Confessions : the philosophy of transparency / Thomas Docherty.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Docherty, Thomas, author.

Series:

WISH list.

The WISH list

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Confession.

Confession in literature.

Confession stories.

Physical Description:

1 online resource : digital, HTML file(s).

Other Title:

Confessions

Place of Publication:

London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2012]

System Details:

text file

Summary:

This book explores what is at stake in our confessional culture. Thomas Docherty examines confessional writings from Augustine to Montaigne and from Sylvia Plath to Derrida, arguing that through all this work runs a philosophical substratum - the conditions under which it is possible to assert a confessional mode - that needs exploration and explication.Docherty outlines a philosophy of confession that has pertinence for a contemporary political culture based on the notion of ‘transparency'. In a postmodern ‘transparent society', the self coincides with its self-representations. Such a position is central to the idea of authenticity and truth-telling in confessional writing: it is the basis of saying, truthfully, ‘here I take my stand'.The question is: what other consequences might there be of an assumption of the primacy of transparency? Two areas are examined in detail: the religious and the judicial. Docherty shows that despite the tendency to regard transparency as a general social and ethical good, our contemporary culture of transparency has engendered a society in which autonomy (or the very authority of the subject that proclaims ‘I confess') is grounded in guilt, reparation and victimhood.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781849666794

1849666792

9781849666787

1849666784

OCLC:

796937349