[Air-l] Re: Confession

[Ann De Vaney]

 Jeremy W. C. et al,
    
    What great questions you pose, Jeremy .You certainly got me thinking and
halted my lurking. 

    The institution of confession within the Roman Catholic Church whether
in the Thomistic Middle Ages or in the 20th century does not appear to me to
be constructed in the manner in which you describe it. I find your
description somewhat romantic. To penitents then or now, I think, the
exercise of power is evident and, in fact, takes precedence over self
examination or reflection. Then or now the penitent recites prescribed sins
­ the discursive construction of authors (authority) invested in the
exercise of power by disciplining and punishing. This is not an exercise in
discovery.  Far from separating the body from the soul or spirit, confession
writes its result on the bodies of penitents ­ more painfully perhaps in the
Middle Ages, but still in humiliating and degrading forms today. Feelings of
relief( a bodily response), I think, come for penitents from having
successfully negotiated  an interaction of power; by being submissive the
penitent receives a reward, a blessing.

    The commonplace notion that confession is good for the soul is, to my
way of thinking, light years away from the institution of confession. Closer
to that notion might be Augustine¹s "Confessions"  or  certain modalities of
self exploration as they are constructed in modern and postmodern
psychoanalytic discourses. The idea that self exploration can be articulated
in some form gets closer, I believe, to your concept of confession. What we
can never shed, after Foucault, is that any discourse one selects will
embody power relations. Perhaps self is constructed in resistance. (In a
non-discursive fashion Touraine and Castells  propose that concept) But I
digress. I think that your exploration is very important for us and hope you
continue to be creative in pursuing it.

Ann De Vaney


Ann De Vaney  
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