Confession, counter-conduct, critique
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Confession, counter-conduct, critique
Maureen Kelly The University of Chicago Divinity School, Chicago, IL, USA.
Abstract In this piece, I highlight three texts by French philosopher Michel Foucault on confession, counter-conduct, and critique to consider the operations of power and possibilities of resistance in the practice of confession. Beginning from The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, I discuss Foucault’s presentation of confession as a technique of power. I then turn to the story of Urusle from Foucault’s 1 March, 1978 lecture of Security, Territory, Population on ‘counter-conduct’ in order to highlight a case in which confession becomes a site of resistance. In the end, I invoke Foucault’s lecture ‘‘What is Critique?’’ (1978) to consider how the story of Ursule’s resistance configures the possibilities of confession in critique today. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11, 310–317. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00176-7
What could I confess to you, Reader, which would mitigate the force relations between us? What am I incited to tell about myself, what sin or transgression ought I disclose, or will you discern, in the author behind the text? This special issue of postmedieval invites us to begin with the question of confession and its function in our own writing. Delineating the question genealogically as a problem of power and resistance, I turn to three works of Michel Foucault that, across historically diverse cases of confession, illustrate its operation in relations
2020 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals
Vol. 11, 2-3, 310–317
Confession, counter-conduct, critique
of power and its possibilities for movements of resistance.1 Beginning from The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, I discuss Foucault’s presentation of confession as a technique of power. I then turn to the story of Urusle from Foucault’s 1 March, 1978 lecture of Security, Territory, Population on ‘counter-conduct’ in order to highlight a case in which confession becomes a site of resistance. In the end, I invoke Foucault’s lecture ‘‘What is Critique?’’ (1978) to consider how the story of Ursule’s resistance configures the possibilities of confession in critique today. In this reading, the possibility of confession as resistance starts with a question of confession and power. What question can we ask? Through what lens can we examine confession and its effects of power, in order to find practices in which confession acts as resistance? In The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 (hereafter HSv1), Foucault cautions: ‘the obligation to confess is […] so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us’ (Foucault, 1978, 60). Against the notion that the truth sets you free, which shields confession from the analytic of power relations, Foucault harasses the optimism that ties together freedom and truth and pivots the lens towards an immanent analytic of tactics, strategies, and relations of
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