Confession of one's feelings or whatever is an act of
submission.
When you confess your sins to god, aren't you submitting
yourself to higher authority.
When you confess your crimes in court, you do so under the
authority exercised by the courts.
When you confess your love of a girl to your buddies, you are
submitting yourself to your buddies, hoping that they will help you
find a solution to your love problem where you have failed.
When you confess your love to a girl, you are submitting
yourself to higher authority, you are asking her to help fulfill
your love.
///Foucault's work on the genre of confession is suggestive
here. The act of confiding, Focault writes, is not only
therapeutic. It is always, in part, an act of submission to
authority, of compliance with the injunction "to tell" which can be
demanded of the (relatively) disempowered on the part of the
(relatively) empowered. Confession is "a ritual that unfolds within
a power relationship....One does not confess without the presence
(or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the
interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession,
prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge,
punish, forgive, console, and reconcile. Telling one's story
performs the power of its listener. It is "an obligatory act of
speech" that occurs under "imperious compulsion":
one............................
............................twins.
.......................Foucault suggests that it is the
recipient of a confession and not its author whom storytelling
empowers: "the agency of domination [within the relations of
confession] does not reside in the one who speaks (for it is he
[sic] who is constrained), but in the one who listens and says
nothing; not in the one who knows and answers, but in the one who
questions and is not supposed to know." The ideal of a
self-affirming dialogue (of an affirmed "self" at all!), on this
account, could never be other than a utopian reaching after
discursive conditions that cannot exist. Such a utopian erotics
would operate, in fact, as the inducement that goads us,
tricks us even, into giving up our stories and empowering their
listeners.///
The Erotics of Talk by Carla Kaplan
wah. you read foucault? i am impressed..
