Confessions: The Philosophy of Transparency

Description

This book explores what is at stake in our confessional culture. Thomas Docherty examines confessional writings from Augustine to Montaigne and from Sylvia Plath to Derrida, arguing that through all this work runs a philosophical substratum - the conditions under which it is possible to assert a confessional mode - that needs exploration and explication. Docherty outlines a philosophy of confession that has pertinence for a contemporary political culture based on the notion of ‘transparency'. In a postmodern ‘transparent society', the self coincides with its self-representations. Such a position is central to the idea of authenticity and truth-telling in confessional writing: it is the basis of saying, truthfully, ‘here I take my stand'. The question is: what other consequences might there be of an assumption of the primacy of transparency? Two areas are examined in detail: the religious and the judicial. Docherty shows that despite the tendency to regard transparency as a general social and ethical good, our contemporary culture of transparency has engendered a society in which autonomy (or the very authority of the subject that proclaims ‘I confess') is grounded in guilt, reparation and victimhood. background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255) Courier New Cover Half-title Title Copyright Contents Series Editor’s Preface Preface Introduction: The Philosophy of Transparency Part One 1 Now To tell the truth Augustine’s conversion: kenosis and the empty turning-point Alias and survival: confessing in the name of another The moment and democracy 2 Official Identity and Clandestine Experience Introduction Experience Becoming Confessional communications Politics 3 This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine Introduction: intimate things The crisis of intimacy The emergence of character as the constitution of modernity Modernity as a mood and as a mode Time under arrest The escape from intimacy; confession as the failure of Selbstdarstellung Part Two 4 Dilatory Time Conversation and the silent witness Of wit, witchcraft and capital 5 Waste and the Ecology of Anguish Autonomy and responsibility Of the embodied voice as witness Economies of representation Political grace 6 Confession and Democracy Towards grace I as we: first confessions and beginnings Down to zero Of persuasion and the confessional ground of judgement Confessing friendship and democracy Part Three 7 Witnessing and Literary Confession Fictional testaments Translation and witnessing Witnessing the dead Listening, uttering: the question of evidence 8 My Language! A dream of availability A detour The notes Concluding, beginning Notes Selected Bibliography Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T V W Y Z