Eight Six Four Oh Oh
On Foucault and confession
In The History of Sexuality, Part I, Foucault talks about a need to confess. He talks about it in a very Catholic sense. A personal, anonymous unburdening of our shame and the permission to be forgiven about it. I’m not going to go quote hunting now, so you’ll have to do the research on your own to see if I’m remembering it right.
This has always struck me as sort of myopic— something phrased in Catholic terms because those were the ones that resonated most with the French. Either that, or I think things have just changed. People want to testify. They want to tell it to the congregation. They want to be that Jimmy Swaggart appearing before the cameras, our faces tear streaked, as we broadcast our sins to millions.
Naturally, God is only a metaphor for our monkeysphere, so in a sense telling God is telling everyone, but in this day and age, I think we want our everyone to be a bit more literal.
