a slender blade, surely not sufficient for sawing through bone, while her slender arms do not seem to be engaged realistically in their task. In contrast, Artemisia’s self-portrait as Judith and her depiction of Abra show robust young women with strong arms. The women are respectively focused on employing a heavy blade and pinning a man forcefully to a bed. Most strikingly of all, the work is of an unprecedented gore, and the sheets are soaked with blood. Far from confession, this double portrait, perhaps referring to but reversing another scene of violence that took place in a bed, seems to function as a rewriting of events. Now, instead of two men raping a woman, two women are beheading a man. This time, as had not happened in her own life, the guilty male suffers and the virtuous woman triumphs with the help of her female friend, who does not betray her. Artemisia would paint the beheading of Holofernes several times, as well as other episodes from Judith’s life, consistently and publicly identifying with the biblical heroine through the uses of self-portraiture. In her later version of the decapitation of Holofernes, from 1620, which is even more gory (the blood spurts in the air), Artemisia has nevertheless taken a greater distance from the scene. There is more space around the three figures who are set further back in the picture plane. An analysis of Artemisia’s re-presentations of herself against the sensational and vicious discourses that surrounded her life, and the manners in which her works may have functioned as practices of self-fashioning against and despite the representations of others, could be elaborated further. Here, however, I will only briefly indicate the directions this might take. First, it is

206 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault interesting to note that Artemisia later ceased to identify herself with virtuous heroines in sexually violent scenarios and portrayed herself as an allegory of Painting instead, [Figure 10]. Artemisia also depicted herself as Melancholy, a passion which by the Baroque was associated with artistic creativity. This new identification with art-making itself, which seems far removed from the trauma of rape and the early paintings of sexual violence which have fascinated feminist art historians, seems to show that Artemisia “moved on” in her life, identifying more with her career and vocation than with the sexual trauma of her youth. Artemisia seems to have healed psychically at least to the extent that after a decade had gone by she no longer felt compelled to reiterate her versions of events, to proclaim her innocence or to avenge herself against Agostino Tassi through her art. At this time, Artemisia also began to paint the sorts of eroticized and idealized young female bodies which patrons desired, instead of the images of heavy, strong, but often awkward and unidealized women which had characterized her early work, and which have pleased feminist art historians for not catering to a male gaze. Artemisia also painted a later version of Susanna and the Elders in 1622, [Figure 11]. As the work exists, it is composed according to a more typically baroque iconography than the earlier work, depicting Susanna gazing seductively at her aggressors with doe-like, come-hither eyes. In this later work, the awkward gestures of the fi rst Susanna, and her compelling facial expression of anguish, are gone. Gone also, it seems, is the artist’s desire to invoke compassion for Susanna in her viewer. Instead, the heroine looks wistfully over her shoulder at the men, and her idealized body is soft and compliant. This sign of complicity on Artemisia’s own part in the sexist blaming of female victims has indicated for feminist art historians that this second Susanna could not have been painted by Artemisia, the artist whom they had claimed as a “feminist” “heroine.”36 Although signed and dated, the signature of this work was heatedly contested, and Mary Garrard argued at length that it could not belong to Artemisia’s oeuvre. 37 As it turns out, the work is indeed Artemisia’s, as even Garrard now acknowledges, but x-radiography has shown that it was partially repainted by another artist: the face as we now see it was a later addition, and while Artemisia—perhaps due to her unhappy encounter with her perspective teacher—never painted landscapes, the original architectural space of Susanna’s garden has been opened up on the left to display a perspectival view of trees. Artemisia was known in her own lifetime as she is today for her rape trial as much as if not more so than for her art, and her paintings which focused on violent sexual relations between men and women were interpreted as autobiographical statements even in her own day. As such, for Artemisia to paint a half-consenting Susanna would have been read by her contemporaries as a confession following repeated denials. We now know, however, that while Artemisia refused to confess to the accusations against her either under torture or in her art, it is a later artist who confessed for her, repainting her work and signing it with her name.

Alternatives to Confession 207 Other and very different repaintings of Artemisia’s Susanna—this time of the 1610 Susanna—have been carried out by the late twentieth-century art restorer and artist Kathleen Gilje. Gilje not only repainted, framed, and displayed an almost exact copy of Artemisia’s earlier Susanna, calling it Susanna and the Elders, Restored (1998), [Figure 12], appropriating it as her own work with only minor adjustments, but also painted a second version, Susanna and the Elders, Restored, X-ray (1998), [Figure 13]. In the second of these works, the elders are not only whispering but have grabbed Susanna by the hair, pulling her head back violently, and Susanna now flails and howls in fury and pain. She also grasps a knife. Gilje has upped the emotional intensity of Artemisia’s already highly dramatic depiction of the story, and in these cases, unlike in the baroque repainting, there is, of course, no pretense of passing the new works off as Artemisia’s own. Gilje’s work is meant to be a contemporary rather than a baroque reflection on sexual violence against women. Much as feminist art historians have read Artemisia’s Judith Beheading Holofernes as the artist’s fantasy of revenge, so Gilje also imagines a potentially bloody revenge against Susanna’s aggressors, and subverts the Susanna story to imagine what could have been. While the Susanna of the biblical story rejects the elders, she is nevertheless a passive victim: she refuses the advances of the elders out of submission to patriarchal expectations of feminine virtue, rather than killing the elders before they could slander or rape her. Gilje, however, imagines a more active heroine, one who loudly voices her fury and threatens the lives of the elders rather than allowing them to threaten hers. Despite the salvaging of a feminist interpretation of Artemisia’s later Susanna, and despite explicitly feminist adaptations of Artemisia’s earlier Susanna such as Gilje’s, Artemisia’s late works are nevertheless not as open to arguments of proto-feminist heroism as are the fi rst paintings produced in the decade following her rape. The self-portrait as Melancholy is, for instance, a melancholic Mary Magdalen. For feminist art historians such as Mary Garrard this is clearly a disappointment. One could nevertheless argue that the fact that the later Artemisia re-presented herself through identifications with her profession, portraying herself as Painting itself and as the melancholic passion which inspires art, while conforming to and successfully competing with the works of her male contemporaries, is not to be interpreted as a feminist failure but rather, once more, as an indication that Artemisia ceased to be haunted by the rape and the need to depict it. One might suggest, however tentatively, that non-confessional autobiographical painting “worked” for Artemisia as a care of herself, transforming her sufficiently so that she no longer identified primarily as a player in a sordid sexual tale, and could thus identify herself with her career rather than with her relations with men, which, for an early modern woman, is remarkably self-empowered. This would also mean that Artemisia no longer perceived herself in the manners in which her contemporaries continued to describe her. Through re-presentations of herself fi rst as an innocent

208 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault victim and later as a virtuous heroine, and later still as an embodiment of Painting itself, Artemisia resisted the misogynist discourses which surrounded her life, trial and artistic career. As shall be seen in the cases of Rivière and Barbin below, Artemisia did so by drawing on resources from her cultural field. For Artemisia, these were biblical stories, Roman history, and the canon of early modern art. Like Rivière and Barbin, Artemisia did not simply adopt the resources she found in her culture, but subverted them selectively against their dominant interpretations in order to make them suit her purposes in the reconstruction of her life.

FEMINIST DESIRE AND THE CONTEMPORARY USES OF ARTEMISIA The autobiographical investment of feminist art historians in Artemisia, or what Griselda Pollock has called “feminist desire,” is evident in their writings on this artist, and these writings can be considered as yet other selfwritings. The most obvious example of this autobiographical investment in Artemisia is to be found in the biographical and autobiographical novel, Artemisia, written by the art historian Anna Banti, although another female art historian, Alexandra Lapierre, has also resorted to a fictional telling of Artemisia’s story. 38 In both cases, women writers turned to fiction because they wished to explore the Artemisia whom they knew from the paintings and the archives—including the trial records—in a genre which allowed for greater fantasy and imagination than the academic writing in which they had been trained. Banti had almost completed a draft of her book in 1944 when it was destroyed in the Nazi bombings of Florence. Banti begins her second version of the book, Artemisia, with a description of herself weeping in the Boboli gardens over her lost manuscript and lost home. In the opening words of the novel, a voice says “Don’t cry,” which most interpreters have taken to be Banti’s character Artemisia soothing the author over her losses, but which Pollock assumes to be Banti’s own voice comforting Artemisia, since Artemisia is also distressed by the destruction of the book which would fi nally have told her tale. In either case, the two women, Banti and Artemisia, are characters who interact in the novel in complicated and even antagonistic ways. Banti is not sure that she will rewrite the story of Artemisia’s life after her first manuscript is destroyed, since the loss of Artemisia seems trivial among the proliferation of deaths in those days. Yet the character Artemisia wants her story told, and wants it to be told her way, even dictating parts of the lost manuscript to Banti for the other woman to rewrite. Banti, however, does not submit to Artemisia’s dictations, but “teases” Artemisia, doing what she wants with Artemisia’s story and changing it according to her own desires. This eventually results in Artemisia’s departure. Artemisia ceases to speak to Banti in the second half of the novel. For a time, Banti says, she took this silence to be consent from the other

Alternatives to Confession 209 woman, but finally she realizes that Artemisia is gone, has disappeared into history and will no longer speak her thoughts or tell her own story, and thus Banti must invent the story for herself. The manners in which Banti does so are forthright in their mingling of biography with autobiography, and although we might not like what this does to our “feminist Artemisia,”39 at least Banti does not claim that her Artemisia is the historic one. Other women art historians writing on Artemisia are also personally invested in the seventeenth-century artist, even though they do not resort to Banti’s fictional and autobiographical mode of writing. That some feminist art historians would not acknowledge the authenticity of Artemisia’s works if they were not adequately feminist suggests that they have a preconceived notion of what they want Artemisia to be, and that she should be (like them) feminist, to the extent that this has become a criterion by which to determine which works are Artemisia’s. The feminist readings of Artemisia rehearsed above have, however, been challenged in at least two ways, both of which highlight the manners in which feminist art historians read Artemisia’s work through the lens of their own lives and desires. First, new historicists such as Elizabeth S. Cohen have argued that the concept of rape as a traumatic psychological event is particularly modern, and that it is anachronistic to read Artemisia’s paintings as expressing her response to the trauma of rape (a shattering of her personal integrity) since she would not have experienced it as such.40 Contemporary art historians, according to this argument, are projecting their own feelings about rape onto Artemisia’s paintings.41 Second, Griselda Pollock compellingly shows that other interpretations can be developed which challenge the feminist reading of Artemisia’s works such as the one I have provided. Discussing Artemisia’s earlier Susanna, for instance, Pollock asks why, if Artemisia’s version was as “deviant” as feminist art historians have supposed, “would it have been painted, bought and hung?”42 Artemisia’s painting is conventional for the period in that it foregrounds an idealized female nude. The fact that this nude is particularly vulnerable and anguished in Artemisia’s version might, Pollock argues, merely “heighten the sadistic pleasure offered by the painting,” thereby increasing the “titillation for a male viewer.”43 Those manners in which Artemisia’s version of Susanna differs from those of her male contemporaries are interpreted by Pollock as resulting from a “lack of initiation” on the part of the young artist, rather than from any self-consciousness challenge to patriarchy. The claustrophobic lack of space in the painting, for instance, the situating of the viewer too close to Susanna, which partially explains the dramatic intensity of the work, may simply have resulted from the fact that Artemisia had not yet learned perspective. The fact that Susanna’s face expresses such intense anguish is also read by Pollock as a mark of artistic inexperience rather than a reflection of personal experience or a desire to challenge patriarchy, and this depiction of female anguish, again,

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might only heighten a certain masculine scopic pleasure. “Why,” Pollock asks, “is Susanna so distressed given the stage of the story represented? [ . . . ] The face of Susanna is also disturbing. Its expressive tenor is pitched almost too high [ . . . ].”44 In a later article, Pollock will also challenge the feminist interpretation of Artemisia’s Judith, writing: “For my money Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting of Judith Beheading Holofernes has nothing whatsoever to do with rape or her life experience.”45 Pollock seems to present these alternative readings of Artemisia’s works, and of the Susanna in particular, in the spirit of a devil’s advocate. She is not heart-set on her interpretation, as is Mary Garrard, but writes: “Mine is only a tentative counter-hypothesis, one semiotic reading of the painting that seeks to trace the level at which I might look for the inscription of difference.”46 While Pollock herself wants to look for the difference a woman artist might make in art history, she also wants to draw attention to what, “as feminists, we desire to see,”47 and to show that the feminist readings of Artemisia’s paintings may have as much to do with the lives and desires of the art historians writing these texts as with the real Artemisia and her works. The interpretations which she provides function just as well as Garrard’s as possible explanations of the particular features of Artemisia’s paintings. Our decision to believe that the unusual aspects of Artemisia’s work result from her biographical experiences rather than from her artistic inexperience has to do with desire, for each interpretation is equally grounded in the visual aspects of the painting and in the archive. The desire on the part of feminist art historians for a strong and feminist Artemisia, for an Artemisia who triumphs through her work over the violence of her rapist and the sexism of her society, is revealed in the outrage expressed by feminist art historians following the release of the fi lm by Agnès Merlet, Artemisia. 48 At the U.S. premiere of the fi lm in 1998, Gloria Steinem circulated a fact sheet written by Mary Garrard and herself entitled “Now You’ve Seen the Film, Meet the Real Artemisia Gentileschi,” and encouraged readers to picket the screenings of the fi lm across the country. This led Miramax to withdraw the claim that the film represented a “true story,”49 although the fi lm is still presented as biographical rather than fictional. What exactly enraged feminists about this fi lm? First, it is that the fi lm focuses almost exclusively on Artemisia’s relationship with Agostino Tassi, beginning shortly before they meet in Rome, and ending with the close of the trial and Artemisia’s departure for Florence, before her career had even begun. Artemisia’s decades as a successful artist working in Florence, Naples and the court of England are not represented in the film. Even more disturbingly, however, Artemisia and her relationship with Agostino are portrayed in the fi lm in a manner which confl icts with the court records and Artemisia’s testimony in particular, despite the fact that the fi lm is presented as historical and biographical. Artemisia is portrayed as a sexually-obsessed adolescent, stealing candles to look at her

Alternatives to Confession 211 naked body in a mirror, spying on various people having sex and then imitating their amorous poses while alone, curious and impatient for sexual initiation, fighting with her father for the right to draw male nudes, bribing a fisherman with sexual favors to pose nude for her, and eventually asking Agostino Tassi to pose for her naked, thus seducing him to have sex with her in a scene which, in Pollock’s words, is “an understandably distressing but desired defloration within the context of a powerful sexual and intellectual attraction between the young woman and the older man.”50 Although, like all other early modern women artists, the historic Artemisia never depicted nude male bodies in any of her paintings—her Holofernes, for instance, is covered by blankets—the fi lmic Artemisia’s insistence on drawing naked men is a central aspect of Merlet’s plot. Artemisia’s drawings of the bribed fisherman are close studies of the male torso and genitals, and these drawings are used in court to prove that Artemisia is a dishonorable woman (and thus could not have been raped), and are also what she presents to Agostino Tassi to convince him to become her teacher. Agostino takes these drawings of male genitals as a “confession” that Artemisia is not a virgin. She says nothing to enlighten him, insinuating that she is sexually experienced. Indeed, in the fi lm, it is only because Artemisia misleads Agostino to believe that she has already had a lover that he has sex with her. Taking the fi lmic Artemisia’s obsession with the male nude further, Merlet has Artemisia request that Agostino pose for her, and he poses for her Judith and Holofernes in particular, although this work was not painted until after the trial. It is Artemisia’s provocative request that Agostino pose for her which leads the couple to have sex for the fi rst time. Later, posing as Judith in order to imagine the painting, the fi lmic Artemisia leans over Agostino/Holofernes on a bed, positioning his body and leading to further sexual encounters. Merlet imagines Artemisia’s Judith and Holofernes—and the later Uffi zi version of 1620 at that—as instigating consensual love-making rather than as a fantasy of revenge following a rape. In further aberrations, Merlet’s Agostino would never have had intercourse with his friend’s daughter had he known she was a virgin, and, in the defloration scene, he immediately stops having sex with her and apologizes in horror when he realizes what has happened. When Artemisia’s father tells her that Agostino has raped her, Merlet has Artemisia cry: “No, he gave me pleasure!” Artemisia continues to sleep with Agostino in Merlet’s fi lm out of desire and love rather than in an attempt to salvage her honor. Merlet’s Agostino loves Artemisia and would have married her if he had not been tied down by another wife. In fact, the historic Agostino’s wife was dead, and Agostino was suspected of her murder, and so nothing was preventing him from marrying Artemisia had he wished to do so. Agostino is falsely accused in the film of having raped Artemisia, but nevertheless confesses to the rape in order to stop the torture of Artemisia’s hands, and is thus sentenced to two years of prison in an act of tragic self-sacrifice,

212 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault when in fact Agostino sat silently through Artemisia’s torture, refusing to confess, and the case was consequently dismissed. Moreover, the Agostino of Merlet’s fi lm says he will say nothing against Artemisia, whom he wishes to protect, whereas the real Agostino slandered Artemisia’s name. Merlet presents the Agostino-Artemisia relationship as a love affair which is spoiled by the unfortunate intervention of Artemisia’s misguided and jealous father, and Miramax marketed the fi lm as “Erotic!” and as the story of a “Forbidden Passion [that] Changed The Face of History.” The claim that Artemisia’s passion (for art? for sex? for Agostino?) changed the face of history is unclear, but probably relates to the text which appears at the end of the fi lm and which claims that Artemisia was art history’s fi rst woman artist to receive commissions. This claim is untrue, as are many aspects of this film. Among feminist art historians, only Griselda Pollock has tried to explore an at least tentatively favorable reading of Merlet’s fi lm, although she ultimately condemns it for its “nontrivial inaccuracies.”51 She does, however, suggest that in her distortions of the archive Merlet tries to “acknowledge female sexuality and desire,” and that the film addresses “the scandal of a woman’s desire, starting from the alleged evidence of seventeenth-century paintings saturated with an intense corporeality and sense of the ambiguities of sexuality, desire, and violence.”52 Much as Gilje takes Artemisia’s depiction of a passively victimized Susanna and imaginatively transforms her into an active heroine who fights back against her aggressors with a knife, so Merlet takes a passively victimized Artemisia and imagines her actively desiring and instigating a sexual relationship which her patriarchal society would have forbidden. Merlet’s Artemisia is a sexually-liberated rebel, and Merlet’s point is arguably that female sexuality and agency have been violently suppressed by patriarchy in ways which have harmed both women and men: Agostino, Orazio, and Artemisia all lose as result of Orazio’s interference in his daughter’s love affair, and yet, as the end of the fi lm suggests, Artemisia nevertheless manages to triumph, becoming the most famous artist of them all. Merlet’s fi lm, however fictitious, is thus another feminist reading of Artemisia’s life. It reads against the painful archival records of a passively victimized Artemisia in order to fi nd a woman who is an agent pursuing her sexual desires. The problems with the film, however, as Pollock points out, are that it presents this reading as the historical truth even while blatantly disregarding the archives. While Garrard and other feminist art historians may read the archives through the lens of their desires, they do nevertheless remain faithful to the historical documents which we have. If we want to change Artemisia’s story according to our feminist desires, Pollock suggests that we should do so ethically, which means that we must acknowledge what we are doing rather than trying to pass it off as historical truth. Pollock takes Anna Banti’s novel, Artemisia, as an example of a fictional but ethical appropriation of Artemisia’s life, which she contrasts

Alternatives to Confession 213 with Merlet’s reading. We could also return to Kathleen Gilje’s painting as another example of an ethical reading of Artemisia: Gilje repaints Artemisia’s work to make a contemporary feminist point, much as Merlet rewrites Artemisia’s life in order to express her own feminist desires, and yet Gilje signs the painting with her own name, and recognizes that this is her own depiction of events, not Artemisia’s. In contrast, Merlet pretends that the story she tells is that of the historic Artemisia, even while disregarding the testimony which the artist maintained under torture. In each of these cases, including that of Merlet’s fi lm, the autobiographical investment on the part of readers of Artemisia’s life and work is interesting because it shows the manners in which interpreters are inscribing their selves in the readings they write. This is of course true of all historians, and of male art historians as much as of feminist art historians; male historians considering Artemisia’s work have to this day manifested their political and personal stakes in patriarchy, continually attributing Artemisia’s work to her father, on the basis of their high quality alone, which they take to be self-evident proof that the works were painted by a man. 53 Investments in gender are clearly at stake for both male and female viewers of Artemisia’s work, to the extent that skills in connoisseurship may be over-ridden by political and personal desires. This in turn indicates the manner in which art historians are engaged in technologies of the self. Art historians have told Artemisia’s story as a mixture of historical fact and autobiography with varying degrees of self-consciousness, and feminist art historians in particular have chosen to speak of Artemisia’s life and work because they identify with them. In so doing, they project their own feminism onto the woman painter whom they admire. Just as Artemisia drew on but re-wrote and subverted resources which she found in her own cultural canon, so feminist art historians as well as fiction-writers and artists draw on the works of Artemisia as part of their own cultural field, even while doing so challenges and subverts the canon in which Artemisia, as a woman, has long been marginalized. In rewriting the canon of Western art and in reinterpreting the works of Artemisia Gentileschi, feminists are engaged in the rewriting of themselves.

THE MEMOIR OF PIERRE RIVIÈRE Foucault would edit and publish two nineteenth-century autobiographical texts which he discovered in archives while preparing to write Discipline and Punish and the fi rst volume of The History of Sexuality. What the two nineteenth-century texts have in common is that both memoirs, in their different ways, evade and refuse the disciplinary discourses which surrounded them, much as Artemisia refused the misogynistically gendered discourses of her own day through her art. Foucault publishes the memoirs alongside the legal, medical, and judicial documents which archived the

214 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault lives, acts, and bodies of the two authors to make precisely this point, a much as Mary Garrard reproduces Artemisia’s art alongside the records of her rape trial. The memoirs also describe the manners in which Barbin and Rivière managed to reject these same disciplinary constraints in their lives, even, when no other means remained, through suicide. In the next two sections I will consider these memoirs and the manners in which they suggest to Foucault that textual strategies exist, and may be invented, which maintain ambivalence of identity and which function as acts rather than subjections to discipline. In his introduction to “I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister and my brother . . . ,” Foucault considers the documents surrounding a young French peasant who killed half of his family in the expectation of execution, and would eventually hang himself in prison under a life sentence, having been refused the execution he desired. Capital punishment was denied Rivière because he was deemed mad, despite the fact that he had produced a surprisingly articulate and lengthy document describing the lives of his mother and father as context for his triple murder, as well as an account of his own deeds and objectives, precisely in order to demonstrate the premeditated authorship of his crimes, that he was sane and could thus be killed. Despite the ultimate judicial decision, Rivière’s contemporaries were amazed by the intellectual capacities which the text demonstrated in a youth who had long been considered the “village idiot” and “madman,” and Foucault is equally “astonished,” seduced by what he repeatedly calls the text’s “beauty,” describing himself as under Rivière’s “spell.”54 In his Preface to “I, Pierre Rivière . . . ,” Foucault says he has decided not to analyze Rivière’s memoir because to interpret it “should have brought it within the power relation whose reductive effect we wished to show, and we ourselves should have fallen into the trap it set.”55 At fi rst glance, the implication seems to be that the only way to avoid the “trap” of “power relations” is to remain silent. However, that power is seen here as necessarily “reductive” or negative, and as avoidable through the simple stance of silence, is at odds with Foucault’s more in-depth accounts of disciplinary power in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction and Discipline and Punish. Here, power is seen as always reciprocal and productive, and moreover as pervasive. Although, like speech, silence can oppose power, the idea that silence can in itself set one outside of networks of power therefore seems too simple, as does the suggestion that the answer to the role of discipline in confession would necessarily be silence, rather than the discovery of new and subversive forms of discourse. Arguably Foucault tries to fi nd such alternative discourses, and sees Rivière’s own memoir as such a text which negotiates and confounds disciplinary power. In his description of the case, Foucault agrees with Rivière’s self-designation as “author” of both his act and his text, rather than seeing the text as authored by disciplinary discourse and in turn authoring him, as we might have expected of Foucault. Rivière is shown to have rejected the

Alternatives to Confession 215 disciplinary discourses which medical, legal and penal authorities urged him to accept, declining psychological and psychiatric accounts of his crime. He very quickly abandons his strategy of pretending to be insane, of claiming to have followed the orders of God, and instead provides a rationalized explanation for his behavior both under interrogation and in his memoir. Nevertheless denied a death sentence on the grounds of madness, Rivière took his own life, insisting on deciding his fate rather than living in the hands of disciplinary authorities. Though Foucault says little, and precisely because he considers his own taciturnity a mark of respect towards the work, he certainly admires it, and does not view it as a mere concession to disciplinary power. In “Tales of Murder” Foucault goes on to say something about Rivière’s memoir after all, arguing that it is “neither confession nor defense, but rather a factor in the crime,” refusing any separation of text and act, the two continually switching orders. 56 The text and crime continually switch orders because Rivière had initially intended to write his explanation of the crime before committing the murders and killing himself. Rivière was, however, continually interrupted in his task of writing his memoir before the deed, whether by family members whom he feared would read the text, or by his own fatigue. In the end, therefore, Rivière decided to commit the murders fi rst and to write the memoir later, thus postponing his suicide. Finally, a month after the crime, Rivière was given the opportunity to write his memoir in prison, but, as he insists, his words were prepared in advance and he writes from memory. This explains why, he tells the reader, he is able to describe the dead in the unforgiving manner which he does, because his words were decided upon while they were still irritatingly alive. In the trial, which focused not on Rivière’s acts and rationalized motives, as he would have liked, but on the question of whether or not he was sane, Rivière’s text and acts were of equal importance and not kept distinct. Foucault claims that Rivière’s text is not a confession, although Rivière at no time denies committing his crime, and at a few points, under duress, expresses contrition. 57 However he never excuses himself or engages in what Derrida has called the apologetic-confessional mode. Moreover, despite the text’s function as premeditated acknowledgement of the triple murder, Rivière’s is not a confession in Foucault’s sense of attempting to explain his deed by revealing his inner self. For Foucault, a confession admits to a form of being rather than to specific deeds, or admits to deeds as indicative of a certain nature, which nature, for Derrida, would simultaneously function as an excuse. In both his memoir and in the police transcripts from his interrogation, however, Rivière not only never resorts to such self-exploration, but he resists authoritative attempts to guide his discourse in this direction. Under questioning, Rivière refuses to explain the deed in terms of his character or of a pattern of behavior dating to childhood. For instance, when the police interrogator says to Rivière: “confess [ . . . ] that, being unluckily born with a ferocious character, you wished to steep yourself in the blood

216 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault of your mother whom you had long abominated [ . . . ],” Rivière replies: “I repeat: God ordered me to do what I did,”58 thus attributing an external cause to his actions, rather than assenting to the police officer’s explanation of a self instinctively prone to violence. Only moments later Rivière changes his story: I wish no longer to maintain the system of defense and the part which I have been acting. I shall tell the truth, I did it to help my father out of his difficulties. I wished to deliver him from an evil woman who had plagued him continually ever since she became his wife, who was ruining him, who was driving him to such despair that he was sometimes tempted to commit suicide. I killed my sister Victoire because she took my mother’s part. I killed my brother by reason of his love for my mother and my sister. 59 Rivière thus returns to his original plan of claiming full and sane authorship of his deeds, but again, the explanation of his deed derives from external motivations and not from an inner compulsion. In his memoir, written in prison over the period of two weeks, Rivière gives a more detailed account of all of the manners in which his mother had caused his father to suffer from the beginning of their marriage until the time of her death, and the manners in which his sister had taken his mother’s part. Rivière thus continues to give external justifications for his actions, rather than explaining them as consequences of his character or his feelings. Never does Rivière say that he murdered half of his family for the internal suffering that they had caused him; rather, he claims to have killed them to save his father from further “tribulations.” As such, Rivière sacrificed himself to end a suffering which he had witnessed, not one which had marked his own soul. Despite Rivière’s own version of events, the police interrogators persisted in suggesting to Rivière that he was innately cruel, as in the second interrogation when he was told: “The investigation has proved against you certain acts which would denote an instinct of ferocity in your character.”60 The police officer, rejecting external explanations for Rivière’s crime, tries to establish the murder as part of a history of violence on Rivière’s part, revelatory of his inner self, telling Rivière: “You are accused of having in your childhood committed various acts of cold-blooded and deliberate cruelty, of having, for instance, crushed young birds between two stones and pursued your young playmates threatening to put them to death with instruments you carried?” Rivière, however, denies such an explanation. He replies: “I do not remember doing that, I only happened sometimes to kill birds by throwing stones at them, as schoolboys do to kill cocks.”61 He thus once more refuses to confess to an intrinsically violent character or to a history of violence which can be traced back to his childhood, and instead claims to have been no different from other schoolboys. As Foucault’s students Jean-Pierre Peter and Jeanne Favret note, Rivière’s parish

Alternatives to Confession 217 priest also declines to consider Rivière’s childhood behaviors as indicative of a murderer’s soul when he says, “Certainly no one would have thought anything more of it had it not been for the murders he has committed.”62 For everyone else, however, all of Rivière’s previous acts were now recast as foreshadowing his eventual murders: as Peter and Favret write, “once Rivière killed, all his games became signs of madness.”63 Since Rivière refused to affi rm theories of an inherent murderer’s self, affi rmation for such an explanation was sought from witnesses to Rivière’s life, to which the dossier which Foucault publishes with Rivière’s memoir attests. In the “Report of the District Prosecutor Royal at Vire,” the story to which Rivière himself refused to assent is given, or we might say that once more an individual who refuses to confess is spoken for: From his childhood Pierre Rivière was an affl iction to his family, he was obstinate and taciturn; even being with his parents was a burden to him. Never did he show a son’s affection for his father and mother. His mother especially was odious to him. At times he felt a wave of something like repulsion and frenzy when she approached him. Pierre Rivière displayed a harshness of character in all his habits which much distressed his family. He is remembered to have been seen in his childhood taking pleasure in crushing young birds between two stones and pursuing children of his age with instruments with which he threatened to kill them [ . . . ]64 Similarly, in the “Statements by Witnesses,” Rivière’s sadistic character and madness are attested to as having been evident since early childhood. In the “Application to Pre-Trial Court for Committal,” Rivière is described as having had “the cruelest propensities” since “his earliest youth,” of having “evil propensities” and an “evil character.”65 In the “Bill of Indictment,” Rivière is said to have displayed a “savage character” since childhood and to have manifested a “predisposition to cruelty.”66 In the “Medical Opinion By Dr. Vastel,” and in several of the other medical examinations Rivière underwent, Rivière’s physical appearance are taken as indicative of an unstable mind and a bestial nature.67 Dr. Vastel refers to Rivière as “Born as he is with this unfortunate predisposition, it was not long before he confi rmed what could be predicted of him,”68 claiming that from the age of four it was clear that Rivière would grow up to commit crimes such as he had done, and speaks of Rivière’s madness as “hereditary.”69 As with sexual “perverts” in the nineteenth century, it was assumed that criminals would have clues to their behaviors written on their bodies and faces, or that they would be visibly and physiologically predisposed to whatever activities it was now known that they had committed. In the case of Rivière, his bestial character could be seen because, “He is short, his forehead is narrow and low, his eyebrows arch and meet, he constantly keeps his head down, and his furtive glances seem to shun

218 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault meeting the gaze of others [ . . . ] his gait is jerky and he moves in bounds, he leaps rather than walks.”70 Based on evaluations such as these, Rivière’s capital sentence was transformed into a sentence of life imprisonment. Although Rivière had written his memoir under the title, “Particulars and explanation of the occurrence on June 3 at la Fauctèrie by Pierre Rivière, author of this deed,” medical authorities argued that it was not Rivière but his madness which had authored his actions and his text, thus de-authorizing Rivière of both his memoir and his crime. Rivière’s innate predisposition was deemed the actor of the mad deeds and mad memoir, or, as one newspaper wrote up the story, Pierre Rivière had been “impelled by a hellish spirit.”71 Rivière was not at fault because he was mad, but he had to be imprisoned for life because he was a danger. As Peter and Favret write, “By having him reprieved [the psychiatrists] were refusing to hear him, they were declaring that, all things considered, the native’s speech had no weight, was not even an effect of monstrosity; such criminals were only disturbed children who played with corpses as they played with words.”72 For Peter and Favret, Rivière’s subsequent suicide “was the death of which a clumsy psychiatry had tried to cheat him” and “came precisely to frustrate these paternalistic reasons.”73 In suicide, Rivière once more claimed authorship of his life and death. As with Jouy, the mentally simple peasant who paid a little girl for sexual favors and ended up spending the rest of his life in the hospital of Maréville, Rivière was asked to speak about his feelings, his thoughts, and his childhood, and was examined repeatedly by no fewer than eight doctors and psychiatrists who testified in court. Unlike Jouy, however, Rivière refused to confi rm the essentializing stories proposed to him, confessing to his crime but not to his soul, telling his own version of his story instead, and refused to spend the remainder of his life confi ned to an institution, thus confounding discipline in both discourse and deed. Foucault makes clear that Rivière, like Artemisia, did not refuse disciplinary discourses in order to produce an entirely free and novel discourse of his own. Instead, Rivière refused only certain forms of discourse—disciplinary, authoritative discourses coming from the police, doctors, and psychiatrists—and adopted other discourses which were also available to him in his historical field as a peasant in rural Normandy. That is, as Foucault points out, in writing his memoir and in his responses to his interrogators, Rivière drew on and subverted the biblical history which he had learned in school and a form of sensational murder rapportage common to fly sheets and broadsides of his age. Similarly, Artemisia re-presented and healed herself not by removing herself from her misogynist cultural field, which for Foucault would be impossible, but by working within that field, subverting the manners in which she represented stories that were made available to her within her culture, and biblical stories in particular. We see Rivière’s similarly subversive use of biblical stories in his memoir and

Alternatives to Confession 219 in his responses to the police. For instance, when the police told Rivière: “you knew full well that God never orders a crime,” he astounded them by promptly replying: “God ordered Moses to slay the adorers of the golden calf, sparing neither friends nor father nor son.”74 Or again, when he was asked, “How did you come to believe later that there existed quite contrary commandments [to the Ten Commandments]?,” Rivière responded: “Because I was specially inspired by God as the Levites were, although those same commandments existed.”75 Rivière was thus capable of drawing on biblical stories to defend his crimes, in a manner which was deemed remarkable in a peasant farmer, and despite the fact that at this point he was only feigning to be a religious fanatic. Later, when Rivière returns to his original intention of claiming his actions as the deeds of a sane mind, and thus embracing execution as a parricide, he writes his memoir in a manner which, as Foucault points out, is not dissimilar to the broadsheet narratives of crime which were popular at the time. As Foucault writes, these sheets were moralizing, emphasizing the criminal’s heinous crime and deserved punishment, but they also presented the protagonists as heroes. The “universal success” of these sheets, according to Foucault, “shows the desire to know and narrate how men have been able to rise against power, traverse the law, and expose themselves to death through death.”76 In these fictionalized narrations, murderers described their crimes and the gruesome punishments which they had willfully called down upon themselves. In one, a female parricide declares: “You shudder, I see, feeling hearts,/And the sight of me inspires terror./ Yes, my felonies, my crimes are horrible/ And I have deserved the rigor of heaven/ Take heart, my torment is ready.”77 In these fictional pre-execution laments, the criminal admits her crime. In Foucault’s words: he not only does not excuse it, but proclaims it; he calls down upon himself his condign punishment; he assumes for himself a law whose consequences he accepts. (“They condemn me to suffer death/ My hand struck off and my severed head/ Will deter all the great villains.”) Secondly, the criminal confesses openly, clothed with a horror that inspires horror in himself, but a horror which he claims for himself unshared; he makes no concessions to his own monstrosity. (“Let us recognize this execrable girl/ Yes, it is I, it is Magdeleine Albert/ This monster, frightful, cruel, abominable.”) Thirdly, the criminal is depicted as speaking up when the punishment is imminent; in the very moment before death, at the very instant of departure for the hulks, he raises his voice to summon the justice which is about to engulf him; the song is placed between two deaths—murder and execution [ . . . ]78 As in this genre of murder rapportage, Rivière proudly proclaims his crime. As with the “Yes, it is I, it is Magdeleine Albert/ This monster . . . ,” Rivière begins his text with the declaration: “I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered

220

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

my mother, my sister, and my brother . . .” Much as the fictionalized Albert acknowledges that she deserves her punishment, and that she is fully aware of what that punishment will entail, so Rivière concludes his memoir with the words: “now that I have made known my monstrosity, and that all the explanations of my crime are done, I await the fate which is destined for me, I know the article of the penal code concerning parricide, I accept it in expiation of my faults [ . . . ] I therefore await the penalty I deserve [ . . . ].”79 If this is a rare moment in which Rivière sounds contrite, he also describes setting off to Vire immediately after the murder because he “wished to have the glory of being the fi rst to announce this news,”80 and compares his slaughter to those of Napoleon and Charlotte Corday, to great historical events, as well as to the killings of biblical heroes. As he left the scene of the murder, and still carrying his bloody weapon, Rivière said to passersby, “go and make sure that my grandmother does not do herself any harm, she can be happy now, I die to restore her peace and quiet,” and, “I die to restore them [my grandmother and father] peace and quiet,” thus proclaiming and ennobling his willingness to die as a martyr immediately after performing the murders, modeling himself on Corday. Rivière, like the criminals in contemporary narratives, simultaneously accepts the punishments of the law and unapologetically recounts the manner in which he flouted the law, relishing the description of his heroic refusal to have complied to norms by which he nevertheless accepts to die. As in the fly sheets, Rivière situates his narrative between two deaths, those of the murders and that of his anticipated execution. What this shows for Foucault is that Rivière for the most part successfully refused the disciplinary psychiatric discourses of his time and surrounding his case, opting instead to mobilize for his own purposes other discourses which were available to him in his historical field and which provided more space for claiming agency over his actions and his text. In the case of both the biblical stories and the newspaper narratives which he drew on, it is significant that Rivière not only used but subverted existing discourses: the fly sheet murder narratives were meant to be moralizing, not to encourage murderers to further crimes, while Rivière’s religious education had hardly been intended to provide him with the tools with which to premeditate and justify his crime. As such, the agency or authorship which Foucault admires in Rivière’s text is not a pre-discursive one, but the limited autonomy of choosing among available discourses, refusing the more constraining ones and selecting those which can be adopted and subverted to cultivate agency and refuse the workings of discipline.

THE MEMOIR OF HERCULINE BARBIN According to Foucault’s introduction to the other nineteenth-century memoir he published, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered

Alternatives to Confession 221 Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, the author of which, like Rivière, ended her life in suicide, what Foucault deems admirable and worthy of publication (with, once more, little commentary) is the author’s refusal to “fi x” her subjectivity, to claim a “truth” of her identity, or to say who she “really” is. Herculine Barbin—later named Abel Barbin as a man—was assumed to be a girl at birth, and grew up in a convent as a girl. S/he eventually became a schoolmistress, teaching young girls and sharing a room with another schoolmistress, thus consistently working and living intimately with unmarried girls and women as only another female in the nineteenth century could. Barbin was nevertheless aware that her/his body was different from those of other girls, that s/he should keep her/his body hidden, and also that s/he experienced desires and pleasures in the company of her/his female companions. As a schoolmistress, s/he fell in love with one of the other schoolmistress with whom s/he shared a room, and later a bed, the two becoming lovers. Barbin describes constantly and openly expressing her/his love and desire for her/his female companions, whether the nuns in the convent, her/his classmates, or her/his lover, through kisses and embraces and words which were accepted as merely extravagant indications of platonic female friendship. Barbin nonetheless recognized that with her/his masculine appearance, and with the very intensity of her/his kisses, s/he was sometimes suspected and surveilled. For instance, of her/his relationship with her/his lover s/he writes: “An active though dissembled watch was kept over every step we took.”81 Unlike Rivière, Barbin frequently confesses. S/he describes fi rst confessing to an abbé that her/his sex is uncertain and that s/he is the lover of a girl. The abbé responds with “wrath” and struggles with his inability to denounce Barbin, given the sacred vow of secrecy imposed on him by the confessional. This abbé nevertheless manages to exploit the power given to him by the confessional, questioning Barbin’s pupils about her/his behavior when they come to him to confess. Despite this experience, Barbin confesses to another priest, who urges her/his to become a nun. Refusing this advice, Barbin confesses a third time, now to a beloved Monseigneur, friend of her/his mother, telling her/his mother of her/his uncertain sex at the same time. This leads to a medical examination during which the doctor tells Barbin that s/he should consider him her/his “confessor.”82 The result of this examination is the decision that Herculine’s designation as a female had been an “error” and that her/his “true sex” was male. This medical “error” was legally “corrected” by a change in Barbin’s civil status. Barbin was thus obliged to officially become a man. As Foucault notes, while for a long time it was accepted that hermaphrodites simply had two sexes, or were neither entirely one sex nor the other but had characteristics of both, and that they could choose which sex to live as, in the nineteenth century everyone had to have a “true sex,” it had to be either male or female, and doctors rather than the intersexed individuals themselves determined which sex this was. Hermaphrodites were examined

222 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault to know whether they were “truly” male or female, and the characteristics of the other sex which they displayed were considered secondary or unessential. When Barbin voluntarily gives her/his three confessions to priests, and undergoes three medical examinations, s/he is almost as convinced as the doctors and the priests and the law that it is her/his “duty” to tell the truth of her/his sex, and to have the matter settled once and for all. Barbin has faith in confession as an unburdening of her/his soul,83 and also has faith in medical practitioners that they can determine whether s/he is male or female. Like them, at this point Barbin assumes that s/he must “truly” be one sex or the other, and that she must admit to it and live accordingly. Later, however, in the aftermath of her/his change in civil status, Barbin regrets her/his confession and her/his former faith in religious, medical, and legal authorities. S/he laments having blindly gone along with what s/he considered to be her/his “duty.” As s/he writes, “Later I was to repent bitterly what I then regarded as an imperative duty. Society was soon to teach me that I had shown stupid weakness, and was to punish me cruelly for it.”84 At this point, Barbin comes to see sex as social, recognizing that the ways in which we conform to gender are more or less arbitrary, a matter of putting on gendered clothes. S/he realizes that by coming to live as a man, s/he has not finally come to act publicly as what s/he had been all along, or that her/ his “true” self had not been revealed. S/he simply dresses differently and is treated differently as the result of some paperwork and new attire: “According to my civil status,” s/he writes, “I was henceforth to belong to that half of the human race which is called the stronger sex.”85 It is not that s/he really is that sex, Barbin seems to say, but that according to her/his “civil status” s/he was to be owned by it. Simply because s/he now wears men’s clothes, the Monseigneur to whom s/he had given her/his third confession was able to “show me more freely all the affectionate benevolence that he had for me. His Excellency clasped my hand warmly, calling me his friend!”86 Even after her/his confession and medical examination, the Monseigneur could not have clasped Barbin’s hand or call her/him his friend as he would another man, but he could do so once Barbin had donned men’s garments. Likewise, because s/he now wore these clothes, although weak, s/he was of the “stronger sex” and could apply for a man’s employment. Initially, having been given the civil status of a man seemed to offer a certain freedom and promise to Barbin, and s/he left for Paris in the hopes of joining a railway company. Quickly, however, because her/his body was still weak despite its official “belonging” to the “stronger sex,” Barbin found her/ himself unemployed and poor in the big city, miserable and “forgotten” by her/his former lover. At this point, Barbin fully regrets her/his confessions, her/his decisions to put her/himself in the hands of the disciplinary authorities which demand them, and her/his trust that they knew best. Throughout her/his text Barbin has shifted between masculine and feminine pronouns, refusing to settle on either one to designate her/himself, thus insisting on her/his gendered ambiguity through syntax, even while apparently

Alternatives to Confession 223 believing the authorities that s/he has one “true sex.” In the fi nal pages of her/his memoir, however, starving and desperate in a garret in Paris, wondering if s/he must resort to crime, abandoned by the only lover s/he has ever had, the sentimental style of Barbin’s writing turns to rage and a refusal of her/his designation as a man. Barbin now denies that s/he has any sex at all, insisting that s/he is not a “degraded man,” 87 earthly and fi lthy and shamed like other men. Rather, s/he is an angel, one of those sexless, androgynous beings who “soar above all your innumerable miseries.” S/he has “boundless space,” experiences “surges of pure ecstasy,” her/his soul drinking deeply of the “infinite.” S/he is pure soul, “set free” of the bonds of humanity, and is “immaterial.” From the ecstacies of having two sexes, Barbin now claims to have none, to be above those differences and “the slime that covers you . . .”88 This angel, now called Abel Barbin, commits suicide with the use of a charcoal stove in February of 1868. As s/he had anticipated, her/his body was then given up to scientists to conduct all the examinations which they could desire to unlock the secret of her/his sex, and Foucault publishes the detailed reports which precede from these examinations along with Barbin’s text. In his Question médico-légale de l’identité dans ses rapports avec les vices de conformation des organes sexuels, Auguste Tardieu reiterates the language of “truth” and “error” concerning Barbin’s sex, assuming that all along s/he had one true sex, and that all her/his woes had followed from the error in its initial determination.89 As he writes: The extraordinary case that remains for me to report indeed furnishes the most cruel and painful example of the fatal consequences that can proceed from an error committed at the time of birth in the establishment of civil status. We are about to see the victim of such an error, who, after spending twenty years in the clothing of a sex that was not his own [ . . . ] had his true sex recognized [ . . . ] According to Tardieu, this case teaches the “lesson” that “malformation of the sexual organs exercises upon the emotional faculties and upon psychological health.”90 He thus attributes Barbin’s suicide to miseries resulting from a mistake regarding her/his sex and from the emotional and psychological troubles caused by having malformed genitals. He does not seem to read the parts of Barbin’s memoir in which s/he expresses the delights and pleasures which s/he had had in her/his body and in her/his sexual organs, and that her/his miseries began only when s/he confessed these pleasures to priests, putting her/himself in their hands, following their advice that s/he undergo a medical examination and change in legal status. Foucault claims that Barbin’s memoir verges on the “banal,” for it is sentimental and flowery in the style common to nineteenth-century romances. He publishes the memoir, however, because it nevertheless resists the legal and medical discourses surrounding it. Although, unlike Rivière, Barbin

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does not avoid confession, but describes multiple confessions and arguably confesses in the memoir itself, the self which s/he describes, unlike the self which the doctors and lawyers try to discover, is neither one sex nor the other, and refuses to stay still. As said, Barbin uses both masculine and feminine pronouns to refer to herself, and eventually claims to be neither sex but an angel. Elsewhere, Foucault has written that freedom is precisely such a remaining “undefi ned,”91 and thus it is perhaps Barbin’s achievement of freedom, in her text as well as in her life-death, that Foucault esteems. Forced by disciplinary authorities to live as a man, Barbin chooses to die, a bit like Rivière chose to die rather than to submit to a life of discipline. Although one is inclined to agree with Judith Butler’s claim that Foucault romanticizes this text,92 even while accusing it of being romantic, his attention to it indicates that he thought that it was possible to say something about oneself, one’s past, one’s childhood, one’s pleasures and miseries, without fi xing oneself as such, obliterating any possibility of ambiguity. As with Rivière, one manner in which Barbin is able to resist the discourses presented by the doctors and lawyers is through reading. As Butler writes, “One thing about Herculine we know is that s/he reads, and reads a good deal, that her/his nineteenth-century French education involved schooling in the classics as well as French Romanticism, and that her/his own narrative takes place within an established set of literary conventions.”93 Butler indeed accuses Foucault of forgetting this, as he had not done in the case of Rivière, and of idealizing Barbin’s sexual experiences in the convent and as a schoolmistress as a sort of prediscursive polymorphous realm of sheer pleasure. However it is clear that while Rivière drew on his biblical studies and readings of popular fly sheets, so Barbin draws on her culture and its canon. As her/his memoir makes clear, s/he had received a classical education in the convent and was also an avid reader of contemporary romantic novels. We see the influence of the romance novels in the flowery writing which, unlike the painfully explicit language of the medical reports, manages to remain forever vague about her sex organs. Simultaneously drawing on her studies of classical texts, Barbin asks: “Doesn’t the truth sometimes go beyond all imaginary conceptions, however exaggerated they may be? Have the Metamorphoses of Ovid gone further?”94 Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the iconography of angels, although part of her nineteenth-century French education, allow Barbin to think outside the modern two-sex system characteristic of her own age95, to conceive of another epistemological system in which sex is not something which is fi xed and true and which one is born with, but which may change and be plural (or neuter), and in which angels, hermaphrodites and same sex lovers may exist. Like Rivière, Barbin has alternative discourses to draw on, discourses from previous epistemological eras as well as contemporary discourses with which she can combat the disciplinary discourses of her own age. S/he is not “freely” producing a novel form of discourse in her memoirs, therefore, but draws on literature available to her which better suits her in explaining her life than do the

Alternatives to Confession 225 medico-legal stories. The medico-legal discourses assume that Barbin must have one sex, that desire must be heterosexual and hence that since she loves a woman she must be a man, and that she must therefore be obliged to live as a man. The nineteenth-century literary forms which Barbin draws on, however, allow sex to remain vague and sentimental, submitting the particularities of bodies and organs to the loftier expressions of romantic love, while reading classical texts allows her/his to resist the claim that s/he must only and ever be a man. In contrast to the self-fashioning writings of Herculine Barbin and Pierre Rivière, Foucault would think that many autobiographical texts, such as Althusser’s memoir, L’avenir dure longtemps, are confessional and submit to the disciplinary discourses of medicine and law. He would think that Althusser was mistaken in comparing his own act of writing L’avenir dure longtemps, the confession of a murderer, to that of Pierre Rivière. Unlike Rivière’s text, Althusser’s work shows his internalization of the ruse of confession. Althusser’s text is a confession and an excuse, and it is an effect of disciplinary power, a submission to power rather than an act. Althusser’s writing continually resorts to the authority of his psychiatrists and psychoanalysts to affirm his non-culpability, his lack of freedom to have done otherwise. Unlike Rivière and Barbin, Althusser does not write in such a way as to defy or to subvert the disciplinary discourses surrounding his case, nor as an affi rmation of his autonomy and his crime, but, on the contrary, to declare his allegiance to these authoritative discourses and to use them as explanation for the inevitability of the murder he committed, and also, unlike Barbin, to reflect upon the “truth” of his sex. Against Althusser’s identification with Rivière, Foucault would note that, unlike Rivière and Barbin, Althusser continually refers to the authority of psychiatric discourses on his case rather than authoring his own text and act. From this comparison it can be suggested that although autobiographical writings can be a strategy for liberating the subject from disciplinary power and for fashioning autonomy, we should not view autobiography as a genre which straightforwardly fulfills this task. On the contrary, like psychoanalysis, many autobiographies fall into the ruses of confession rather than liberating the author from them, even while they so often take up the language of freedom.

ACTING OUT: ANNA O. AND FEMINIST PRACTICE Anna O., whose treatment for hysteria was the basis for Breuer’s and Freud’s Studies On Hysteria, was not cured by the “talking cure,” the early psychoanalytic method which she had named and helped to invent, but had in fact deteriorated during the “cure,” however the doctors tried to gloss this fact in their study. When her treatment by Breuer ended, Bertha Pappenheim, to use her real name, was addicted to chloral, which caused her to suffer from convulsions, and to morphine, used to treat her acute

226 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault facial pains. In addition to her neuralgia, she continued to suffer from hysterical symptoms and was suicidally depressed. In 1882 Pappenheim was sent to a sanatorium in Kreuzlingen and later in Inzerdorf, and continued to struggle with her health for many years. Fourteen months after he had fi nished treating her, Breuer would confide in Freud that Pappenheim was “quite deranged.”96 In his description of his treatment of Pappenheim, Breuer noted that she had “looked after some poor, sick people, and this helped her greatly.”97 Pappenheim’s desire to care for the sick and poor, and the manner in which this eased her own illnesses, solidified in 1888 when she moved to Frankfurt am Main and began a life of political and social activism. Pappenheim fi rst worked in soup kitchens for Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and then as a housemother in a Jewish orphanage for girls, a position that she kept for twelve years. At the same time she worked as a journalist and pamphleteer, advocating reform in the education of women. The multilingual Pappenheim, who could only speak in English, French, and Italian during periods of her treatment with Breuer, also translated Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women into German, while writing her own feminist book on the sexual and economic exploitation of women, A Woman’s Right, as well as a book of short stories and a children’s book. Pappenheim became particularly involved in the problem of poverty-stricken Jewish girls from Eastern Europe being sold into the white slave trade. She wrote The Jewish Problem in Galicia addressing this concern, founded Care for Women, and tried to educate Western Jews about the plight of Eastern Jewish girls. Pappenheim also founded the Jüdischer Frauenbund (The Jewish Women’s Union), and became the fi rst president of the International Council of Women. Finally, Pappenheim traveled extensively in order to intercept the sales of young girls intended for prostitution rings at train stations, keeping a house for them and for other girls at risk and illegitimate children in Neu-Isenberg.98 Later in life Pappenheim did not want to be known for her involvement in the invention of psychoanalysis, and destroyed all of her documents dating prior to 1890. In one of the rare references that she made to psychoanalysis, she compared it to Catholic confession, stating that “Psychoanalysis in the hands of the physician is what confession is in the hands of the Catholic priest. It depends on its user and its use, whether it becomes a beneficial tool or a two-edged sword.”99 Although she does not say whether psychoanalysis functioned in her own case as a benefi cial tool or as a weapon, Pappenheim’s feelings about psychoanalysis are perhaps best indicated by the fact that when the girls and young women in Pappenheim’s care manifested psychological disturbances, she refused to allow them to be psychoanalyzed, psychoanalysis by that time having become relatively common. More reticent with her confessions in later life than she had been under the care of Breuer, this is the only indication that we have of how she felt about its practice.

Alternatives to Confession 227 On the other hand, if Pappenheim did not advocate psychoanalysis, she did advocate philanthropy and female independence. She actively sought out other women whom she could “make [ . . . ] fit to be helpers.”100 She not only educated the girls and young women in her house for an active and independent life, she also sought to change the manner in which bourgeois girls and women were socialized, as she herself had been, to see crime as sin, poverty as theatrical, and illness as disgusting, but rather to struggle to overcome the misery and injustice to which they were raised to be blind.101 This would seem to suggest that while chimney-sweeping her internal world had not helped to cure Pappenheim of hysteria, she had discovered that social and political activism served better as a cure and a care of herself, and she sought to offer this alternative cure to other bourgeois women and girls, not only for their own sakes but for the sakes of the less affluent and less sheltered women and girls who could benefit from their care. Pappenheim chose to engage in political activities, including writing and translation, which were associated with her self: the political and social causes which Pappenheim made her own all involved women and Jewish women in particular, while she was a tireless opponent of sexism, to which hysteria has frequently been tied. Despite the autobiographical nature of the political activities that she chose, Pappenheim’s activism no longer reflected upon the effects of sexism on her own life and psyche—the frustrations of not being able to go to school like her brother, for instance, and of needing to be restrained and polite even when restless, bored and angry—but instead struggled directly against sexism and other injustices in the public and political sphere. Hysteria, and the case of Anna O. in particular, has been frequently theorized by feminists as a strategy through which verbally repressed bourgeois Victorian women “spoke” their discontent somatically, retreating into illness, bodily language, and corporeal refusals (to eat, to speak, to swallow, to move, to conform to social and sexual expectations, and to be available for sexual and domestic (re)production) in order to express the anger and discontent which they could not describe otherwise, repressed as they were at the level of language and excluded from the political sphere.102 Hysteria has occasionally been heralded as a form of feminist behavior, a rejection of patriarchy, and a feminine language.103 We should be cautious about applauding hysteria, however, as it was clearly at least as painful for hysterical women as it was for patriarchy, and Pappenheim had to become addicted to morphine to combat this quite literal pain. Moreover, far from combating sexism, hysteria may also merely have confi rmed stereotypes of femininity: women as irrational, emotional, unfit for the professions and politics, passive victims of their own excessive corporeality, and objects of spectacle, as in Charcot’s theater. Pappenheim, however, gave up this typically feminine corporeal language and instead penned tracts in which she openly criticized the socialization and education as well as the economic and sexual restrictions and exploitations of women such as herself.

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As Pappenheim’s later life suggests, writing feminist articles and plays and becoming directly involved in feminist political engagement cared for her self and healed her in a way that the confessional practices of the “talking cure” did not. At the same time, Pappenheim helped many other women and girls and Jewish immigrants of both sexes as well. If Pappenheim’s life seems to attest to the manner in which political activism, and feminist political activism in particular, can be a care of the self as well as of others, Ladelle McWhorter explores this claim explicitly. McWhorter has argued that feminist political action as well as the reading and writing of feminist texts can function as a technology of self-transformation that serves the subject better than confessing to the self, and which, we may add, is also done in the service of other women. In “Practicing Practicing,” McWhorter turns to Foucault’s notion that philosophy is a practice of the self, something which should be lived and which should transform one’s life, in order to think about feminist political practices. In this article McWhorter describes the ways in which feminist practices, which she calls “woman-affi rming practices,” at least initially functioned as transformative of her self. Reading and writing feminist theory and being actively engaged in feminist politics was a way for McWhorter to work on her self in order to transform her gendered and disciplined soul into a self which was self-fashioned and in a self-conscious process of becoming. Reading feminist theory enabled McWhorter to realize that the kind of embodied subject which she had been socialized to be was abjected for political and economic reasons, not because it was in any way inherently abject. By learning about the contingency of the ways in which she and other women experienced their bodies, McWhorter describes being able to come to experience her body in more empowering and positive ways. McWhorter then describes writing about this transformation of her sense of self, and this writing may in turn be read by other women and be equally a part of their self-transformations. As such, feminism functioned as a form of rational and joyful self-transformation for McWhorter, or as a Foucaultian care of the self, and it is an example of self care which, unlike Foucault’s examples from Ancient Greece and Rome, involves a group movement and the care of others as well as the self. McWhorter goes on to explain how her feminist practice developed into eco-feminism, and how this continued to be a transformation of her way of experiencing herself, her body, and her relation to the world, in the way that technologies of the self should be ongoing processes and not, as in narrative therapy, a story told about the self once and for all. Unfortunately, McWhorter notes, within the feminist movement it was soon not simply a matter of “inventing ourselves,” but of establishing new feminist norms of what woman should be, and a very quick collapsing of these normative claims into new feminist ontologies. As such, according to McWhorter, woman-affi rming practices quickly cease to be technologies of the self as Foucault describes them:

Alternatives to Confession 229 At this point I become extremely uneasy. [ . . . ] Feminism gradually came to have an identifiable center: Woman—woman the victim of oppression, woman the subject and object of efforts to emancipate, woman the site of downtrodden virtue and righteous social change. Feminism came to be about recognizing that Woman and nurturing her as she recovered herself and took her destined place as the catalyst for a general, culturalwide moral revolution. What had perhaps started as a courageous journey into the unknown somehow got recast as a kind of enlightened return to origins. What I fear is that within feminism, such a turn is in some sense inevitable.104 As a politics, many feminists have argued that feminism must assume a category of “woman,” but the result of this for McWhorter is ultimately that woman-affi rming practices and feminism in general come to be conservative processes of self-recovery rather than processes of self-creation, becoming, or differing. McWhorter is deeply suspicious of this move to self-recovery, and moreover does not recognize herself in or feel empowered or affi rmed by the self which aims to be recovered. Woman-affi rmation ceases to be self-affi rming for McWhorter at this point, and this brings McWhorter to contrast rather than to compare feminist practices and Foucaultian technologies of the self.105 Having fi rst described feminism as a practice of joyful and empowering self-fashioning, McWhorter thus comes to the conclusion which she acknowledges is “painful,” since she is herself indebted to the self-transformations which feminism equipped her to make, which is that ultimately feminism is incompatible with her ongoing philosophical practice. McWhorter concludes by considering whether feminism could abandon the ontological and normative category of woman, or understand woman not as a category but as a “site of volatility,” without losing its ability to engage in politically effective ways for the sake of women as they now exist, without becoming a “mere verbal contortion” or “esoteric exercise in theory production.”106 McWhorter expresses her hope that it can do so, or, as she says, that we can “make it so. That is, to live it so.”107 Other Foucaultian philosophers have also defended feminist practices as technologies of the self, and have remained more optimistic than McWhorter regarding their staying power. In Disciplining Foucault, Jana Sawicki argues for a non-disciplinary form of feminist consciousness-raising as a practice of self-care. Once more, it can be noted that if consciousness-raising works, one would be simultaneously caring for others and oneself. According to Sawicki, “The purpose of such consciousness-raising would not be to tell us who we are, but rather to free us from certain ways of understanding ourselves; that is, to tell us who we do not have to be and to tell us how we came to think of ourselves as we do.”108 Sawicki follows Sandra Bartky in arguing that feminist autobiographical practices, and feminism in general, “leads to awareness

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of oppression, victimization, category confusion and a sense of moral ambiguity. Destabilization of identity is often the most profound effect of consciousness raising, not the creation of a unified sense of self.”109 However, following McWhorter, the danger is that in destabilizing the patriarchally- constructed sense of self which one had before, one replaces it with a new feminist sense of self which is equally essentialized: one has thrown off patriarchy in order to reveal one’s “true self,” and one does not merely tell women what they do not need to be, but what they ought to be. In these cases, this more positive self-image tends to be pursued as the essential being which victimization and oppression has obscured, and which consciousness-raising can reveal. Consciousness raising,110 as well as women’s self-help groups,111 therapy,112 autobiographical writing and image making or art production,113 have also been suggested by feminist Foucaultians to be other feminist technologies of the self. In each of these cases, as in McWhorter’s and Sawicki’s discussions of “woman-affi rming practices” and consciousnessraising, autobiographical and self-reflective practices may function as selfgovernance and self-care, and in some cases may also involve caring for others, but they may also become disciplinary. As Foucault acknowledges, dominance and self-governance, technologies of discipline and technologies of self-care, are always co-existent and inextricably intertwined, and yet the goal is to cultivate oneself such that self-care predominates. What each of these examples shows is that autobiographical discourses are to be approached warily lest they fall into the ruses of confession, and yet they can be appropriated as liberating practices of self-care and care for others.

FOUCAULT’S SELF-WRITING In defending Foucault’s silence about his contraction of HIV, Daniel Defert wrote: “In his work, Michel Foucault inserted the practice of confession within a problematic of power. He never valued confession as such, he always showed the policing process at work in it.”114 Defert’s defense of his partner’s silence clearly refers to Foucault’s account of confession as strategy of disciplinary power in the first volume of The History of Sexuality. This work has been widely accepted as Foucault’s fi nal word on confession, and as the explanation for his own silence regarding his sexuality and illness. Read as excuse, or explanation, for his own failure to confess, this work has had a posthumous life that can be compared to that of “Excuses (Confessions)” in the case of de Man, in which, likewise, silence seems to be offered as the only strategy which remained to the author for escaping discursive traps which he had himself so meticulously described. As with de Man, Foucault’s silence was not entire, however, as he did give late interviews on homosexuality, and so it would be an exaggeration to say that Foucault himself sought silence as the sole alternative to confession, rather

Alternatives to Confession 231 than alternative forms of discourse, or non-confessional manners of speaking about his sexuality.115 Moreover, while Derrida claims we may read all of de Man’s academic writings as autobiographical,116 Foucault himself suggested in an interview that each of his scholarly books could be read “as a fragment of an autobiography,” which requires at least as complex a reading as Derrida has provided in the case of de Man. Such an explanation can be provided by Foucault’s notion, in “Self Writing,” of a form of self-writing that constitutes the subject through rationally chosen and fragmentary citation of the historically-given or déjà-dit (as opposed to revelations of the supposedly non-dit). On similar lines, Foucault stated, “I believe that [ . . . ] someone who is a writer is not simply doing his work in his books, but that his major work is, in the end, himself in the process of writing his books.”117 In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault would later write, “More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.”118 Like the hupomnêmata, Foucault’s books are not intimate journals in which he speaks of himself, but are organized collections of citations chosen from archives, subjectively selected “histories,” and Foucault’s reflections on them according to themes—themes which held a certain resonance with Foucault’s own experiences (of madness, medical institutionalization, learning, desire in restraint, so-called sexual perversion). In his studies of subjects which were not therefore disinterested, Foucault does not try to reveal his true face, who he “is,” but rather brings together fragments of others’ voices on the subject, and his meditations on them. If we are to read these as “autobiography” in a very loose sense, it is in the sense of hupomnêmata, a means to work on himself and the themes which preoccupied him in a way which remained chosen, fragmentary, active, and always “in process”—not, then, the revelation of a true or pre-existing self, but an always unfinished constitution of a self through citation and reasoned thought. These works are offered to his readers, like the hupomnêmata of Plutarch given to Fundanus, but not to tell us who he is, nor really to tell us about history either—that they are not very good books of “history,” precisely because so subjectively selective (which, then again, all histories are), has been frequently noted, and many historians have “corrected” Foucault’s writings, particularly on madness.119 Rather, as with Plutarch’s hupomnêmata, these are offered as philosophical resources that may be used as part of our own philosophical and political thought, our methodology of thinking and living, our aesthetics of self. We may cite fragments of Foucault’s books into our own hupomnêmata, therefore, as attempts to work on and change our lives and selves, reading, rereading and writing philosophy to cure the anxieties of our souls with greater success than we may have found in confessional discourses. One description of how Foucault’s writings can be used by others as hupomnêmata or as a practice of self-care occurs in Ladelle McWhorter’s book Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization. In her introduction to this work, McWhorter says that she is not

232 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault interested in debating “the logic of [Foucault’s] argumentation or the accuracy of his reportage or even of the works’ political utility or danger.” 120 Rather, what interests McWhorter about Foucault is: the question of how it has been able to push me in the directions I have gone both philosophically and politically, the question of how that work has been able to excite, stimulate, enliven, and empower me for the greater part of my adult life. I am not so interested, then, in what his works have to say, although what they have to say is crucial to my study; instead, I am most interested in what they tend to do [ . . . ] At the level of the individual, I’m interested in how the works [ . . . ] operate as a discipline, as an askesis, an exercise of thinking that transforms its reader. At the level of the political situation, I’m interested in how those works operate to open possibilities, how they transform the reader’s world, how they interfere with heterosexist business as usual.121 McWhorter’s book is in part a description of how reading Foucault over fi fteen years has been a continual practice of transforming her life, much as, in the later “Practicing Practicing,” feminism is argued to have worked for a while. McWhorter’s book is autobiographical, beginning with a description of growing up queer in a small town in Alabama in the 1970s, being submitted to heterosexist discipline at school, at home, in church, and in medical and psychiatric institutions, and the ways in which Foucault’s History of Sexuality: An Introduction, which McWhorter read as a young adult, resonated with her own life and gave her the tools to understand, critique, and change it: Then, on January 7, 1983, I read Foucault’s The History of Sexuality in its entirety, and for the fi rst time in my life I heard something I believed it was impossible to hear: the articulation of a homosexual point of view. I had believed it was impossible to speak as a homosexual, from a homosexual perspective, because I had believed there was no way to be a homosexual except to be totally objectified. But Foucault’s book proved me wrong. I was astonished. I was excited. I was overjoyed. Never have I been so happy with a book between my hands.122 And later: Through years of personal experience I already knew that Foucault’s descriptions of how sexuality and sexual subjectivity and classification actually worked were accurate, but his genealogy gave or at least suggested answers to the questions that that knowledge had generated, such as: Why does it work that way, and how did this all come about? I was able to let go of that still lingering belief that, after all, heterosexuality was superior

Alternatives to Confession 233 in some organic or natural way to homosexuality. Heterosexuality, like homosexuality, I was able to maintain, is a social construct; its power and prestige rest solely on its embeddedness within the classification system that invents it. With the advent of those new abilities, the grip of a crushing form of power was gradually loosening around me.123 As she describes it, the ongoing practice of reading and re-reading Foucault’s work over fi fteen years enabled McWhorter to find ways to live as a homosexual “fully and completely” even while refusing to be a homosexual “essentially.”124 Foucault’s last five books showed McWhorter how her sexuality had come to be her identity through discipline, but that this classificatory system in which sex is identity was not essential. More specifically, reading Foucault enabled McWhorter to realize that the denigrating and dehumanizing ways in which her self-understanding as homosexual had been constructed were contingent and political, and not moral or scientific fact, and thus that through practice she could transform that self understanding into a positive and self-chosen identification as queer. McWhorter’s book on Foucault is far more explicitly autobiographical than any of Foucault’s “fragments of an autobiography,” and McWhorter acknowledges that the idea of writing autobiographically in order to present Foucault’s philosophy is “a little bizarre”125 given Foucault’s own claims to “write in order to have no face.” Nevertheless, McWhorter’s writing is no more confessional than Foucault’s. Although McWhorter is describing moments from her own life, her feelings and thoughts, and perhaps most importantly her sexuality, she is not confessing to or discovering or revealing a pre-given or essential self in these pages, but is rather describing the ways in which she became a certain kind of subject and the ways that she has transformed that subject through philosophy. This non-confessional autobiography is written for two reasons: fi rst, as a further practice of self-transformation for the author and, second, as an indication not that Foucault is “right” or that his arguments are “logical” or that his historical narratives are “accurate,” or even that they are politically “useful,” but rather that on a personal level, in terms of transforming her own life, reading Foucault’s books “work.” More specifically, they work as hupomnêmata, as books of life that can be read as part of a reader’s practices of self-care. For McWhorter, as for the Stoics and for Foucault, “philosophy is not primarily a body of knowledge or a collection of skills; it is a way of living.”126 Reading Foucault, and later writing about Foucault, describing her reading of Foucault and how it has resonated with and changed her life, is a practicing of philosophy as a way of life and of self-care. Even though for Foucault such writings are involved in an aesthetics of the self, it is crucial that they do not turn inwards or assume any pre-existing interior self to turn in upon, but listen to others, reflect on what they say, read them, record them, respond to them, and offer something back to them. Foucault’s last writings—the histories of sexuality and the lectures

234 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault from that period, the analysis of confession and of humpomnêmata—arguably tell us that things get better for ourselves when we stop confessing to those selves and start doing something which will change those selves and which we may offer to others instead, something which may nevertheless remain rooted in personal experience but does more than reflect on its particularity, whether this alternative be direct political engagement or the writing and speaking of something other than confessions. Foucault laughed at accusations that there were inconsistencies between one book he had written and another, since these accusations missed the point of philosophy for him. For Foucault, as for McWhorter, philosophy is a manner of changing oneself through the reading and writing of books, and hence the aim is not to stay the same or consistent from one to another. Foucault thus replies to such critiques: “‘Well, do you think I have worked like that all those years to say the same thing and not to be changed?’”127 Taking up these writings and this understanding of philosophy, McWhorter’s philosophical practices are also ways in which the writer re-writes and transforms herself through non-confessional autobiography. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, read as explanation for Foucault’s own silence, seems to suggest that withdrawal from all self-reflective discourse is a possible means (and the only possible means) to avoid the workings of disciplinary power and the policing effects of subjectification. Such a reading is used by Daniel Defert to explain his lover’s silence with respect to his cause of death, and seems to be confi rmed by Foucault’s explanation of his refusal to analyze the memoir of Pierre Rivière, but at the same time reflects a curiously simple and even un-Foucaultian understanding of the workings of power. By looking at what Foucault goes on to say about Rivière, despite his decision to say nothing, and about the memoir of Herculine Barbin, I have suggested that Foucault did after all look for possible textual strategies for self-writing as act rather than subjection, acts which may maintain an indefi nition of identity and thus keep open the possibility of freedom. It remains, however, that despite some candid interviews Foucault undertook no such directly self-referential writings himself. One can, however, make sense of his claim that all of his writings are nevertheless autobiographical by examining his interest in ancient practices of self-care and self-governance, and particularly in the writing of hupomnêmata. Drawing on Foucault’s brief discussion of this ancient genre, it has been argued that the writing of philosophy, and of histories, as in Foucault’s own works and in the feminist philosophical and autobiographical practices of authors such as Ladelle McWhorter, may be read as livres de vie or arts of the self which nevertheless turn outwards towards others, constituting a self through responses to the given world and to other people, rather than through revelations of what one thinks is hidden within one and one’s very own secret and true self. As Foucaultian feminists have argued, other autobiographical feminist practices such as consciousness-raising and image-making, as seen in the example

Alternatives to Confession 235 of Artemisia Gentileschi, may function as technologies of the self, even if they, like testimony, and indeed like all autobiographical practices and technologies of self-care, run the risk of sliding into the workings of discipline with which they are always intertwined. As with Foucault’s praise for the memoirs of Rivière and Barbin, the advantage that Foucault would have seen in such practices is that they are active as well as fragmented or forever incomplete, constituting a subject which is likewise free and in process or undefi ned.

Figures

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Figure 1 Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, 1610. Pommersfelden, Schloss Weissenstein.

238

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Figure 2 Annibale Carracci, Susanna and the Elders, etching and engraving, c. 1590. Board of Trustees, Washington D.C. National Gallery of Art.

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Figure 3 Rembrandt, Susanna and the Elders, 1647. Berlin-Dahlem, Staatliche Museen, Preussicher Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie.

240 Figures

Figure 4 Peter Paul Rubens, Susanna and the Elders, 1636–40. Munich, Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen.

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Figure 5 Titian, Tarquin and Lucretia, 1568–71. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

242 Figures

Figure 6 Giovanni Biliverti, Tarquin and Lucretia, 17th Century. Rome Academia Nazionale di San Luca.

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Figure 7 Artemisia Gentileschi, Lucretia, 1621. Genova, Palazzo Cattaneo-Adorno.

244

Figures

Figure 8 Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1612–13. Naples, Museo di Capodimonte.

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Figure 9 Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1598–99. Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini.

246

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Figure 10 Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, 1630. London, Kensington Palace, Collection of Her Majesty the Queen.

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Figure 11 Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, 1622. The Burghley House Collection, Stamford, England.

248

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Figure 12 Kathleen Gilje, Susanna and the Elders, Restored, 1998.

Figures

Figure 13 Kathleen Gilje, Susanna and the Elders, Restored. X-Ray, 1998.

249

Conclusion

In Lighthousekeeping, Jeanette Winterson writes: There’s a booth in Grand Central Station where you can go and record your life. You talk. It tapes. It’s the modern-day confessional—no priest, just your voice in the silence. What you were, digitally saved for the future. Forty minutes is yours. So what would you say in those forty minutes—what would be your death-bed decisions? What of your life will sink under the waves, and what will be like the lighthouse, calling you home? We’re told not to privilege one story above another. All the stories must be told. Well, maybe that’s true, maybe all stories are worth hearing, but not all stories are worth telling [ . . . ] and the stories I want to tell you will light up part of my life, and leave the rest in darkness. You don’t need to know everything. There is no everything. The stories themselves make the meaning.1 Winterson describes what is perhaps indeed the modern-day confessional experience, in which confession is no longer necessarily a speech act which serves as an expression of guilt over what one has done, but which more importantly reflects a desire to tell another who one is. But as Winterson’s example also shows, this desire has already exceeded the capacities of others to hear, and so we resort not only to paying others to listen, but to speaking to virtual others, to the writing of memoirs and eventually to speaking to machines: for the train station confessional booth is but one of many strange inventions of the second half of the twentieth century, inventions which draw on technology to receive the flood of confessional discourse which characterizes this age and which human ears can no longer accommodate. Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester describe ELIZA, a conversational computer programmed by a psychoanalyst to simulate the therapeutic confessor, and the later software program DEPRESSION 2.0 to which virtual psychoanalyst patients can also talk. 2 Similarly, Dr. Phil urges his television spectators to post

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their confessions on his on-line bulletin board as other depersonalized and technologically-mediated confessional cures. Along similar lines, Peter Brooks writes of the strange case of “Mr. Apology,” a man who used posters in Manhattan to advertise a confessional-hotline. The posters read: “Get Your Misdeeds off Your Chest! Call APOLOGY (212) 255–2748.”3 As with the confessional booth that Winterson describes, confessants did not speak to a human being when they called Mr. Apology’s hotline, they could only leave messages on a tape recorder. Patients called in not only to apologize, but to describe their victimization by others, as in the case of a woman testifying to childhood sexual abuse. Here we see a very simplified notion of a talking cure, such that talking alone, even to a “virtual other, “ a tape recorder or a website “bulletin board,” is understood as therapeutic, a means of catharsis or of externalizing painful or shameful histories. For instance, criminals who called Mr. Apology’s tape recorder apparently hoped to be exculpated of their crimes by talking alone, and notably not to their victims. That we believe in such a talking cure is attested to by the fact that Mr. Apology received numerous calls, and by the popularity of programs such as DEPRESSION 2.0, and yet what Winterson’s brief account of the confessional booth at Grand Central Station also suggests is that rather than confessions getting things off our chests, they will be like the lighthouse calling us home, discursively fi xing those confessions as the place where we live. Confessions, in Winterson’s metaphor, do not allow memories to sink under the waves, to disappear into the darkness. The stories we tell in confession “make the meaning” of our lives and our selves, and hence it is important, Winterson indicates, to choose the stories we tell carefully because we will have to live in them, suggesting that they become inscribed on our very bodies. What we confess to is a momentous choice, Winterson implies, our “death bed decisions,” for these confessions defi ne who we are or are productive of our subjectivity. While in our confessional age we are urged to tell everything—perhaps by those who want, in turn, to tell everything—Winterson argues that not all stories are worth being told, or are worth becoming who we are. Surely the train station confessional booth, ELIZA, DEPRESSION 2.0, Dr. Phil’s bulletin board, and Mr. Apology’s phone line will fail as therapeutic cures, and not only because, following Foucault and Winterson, they will discursively fi x rather than abreact memories. Even if we have faith in the curative powers of confession as it occurs, for instance, in psychoanalysis, in these technologically-mediated examples it would seem that there is no relation with another, no possibility of transference and counter-transference in which neuroses can be worked through. And yet Appignanesi and Forrester describe the strange dependence which “patients” developed with their computers, almost as if they were speaking to human beings. Moreover, while Mr. Apology’s original incentive was to create an exhibit using the material he gathered, wearing a false beard

252 The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault to remain anonymous to the criminals whose confessions he exploited, he kept the phone line open after the exhibit ended and eventually began responding to calls. The confessional phoneline, like the confessional booth in Grand Central Station, was meant to be unidirectional and anonymous, but Mr. Apology found himself solicited to respond to the calls and eventually complying to this demand. In particular, he received messages to respond to the calls of a man named Jim who claimed to have murdered his mother. Mr. Apology returned Jim’s calls more than once, even making and breaking plans to meet him in person. On one occasion when Mr. Apology phoned Jim, however, the phone was picked up by a woman claiming to be the alleged matricide’s mother. Here we see not only the inclination of confessions to implicate their listeners, but also their tendency to reveal the truth of desires produced between confessor and confessant rather than historical facts. The confessor and confessant became increasingly dependent and complicit in this case, in a manner which Brooks describes as a transferential bond.4 Accused of having lied about killing his mother, Jim promised Mr. Apology to bring proof of his mother’s death. Now Mr. Apology feared that Jim would kill his mother just to prove that he had told the truth about who he was to the confessor with whom he had formed an intense psychological bond. As was argued in Chapter Two, confessions, far from being particularly authentic instances of truth-telling, may in fact tend towards untruth, and yet they have a way of becoming true of the subject, as this case alarmingly indicates. As such, to return to Winterson once more, we should be careful what we say. Along these lines Winterson suggests that we may resist the other’s demand that we confess, stating, “You don’t need to know everything.” This is somewhat strange in the context of speaking to a tape recorder in a train station box, and yet even if in many cases our desires to confess exceed the capacities of others to hear, in other cases, as was seen in Chapter Four, the other’s desire to hear our confessions may also infringe upon our wishes to remain silent. Winterson and Foucault would both dismiss the other’s demand to know everything, because their interest lies primarily with the pernicious effects of confession upon the speaking subject. Although I have followed these arguments to a point, I have also wanted to follow philosophers such as Lévinas and Derrida in order to say that the question of the other, including her demand to hear my confessions, is not so easily set aside, despite the fact that, as I have argued, this ethical demand is itself a result of confessional discipline which in turn aims to discipline the speaker. For this reason I have problematized not only the confessional desire to speak the truth of the self, but also the confessional desire to hear truthful, identity-fi xing confidences from others. In the present, when I harm the other in my failure to grant her the recognition which she requires through my confession, it nevertheless may not always be enough to say: “You do not need to know everything.” Autonomy, like

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confession, is relational, and as such I have argued that the practices which I cultivate to overcome discipline, including the disciplinary habit of confession, can only occur with others and by taking their disciplined needs and their capacities for freedom into account. I have therefore tried to consider not only the contingency and the problems with confession, and hence the possibility of leaving it behind, but also the demands of the other and the possibilities of silence. Finally, I have wanted to consider ways of speaking of the self which may respond to my own and the other’s needs to tell and to hear my story, ways which do not discursively fi x the speaker’s identity. It was seen that Winterson’s novel suggests that we should be careful about what we say, but she also writes: “Turn down the daily noise and at fi rst there is the relief of silence. And then, very quietly, as quiet as light, meaning returns. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.” Winterson argues not only for a silence which resists confession, but for new ways of speaking which are not confessional, which she explores through the stories told by the lighthousekeeper Pew and his adopted daughter Silver: Tell me a story, Pew. What kind of story, child? A story with a happy ending. There’s no such thing in all the world. As a happy ending? As an ending. [ . . . ] Tell me a story, Pew. What story, child? One that begins again. That’s the story of life. But is it the story of my life? Only if you tell it. [ . . . ] Tell me a story, Silver. What story? The story of what happened next. That depends. On what? On how I tell it. 5

It was seen that Judith Butler argues against the practice of narrative therapy, in which patients and analysts construct a coherent story of the patient’s life once and for all. For Butler, the stories we tell, and the stories we ask others to tell, must be allowed to change with each telling, or, in Foucault’s terms, to be on-going productions of the self as works of art. Similarly, Winterson writes: “A beginning, a middle and an end is the proper way to tell a story. But I have difficulty with that method” for, as she says later, the “continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative,

254

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

there are lit up moments, and the rest is dark.”6 As an ending to this work, I will simply recall what Pew teaches Silver, which is not only that we need not tell all stories, or that even in the lighthouse there can be a space of dark, but that the stories that we do tell can be “a long story, and like most stories in the world, never fi nished. There was an ending—there always is—but the story went on past the ending—it always does.”7

Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 1. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Perennial Classics, 1998: 10. 2. Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, New York and Middlesex: Pelican, 1974: 68, italics in the original. 3. Cited in Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000: 23–4. 4. Erik Berggren, The Psychology of Confession. Leiden, Belgium: E. J. Brill, 1975: 3. 5. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967: 165. 6. Shlomit Schuster, The Philosopher’s Autobiography: A Qualitative Study. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003: 112 7. Georges Gusdorf, Les écritures de moi. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991. Discussed in “Entretien avec Philippe Lejeune: Une pratique d’avant-garde,” Magazine Littéraire, Mars-Avril 2007: 8. 8. Tentler found in the case of medieval and Renaissance confession that “The results were not quite so simple [ . . . ]”: “Perhaps the most important realization of all was that this institution continued to perform, as it had throughout its long and varied history, the function of discipline or social control. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it became apparent that discipline could not be ignored, that the cure of anxiety could not be examined separately. Sacramental confession was designed to cause guilt as well as cure guilt, and it no longer seemed fruitful to try to analyze one without the other.” Thomas Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of Reformation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977: xiii. 9. Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Self,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon. Pantheon Books, New York: 1980, pp. 194–228. 10. Michel Foucault, Abnormal, : Lectures at the Collège de France: 1974–1975. New York: Picador, 2004: 205. 11. Ibid., 184. 12. Ibid. 213. 13. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” The Foucault Reader. Paul Rabinow, ed. New York: Pantheon, 1984: 78. 14. Ibid., 89. 15. Ibid., 87. 16. Ibid., 89. 17. Ibid., 79.

256 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

Notes Ibid., 82. Ibid., 87–88. Ibid., 88. Ibid., 90. Ibid. Ibid. Foucault, “Two Lectures,” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings: 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1972: 83. C. G. Prado, Starting with Foucault: An Introduction to Genealogy. Bolder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000: 40. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 76. Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” The Politics of Truth. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1997: 125–6. Foucault, “Subjectivity and Truth,” The Politics of Truth. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1997: 173. Foucault, La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976: 82–3. Ibid. Foucault, “Subjectivity and Truth,” The Politics of Truth, 176. Ibid., 177. Foucault, “Christianity and Confession”: 199. Ibid., 181–182. See Cressida Heyes, “Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers,” Hypatia 21:2, 2006; Liz Eckermann, “Foucault, Embodiment, and Gendered Subjectivities: The Case of Voluntary Self-Starvation,” Foucault, Health, and Medicine. Alan Peterson and Bryan S. Turner, eds. London and New York: Routledge, 1997: 151–172. Foucault, “Subjectivity and Truth,” 179. Ibid. Plato, Laches, 201a. Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984. Lawrence D. Kritzman ed. New York and London: Routledge, 1988: 323–330. Foucault’s manuscript, Les aveux de la chair (The Confessions of the Flesh), dealing with the Christian period, was destroyed at Foucault’s request at the time of his death. As I shall argue below, while Foucault uses the term “ethical” to refer to relations to the self, I will want to reserve this term primarily for relations with others, or at least to include both relations with others and to the self. It is in this sense that I think that Foucault neglects to consider confession in terms of ethics, despite his late so-called ethical writings.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. In La volonté de savoir, Foucault claims that the second volume of The History of Sexuality, which was to deal with the Christian period, would be called La chair et le corps. This work never appeared, however, and the second volume of the History deals instead with Ancient Greece. The fourth volume of The History of Sexuality which Foucault did write, however, Confessions of the Flesh, or Les aveux de la chair, dealt with confession in the Christian period, but Foucault had the manuscript destroyed when he died. The lecture, “Christianity and Confession,” discussed below, may give an impression of the content of this lost work.

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2. Foucault, “Subjectivity and Truth,” The Politics of Truth. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1997: 184. 3. Foucault, “L’écriture de soi,” Dits et écrits II: Paris: Gallimard, 2001: 1237. This article is translated as “Self Writing” in The Essential Works of Foucault. Volume 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: New Press, 1997: 207–22. 4. Foucault, “Subjectivity and Truth,” 194–5. 5. Seneca, “on Anger,” cited in Foucault, “Subjectivity and Truth,” 186–7. 6. Foucault, “Christianity and Confession,” The Politics of Truth. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1997: 201. 7. Ibid., 202. 8. Reverend R. C. Mortimer, The Origins of Private Penance in the Western Church. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939: 1. 9. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of Reformation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977: 5. 10. Ibid. 11. Mortimer, The Origins of Private Penance in the Western Church, 1. 12. Ibid. 13. Ambrose, De poenitentia, II, 10, 95, cited in Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of Reformation, 4. 14. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of Reformation, 5. 15. Mortimer, The Origins of Private Penance in the Western Church, 2. 16. Foucault, “Christianity and Confession,” 207. 17. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica 5:28, cited in Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000: 91. 18. Cited in Foucault, “Christianity and Confession,” 212–13. 19. Ibid., 214. 20. Ibid., 213. 21. Ibid., 214. 22. Heloïse writes: “In my case, the pleasures of lovers which we shared have been too sweet—they can never displease me, and can scarcely be banished from my thoughts. Wherever I turn they are always there before my eyes, bringing with them awakened longings and fantasies which will not let me sleep. Even during the celebration of mass, when our prayers should be purer, lewd visions of those pleasures take such a hold upon my unhappy soul that my thoughts are on their wantonness instead of on prayers [ . . . ] Men call me chaste; they do not know the hypocrite that I am. They consider purity of the fl esh a virtue, though virtue belongs not to the body but to the soul.” The Letters of Abelard and Heloïse. New York: Penguin, 1974: 133. 23. Ibid. 24. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning from More to Shakespeare. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980: 2. 25. Foucault, “Christianity and Confession,” 222–3. 26. John Cassian, Second Conference of Abbot Moses, chapter II, 312–13, nt 312, in vol. II of A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, edited by Philip Schaft and Henry Wace (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1955). Cited in Foucault, “Christianity and Confession,” 223–4. 27. Foucault, “Christianity and Confession,” 224. 28. Ibid., 228. 29. Ibid., 227. 30. Ibid., 229.

258

Notes

31. As Foucault said, “People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.” Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983: 187. 32. As will be argued below, the case of psychoanalysis as a modern confessional practice might be more complicated, involving an effort to transform the self and not merely to affi rm it as it is. 33. Foucault, “Christianity and Confession,” 230–1. 34. Foucault, Dits et écrits II, 130, 555, 993–996, 1208, 1382, 1433, 1438, 1602, 1624. 35. My translation of Foucault: “À propos de la généalogie de l’éthique: un aperçu du travail en cours,” Dits et écrits II: 1213–1214. 36. Phillip Cary, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000: 9. 37. Rather than an inwards and up movement, J. Lenore Wright discusses a backwards and inwards move in Augustine’s Confessions, or retrospection on the past followed by introspection upon Augustine’s present spiritual concerns. While this is somewhat different from what I am arguing, she does, however, point out the interesting manner in which the structure of Augustine’s Confessions echoes his philosophical and theological understanding of the way in which humans have access to truth and God. See The Philosopher’s “I”: Autobiography and the Search for the Self. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006: 55–62. 38. Phillip Cary, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000: 123. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 122–3. 41. See Charles Taylor Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989; and Stephen Menn Descartes and Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 42. Michael Hanby, Augustine and Modernity. London and New York: Routledge, 2003: 8–9. 43. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 138, cited in Hanby: 9. 44. Hanby, Augustine and Modernity, 10. 45. Ibid. 46. Ann Hartle, The Modern Self in Rousseau’s Confessions: A Reply to Augustine. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983: 14. 47. Ibid., 4. 48. Ibid. 49. Augustine, sermon 169, quoted in Peter Brown, Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine. London: Faber and Faber, 1972: 30, and cited in Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning From More to Shakespeare: 2. 50. For a discussion of Augustine’s changing views on human freedom, see Gerald Bonner, Freedom and Necessity: St. Augustine’s Teaching on Divine Power and Human Freedom. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007: 3–13. 51. Ibid., 20. 52. Ibid., 20. 53. Ibid., 14. 54. See Augustine Confessions, New York: Vintage, 1997: xxxv. 55. Bonner, Freedom and Necessity, 21. 56. Ibid., 25.

Notes 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

259

Ibid., 26. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 25–6. Augustine, Confessions, 198. Ibid., 200. Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2),” Without Alibi, translated and edited by Peggy Kamuf. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002: 86 Augustine, Confessions, 21. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 27–8. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 28. Les Smith, Confession in the Novel: Bhaktin’s Author Revisited. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996: 33. Augustine, Confessions, 197. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 199–200. Ibid., 198. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 32. Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon,” 81–2. Augustine, Confessions, 76. Ibid., 199. Ibid., xiii. James J. O’Donnell, “Augustine’s Unconfessions,” in Augustine and Postmodernism: Confessions and Circumfession. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, eds. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005: 218. Ibid., 214. Ibid., 219. Ibid. Henry Chadwick, “Introduction” to Augustine’s Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998: ix. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967: 165. Augustine, Confessions, 3. Ibid. Ibid., 5. My italics. Ibid., 6. Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography: 181. Augustine, Confessions, xxiii. Ibid. Ibid., xv-xvi. Brown, in Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, also cited the conversion tales of martyrs, “overshadowed by death” and with death as their climax, as precedents to Augustine’s “autobiography”: 159. Augustine, Confessions, 49. Ibid.: 173.

260

Notes

102. Robert Bernasconi, “The Infi nite Task of Confession: A Contribution to the History of Ethics,” Acta Institutionis Philosophiae et Aestheticae, vol. 6 (1988)”: 80. 103. Ibid. 104. Augustine, Confessions, see page 149 for repeated examples. 105. Ibid., 132. 106. Ibid., 75. 107. Ibid., 145. 108. Ibid., 145. 109. Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984: 215. 110. For another study of how rarely medieval subjects confessed, see Rob Meens, “Frequency and Nature of Early Medieval Penance,” in Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages, Peter Briller and A. J. Minnis, eds. York, United Kingdom: York Medieval Press, 1998: 35–55. 111. Mortimer, The Origins of Private Penance in the Western Church, 171. 112. Berggren, The Psychology of Confession, 19, 4, 11, 10, 12. 113. Ibid., 4. 114. Paul Galtier, L’Église et la rémission des péchées. Paris: 1932. Mortimer and others have refuted Galtier’s position. 115. Mortimer, The Origins of Private Penance in the Western Church, 141–2. 116. Ludwig Bieler, ed. The Irish Penitentials. Dublin: The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1975. 117. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of Reformation, 9. 118. Ronald K. Rittgers, “Private Confession in the German Reformation,” Repentance in Christian Theology, Mark Boda and Gordon Smith, eds. Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2006: 190–1. See also John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A translation of the principal libri poenitentiales and selections from related documents. New York: Octagon Books, 1965: 29. 119. Allen Frantzen, “The tradition of penitentials in Anglo-Saxon England,” Anglo Saxon England, vol. 11, 1982: 23–56. 120. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of Reformation, 11. 121. Ibid., 14. 122. Cited in Tentler, 25. 123. Bernasconi, “The Infi nite Task of Confession,” 84. 124. Ibid.: 87. 125. Ibid.: 84. 126. Ibid.: 78. 127. Ibid. 128. Meyers, “Poor Sinning Folk”: Confession and Conscience in Counter-Reformation Germany. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996: 7. 129. See Bernasconi, “The Infi nite Task of Confession,” 85. 130. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of Reformation, 62. 131. If we examine the incidents of confession in Boccaccio’s Decameron, these demeanors within the confessional come to seem less unlikely. 132. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of Reformation, 26–7. 133. Bernasconi writes that “the tide of diminishing penances” was “a tendency governed by the desire to encourage confession.” “The Infi nite Task of Confession,” 85. 134. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of Reformation, 109 ff. 135. For this and similar “didactic jingles” used as aide-mémoires for priests and penitents alike, see Tentler, 117 ff. 136. See Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of Reformation, 119.

Notes

261

137. Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984: 216. 138. Ibid. 139. Ibid. 140. While authors such as Foucault and Le Goff think there would have been a dramatic increase in confessions, Tentler is more cautious and tends to see a gradual rise in the importance of confession, of which the Decree of 1215 is an important signpost rather than cause. Tentler points to one cleric who complained even in the twelfth century that the laity “barely confessed once a year” (70), thus suggesting that the frequency of confession, and the expectation of it, was not so much lower before the legislation of 1215 than after. After 1215, many Christians would still only have confessed the required one time per year, largely because an “alms” or Beichtgeld was customarily expected of the penitent, and parishioners would thus have been put off by the expense of confessing. 141. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of Reformation, 59. 142. Ibid., 60 ff. 143. Meyers, “Poor Sinning Folk,” 91. 144. Ibid. 145. Ibid.: 96. 146. Ibid.: 97–8. 147. Ibid.: 91–3. 148. Ibid.: 94. 149. Alexander Murray, “Counselling in Medieval Confession,” Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages: 63–77. 150. Katherine C. Little, Confession and Resistance: Defi ning the Self in Late Medieval England. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006: 101. 151. Meyers, “Poor Sinning Folk,” 56. 152. Foucault, La volonté de savoir, 81. 153. See Bernasconi, “The Infi nite Task of Confession,” for an account of the invention of the confessional, the problems and scandals which it was intended to resolve and to which it gave rise. 154. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of Reformation, 82 ff. 155. Bernasconi, “The Infi nite Task of Confession,” 86. 156. Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 93. 157. Ibid. It is in the shadow of this history that modern law has developed the right of suspects to not bear witness against themselves. 158. The Justinian’s Digest of Roman law had been rediscovered in 1070. In it, circumstantial evidence is insuffi cient to convict a suspect in the absence of a confession, and thus confessions were necessary for many convictions. See Brooks, Troubling Confessions, Ch. 4, and Foucault, La volonté de savoir, 78. 159. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of Reformation, 92. 160. Henry Charles Lea, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church. Philadelphia: Lea, 1896. 161. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of Reformation, 165. 162. Jacqueline Murray, “Gendered Souls in Sexed Bodies: The Male Construction of Female Sexuality in Some Medieval Confessors’ Manuals,” Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages: 79–93. 163. Peter Briller, “Confession in the Middle Ages: An Introduction,” Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages: 15. 164. Gerson, De Confessione mollitiei, Du Pin, II, 453–455. Cited in Tentler, 91–2.

262 Notes 165. Foucault, Abnormal, 219–221. 166. Rittgers also observes that confessions were rarely in practice as thorough as they were supposed to be according to the manuals. See “Private Confession in the German Reformation,” in Repentance in Christian Theology, 192. 167. Meyers, “Poor Sinning Folk,” 183. 168. Ibid., 83–7. For a study of confession in nunneries, see Julie Ann Smith, Ordering Women’s Lives: Penitentials and Nunnery Rules in the Early Medieval West. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2001. 169. Meyers,”Poor Sinning Folk,” 57. 170. Ibid., 144 ff. 171. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of Reformation, 135. 172. Ibid., 141–2. 173. Calvin, Ionnais Calvini Opera quae supersunt omnia, 59 vols., Corpus Reformatorum, ed. by W. Baum, Eduard Cunitz, and Eduard Reus, vols 29– 87, Brunswick, 1863–1900, letter to Farel (May 1540), 9:41; cited in Tentler, 350 f. 2. 174. Luther, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), discussed in Rittgers, “Private Confession in the German Reformation,” Repentance in Christian Theology, Mark Boda and Gordon Smith, eds., Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2006: 193–4. 175. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of Reformation, 73. 176. Ibid., 80–81. 177. Berggren, The Psychology of Confession, 6. 178. Von Dambach, Consolatio theologiae, XIV, 8, 9, cited in Tentler, 114. 179. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of Reformation, 114. 180. Matthew of Cracow, De modo confitendi, 8, A3b, cited in Tentler, 154–5. 181. Antoninus of Florence, Confessionale-Defecerunt, 8, cited in Tentler, 76–7. 182. Carlo Borromeo, Instructions aux confesseurs. Discussed by Foucault in Abnormal, 181. 183. This is Antonius de Butrio’s suggestion. Discussed in Tenter, 82. 184. Gerson, De Remediis, Du Pin, III, 585c-586b. 185. Cited in Riggers, “Private Confession in the German Reformation,” 194. 186. Cited in Meyers, “Poor Sinning Folk,” 65. 187. Calvin, Opera, I, 158, 707; 2, 469; 6, 495, 7, 467; cited in Tentler, 362. 188. Rittgers, 195–8. 189. “On the Sacrament of Penance,” Catechism of the Council of Trent for Parish Priests. Issued by Order of Pius V., tr. with notes by John A. McHugh and C. J. Callan. New York and London, 1947: 190. 190. Berggren, The Psychology of Confession, 13. 191. Meyers, “Poor Sinning Folk,” 91–3. 192. Rittgers, “Private Confession in the German Reformation,” 201. 193. R. Huch, op. cit.; p. 239, cited in Berggren, 8–9. 194. Berggren, The Psychology of Confession, 8–9.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1. Ladelle McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press: 1999: 28. 2. Foucault, La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976: 80. 3. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. New York: Vintage, 1978: 23. 4. Ibid. 25–26.

Notes

263

5. Ibid., 61. 6. Ibid., 65. 7. Foucault, lecture for 5 March 1975. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France: 1974–1975. New York: Picador, 2004. 8. Bergman, Laterna Magica. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. 9. See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Bodies and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1990: 218ff. 10. Cited in Laqueur, 221. 11. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, 66. 12. Rousseau, Confessions. London: Everyman’s Library: 1931: 65 (my emphasis). 13. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. New York, San Diego, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1957 (1929): 26–7. 14. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, 32. 15. Ibid., 8. 16. Ibid., 6. 17. Ibid., 8. 18. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, 44. 19. Cited in Brooks, 88. 20. Annie Reich, “On Counter-transference,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1951), 32: 25–31. 21. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, 44–5. 22. Ibid., 60. 23. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 48. 25. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984: 69. 26. Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 101–2. 27. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, 43. 28. Ibid., 58–9. 29. Ibid., 81. 30. Ibid., 80. 31. Ibid., 59. 32. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, 60. 33. Ibid., 43. The Charles Jouy case is also discussed in more detail in Abnormal, in the lecture for the 19 of March 1975. For feminist discussions of this case, see Monique Plaza, “Our Damages and Their Compensation: Rape: The Will Not to Know of Michel Foucault.” Feminist Issues: 1: 25–35 (1981); Winifred Woodhull, “Sexuality, Power, and the Question of Rape,” in Feminism and Foucault: Refl ections on Resistance. Ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988: 167–176; Vikki Bell, “‘Beyond the “Thorny Question”‘: Feminism, Foucault, and the De-Sexualization of Rape.” International Journal of the Sociology of Law 19 (Feb. 1991): 83–100; Hengehold, Laura, “An Immodest Proposal: Foucault, Hysterization, and the ‘Second Rape.’” Hypatia 9 (3): 89–107, 1994; Ann J. Cahill, Rethinking Rape. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001; Chloë Taylor, “Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, volume 24 (4), 2009. 34. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, 31. 35. Ibid., 43. 36. In the Renaissance, for instance, sexual crimes were considered a consequence of passionate circumstances and were treated extraordinarily cavalierly. Rapes were barely described in court records unless they involved bloodshed, or sex between persons whose blood was too proximate or too

264 Notes

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

distant (i.e. incest or sex between persons of different social classes), demonstrating Foucault’s point that identity, and interest, lay in blood rather than sex in the pre-modern period. At the same time, contrary to modern intuitions, crimes such as theft showed an intrinsically degenerate character, a permanent threat to the community, and could thus lead to exile, the removal of the thief’s hands, or other permanent impediments to repetitions of the crime. This shows that what an epoch considers intrinsic to a person’s character changes, and it is a peculiarity of our own era that sex crimes, and not theft, are considered bound to repetition rather than to social contexts. In the Renaissance, when sex acts were not deemed bound to a subject’s very being and thus to repetition, particular sex acts such as homosexuality and rape do indeed seem to have been related to “time of life,” i.e. bachelorhood, and not to identity. Young men in Renaissance Italy, for instance, regularly had homosexual relations and engaged in gang rapes of lower class women, but set aside these behaviours when they married in their late twenties. Today if a young man commits rape or has homosexual relations, he will see himself, and will be seen, as a sadist, rapist, or homosexual for life, and it seems that he is indeed today more likely to continue those behaviours throughout his life. See the studies of treatments of sexual crimes in the early modern period in works such as Guido Ruggiero’s Violence in Early Renaissance Venice (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1980) and The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). See previous endnote. Lejeune, Philippe, “Le pacte autobiographique.” Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975. 13–46. Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 18. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” The Foucault Reader. Paul Rabinow, ed. New York: Pantheon, 1984: 79. C. G. Prado, “The Faces of Truth,” Chapter Six of Starting With Foucault: An Introduction to Genealogy. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000. Cited in Prado, Starting with Foucault, 129. See Foucault, “Two lectures,” Power/Knowledge, for instance. Foucault, “Subjectivity and Truth,” 173. Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 74. Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground. New York: Signet, 1961: 101. Rousseau, Confessions, 33. Ibid., 34. Previous self-writings on the part of Rousseau include: les lettres à M. de Malesherbes and a notebook titled “Mon Portrait.” Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 21. de Man, “Excuses (Confessions),” Allegories of Reading. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979: 278–9. Ibid., 285. Ibid., 286. Ibid., 286. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994: 105. Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon,” 84. Footnote to page 33, of The Confessions. London: Everyman’s Library, 1931. The event is described in Les Confessions. Paris: Gallimard, 1973: 72. Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 21.

Notes 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

265

Ibid. de Man, “Excuses (Confessions),” 284. Ibid., 292. Ibid., 293. Ibid., 279. Ibid., footnote on page 289–90. Ibid., 290. Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon,” 108. Ibid., 109. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 111. Rousseau, Les Confessions, 439: “J’ai promis ma confession, non ma justification; ainsi je m’arrête sur ce point.” Foucault illustrates this point in “The Dangerous Individual,” Michel Foucault:Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977– 1984. Lawrence D. Kritzman ed. New York and London: Routledge, 1988: 125–151. Cited in Tentler, Troubling Confessions, 25. Derrida, “History of the Lie: Prolegomena,” Without Alibi, translated and edited by Peggy Kamuf. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002: 38. Cited in Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 11. Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 74. Cited in Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 30–31. Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 76. Ibid., 31. Maimonides, The Code of Maimonides: Book Fourteen, The Book of Judges, 52–53, trans. Abraham M. Hershman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), cited in Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 72. Cited in Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 24. Ibid., 24–5. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 11. Ibid. Ibid., 84. Despite all the evidence he provides to show that confessions are “troubling,” coerced, often false, abject, and so forth, Brooks nevertheless writes, “They’re too useful to give up.” Troubling Confessions, 87. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 153. Ibid., 38 and following. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 150–1. Ibid., 152. Ibid., 129–30. Ibid., 141. Foucault, “The Dangerous Individual,” 125–6. Ibid.: 127. This is the expression of Justice Frankfurter, cited in Brooks, 69. Freud, Studies in Hysteria, 82. Ibid., 85. Ibid. Ibid., 86.

266 Notes 104. Freud, “First Lecture” of the Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1910), for instance, and in A Short Account of Psychoanalysis (1923). 105. Freud, “Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear,” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (1926). London: Penguin, 2003: 219. 106. Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (1914). London: Penguin, 2003: 33. 107. Ibid., 33–34. 108. Freud’s most extensive discussion of the death drive occurs in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The death drive, which posited a biological instinct to return to a state of quiescence, was Freud’s manner of explaining the tendency of humans to repeat traumatic and painful experiences, which compulsion to repeat confl icts with our instinct to seek pleasure, or appeared to contradict the pleasure principle which Freud had theorized earlier. 109. Freud, “A Short Account of Psychoanalysis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, volume XIX (1923– 1925): 194. 110. In A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Freud writes that when “excitations in the unconscious” are “‘incapable of becoming conscious’; we call them repressed.” (306). See also “Repression” and “The Unconscious” in Freud’s Metapsychology. 111. Appignanesi and Forrester, Freud’s Women. London: Phoenix, 2005: 81. 112. Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground, 123. 113. Ibid., 202. 114. Ibid. 115. Ibid. 116. Ibid., 203. 117. Ernaux, Se perdre. Paris: Gallimard, 2001: 42. 118. Ernaux, La honte. Paris: Gallimard, 1997: 132. 119. Ernaux, L’écriture comme un couteau. Paris: Stock, 2003: 51. To take some examples, Ernaux writes, “J’avais honte de mon livre [Les armoires vides]” (L’écriture comme un couteau 51) (“I was ashamed of my book [Les armoires vides]”), and tells us that, years later, she was ashamed to tell her sons that she was having an affair, was uncomfortable with her children knowing about her sex life, and told them only for pragmatic purposes (Se perdre 26), and yet she soon after published not only an autobiographical book on her affair but her diaries from the period, in which her sons may read in detail of their mother’s sexual encounters, her masturbation, her romantic and emotional degradation, as well as her admission that, compared to the passion she is living, her sons figure merely as inconveniences in her life. Similarly, she tells us of the pains she went through to conceal her pregnancy and abortion from her family, and yet soon afterwards she published the story of these events in Les armoires vides for all, including her family, to read. 120. Ernaux, Passion simple. Paris: Gallimard: 1992: 69. All translations of Ernaux are my own. 121. See, for instance, Ernaux, “Quelque chose de dangereux” in L’écriture comme un couteau, or her talk at Winchester College, 10 March 1988, cited in McIlvanney 2–3, in which she says, “pour moi, l’écriture a eu toujours un petit peu cette fonction de dire ce que l’on sent mais sans oser le dire, de libérer des choses qui sont très refoulées dans les gens et qui ne se disent pas.” 122. Ernaux, L’écriture comme un couteau, 117. 123. Ernaux, Se perdre, 54. 124. Ernaux, Se perdre, 70. 125. Ernaux, Se perdre, 155.

Notes 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134.

135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152.

267

Ernaux, La honte, 16. Ernaux, Se perdre, 144. Ernaux, Passion simple, 24. Ernaux, Se perdre, 117. Rousseau, Confessions, 328. Ernaux, Se perdre, 200. Ibid., 172–3. Ernaux, La honte, 16–17. For a similar discussion of trauma and healing through expression, see Susan Brison, “Surviving Sexual Violence: A Philosophical Perspective,” in Violence against Women: Philosophical Perspectives. Ed. Stanley G. French, Wanda Teays, and Laura M. Purdy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998: 11–26; see also Brison’s “The Uses of Narrative in the Aftermath of Violence,” in On Feminist Ethics and Politics. On Feminist Ethics and Politics. Ed. Claudia Card. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999: 200–225. Ernaux, La honte, 21. Ernaux, Se perdre, 224, 227, etc. Ibid. Ibid., 289. Ernaux, L’événement. Paris: Gallimard, 2000: 108. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 102. Ernaux, Se perdre, 18. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 48. Ibid. Ibid., 68–9. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 182. Ibid., 269. Ibid., 271. Ibid., 63–64. Although she adds that the text may nevertheless help others, if not herself, Ernaux, it seems clear, is not writing out of altruism Superfi cially altruistic acts in Ernaux, such as giving money to beggars and charities, are immediately shown to be self-interested in Se perdre and Passion simple, in which Ernaux explains that she gives to charitable causes out of the superstitious belief that this will make her lover call her that day. Casting doubt on the idea that Ernaux might be writing in order to help others, we can think of Ernaux’s claims not to be writing for her readers whom she suggests she despises: “desire to insult the people who came there, to the Cultural Center, to hear me. To tell them: “What are you waiting for? What are you here for? The cultural mass? Bunch of idiots, there is nothing to see here and I don’t write for you, cultivated old Swedish grannies.” (Se perdre 122–3) In a passage discussed below, similarly, Ernaux explains why she writes things which her readers do not necessarily need or want to know, stating that she is writing, not for them, but for herself: she claims she needs to write certain details, “even if it is not necessarily what interests most readers.” (L’écriture comme un couteau, 144–5) McIlvanney writes that even Ernaux’s apparent interest in the Other in certain nonautobiographical works, such as Journal de Dehors, is securely anchored in an interest in herself, such that there seems to be no non-self-interested functions of writing for Ernaux. See McIlvanney, Annie Ernaux, The Return to Origins. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001: 11.

268 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160.

Notes Arcan, Folle. Paris: Seuil, 2004: 69. All translations of Arcan are my own. Ibid., 172. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 198. Ibid., 151. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 96. Derrida, “A Silkworm of One’s Own,” Veils, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001: 38.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 1. Foucault, Dits et écrits II. Paris: Gallimard, 2001: 1071. 2. Todd May, Between Genealogy and Epistemology: Psychology, Politics, and Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1993: 10. 3. John E. Toews, “Foucault and the Freudian Subject,” in Foucault and the Writing of History, ed. Jan Goldstein. Oxford, U.K. and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1994: 131. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 133. 6. Todd May, Between Genealogy and Epistemology, 58. 7. Foucault, Madness and Civilization. New York: Vintage, 1965: 16. 8. Pascal, Pensées, cited in Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 70. 9. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 75. 10. Ibid., 76. 11. Ibid., 75. 12. Ibid., 68. 13. Ibid., 236. 14. Ibid., 227. 15. Ibid., 158. 16. Ibid. 17. For Foucault, the “soul” is a product of the disciplining of the body. 18. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 224. 19. Ibid., 247. 20. Ibid., 244–245. 21. Ibid. 245. 22. Ibid., 247. 23. Cited, Ibid., 271. 24. Foucault, “Psychiatry, Confi nement, Prison,” in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984: 180. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 188. 27. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 251. 28. Ibid., 256. 29. Ibid., 255. 30. Ibid., 264. 31. Ibid., 253. 32. See Kristeva’s About Chinese Women. London and New York: Boyars, 1986 (1977). 33. See Judith Butler’s critical essay on Kristeva, “The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva,” in Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing, ed. Kelly Oliver. New York and London: Routledge, 1993: 164–178.

Notes 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

269

Foucault, Madness and Civilization., 258. Ibid., 260. Ibid., 268. Foucault, “Confi nement, Psychiatry, Prison,” 181. Ibid., 183. Ibid. Ibid., 193. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 262. Ibid., 277–8. Ibid. 278. Ibid., 207. Ibid., 208. Foucault, “I, Pierre Rivière . . .” Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1975: xiii. Foucault, “Critical Theory/Intellectual History,” Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, Interviews and Other Writings: 1977–1984: 23. Foucault, “The Functions of Literature,” Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984. Lawrence D. Kritzman ed. New York and London: Routledge, 1988: 312. Foucault, “Entretien avec Michel Foucault,” Dits et écrits II, 97. Ibid., 98. Foucault, Dits et écrits II, 1016. My translation. See, for instance, Foucault, “Sexualité et Pouvoir,” Dits et écrits II: 555. Foucault, The Order of Things. New York: Vintage, 1970: xv. McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures, 72. Foucault’s most serious biographer, Didier Eribon, mentions that Foucault debated throughout his entire life whether he should be psychoanalyzed. Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23, trans. And ed. James Strachey, Hogarth Press, London: 216; reproduced in On Freud’s “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” Edited by Joseph Sandler for the International Psychoanalytic Association, New Haven and New York: Yale University Press, 1991: 3. I will provide the page numbers for both the Standard Edition and the IPA publication. Ibid., 225 [12]. Ibid. 250 [37]. Ibid., 217–18 [4–5]. Ibid. 221 [8]. Ibid. 222 [9]. Freud, “Eighteenth Lecture,” in A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1917). New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1970: 285. Ibid. Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” 235 [22]. Freud, “The Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy”: 17. Ibid., 239 [26]. Ibid., 232 [19]. Ibid. 248 [35]. Ibid. Ibid., 249 [36]. Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”: 235 [22]. Ibid. 235 [22]. Freud, “A Short Account of Psycho-analysis”: 209. Joseph Sandler, “Preface” to On Freud’s “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” vii.

270

Notes

75. Breuer himself compares psychoanalytic confession to Christian confession in the Studies on Hysteria, while Freud also makes this comparison, although also to draw out contrasts, in his The Question of Lay Analysis. 76. Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” 221 [8]. 77. Ibid., 239 [26]. 78. Ibid., 218 [5]. 79. Ibid., 250 [37]. 80. Ibid., 249 [36]. 81. See, for instance, Lacan’s comments on the interference of Freud’s countertransference in the Dora case in “Intervention on Transference,” in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose, New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1985: 61–73. 82. Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” 249 [36]. 83. Benjamin Wolstein, “Introduction” to Essential Papers in Counter-transference. Benjamin Wolstein, ed. New York and London: New York University Press, 1988: 3. 84. Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” 252 [39]. 85. Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester write in Freud’s Women that by the 1930s Freud was aware of maternal transference, aware of his discomfort with this role: 160. Appignanese and Forrester also argue that Freud failed in his analysis of Ida Bauer (“Dora”) because in his counter-transference he insisted on believing that Ida had transferred onto him her relation with Herr K., a man whom Freud saw as strong and virile and to whom Ida, like any normal female, should be attracted. Freud did not want to see himself as a father-substitute in Ida’s case since her father was impotent and sickly, and preferred to see himself as Herr K., and to thus exerted his energies trying to convince Ida that she was secretly in love with Herr K. In the process, he neglected to realize that Ida was in fact in love with Frau K., who had introduced her to sexual knowledge through their secret conversations. Appignanesi and Forrester argue that if Freud reminded Ida of anyone, it would have been Frau K., since she was again having sexually explicit and secret conversations with Freud. 86. Cited in Appignanesi and Forester, Freud’s Women, xiv. 87. Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” 252 [39]. 88. Ibid, 249 [36]. 89. Ibid., 239 [26]. 90. Ibid., 239 [26]. 91. Sandor Ferenczi and Otto Rank, “The Development of Psychoanalysis,” in Essential Papers on Counter-transference: 33. (My emphasis) 92. Ralph M. Crowley, “Human Reactions of Analysts to Patients,” in Essential Papers on Counter-transference, 85. 93. Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” 239 [26]. 94. Annie Reich, “On Counter-transference,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1950) 31: 81–84. Discussed by Mabel Blake Cohen in “Counter-transference and Anxiety,” in Essential Papers On Countertransference, 67. 95. Annie Reich, “On Counter-transference,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1950) 31: 81–84. Discussed by Mabel Blake Cohen in “Counter-transference and Anxiety,” in Essential Papers On Countertransference, 67. 96. Crowley, “Human Reactions of Analysts to Patients,” in Essential Papers on Counter-transference, 84. 97. Ibid., 87.

Notes

271

98. Edward S. Tauber, “Exploring the Therapeutic Use of Counter-transference Data,” Essential Papers on Counter-transference, 112. 99. Clara Thompson, “The Role of the Analyst’s Personality in Therapy”: Essential Papers in Counter-transference. 100. Lawrence Epstein and Arthur F. Steiner provide a summary of such views in “Counter-transference: the Therapist’s Contribution to Treatment,” in Essential Papers on Contertransference: 284–5. 101. Ibid: 285. 102. Ibid., 296. 103. Winnicott, D., “Hate in Counter-transference,” in International Journal of Psycho-analysis (1949), 30: 69–75. 104. Kelly Oliver, “Introduction” to Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing: New York and London: Routledge, 1993: 11. 105. Judith Butler, “The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva,” in Ethics, Politics and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing. 106. Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995: 86. 107. Ibid., 69: “Nine out of ten patients who have been diagnosed with multiple personality disorder are women.” 108. Freud, “A Short Account of Psycho-analysis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, volume XIX (1923– 1925): 209. 109. Freud, “Medusa’s Head,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920–1922): 273–4. 110. Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” 240 [27]. 111. Foucault, “Sexualité et Solitude,” in Dits et écrits II, 993. 112. For instance, in Freud’s “A Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” although the patient is not neurotic or hysterical, her homosexuality requires treatment undertaken in the hopes of “curing” her and “converting” her to a male object choice. Freud discovers what went “wrong” in the development of her Oedipal complex, and describes the patient’s lesbianism as a “foreswearing of her womanhood.” The patient is described as “changed into a man” by choosing to take the active role in pursuing a feminine love object. In a footnote to this case, Freud also describes having successfully “cured” a male homosexual, meaning that the patient came to be attracted to women. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920–22): 145–174. 113. In Les nouvelles maladies de l’âme, Kristeva writes that female homosexuality “n’est pas une sexualité” (93). Judith Butler explores the impossibility of lesbian desire in Kristeva at length in Gender Trouble. 114. Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” 251 [38] ff. 115. Freud, “A Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” 154. 116. Ibid., 251 [38]. 117. Ibid. 118. That passivity is normal in women but neurotic in men is assumed again in Freud’s “The Economic Problem of Masochism” and in “Femininity,” in which “feminine masochism” is described as normal in women, and only when men are masochistic is there a problem for psychoanalytic study. Appropriately, every case of “feminine masochism” which Freud discusses involves a male patient: a female patient who displayed “feminine masochism” would be considered well-adjusted to her destined “attitude” of passivity and inferiority, and her case would not need to be discussed. 119. Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” 252 [39]. 120. Ibid., 251–2 [38–9].

272 Notes 121. National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Mental Health. 1994. Depression: What Every Woman Should Know. NIH publication 95–3871. Washington, DC: GPO. 122. Kelly Oliver, The Colonization of Psychic Space: 104. See also Abram Kardiner and Lionel Ovesey, Mark of Oppression: Explorations in the Personality of the American Negro. The National Mental Health Association reports that “historically, among health professionals, there has been aconsistent under-diagnosis of depression in the African American community and an over-diagnosis of schizophrenia. (1998a), cited in Oliver: 212. 123. The Dr. Phil episodes dealing with the Jena 6 aired on September 29 and October 1, 2007. 124. Fanon, Peau Noir, Masques Blancs. Paris: Seuil: 1952: 8. My translation. 125. Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre. Paris: Decouverte, 1962: 251. 126. Ibid.: 42. 127. Ibid.: 275–7. 128. Félix Guattari, Chaosmose, 1992. 129. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove, 1965: 50–66. 130. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, 119. 131. Ibid., 5. 132. As Freud writes: “Analysis [ . . . ] enables the ego [ . . . ] to undertake a revision of these old repressions; a few are demolished, while others are recognized but constructed afresh out of more solid material. These new dams are of quite a different degree of fi rmness from the earlier ones; we may be confident that they will not give way so easily before a rising flood of instinctual strength. Thus the real achievement of analytic therapy would be the subsequent correction of the original process of repression [ . . . ] “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” 227 [14]. 133. Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” 225 [12]. 134. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: The Beacon Press: 8. 135. See pages 81–2 of The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, for a discussion of Lacanian psychoanalysis (although Foucault does not name Lacan). 136. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, 7. 137. Ibid., 131. 138. Ibid., 59. 139. Ibid. 140. Ibid. 141. Ibid. 142. Ibid. 143. Ibid., 68. 144. Freud gives the example of a civil servant who was not allowed to “communicate certain matters” because “bound by his oath.” Freud writes: “I made up my mind never again to repeat the attempt under such conditions.” “Nineteenth Lecture,” A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, 299. 145. Lucia E. Tower, “Counter-transference” (1961), in Essential papers in Counter-transference, 134. 146. Janet MacKenzie Rioch, “The Transference Phenomenon in Psycho-Analytic Therapy” (1943), in Essential Papers in Counter-transference, 40. 147. Ibid. 42. 148. Ibid. 149. Ibid., 49. 150. Cressida Heyes, Self-transformations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Notes

273

151. John E. Toews, “Foucault and the Freudian Subject,” in Foucault and the Writing of History, 128. 152. Ibid. 153. Fanon, Les damnés de la terre, 291. 154. Ibid. 285. ff. 155. Ibid.: 241. 156. The only instance in which anything sexual arises in one of these case studies is in a case of a man experiencing impotence after the rape of his wife. Even in this case, Fanon does not delve into the patient’s sexual history, his sexual desires or proclivities. It is simply a case of a man being unable to have sex with any woman because he thinks of his wife who has been made “rotten” by the colonizers. The solution for Fanon, again, is not a question of either repressing or liberating sexual impulses, or even inquiring into them, but ending the colonization of Algeria. 157. Ibid.: 296. 158. Ibid.: 46. 159. Foucault was himself in Algeria at the time, and also aided students in the FLN. He then returned to France where he participated in post-May ’68 riots with his students and colleagues, which took inspiration from Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. 160. Freud, “The Question of Lay Analysis,” 21. 161. Oliver argues that psychic revolt is necessary for social revolt: The Colonization of Psychic Space, 149.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 1. Makine, Andreï, La femme qui attendait. Paris: Seuil, 2004. 2. Derrida, “Circumfession,” Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993: 147. 3. Nancy K. Miller, “Reading Spaces.” The Yale Journal of Criticism, volume 13, number 2 (2000): 422. 4. Ibid.: 422–3. 5. Foucault, La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976: 82–3. 6. Judith Butler, Giving An Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005: 21. 7. Augustine, Confessions. New York: Vintage, 1997: 145. 8. Pontalis, “Préface” to Rousseau’s Confessions. Paris: Gallimard, 1973: 8: “l’examen des différents fragments autobiographiques, la correspondance avec l’éditeur Rey, attestent la longue antériorité d’un projet dont on pourrait même soutenir, tant à la fois il l’accompagne et la corrige, qu’il est corrélatif de l’existence de Rousseau, traversée de part en part par le désir moins de se connaître que d’être reconnu.” 9. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984: 252. 10. Ibid., 261–5. 11. Ernaux, “Vers un je transpersonnel.” Autofiction et cie. Ed. Serge Doubrovsky, Jacques Lecarme and Philippe Lejeune. Paris: RITM, numero 6, Université de Paris X, 1993. 219–221. 12. Cited in McIlvanney, Siobhán. Annie Ernaux: The Return to Origins. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001: 5. 13. Ernaux writes, for instance: “Les lesbiennes choissisent la facilité” (Se perdre 93) (“Lesbians choose facility”); “une femme ne peut donner un plaisir supplémentaire à la masturbation, non ce que j’ai partagé avec S.” (Se perdre

274 Notes

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

154) (“a woman cannot give pleasure [to another woman] beyond that of masturbation, not that which I shared with S.”) L’événement. Paris: Gallimard, 2000: 112. Miller, “Reading Spaces,” The Yale Journal of Criticism, volume 13, number 2 (2000): 422. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 430. Ibid., 423. Ibid., 424. Ibid., 424. Ibid. Ibid., 425. Ibid., 429. Ibid., 423. Ibid., 430. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 430. Ibid., 432. Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 165. Ibid., 145. Sartre, L’être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard, 1943: 99. Sartre, Selections from the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Robert D. Cumming. New York: Random House, 1965: 158. Butler, Giving an Account of Onself, 43. Ibid., 82. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 68. Butler, Gender Trouble. New York and London: Routledge, 1999: 129. Sartre, Selections from the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, 159. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 43. Derrida, “To Forgive,” in Questioning God, ed. Jack Caputo, Mark Dooley, and Michael J. Scanlon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001: 41. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 27. Lévinas, “Toward the Other,” 15. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 22–23. Lévinas, Otherwise than Being. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998. 112. Lévinas, “Toward the Other,” 25 Derrida, “A Silkworm of One’s Own,” Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils, translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001: 38. Derrida, “History of the Lie: Prolegomena,” Without Alibi, translated and edited by Peggy Kamuf. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002: 42. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 47.

Notes

275

58. Ibid., 48. 59. Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2).” Without Alibi, translated and edited by Peggy Kamuf. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002: 79. 60. Ibid., 150. 61. Derrida, “‘Le parjure,’ perhaps: Storytelling and Lying,” Without Alibi, translated and edited by Peggy Kamuf. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002: 186. 62. Ibid., 187. 63. Ibid. 64. Sartre, Selections from The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Robert D. Cumming. New York: Random House, 1965: 156–7. 65. Ibid., 157. 66. Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon,” 160. 67. Derrida, “‘Le parjure,’ perhaps,” 192. 68. Ibid., 196. 69. Despite these differences, it still remains that testimonial speech may very easily fall into the dangers of confessional discourse which Foucault has described, or, particularly in cases of testifying to one’s own victimization, can reify the speaker into an essential subject of the experience she describes rather than liberating her from it. Testimonial, in other words, is different from confession, but it may fall into confession’s traps. Testifying repeatedly to victimization in a confessional manner, or as if this victimization were the truth of the self, for instance, can result in an inability on the speaker’s part to see herself as anything other than a victim and may construct her as such. Moreover, if victimization is the position from which a subject “comes to voice,” to use bell hooks’s phrase, even though this speech purportedly aims to liberate her from victimization, the subject may fi nd that she does not wish to give up that victimization and thus the site from which she feels she has a voice and a right to be heard. This in turn can lead not only to the subject interpreting scenarios in which she fi nds herself in self-victimizing ways, unable to see that she is not always the victim but may even be victimizing others, but can also contribute to the reproduction of a victimization which has become a secure site of identity for the testifying subject. Something like this is Zizek’s argument against feminism in The Ticklish Subject, and is also close to Wendy Brown’s more compelling discussion of feminism as ressentiment in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. We arguably also see this process of testimony to victimhood becoming identity most strikingly in the discourse of certain supporters of Israel today, in which a culture of necessary remembrance to indisputable victimization is not unconnected to the current victimization of others which many Israelis and supporters of Israel not only fail to recognize as such, but which they can only interpret as further harm to themselves, because they are invested in a cultural identity of victimhood and the political privileges which are justified by that position. To be clear, the problem lies not in testifying to the suffering of the Jews under, before, and after National Socialism, or of women under patriarchy for that matter (and not to equate the two), but in the way in which all this testifying can slide into the discursive construction of a self-perceived identity as “the one who suffers,” the only one who suffers, and the one who hence is only ever the victim and not ever the one who causes the suffering of others. This sense of self as universal and essential victim will inevitably be rejected by others, and since the subject is invested in her identity as victim, the rejection of this identity by others, the incredulity with which it is inevitably met, can only be experienced as an additional victimization and suffering.

276

Notes

Although it is necessary, therefore, to not re-silence the victims of history and of the present, and although it is of course necessary and advantageous on both individual and socio-political levels to create the conditions in which testimony to that victimization can take place and be heard, it is also important that this testimony should not function as reifying confessional speech as Foucault defi nes it. 70. Derrida, “To Forgive,” 47.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 1. Foucault, “An Ethics of Pleasure.” Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984: 371–381. 2. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure. New York: Vintage, 1985: 8. 3. Todd May, Between Genealogy and Epistemology. Psychology, Politics, and Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University, 1993: 123. 4. Amy Richlin argues that Foucault’s discussion of Ancient Greek and Roman practices of the self is even more ‘male-centered’ than are his original sources. Amy Richlin, “Foucault’s History of Sexuality: A useful theory for women?” in D. Larmour, P. Miller, C. Platter (eds.) Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. 5. The fi rst three chapters of Feminism and the Final Foucault also deal with examples of women practicing technologies of the self: Jeannette Bloem’s “The Shaping of a ‘Beautiful’ Soul: The Critical Life of Anna Maria van Schurman” considers the technologies of the self of a seventeenth century Dutch scholar, while Kathy E. Ferguson’s “E.G.: Emma Goldman, for Example,” considers the work of the Marxist writer and activist Emma Goldman, and in “Exit Woolf” Stephen M. Barber examines technologies of the self in the life and writing of Virginia Woolf. 6. Foucault, “The Dangerous Individual,” Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984. Lawrence D. Kritzman ed. New York and London: Routledge, 1988: 125–6. 7. Michel Foucault, “The Minimalist Self,” in Politics Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, edited with an Introduction by Lawrence D. Kritzman: 3–4. 8. Ibid., 4. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 3–4. 11. For discussions of the applicability of Foucault’s critique of confession to feminist consciousness raising, see Jana Sawicki: Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body. London and New York: Routledge, 1991: 44, 46, 104; see also Marianne Valverde’s “Experience and Truth Telling in a Post-Humanist World” and Margaret A. McLaren’s “Foucault and Feminism: Power, Resistance, Freedom,” both in Feminism and the Final Foucault, edited by Dianna Taylor and Karen Vintges. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004: 214–234. 12. Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings: 1977–1984: 330. 13. Cited in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault. Paris: Flammarion, 1991: 142. 14. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Paris: Gallimard, 1978: 62. 15. Ibid., 100–1. 16. Foucault, Dits et écrits II. Paris: Gallimard, 2001: 1234.

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17. My translation from: Dit et écrits II, 1249: “s’agissait de se constituer soimême comme sujet d’action rationnelle par l’appropriation, l’unification et la subjectivation, d’un déjà-dit fragmentaire et choisi.” 18. Marianne Valverde, “Experience and Truth-Telling in a Post-Humanist World.” Feminism and the Final Foucault: 67–90. 19. Cressida Heyes, “Foucault goes to Weight-Watchers.” Hypatia 21: 2, 2006. 20. Foucault, “An Ethics of Pleasure,” in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996: 379. 21. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: l’autoportrait et d’autres ruines. Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1990. 22. Ruggiero, Guido, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; Violence in Early Renaissance Venice. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1980. 23. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1989: 207. 24. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, Appendix B, ms. 22. 25. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, 22. 26. See Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, Appendix B: 462. 27. See Georges Vigarello, Histoire du viol: XVI-XX siècle. Paris: Seuil, 1998. Vigarello documents the remarkable infrequency of rape trials during this period, and the near impossibility of winning such cases. 28. See Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, 206–7. 29. Ibid., 207–8. There are numerous reasons to think that the painting may date to slightly later than 1610. For one, Orazio claims Artemisia only began to paint in 1609 and it is unlikely that she could have executed a work of this quality only a year later. Orazio lied about Artemisia’s age in the rape trial in order to claim that she was a minor when she was raped, and was also eager to claim that she was artistically precocious, and so he may also have wanted to ascribe a slightly earlier date to the painting than is accurate. The painting may also have been dated somewhat earlier than its actually date of execution in order to avoid associating it with Artemisia’s own rape trial, given the subject matter of the work. However it is precisely the subject matter of the work which further suggests that the painting was painted in 1611, when Artemisia, like Susanna, was undergoing sexual harassment and threats of slander. On the other hand, Garrard suggests that the date may be accurate while maintaining that it is an autobiographical work, in which case it would seem that the sexual harassment of Artemisia by Cosimo and Agostino began as early as 1610, which is when Agostino fi rst came to Rome, even if the actual rape did not take place until May of 1611. 30. See Mary Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, 185–6. 31. Max Rooses, in L’Oeuvre de P. P. Rubens: Histoire et description de ses tableaux et dessins, 5 vols. Antwerp: J. Maes, 1886–92], 1: 171, cited in Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, 191. 32. Griselda Pollock, “The Female Hero and the Making of a Feminist Canon: Artemisia Gentileschi’s representations of Susanna and Judith,” in Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. London and New York: Routledge, 1999: 113. 33. In addition to Mary Garrard’s work on Artemisia, see Ward Bissell’s Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art: Critical Reading and Catalogue Raisonné. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999; and Chapters Five and Six of Griselda Pollock’s Differencing the Canon:

278

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

Notes Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Augustine, The City of God, 1871–2. Trans. Rev. Marcus Dods. 2 vols. Edinburgh: T. &T. Clark. Garard, Artemisia Gentileschi, 21. Mary Garrard uses both these words in her fi rst book on Artemisia, and defends their use in her second book, Artemisia Gentileschi Around 1622: The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic Identity. Mary Garrard calls this an “anonymous” seventeenth-century work in her book, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art. Anna Banti, Artemisia. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995 (originally published in 1947); Alexandra Lapierre, Artemisia: The Story of a Battle for Greatness. Trans. Liz Heron. London: Chatto and Windus, 2000. See Miriam Fuch’s “Biographical Fiction as Autobiographical Palimpsest: Anna Banti’s Artemisia,” in The Text is Myself: Women’s Life Writing and Catastrophe. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004: 109–138, and Tina Olsin Lent’s “‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’: The Fictionalization of Baroque Artists. Artemisia Gentileschi in Contemporary Films and Novels,” in Literature/Film Quarterly (2006), for critical readings of Banti’s fictionalization of Artemisia. For more positive readings, see Deborah Heller’s “History, Art, and Fiction: Anna Banti’s Artemisia,” in Literary Sisterhoods: Imagining Women Artists. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2005: 50–67, and Griselda Pollock, “Feminist Dilemmas with the Art/Life Problem,” in The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and Other Thinking People, edited by Mieke Bal. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. See Elizabeth S. Cohen, “The Trials of Artemisia Gentileschi: A Rape as History,” in Sixteenth Century Journal 30, no. 1 (2000): 47–75. Pollock, however, argues that rape would be traumatizing in the early modern period even if for different reasons than it is today. While today rape is experienced as traumatic because it involves a loss of personal integrity, in the early modern period as in the ancient and medieval worlds, it was traumatic because it entailed a loss of what Pollock calls “social being.” As Pollock points out, women have killed themselves over the loss of their social being, and the story of Lucretia, painted so frequently during this period and by Artemisia herself, is an expression of the conviction that loss of social honor through sexual contamination made a woman’s life unlivable. As Pollock asks, “Why would the loss of social being be any less traumatizing than the loss of personal integrity if the terms offered by a culture for one’s identity bind modes of subjectivity to social sanction, often with real economic effects?” See Griselda Pollock, “Feminist Dilemmas with the Art/Life Problem”: 187. Griselda Pollock, “The Female Hero and the Making of a Feminist Canon,” Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. London and New York: Routledge, 1999: 112. Ibid. Ibid.: 114. Griselda Pollock, “Feminist Dilemmas with the Art/Life Problem,” in The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and Other Thinking People, edited by Mieke Bal. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005: 203. Griselda Pollock, “The Female Hero and the Making of a Feminist Canon,” 115. Ibid.

Notes

279

48. See Tina Olsin Lent, “‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’: The Fictionalization of Baroque Artists. Artemisia Gentileschi in Contemporary Films and Novels,” in Literature/Film Quarterly, 2006; Mary Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi Around 1622: The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic Identity: 121–3; Mary Garrard, “Artemisia’s Trial by Cinema,” Art in America. 86: 10 (October 1998): 65–9. Griselda Pollock, “Feminist Dilemmas with the Art/Life Problem”; Griselda Pollock, “A Hungry Eye,” in Sight and Sound, 8:11 (1998): 26–28. 49. Griselda Pollock, “Feminist Dilemmas with the Art/Life Problem”: 172. 50. Ibid., 174. 51. Ibid.: 195. 52. Ibid., 171. 53. Garrard points out that all the art historians who attribute the Cleopatra to Orazio are male, and almost all who attribute it to Artemisia are female, while the most prominent male specialist on Artemisia has recently re-attributed almost all of Artemisia’s early works to her father, to the bewilderment of everyone. See Mary Garrard’s “Artemisia’s Hand,” in The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and Other Thinking People, edited by Mieke Bal. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005: 1–31, especially pp. 15 and 24. 54. Foucault, “I, Pierre Rivière . . .” Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1975: x, xiii. 55. Ibid., xiii. 56. Ibid., 201. 57. In the second interrogation, Rivière says, “Yes, sir, an hour after my crime my conscience told me that I had done evil and I would not have done it over again.” In his memoir, Rivière also describes contrition and despair overwhelming him about an hour after having committed the murders. 58. Foucault, “I, Pierre Rivière . . . ,” 21. 59. Ibid., 24. 60. Ibid., 35. 61. Ibid., 22. 62. Ibid., 26, and cited 196. 63. Ibid., 196. 64. Ibid., 9–10. 65. Ibid., 40. 66. Ibid., 49. 67. Ibid., 125. 68. Ibid., 127. 69. Ibid., 135. 70. Ibid., 11. 71. Ibid., 211. 72. Ibid., 198. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., 20. 75. Ibid., 21. 76. Ibid., 206. 77. Ibid., 207. 78. Ibid., 208. 79. Ibid., 121. 80. Ibid., 112. 81. Foucault, Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite. New York: Pantheon, 1980: 72. 82. Ibid., 78.

280

Notes

83. S/he writes: “My plan was to unburden myself quite frankly to this unknown confessor and to await his judgement!”: Ibid. 62. 84. Ibid., 81. 85. Ibid., 89. 86. Ibid., 90–91. 87. Ibid., 99–100. 88. Ibid., 99–100. 89. Ibid., 122. 90. Ibid., 123. 91. Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” 316. 92. Butler, Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1999: 119. 93. Ibid., 125–6. 94. Foucault, Herculine Barbin, 87. 95. Thomas Laqueur distinguishes between one-sex and two-sex epistemologies in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990. 96. Cited in Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester, Freud’s Women. London: Phoenix, 2005: 77. 97. Ibid. 75. 98. See Kaplan, Marian A., The Jewish feminist movement in Germany: the campaigns of the Jüdischer Frauenbund, 1904–1938 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979); Anna O.: fourteen contemporary reinterpretations (New York, NY: Free Press, 1984); Guttman, Melinda Given, The Enigma of Anna O.: A biography of Bertha Pappenheim (Wickford, RI: Meyer Bell, 2001); Freeman, Lucy, The Story of Anna O. (New York, NY: Walker, 1972). See, also, Appignanesi and Forrester, Freud’s Women, 77–80. 99. Cited in Appignanesi and Forrester, 80. 100. Ibid., 79. 101. Ibid. 78. 102. See, for instance, Elisabeth Bronfen, Hysteria and Its Discontents. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998; and David B. Morris, The Culture of Pain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. 103. Hélène Cixous and Marguerite Duras have both argued that women’s writing or écriture feminine must be hysterical, for instance, or that any woman who writes as a woman will write hysterically. Discussed in Morris. 104. McWhorter, “Practicing Practicing,” in Feminism and the Final Foucault, Dianna Taylor and Karen Vintges, eds. . Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004: 151–2. 105. Ibid., 156. 106. Ibid., 157. 107. Ibid., 159. 108. Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body. London and New York: Routledge, 1991: 44. 109. Ibid., 104. 110. See Margaret McLaren’s “Foucault and Feminism: Power, Resistance, Freedom,” in Feminism and the Final Foucault. 111. Marianne Valverde considers self-help groups as well as consciousness-raising and autobiographical practices in her chapter, “Experience and Truth Telling in a Post-Humanist World.” Feminism and the Final Foucault. 112. See Helen O’Grady’s “An Ethics of the Self,” in Feminism and the Final Foucault. 113. See Sylvia Pritsch’s “Inventing Images, Constructing Standpoints: Feminist Strategies of the Technology of the Self,” in Feminism and the Final Foucault.

Notes

281

114. cited in James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993: 25. 115. One interview has recently been republished in Le Point under the provocative but misleading title, “Les confessions de Michel Foucault.” 116. Derrida, for instance, states that de Man’s texts “can and should be read as also politico-autobiographical texts. They also figure as long, machinelike performative, at once confessional and apologetic, with all the traits that he himself, in an exemplary way, trains on this object that offers itself and that is called, for example, and ‘à propos,’ Rousseau.” “Typewriter Ribbon Limited Ink (2).” Without Alibi, translated and edited by Peggy Kamuf. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002: 150. 117. Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel. London and New York: Continuum, 1986: 184. 118. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon, 1972: 17. 119. Although sympathetic to Foucault’s project, Andrew Scull nevertheless agrees with “the verdict of most Anglo-American specialists: that Madness and Civilization is a provocative and dazzlingly written prose poem, but one resting on the shakiest of scholarly foundations and riddled with errors of fact and interpretation.” Andrew Scull, Museums of Madness. New York. St. Martin’s Press, 1979, 70. Patricia O’Brien, although also appreciative of Foucault’s work, assents that “historians who are willing to admit that Foucault was writing history fi nd it bad history, too general, too unsubstantiated, too mechanistic.” Patricia O’Brien, “Michel Foucault’s History of Madness,” History of the Human Sciences 3 (1990): 57. H. C. Eric Midelfort, who is more dismissive of Foucault’s work, writes: “What we have discovered in looking at Madness and Civilization is that many of its arguments fly in the face of empirical evidence, and that many of its broadest generalizations are oversimplifications. Indeed, in his quest for the essence of an age, its episteme, Foucault seems simply to indulge in a whim for arbitrary and witty assertion so often that one wonders why so much attention and praise continue to fall his way.” H. C. Eric Midelfort, “Madness and Civilization in Early Modern Europe: A Reappraisal of Michel Foucault,” Malament, ed., After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter, 259. Midelfort arguably misunderstood Foucault’s book, however. For instance, he identifies “four basic contentions” in Foucault’s Madness and Civilization which, although historically contestable claims, are certainly not the four most fundamental points in Foucault’s work. Indeed, some of these four points merely function rhetorically, as Gary Gutting argues in “Foucault and the history of madness,” while three of them do not even deal with the “classical age” with which Foucault was primarily concerned. See Gutting’s chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Foucault’s later work has been equally sceptically received by experts in the period of history concerned. Regarding Foucault’s fi nal writings on ancient technologies of the self, for instance, Martha Nussbaum notes that “Foucault was not a professional classical scholar”: “Sex, Truth, and Solitude,” in Sex and Social Justice: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999: 332. Nussbaum and other classical scholars disagree with Foucault’s readings of ancient practices of self-care, however a case can be made that whether or not Foucault got it “right” is less important from the perspective of Foucault’s own project than the manners in which his writing about ancient technologies of the self helped him to develop these technologies for his own life, and enabled him to theorize manners in which such technologies could function in our own era. Because, as Foucault says in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” genealogy is not about

282 Notes

120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

understanding but about cutting, not about telling the one “true” story but equipping oneself to be able to approach the present critically, the historical accuracy of Foucault’s work is less important than the manners in which his writing worked as a practice of self-transformation. Foucault did not wish to understand ancient ethics in order to reactivate them—as cited above, Foucault found ancient ethics to be in many ways “disgusting”—but studied them from the perspective of the present. Foucault’s main objective in writing about antiquity was to intervene in the present, not to understand the past. As such, what he wrote about madness, and about antiquity, aimed to transform the author and enable him to think critically about contemporary forms of subjectification. McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures, xvii. Ibid. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 30. Ibid., xviii. Ibid., xix. Foucault, “An Ethics of Pleasure,” 379.

NOTES TO THE CONCLUSION 1. Winterson, Lighthousekeeping. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2004: 134. 2. Appignanesi and Forrester, Freud’s Women. London: Phoenix, 2005: xxiixxiii. 3. Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000: 42–3. 4. Ibid., 45. 5. Winterson, Lighthousekeeping, 49; 109; 129. 6. Ibid., 134. 7. Ibid. 11.

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Index

A Abelard, 51; and Heloïse, 21 abreaction theory, 70, 106, 160 Alain de Lille, 51 Althusser, Louis (L’avenir dure longtemps), 183, 225 Ambrose, 18, 48 “Anna O.” (Bertha Pappenheim), 75, 105, 108, 109, 114, 134, 138, 159, 225–228 Appignanesi, Lisa, 108, 250, 251 Aquinas, Thomas, 49, 51, 96 Arcan, Nelly, 10, 114–115 Aron, Jean-Paul, 174 Artemisia See Gentileschi Augustine, 1, 2, 6, 10, 17, 26–46, 47, 50, 90, 91, 169, 170, 173, 175, 183, 190, 202 autobiography, 2, 3, 10, 12, 38, 39–45, 71, 77, 82, 168–170, 209, 213, 225, 231, 233, 234

B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 169 Banti, Anna, 208–209, 212 Barbin, Herculine, 12, 25, 177, 178, 193, 196, 208, 214, 220–225, 234, 235 Bartky, Sandra, 229 Berggren, Erik, 1, 2, 6, 10, 39, 41, 46, 47 Bergman, Ingmar, 69, 91 Bernasconi, Robert, 44, 49–50, 52 Biliverti, Giovanni, 202, 242 Bonner, Gerald, 32–34 Brentano, Clemens, 65 Breuer, Joseph, 1, 6, 70, 75, 105–108, 134, 138, 159, 225, 226

Briller, Peter, 56, Brooks, Peter, 8, 10, 56, 66, 77, 80, 86, 91, 92, 96–102, 113, 115, 173, 174, 195, 251–252 Brown, Peter, 2, 6, 10, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44 Burger, Chief Justice Warren, 1, 6 Butler, Judith, 11, 146, 168, 169, 174–179, 224, 253

C Calvin, John, 59, 63 canonical penance, 18, 46–48, 51–52 care of the self, 9–12, 19, 20, 25, 26, 46, 137, 229, 162, 163, 166, 191–3, 198, 199, 228–235 Carracci, Annibale, 201, 238 Carravagio, 203, 205, 245 Cary, Phillip, 28–30, 50 Cassian, John, 21–24 Catharsis, 10, 70, 105–109, 111, 119, 251 Chadwick, Henry, 38 Chrysostom, John, 20–21 coercion, 9, 67, 76, 92, 97–98, 101, 103, 125, 194–5 Cohen, Elizabeth S., 209 Cohen, Mabel Blake, 145 confession: canonical confession See canonical penance Catholic confession, 1, 2, 6, 26, 46–65, 69, 112, 226; confession as therapeutic, See catharsis; abreaction theory false confessions, 66, 73, 79, 82, 84, 86, 91, 104; female confessants, 56, 58, 61, 75, 170; legal confessions, 1, 10, 16, 25, 55, 56, 73, 82, 92, 97–104;

296

Index

literary confessions, 1, 2, 41, 65, 67, 80, 108, 173 See also Arcan; autobiography; Barbin; Dostoyevsky; Ernaux; Kafka; memoir; Miller; Rivière; monastic confessions, 13, 17, 20–24, 25, 27, See also exagoreusis; political confessions, 182–184, 187–189; Protestant confession, 63–65; psychoanalytic confessions, 2 See also psychoanalysis; Reformation critiques of confession 59, 63–64; resistance to confession, 2, 3, 7, 24, 52–55, 57, 62, 64, 76, 88, 89, 181, 197; sexual confessions, 56–59, 67–79 to doctors (medicalization of confession), 65, 68–70, 72–75, 78–79, 119, 130, 218, 221, 222, 224 confession manuals, 6, 52, 56, 58, 60, 62, 68 confessional box (booth), 50, 52, 55, 252 Confidences trop intimes (Patrice Leconte): 82–4 consciousness-raising, 195, 229, 230, 234 Council of Trent, 64, 66, 140 Crowley, Ralph M., 144–145

D de Man, Paul, 10, 66, 77, 87–89, 92–97, 105, 182, 184–189, 199, 230–231 death drive, 92, 106, 107, 113 Deleuze, Gilles, 89 Derrida, Jacques, 8, 10, 11, 33, 36, 88–92, 95–97, 102, 105, 115, 167, 168, 178, 180, 182190, 200, 203, 215, 231, 252 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor (Notes from the Underground), 7, 10, 84–86, 91, 97–98, 108–109, 114, 115, 160, 169, 171, 173, 190 Dr. Phil, 152, 250, 251 Duns Scotus, 51

E Ernaux, Annie, 10, 109–115, 170, 171, 173, 190 exagoreusis, 17, 20, 24, 26 exomologesis, 17–20, 22, 24, 26, 47

F Fanon, Frantz, 152–155, 163, 166 Ferenczi, Sandor, 138, 141, 144, 145, 150 Forrester, John, 108, 250, 251 Foucault, Michel See also specific topics; and Augustine, 26–27; and Christianity, 17–26, 67–68; and confession, 3, 7–9, 13–16, 66– 79, 88, 97, 102–105, 167–169; and genealogical method See genealogy; and Nietzsche See Nietzsche; and silence, 193–197; and the psychological sciences, 2, 10–11, 116–137, 139, 140, 141, 143, 148, 149, 152, 155–159,162; and the sexual sciences, 68–79; and technologies of the self (Greek and Roman) 13–16, 191–193, 197–198; and truth, 80–81 See also truth; “Christianity and Confession,” 17, 20, 26; Discipline and Punish, 14, 62, 71, 119, 123, 135, 196, 198, 213, 214; History of Sexuality, The, 3, 7, 8, 10, 25, 27, 56, 62, 65, 66, 67, 71, 85, 116–120, 137, 155, 158–159, 191–192, 196, 198, 213, 214, 230, 232, 234; Madness and Civilization, 116, 119, 120, 124, 126, 130–132, 137, 141, 148, 155, 195; Order of Things, The, 8, 25, 119, 120, 135; “Self writing,” 14–16, 197–199, 230–231; “Subjectivity and Truth,” 7–8, 15 Fourth Lateran Council, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 63 freedom, 11, 12, 23, 74, 76, 79, 135, 158, 174, 175, 178, 181, 193, 194, 195, 197, 224, 225, 234, 253 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 6, 22, 24, 70, 81, 86, 92, 97, 98, 101, 105–108, 115, 116–118, 130–160, 165, 225, 226

G Galtier, Paul, 47 Garrard, Mary, 204, 205, 206, 207, 210, 212

Index genealogy, 3–10, 133, 191, 232 Gentileschi, Artemisia, 12, 193, 199–213, 235, 237, 243, 244, 246, 247 Gerson, Jean, 56–7, 63 Gilje, Kathleen, 207, 212, 213, 248, 249 Gratian, 51 Greenblatt, Stephen, 23, 31, 193 Guattari, Félix, 153–154, 163, 165–166 guilt, 15, 16, 23, 25, 27, 33, 46, 55, 60, 62, 63, 65, 84–87, 89–92, 94, 97–101, 104–105, 109, 125, 130, 173, 176, 178–182, 185–186, 190, 201–205, 250 Gusdorf, Georges, 2, 6

297

Lea, Henry C., 56 Lejeune, Philippe, 80 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 11, 154, 168, 176, 180–183, 187, 189, 190, 252 Little, Katherine C., 54 Little, Margaret, 145–6 Lombard, Peter, 51 Luther, Martin, 59, 63–64

M

Hacking, Ian, 147 Hampl, Patricia, 41, 42, 44 Hanby, Michael, 29, 30 Harlan, Justice John Marshall, 100, 101 Hartle, Ann, 30, 91 Hegel, Georg W. F., 168, 178, 179, 180, 182, 187, 189 Heimann, Paula, 146 Heyes, Cressida, 161, 199 Hugh of Saint Victor, 51 hupomnêmata, 12, 198, 199, 231, 233–234 Hurston, Zora Neale, 1, 6, 39

Maimonides, 99, 100 Marcuse, Herbert, 153, 156, 157, 158 masochism, 16, 75, 84–87, 92, 107, 182 masturbation (confession of), 56–59, 69–70 May, Todd, 116, 118, 166, 192 McWhorter, Ladelle, 66, 135, 199, 228–234 memoir, 6, 12, 107, 133, 135, 167, 170–173, 177, 178, 193, 213–225, 234, 235 See also autobiography Menn, Stephen, 29 Merlet, Agnès, 210–213 Meyers, W. David, 50, 53, 54, 58, 59, 64 Miller, Nancy, 11, 168, 170–174 Miranda warnings, 99, 100 Mortimer, Reverend R. C., 18, 46, 47, 48 Murray, Alexander, 54 Murray, Jacqueline, 56

I

N

introspection, 28, 39, 50, 52, 62–63, 158, 165

narcissism, 144, 172, 178 navel-gazing, 171 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 5, 6, 80, 132, 133, 135

H

J Jackson, Justice Robert, 99–101 Jerome, 18, 20 Jouy, Charles, 78–79, 218 Joyce, James (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), 75

K Kafka, Joseph (The Trial), 62, 63, 71 Klein, Melanie, 146 Kristeva, Julia, 128, 129, 144, 146, 147, 149, 154, 155, 163, 165, 176

L Lacan, Jacques, 128, 133, 156, 157 Lapierre, Alexandra, 208 Lateran IV See Fourth Lateran Council Le Goff, Jacques, 46, 52, 53, 55, 68

O O’Connor, Justice Sandra Day, 98 O’Donnell, James J., 37–39 O’Grady, Helen, 162, 163, 165, 166 Oliver, Kelly, 153–154, 165, 176

P penitentiales, 47–49, 52 Plotinus, 28 Plutarch, 30, 199, 231 Pollock, Griselda, 202, 208–212 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 169 possession (possessed women), 3, 55, 62 Prado, C. G., 6, 80, 81 psychoanalysis, 2, 10, 11, 78, 82, 98, 106–108, 116–166, 176–177, 192, 225–227, 251

298 Index public penance, See canonical penance

R Rank, Otto, 144 Rembrandt, 201, 239 Reich, Annie, 75, 145 Reich, Wilhelm, 116, 153, 156, 157, 158 Reik, Theodor, 84, 92, 101 Rioch, Janet MacKenzie, 160–162 Rittgers, Ronald K., 48, 64 Rivière, Pierre, 12, 25, 103, 132, 133, 135, 193, 196, 208, 213–225, 234, 235 Rousseau, Jacques, 2, 6, 10, 27, 30, 33, 38–40, 71–72, 76, 85–98, 105, 111, 169, 171, 173, 182–183, 190 Rubens, Peter Paul, 201, 240

S Sandler, Joseph, 140 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 11, 168, 174–175, 177–178, 185–186, 190 Sawicki, Jana, 162, 229–230 Schuster, Shlomit, 2 scrupulousness, 55, 60–62, 64 self-care See care of the self self-examination, in antiquity 13–16; in early medieval monasteries, 20–24 see also exagoreusis self-writing, 45, 113, 193, 197–198, 230–231, 234 Seneca, 7, 15–16, 20–22, 35, 37–39 shame, 7, 8, 13, 14, 15, 16, 23, 24, 27, 44, 54, 57, 68, 72, 75, 82, 84–93, 97, 100. 105, 107–110, 115, 125, 130, 182, 198, 251

T talking cure, 70, 105–109, 160, 225, 228, 251 talk shows, 6, 107, 173 See also Dr. Phil Tauber, Edward S., 145 Taylor, Charles, 29 technologies of the self See care of the self Tentler, Thomas, 2, 18, 47, 48, 56, 58, 59 Tertullian, 18, 19 testimonials, 42, 107, 183, 188–190, 195

Thomas, Henri (Le parjure), 184–187 Thompson, Clara, 145 Titian, 203, 204, 241 Toews, John E., 117, 118, 134, 135, 137, 154, 162, 165, 166 Tower, Lucia E., 160 truth, 5, 7–10, 13–20, 22–25, 27–30, 34, 36, 49, 52, 61, 66, 67, 71, 72, 76–86, 88, 90, 92, 94, 96–97, 102–105, 115, 119–121, 128, 134, 148, 152–155, 170, 173, 182–183, 187–188, 192, 224–5, 252; confession as truth-telling, 7–10, 79–80, 252 genealogy and truth, 5 manifesting the truth of oneself, 17–20, 24 See also exomologesis monastic truth-telling practices, 20–24 See also exagoreusis sexuality and/as truth, 67 truth and power, 76–78, 134 truth as external (in God), 17, 27–30 truth as internal (in the subject), 8, 17, 49, 52, 85–87, 96 truth-telling as ancient technology of the self, 13–16 truth-telling as liberating/therapeutic, 76 See also catharsis, abreaction theory untruths, 61, 66, 72, 82, 86–7, 90–92, 96, 252 uses of truth in Foucault, 8, 80–81 Truth and Reconciliation, 188

V Valverde, Marianne, 199

W White, Justice Byron, 97 Winnicott, D., 146 Winterson, Jeanette, 250–253 Wolstein, Benjamin, 143 Woolf, Virginia, 72–73 Wright, J. Lenore, 28 Wycliffites, 54

Z Zwingli, Huldrych, 59