Confessing the Unknown. Jacques Derrida and the Politics of Confession

Abstract

The aim of this study is to consider the political dimension of confession from Derrida’s works. Far from finding in confession a biopolitical dispositive of subjectivation, as Michel Foucault does, Derrida finds in this literary gender an exercise of deconstruction of the sovereignty of the subject, and a destitution of the idea of literary genre. This gesture supposes a displacement of confession from its epistemological dimension (self-knowledge and self-vigilance) to a practical dimension, in order to value it as a performative language. In this way, Derrida offers an original development of speech act theory, where performativity is not characterized by its activity, but rather by a sort of passivity; the subject is not self-made by doing things with words, but rather it is altered and transformed. This strategy manifests the political character of confession as a speech act, and offers an important turn in the conception of confession, anticipated by authors such as Zambrano and Kierkegaard: first, one confesses what he/she unknows; and second, confession is a textual dispositive that contaminates any discourse: every text, Derrida states, is a confession. Derrida’s position implies, in this manner, a reconsideration of the meaning of authorship, and puts in question the distinction life/writing.