Confession (n.) is a disciplinary device, an injunction to render into language what is often culturally unspeakable: 'One confesses one's crimes, one's sins, one's thoughts and desires, one's illnesses and troubles... one goes about telling with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell.
Confession (n.) is a vital component of 'modern power' in which a specific technology of the body was forged.
Confession (n.) is a vital component of 'modern power' or 'bio-power' which teaches that our liberation requires us to make confessions or tell the truth (to a priest or a psychoanalyst or someone in power), and that this truth-telling will somehow set us free.
Confession (n.) is a vital component of modern power. . . ..Transforming sex into discourse had been devised long before in an ascetic and monastic setting.
Confession (n.) is always an act of discipline and subjection, a discourse whose policing of sex guarantees domination, even if he is unclear about the makeup of this domination.
Confession (n.) is, in the 18th and 19th centuries, gradually secularized. People were incited to confess to their innermost desires and sexual practices. These confessions then became data for the social sciences which used the knowledge to construct mechanisms of social control.
Confession (n.) is part of a larger technology of self-regulation in which the organizing semiotic is the panopticon, a mechanism of visual power that is simultaneously omniscopic and invisible.
Confession (n.) is the mark of western man. He has become a confessing animal. From the most defenseless tenderness to the bloodiest of powers, all have a similar need of it.