10.13135/2036-542X/7974
The aim of this paper is to examine two modes of problematization, which shift the traditional examination of self–truth away from its initially Cartesian focus point. It analyses two new ways — those of Ricoeur and Foucault—of redefining the relationship between subjectivity and truth, two ways of challenging both the Cartesian veridiction mode (the evidence) and the resulting metaphysical offshoot of the subject (the res cogitans) and its self–positioning and founding nature (the subjectum). The first method finds a founding paradigm in testimony, while the second takes confession as its model.
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Johann Michel
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Of Testimony and Confession: 
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2015-12-01
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2015-12-01
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Johann Michel
2015/12/01
10.13135/2036-542X/7974
53
Université de Poitiers
2036-542X
2
66
Of Testimony and Confession: 
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos/article/download/7974/6703
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                                                          trópos • anno VIII • numero 2 • 2015 – ISBN 978-88-548-9061-9
                                                             DOI 10.4399/97888548906194 – pag. 53-66 (dicembre 2015)




                                          Of Testimony and Confession
                                                          Two Paradigms of the Subject
                                                                                     J M*




   : The aim of this paper is to examine two modes of problematization,
      which shift the traditional examination of self–truth away from its initially
      Cartesian focus point. It analyses two new ways — those of Ricoeur and
      Foucault — of redefining the relationship between subjectivity and truth, two
      ways of challenging both the Cartesian veridiction mode (the evidence) and
      the resulting metaphysical offshoot of the subject (the res cogitans) and its
      self–positioning and founding nature (the subjectum). The first method finds a
      founding paradigm in testimony, while the second takes confession as its model.

   : Hermeneutic, testimony, confession, P. Ricoeur, M. Foucault.




Introduction

Whilst a philosophy of the subject, in its metaphysical or idealist incar-
nations, might seem to be out of reach, a fortiori in its initial Cartesian
intention, and in spite of the limits and “things unthought” of philosophies
of the anti–cogito, we might nevertheless wonder whether we cannot get
past the contradiction of the foundation and the illusion of the cogito, by
shifting the sense of the problematization. To mark the sense of this shift
and hence of the difference with Cartesian, Kantian or Husserlian varia-
tions of what some people call the egological tradition of modern western
philosophy, we will talk less of “subject,” of “cogito,” of “substance,” of
“me,” than of “self ” or of “ipseity.” It remains to be seen, beyond or through
this change in lexicon, what might be saved or shifted in a philosophy of the
subject which has lost its founding certainties. Our intent is not to review
all contemporary attempts to redefine the intersection between subjectivity
and truth, but to focus on just two.
    Under a Ricoeurian hermeneutic modality, the shift takes place in the sub-
stitution of the conceptual episteme/doxa couple by the attestation/suspicion
    ∗
        Johann Michel, Université de Poitiers (johann.michel@univ–poitiers.fr).


                                                                                                                   
    Johann Michel


pairing: the attestation is presented as a sort of belief, which is not uttered
in the doxic grammar of “I believe–that” but in the hermeneutic gram-
mar of the “I believe–in.” The testimony is its paradigmatic form. Under a
Foucauldian “archaeological” modality, the problem is not that of knowing
under what conditions an enunciation (about an object, oneself. . . ) is true,
but of knowing how subjects are effectively linked in and by historical forms
of veridiction. It is a case of analysing the forms of discursive institutions
which enjoin the subject to tell the truth about himself. Confession is the
paradigmatic form of this.
    Our exact intent is not to present a confrontation between Ricoeur and
Foucault, due to the radically heterogeneous philosophical position from
which Ricoeur and Foucault deploy the direction of the shift of the rela-
tionship between subjectivity and truth. The Ricoeurian hermeneutic shift
once again takes place within the framework of reflexive philosophy, albeit
to subvert it from within. Ricoeur can still call himself post–Cartesian. With
Foucault, the shift is far more radical and comes right off its Cartesian
hinges: it is less a case of coming up with new and positive reformulations
of reflexive philosophy, than of describing the historical forms through
which regimes of veridiction transform subjectivities. A philosopher ini-
tially trained in the history of sciences in the tradition of a Bachelard or a
Canguilhem will most definitely be subject to historical temptations. Whilst
Ricoeur might also in one sense call himself a historian of philosophy, he
maintains an almost Hegelian gesture, if only to shatter its dialectic and
absolute knowledge, in as much as each “moment” in the history of phi-
losophy of the subject is likely to be “taken up.” Nothing of the sort with
Foucault, whose historical analyses, severed from any dialectic, are intended
to be not only purely descriptive, but also to exceed the strict field of subjec-
tivations and of philosophical regimes of veridiction, so as to better examine
modes of veridiction in the field of criminal justice, prisons, psychiatry, etc.
    The fact that such a face–off is difficult to organise, in as much as Ricoeur
and Foucault are not talking about the same philosophical place, does not
stop us from outlining the zones of intersection, involvement or exclusion
between their two philosophical enterprises. This is demonstrated by the
way in which they look to consider regimes of self–veridiction above and
beyond the criterion of evidence or of the verificationist model. The self
which comes out of these tests of veridiction transformed, will at the same
time have lost its founding centrality.
                                                          Of Testimony and Confession           


. Attestation of the self and the paradigm of testimony

It is in the preface to Oneself as Another that Ricoeur outlines his hermeneu-
tic of the self, the regime of veridiction of which is based on the concept
of attestation. The hermeneutic of the self implies a veritative type which
exceeds the Cartesian mode of veridiction just as much as the presumption
of the self–founding cogito. Of hermeneutic obedience, the notion of attes-
tation nevertheless differs from Heideggerian aletheia in as much as it does
not put itself forward as a disoccultation of the being in general, but as a
belief mode linked to the existence of self in particular. Even though it is a
very specific mode of belief — which cannot be reduced to the doxic belief
(the I–believe–that) — which is uttered in the grammar of the I–believe–in.
Attestation opposes just as much the regime of veridiction of evidence
as the regime of verificationist veridiction that Ricoeur relates to the epis-
teme of objective knowledge, though without attestation being assimilated
into a simple “opinion.” Defined within the framework of post–romantic
hermeneutics, attestation is by no means an immediate understanding: on
the contrary, it requires mediation and detour through analysis, explanation
and clarification of the self. Whence the constant reliance (for which the
hermeneutic of the self searches in the Ricoeurian manner) on intentionally
objectivising disciplines such as analytical philosophy and human and social
sciences. So attestation does not oppose the idea of science in general, as
long as such disciplines attempt to clarify and interpret the beings that we
are. It opposes objective knowledge which claims to be a last foundation
of self–knowledge. In other words, attestation, which cannot be reduced to
a doxa, only opposes episteme to the extent that it is an episteme defined in
terms of the last foundation or of apodictic truth.
    Of course, Ricoeur does not hesitate to point out family resemblances
between the attestation/suspicion pairing and the Aristotelian ontological
to–be–true/to–be–false pairing, though he quickly moves on to demon-
strate their fundamental difference:
   Si par tous ces traits la dimension aléthique (véritative) de l’attestation s’inscrit bien
   dans le prolongement de l’être–vrai aristotélicien, l’attestation garde à son égard
   quelque chose de spécifique, du seul fait que ce dont elle dit l’être–vrai, c’est le soi;
   et elle le fait à travers les médiations objectivantes du langage, de l’action, du récit,
   des prédicats éthique et moraux de l’action. (Ricoeur : )

   Strictly speaking, it is an attestation, not for all human beings in its
anthropological sense, but for all beings who take charge of interpreting
themselves by objectifying all signs, texts and symbols in which their exis-
tence is perceived. In this sense, attestation of the self is seen less as a general
trait of the human condition than as an existential. The fragile nature of
      Johann Michel


this veritative mode of oneself is due to the fact that it is no more than an
interpretation. Not a purely arbitrary interpretation, of course; as on the
one hand the attestation of the self is also uttered in the ethical grammar of
credence — the trust in the power to say, to do, to tell. . . Yet there is never-
theless interpretation which — because it specifically presents itself as belief
(albeit doxic), or as confidence — remains less than an apodictic veritative
mode. It is also another way of differentiating the attestation/suspicion
pairing from the to–be–true/to–be–false pairing: if attestation is indeed the
opposite of suspicion, just as the to–be–true is the opposite of the to–be–
false, the opposite in the first case is not considered in a purely disjunctive
sense but in an almost conditional sense as long as the attestation is condi-
tioned by the test of suspicion: “Le soupçon est aussi le chemin vers et la
traversée dans l’attestation. Il hante l’attestation, comme le faux témoignage
hante le vrai témoignage.” (Ricoeur : )
    This is the category of testimony which finally allows us to analogically
consider the attestation of the self model. Yet Ricoeur says almost nothing
about this in Oneself as Another. The question which needs to be asked,
and which Ricoeur does not specifically ask, is to what extent testimony
may serve as a paradigm for attestation of the self. We have to search in
other texts by Ricoeur to show in what this paradigm of testimony really
consists. These reflections, sometimes dating back some time, are dispersed
throughout various texts, the oldest but also the most complete being the
article L’herméneutique du témoignage, initially published in « Archivio di
Filosofia » in ; the most recent reflections, of an epistemological nature,
are brought together in developments relating to the historiographical op-
eration. (Ricoeur : –) The testimony is framed in three registers
of specification: legal, historiographical and theological.
    In all three cases, testimony supposes three distinct operations: percep-
tion of a scene which has been experienced, its retention in the memory
and its restitution in a narrative. The testimony cannot therefore be reduced
to the perception of a situation or event, in the sense of an eye or ear witness
who has seen or heard an event. The assertion of reality cannot be separated
from the self–designation of the witness. To say “I was there” is to break
away from the illusion of an omniscient spectator; it is to report what was
seen or heard yesterday and to correlatively attest to the flesh and bone
presence, of he/she who was there yesterday and who is offering an account
today.

     . Whilst Ricoeur does not make any specific reference to this, testimony and attestation (just
like contest, protest) have the same etymological root which goes back to the Latin testis, probably
originally a third person or party who is witness to a conflict between two other people.
     . Article republished under the same title in R : –.
                                                         Of Testimony and Confession         


   There is only testimony if the fate of the perception is simultaneously
transmuted in the narration of the event in what Ricoeur calls the transport:
   C’est le témoin qui d’abord se déclare témoin. Il se nomme lui–même. Un déictique
   triple ponctue l’autodésignation: la première personne du singulier, le temps passé
   du verbe et la mention du là–bas par rapport à l’ici. (Ricoeur : )

   Yet as from this common property, testimony follows different pathways,
depending on the register of specification. In the legal register, testimony’s
path is only completed if it serves judgement in a regime of veridiction
proper to the grammar of the trial right through to the end of sentencing:
   La constatation et le récit constituent des informations à partir desquelles on se
   fait une opinion sur une séquence d’événements, sur l’enchainement d’une action,
   sur les motifs d’un acte, sur le caractère d’une personne, bref, sur le sens ce qui
   est arrivé. Le témoignage est cela sur quoi on s’appuie pour penser que. . . pour
   estimer. . . , bref, pour juger. Le testimony veut justifier, prouver le bien–fondé
   d’une assertion qui, par de–là le fait, prétend atteindre son sens. (Ricoeur : )

    Furthermore, within the framework of a trial, the testimony — or, in
the case of an appeal court, whatever the judge and jury might make of it
— does not just relate to the facts: to testify does not simply mean offering
testimony about something, but also to testify for or against someone. In
this sense, to testify is already to plead a case, albeit implicitly. Through
testimony, which is just one possible element within a range of evidence,
judgement comes down in favour of, condemns or acquits, decides be-
tween. . .
    This gives us a better understanding of how and why the paradigm of
testimony can have an analogical pertinence with a hermeneutic of the
attestation of the self: on the one hand this is because it cannot achieve a
regime of apodictic veridiction and be part of the necessary order of things
(instead merely of the probable, likely and therefore questionable order);
on the other hand it is because it makes suspicion the very condition for
the attestation of something and, in the final instance, of self as a reliable
voice. Suspicion is possible as from the perceptive phase (did he see/hear
correctly? Did he see the whole thing or just see it from a particular angle?
Was he hallucinating?); it can be produced or be pushed back to the retention
phase (memory distortion) and can be directed onto the declarative phase
in the case of a false declaration legally sanctioned as being false testimony
or perjury. Of course, the situation can become more complicated when
there are contradictory testimonies where one person’s account negates
someone else’s. Even clearer is Ricoeur’s cardinal proposition whereby the
suspicion is the condition of attestation. In this sense suspicion is not an
accident of testimony — indeed it haunts it throughout the trial: there is
    Johann Michel


testimony only because the parties disagree; the testimony thus calls for
debate, argument, investigation. . .
    Testimony is never evidence in itself and never and definitive evidence; it
is similar to a regime of veridiction where the probable requires confronta-
tion and reasoned discussion: testimony is always a fallible and provisional
candidate for the status of evidence, even after sentence has been passed, and
as long as all recourses have not been exhausted. This is also why witnesses,
when they are in the position of third parties at a trial (neither victim nor
accused), are always in a dialogual position when addressing listeners who
may or may not believe what witnesses say. Ricoeur insists that in such a
case the fiduciary and dialogual dimensions of testimony are inseparable.
Accreditation is strengthened, i.e. the testimony becomes more credible,
though without suspicion ever being eradicated, when witnesses are able
to maintain and reiterate their accounts over time. Reiterated testimony is
then akin to a promise: to repeat tomorrow what one says today about a
scene seen or heard yesterday. By keeping one’s word in the face of others,
witnesses pass the test of their own attestation and underline their ipseity.
    It is notably under these aspects that testimony, in its legal specification,
finds a particular resonance in its historiographical specification, without
us being able, here, to examine its theological (through testimony of the
absolute) or metaphysical (for example, testimony and trace of the Other
in Levinas) specifications. Until it has been subject to internal and external
review by historians, particularly with regard to the authenticity of the doc-
ument, regarding confirmation and cross–referencing with other sources,
testimony cannot be accorded the status of documentary evidence. Here
again, testimony must run the gauntlet of permanent suspicion and is thus
considered to be a fallible and provisional attestation as long as no other
testimony has contradicted it. Before becoming a evidence, albeit always
provisional, historical testimony must always be subject to a series of tests
that Ricoeur calls historiographical operations. The same is true of the veri-
tative regime of the attestation of the self: no proof of self without proving
self. Just like its legal specification, even though the rules and procedures are
different, it must be possible for the historiographical testimony operation
to be embedded into a reasoned debate within a public that is no longer
that of the courtroom but that of the scientific community of historians.
The testimony test cannot be reduced to the critical process of the isolated
historian; it must always be backed by suspicion which is mediated inter–
subjectively by peers and virtually by all informed publics. This is what
constitutes the critical public test of testimony.
    In its legal and historiographical functions, testimony differs in various
ways. On the one hand the difference is found in the type of judgement that
follows it. Whilst we might talk about historical judgement, and sometimes
                                                 Of Testimony and Confession   


despite the mixture of genres when they attend certain high–profile trials,
strictly speaking historians should not use witnesses in order to pass sen-
tence, but must confine themselves to recapturing the past as it happened.
On the other hand, regarding the historiographical operation, the testimony
category is far more extensive than the legal category of the eye witness.
Ultimately, any document, any vestige of the past may become a testimony
in what the French historian Marc Bloch calls “witness despite themselves.”
Historical witnesses cannot in any circumstances be reduced to people who
say “I was there” and who ask others to take their word for it: it suffices
that “that was the case,” it suffices that there is a trace problematized by the
historian to attest that something did indeed happen, and must have hap-
pened in that way. . . Finally, the testimony’s certification and confrontation
rituals within the courtroom differ from those which take place within a
scientific community: a symposium of scientists is not a court; a historian
does not have a judge’s authority to summon witnesses or to punish them
in cases of false testimony.
    This lengthy detour via historical and legal testimony, whilst it has
an intrinsic heuristic value — a fortiori if one is examining regimes of
veridiction — ultimately aimed to show how it might serve as a paradigm
for the attestation of the self. The answer was to be found in texts prior
to Oneself as Another, showing what exactly underlies this model of the
hermeneutic of the self. This threw light on a mode of veridiction which falls
within the order of the probable and the likely, which supposes a permanent
passage through the test of suspicion, which refuses any last foundation
and any form of apodictic truth, which is part of the register of belief and
trust It nevertheless remains that this analogical transfer of testimony is not
entirely self–evident under its legal or historical specification. Limits which
Ricoeur does not explicitly mention in Oneself as Another.
    If attestation can be posited for the witness him/herself (attestation
correlative to a past reality and self–identifying reference), it is also posited
in a legal context when the witness is placed in the position of a third party,
i.e. when they testify on behalf of someone else. In this sense, witnesses are
not asked to testify on their own behalf. Attestation of the self nevertheless
remains pertinent even in this position of a third party adopted by the
witness as from the moment that Ricoeur’s self is in no way exhausted in
the first person singular but is extended to all personal functions, including
impersonal functions. But conversely, how can we transpose the function
of a third party to a self which expresses itself in the first person singular,
with the risk of desecrating the root of the word, i.e. of witness, of testis
as a third party? Assuming that testifying on one’s own behalf still has any
meaning, it has by no means the same implications as testifying on behalf
of someone else.
    Johann Michel


    The problem is even greater if we examine this from the standpoint of
the process of suspicion through which the attestation is attested.
    In the case of a historiographical operation or of court proceedings,
suspicion is not exercised by the witness but by someone else: historians,
judges, jurors etc. The witness asks to be believed, but accreditation — if it
exists — does not come from the witness but from others. Furthermore, in
all cases accreditation supposes strict rules and procedures which make it
possible to put a witness’s testimony to the test. Yet who exercises suspicion
once we leave the courthouse or scientific arenas? What accreditation proce-
dures must be justified when the self is no longer witness in a trial? Can we
say that the self, as a reflexive instance, can exercise a function of suspicion
in the form of an interiorisation of the dialogual and fiduciary structure of
accreditation — ultimately, in the form of an interior court? Ricoeur does
not directly examine this problem when he takes on attestation of the self
and the test of suspicion. However, we might reasonably think that he does
not exclude this possibility, particularly when (after adapting it) he himself
adopts the Heideggerian Gewissen. Yet attestation of the self, particularly
when it is examined in the final study of Oneself as Another, is constantly
modified by an ontology of otherness, notably in its intersubjective form.
We can only surmise that whilst the test of suspicion can be applied within
oneself, it can only find fulfilment in an intersubjective form. Indeed, this
is confirmed in the passages Ricoeur devotes to the ethic of discussion of
Habermas and his followers. This therefore means that attestation of the
self — and here the paradigm of testimony finds its fullest justification — re-
quires recognition and accreditation from others, without the procedure in
question being reduced to its legal format. The others in question may also
take an impersonal form: we must therefore add an institutional dimension
to the dialogual aspect of the attestation of the self.


. Technologies of the self and the paradigm of confession

We cannot move from Ricoeur’s hermeneutic method to Foucault’s archae-
ological approach without transitions or precautions. We must not forget
why a comparison of the two methods is complicated: where Ricoeur works
to justify a hermeneutic of the self on the ruins of philosophes of the sub-
ject, Foucault simply attempts to describe the historical structures through
which regimes of veridiction link, constitute and transform subjectivities.
Where Ricoeur can still position himself within a post–Cartesian tradition,
Foucault prefers to see himself as belonging to a post–Kantian tradition of
critical philosophy. Not a critical philosophy which in classic fashion pon-
ders the transcendental conditions of a true enunciation, but a philosophy
                                                 Of Testimony and Confession   


which examines the historical conditions of truth–telling, which tries to
understand how subjects are linked in and by the forms of veridiction they
engage.
    Whilst this certainly constitutes the guiding thread of Foucault’s works,
especially from the publication of the three volumes of History of Sexuality
through to the posthumous publication of writings taken from his lessons
at the Collège de France, we will concentrate here on one particular rela-
tionship between subjectivity and truth: confession. This is by no means a
trivial choice, in as much as this particular mode of veridiction reverses and
radically shifts the problem of truth from its Cartesian location and further-
more allows us to establish an interesting comparison with the paradigm of
testimony. Although Foucault examines confession in several of his works,
in this paper we will be relying on the recently published conferences he
gave at the University of Louvain in May . (Cf. Foucault ) It is not
possible, within the framework of this paper, to enter into the details of
analyses of a book in which Foucault patiently dissects all of the historical
manifestations of confession, its transformations from its first formulations
in Greek tragedy to its most recent contemporary forms, its registers of
legal and Christian specification. What is important is to analyse how such
historical forms offer a new regime of veridiction, along with an original
conception of the subject.
    Confession concerns declaratory acts through which people recognise
having said or done something. Yet it is more than a simple declaration
and simple recognition, if only through the fact of having sinned. The
point to be taken into account is not so much the object of the declaration
as the way in which it occurs. To recognise that one has committed a
reprehensible act is not necessarily an avowal. Foucault tells us that for
there to be avowal, there must be “a certain cost of enunciation” for the
person speaking. In the enunciation of an avowal, not only is recognition of
what one has said or done by no means self–evident, but said recognition
exposes those making the avowal, causes them to run risks. Confession
is therefore always a test for those who make it, and supposes personal
engagement by the subject. To admit is not just to recognise something in
the sense of assertive truth, it means committing oneself. This means that
the paradigm of avowal already has one thing in common with the legal
paradigm of testimony, because in certain very specific cases the witness
can also be put in the position of avowing subject. However, confession
takes the subject’s commitment a step further, unlike the witness who,
placed in the position of third party, testifies for or against another person.
In the declaration of the avowing subject, there is an assertion about a past
reality and a self–identifying reference, but there is an additional test in that
one has to say something about oneself (and not about another person) in
      Johann Michel


the sense of a self–imputation and of something that one has difficulty in
recognising. The test of the avowing subject is thus far greater than that of
the testifying subject.
    Confession is thus a very particular mode of truth–telling: truth–telling
which inseparably concerns what is to be avowed and the person who is
avowing. First and foremost one tells a truth about oneself, though always
through acts or thoughts. If one can admit to oneself something deep down
inside, then like testimony, the confession that Foucault dissects in its histor-
ical institutions has from the outset a dialogic and institutional dimension.
The test of confession, unlike the internal courtroom of moral conscience
for example, takes place before another person who is in a position of au-
thority (a judge, a keeper of conscience, a confessor, a psychiatrist, etc.).
There is an asymmetrical dialogic and institutional structure between the
avowing subject and the confession destinee. In a position of power, the
destinee is never in the position of pure recipient: he/she must specifically
put the sincerity of the confession to the test and, where required, force
confession. Unlike testimony in a legal context, the process does not consist
in the transport of things seen or heard into things said and told to another
person, but in the passage from something originally shameful and unsaid
to something avowed.
    Unlike simple enunciations of true propositions, confession proceeds
from an obligation of truth–telling. This is not an obligation (in the Kantian
sense of duty), the moral appeal court of which is based on reason; it
is an external constraint emanating from an authority which enjoins a
subject not only to tell the truth in general, but to tell the truth about
him/herself. To analyse this regime of veridiction, as Foucault does, thus
requires one to place the question of power at the heart of the relationship
between subjectivity and truth, and to deliberately set aside, for example,
the reflexive form of admitting to oneself. Here, being obliged to tell the truth
about oneself only has meaning because an authority puts itself into an
injunctive position. It is not just a question of obliging the subject to avow,
including by force, by torture, but to test the veracity, the authenticity and
the sincerity of the confession. Here the question of belief and accreditation
is more radical and dramatic than that of testimony: to increase belief both
in the content of the confession and in the person who is confessing. This
test of commitment of self is so important that, as Foucault shows, under
the Inquisition, after torture confessions had to be renewed before the
appropriate authorities:

     Il n’y a d’aveu au sens strict qu’à l’intérieur d’une relation de pouvoir à laquelle
     l’aveu donne l’occasion de s’exercer sur celui qui avoue. Les choses sont évidentes
     lorsque ces relations de pouvoir sont définies institutionnellement: ainsi dans le cas
                                                        Of Testimony and Confession         


   de confession judiciaire, ou de la confession dans l’Eglise catholique. Mais il en est
   de même dans des relations beaucoup plus floues et beaucoup plus mobiles [. . . ].
   En bref, l’aveu suscite ou renforce une relation de pouvoir qui s’exerce sur celui qui
   avoue. C’est pourquoi il n’y a d’aveu que “coûteux.” (Foucault : )

    What subject emerges from this test of veridiction, from this specific
power relationship? To what self does the paradigm of confession give place?
To answer these questions is to measure the considerable difference with
the regimes of veridiction at work in subjectivist idealist philosophies, and
first and foremost in its Cartesian version. If we can say that radical doubt
constitutes a typically Cartesian test of veridiction which allows one to
access primary truth, as we know, the result is the proud self–positioning of
the cogito. Vice versa, we can say that the test of veridiction of confession
gives the opposite result — a humiliated subject.
    We sometimes have a misleading understanding of Foucault’s notion of
technology of the self: confession is an inseparable regime of veridiction
and technology of self, but a technology of the self which functions through
constraint. Technologies of the self, such as confession, are in no way related to
agency, to Goffman’s “techniques for secondary adaptation,” to Certeau’s “arts
of doing,” to Sen’s or Ricoeur’s “capabilities” — all of which are technologies
of the self which manifest a power, albeit relative, of a subject facing outside
constraints. Of course — and this is the thrust of Foucault’s technologies of
the self — the test of confession transforms the subject; confession underlines
a self’s before and after. But this subjectivation, this transformation of self is
entirely formed under the vertical dependence of an outside injunction and
of an asymmetrical authority. The power in question is not so much power
to as power over. More specifically, power to — to recognise something — is
entirely under the dependence of a power which is exerted over the avowing
subject. We are dealing with a mode of subjectivation that is constituted
under a regime of veridiction which is inseparably a regime of power over. Yet
this subjectivation is anything but self–founding:

   L’aveu est un acte verbal par lequel le sujet pose une affirmation sur ce qu’il est,
   se lie à cette vérité, se place dans un rapport de dépendance à l’égard d’autrui, et
   modifie en même temps le rapport qu’il a à lui–même. (Foucault : )

   Although we cannot here go into the detail of Foucault’s historical analy-
ses, it is of course with Christianity that confession takes on what we might
call its paradigmatic form, particularly as from the monastic institutions
which began to flourish in the East and then in Europe during the first
Middle Ages. It was within these institutions that confession took on its
most radical form through a process of subjectivation that we might para-
doxically consider to be desubjectivation — in the sense of a destitution
       Johann Michel


of the ego — when it becomes permanent and is built against continued
obedience, which is manifested in a humilitas:

     L’humilitas consiste à se considérer comme le dernier au milieu de tous les autres:
     Alors donc que dans l’Antiquité, la verbalisation se fait à partir du maître en direction
     du disciple qui est l’instance de l’écoute, au contraire, on va avoir, dans ce nouveau
     rapport d’obéissance que les institutions monastiques développent, une structure
     complètement inverse. Pour obéir, à la fois parce qu’on obéit et pour obéir et pour
     pouvoir rester toujours dans l’état d’obéissance, il faut parler. Il faut parler de soi.
     La véridiction est un processus; la véridiction de soi–même – le dire–vrai sur soi —
     est une condition indispensable pour l’assujettissement à un rapport de pouvoir à
     l’autre. (Foucault : )

     Of course, Foucault is not philosophically justifying such a mode of obe-
dience and regime of veridiction: he only analyses their content measuring
their impact on western culture, even if confession might later on take less
radical forms. Yet we can clearly see that the paradigm of confession goes
hand in hand with a subjectification of the anti–cogito, whilst for Ricoeur,
the model of attestation of the self, which takes testimony as its paradigm, is
specifically located at an equal distance between the humiliated cogito and
the exalted cogito.
     Here it is interesting to compare the few pages that Ricoeur devotes to
confession (without it constituting a paradigm for attestation of the self) in
the second volume of Philosophy of the Will, with the status that Foucault gives
it. For Ricoeur, the phenomenology of confession, highly programmatic, is
rapidly enrolled into a hermeneutic of evil, the problem being the analysis
of modes of verbalising and symbolising evil (myth, gnosis, etc.). At first
sight, the avowing subject theorised by Ricoeur is not far removed from that
put forward by Foucault, as from the moment that the experience — evil —
which must be reflected demonstrates blindness, scandal or alienation. Yet for
Ricoeur, the act of avowal itself takes on an ignored aspect of Foucauldian
suspicion: “L’aveu exprime, pousse au dehors l’émotion qui sans lui se refer-
merait sur soi, comme une impression de l’âme; le langage est la lumière
de l’émotion; par l’aveu la conscience de faute est portée dans la lumière de
la parole; par l’aveu l’homme reste parole jusque dans l’expérience de son
absurdité, de sa souffrance, de son angoisse.” (Ricoeur : )
     For Ricoeur, symbolisation through the confession of evil (not just the
evil we have done directly, but also the evil in man, radical evil) is already a
way out of blindness: enunciation of the evil frees the avowing subject (this
is the dimension that Foucault ignores), even if it does not change the status
of the fallible cogito which traverses the Symbolism of Evil. Even if the avowing
subject loses his/her founding position, under his/her Ricoeurian modality
he/she would not for this reason take on the humiliating form suggested by
                                                  Of Testimony and Confession   


Foucault. Probably because Ricoeur’s preferred form of confession remains
confession to oneself, especially when the hermeneutic of evil is likely to
be taken up in reflexive philosophy in the form of a symbol which leads
one to consider the moral position of mankind in the world. Conversely,
unlike Foucault, Ricoeur’s hermeneutic ignores confession as an institutional
practice which is expressed in dissymmetrical power relationships. Ricoeur’s
avowing subject is set before texts, symbols and myths, with the avower
already becoming a hermeneut; in his/her Foucauldian form, the avowing
subject is first of all set before an authority.
    For Foucault, far from being a free act, the ability to tell the truth about
oneself, to interpret the signs of one’s existence, was historically framed
in the dual dependency on the Church’s institutional authority and on the
authority of sacred text. It is also in this sense that the famous believe–in as a
non–doxic register of Ricoeur’s attestation finds historical resonance: the
close link between the obligation to believe (in dogma, in God, in the re-
vealed truth, etc.) and the obligation to discover oneself. However, Foucault
shows that during primitive Christianity there was a relative dysfunction
between the hermeneutic of the self and the hermeneutic of text: whilst
for Foucault the hermeneutic of the self is in one sense an invention of the
asceticism and monasticism of the th and th centuries, it only had very
rudimentary verbalisation techniques at its disposal, unlike the techniques
for interpreting texts which as from the emergence of Judaism became
available in eminently complex forms. It was not until the Reformation that
there was a triple discontinuity which led directly to Ricoeur’s hermeneutic
of the self: firstly in the refusal to submit the hermeneutic of the texts to
the authority of dogma, secondly in the refusal to submit the hermeneutic
of texts to the institutional authority of priests. It is in this sense that the
avowing subject, as Ricoeur envisages it in Symbolism of Evil is already, his-
torically, a “reformed subject,” or at least a mode of confession which made
the Reformation its own.
    Although the Ricoeurian hermeneutic of the self is weighed down by
this triple discontinuity, it continues and considerably broadens its outlook.
A broadening, on the one hand, in the sense of a secularisation of the
hermeneutic of the self where the issue of belief — which finds specific
support in the paradigm of testimony — leaves aside the question of belief
in God as a final attestation. A broadening, on the other hand, which it owes
in part to Schleiermacher, in the sense of a significant extension to the
hermeneutic of texts above and beyond sacred texts which have not only
lost their dogmatic authority but also their interpretive centrality: texts on
history, on law, fiction are all laboratories which allow me to understand
and interpret myself. Finally, a broadening that owes much to Dilthey, in the
sense of an extension of hermeneutics to all forms of objectivised meaning,
     Johann Michel


be they symbols, actions or institutions. We can therefore see that whilst
Ricoeur’s hermeneutic of the self might be part of a historical process which
dates back to that of confession — the notion of an obligation to tell the
truth about oneself — as a specific regime of veridiction, it is a radical
departure in that it incorporates all of its discontinuities and movements of
deregionalisation. This is why testimony remains the preferred veritative
regime for the hermeneutic of the self in its Ricoeurian modality.


References

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