Confessional critiques: Parrhesia and avowal in contemporary anti-racist discourses

Abstract

Confessional critiques proliferate in contemporary culture, remodelling critical politics as self-purification. Within Foucault’s work, critique is associated with resistance to power and subjectification, whereas confession appears a technique of disciplinary and pastoral power. However, genealogy creates hybrids, and herein we observe how critique and confession are entangled in contemporary social justice discourses, focusing empirically on contemporary anti-racist texts. These critique their imagined readers and society more generally, demanding confessions, castigating denials and exhorting interminable purificatory self-work. This analysis draws from Foucault’s genealogies of parrhesia and avowal, through his latter works on the problem of ‘truth-telling’ and how it forms subjects, even by critique. Recognising this historical hybridisation of critique and confession within discourses such as anti-racism may help to clarify the political stakes of critique.