Rhetoric and Power: An Inquiry into Foucault’s Critique of Confession

Tell, Dave

doi:10.1353/par.0.0056

Cited by 18 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…States of sinfulness serve as a metonym for impure subject positions, foreshadowing the juridical shift from ‘acts’ to ‘persons’ identified in Discipline and Punish . Tell (2010) shows how the shift from Greek techniques of self which examined the minute particulars of conduct to Christian notions of a ‘soul’ as a deep substance of personhood which was expressed in every thought, word and deed was a long-running concern for Foucault. The production of the ‘soul’ or ‘conscience’ generated a model of subjecthood which was malleable and open to indefinite reformation and transformation.…”

Section: Theorising Truth-tellingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Confessional critiques: Parrhesia and avowal in contemporary anti-racist discourses

Boland,

Moore-Ponce

2023

European Journal of Social Theory

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Confessional critiques proliferate in contemporary culture, remodelling critical politics as self-purification. Within Foucault’s work, critique is associated with resistance to power and subjectification, whereas confession appears a technique of disciplinary and pastoral power. However, genealogy creates hybrids, and herein we observe how critique and confession are entangled in contemporary social justice discourses, focusing empirically on contemporary anti-racist texts. These critique their imagined readers and society more generally, demanding confessions, castigating denials and exhorting interminable purificatory self-work. This analysis draws from Foucault’s genealogies of parrhesia and avowal, through his latter works on the problem of ‘truth-telling’ and how it forms subjects, even by critique. Recognising this historical hybridisation of critique and confession within discourses such as anti-racism may help to clarify the political stakes of critique.

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Section: Theorising Truth-tellingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Confessional critiques: Parrhesia and avowal in contemporary anti-racist discourses

Boland,

Moore-Ponce

2023

European Journal of Social Theory

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“…The confession in our present time is concerned with thoughts as a material for scrutiny rather than with actions, what we can call a bureaucratization of confession. No longer does it just contain a simple enumeration of misdeeds, instead it involves the rhetorical insertion of an account that can anticipate and explain such misdeeds (Tell 2010). A bureaucratic, professional and rational confession that must constantly be practiced is also interwoven with a psytechnology.…”

Section: Confessional Practices and Collective Subjectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Confessing the will to improve: systematic quality management in leisure-time centers

Holmberg

2017

Education Inquiry

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The focus of this article is to analyze the systematic quality management of educational settings the way it is present in Swedish leisure-time centers. The study explores how the production of both systematic reporting and documentation works through self technologies in this discursive practice. The analysis will illustrate and discuss how the systematic quality work viewed as a discursive practice is expected to be both self-scrutinizing and transparent, but also how this process is supposed to be made with a certain`correct´attitude-what can be described as the 'will to improve'. Moreover, it interrogates how the systematic quality management operates strategically and politically to exercise power on and through the personnel working at leisure-time centers. In the empirical material discussed, an ongoing subjectification appears, which takes the form of confessional practices. This can be said to be primarily about constructing a free but loyal collective subject, who produces systematic quality work in line with what the educational authorities want to happen. Such a process of subjectification gives rise to a collective subject, which is regarded as having unavoidable responsibility for an infinite need of quality improvement through confessional acts of 'truth'.

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Journey to the Unknown: Survival, Re-awakening, Renewal, and Reformation

Steele

2019

Pedagogical Journeys Through World Politics

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Rhetoric and Power: An Inquiry into Foucault’s Critique of Confession

Cited by 18 publications

References 29 publications

Confessional critiques: Parrhesia and avowal in contemporary anti-racist discourses

Confessional critiques: Parrhesia and avowal in contemporary anti-racist discourses

Confessing the will to improve: systematic quality management in leisure-time centers

Journey to the Unknown: Survival, Re-awakening, Renewal, and Reformation

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