Date: Sun, 04 Dec 1994 18:17:08 -0400 (EDT) From: Stephen Katz <SKATZ-AT-TrentU.ca> To: foucault-AT-world.std.com Subject: Re: The confessing animal. (fwd) I've read Miles Jackson's responses concerning the question of self-reflection and "confessing" with interest because I've just been looking at Foucault's paper, "Hermeneutics of the Self" (_Political Theory_, 21(2), 1993). In it, Foucault attempts to distinguish between two kinds of self-examinations, the "exomologesis" of the early Christians, and the "exagoreusis" of the later Christians. In the case of the former, there were theatrical rituals of the person to "publish" themself; show themself as a sinner, but more importantly, use the ritualizatoin of self-examination and expression to "get free from the world" and "get access to a new spiritual life." It was a way to use the self to go beyond it, or exteriorize the self in such a way that the person is re-subjectivized and re-inserted into the social-moral order at a different place. "Exagoeursis" is the obedient, disciplinary obligation to verbalize one's confession. Furthermore, such verbalization marks the proof of the subject's truth; permanent, exhaustive, private, revelatory. Both situations reveal the connection between self-sacrifice and self-truth. But the first one is public, bodily, ritualized, and plural in its possible effects. The second is private, etc. and very singular in its effects. Foucault's point is threefold. 1. The genealogy of the hermeneutics of the self in Western culture involves a number of truth-technologies. 2. Different truth-technologies are articulated to different power relations, and not all truth-technologies are articulated in the same way, or for the same reason. Sometimes different truth-technologies exist simultaneously and conflict with other. 3. We can't just get rid of the cultural layers of the hermeneutics of the self, or the truth-technologies encrusted upon them, but by genealogically rearranging the conditions of our present, the self-truth-sacrifice-confession quadrangle, we can come at our-selves as a political problem. That's why I would think that exercises such as engaging in self-reflection about the language we speak (also the gestures and bodily contests we conduct) is worthwhile. It doesn't return us to an interiorization of power relations, or a solipsistic foray into Geraldo-Oprah territory, necessarily, but to ways of ritualizing our self-examination, a kind of "exomologesis" to understand our enfoldment within power relations, or how our-selves have become situated as such. To the question of how "poor wages for women relative to men can exist in our society with no intent to discriminate against women," I might ask "could it exist if men intended otherwise?" Stephen Katz Trent University
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