Confessions: The Philosophy of Transparency

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… (more)

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.