Confession and Avowal in Foucault’s early work, 1954-1972

Confession is one of Foucault’s best-known concepts, it is also one of his most misunderstood. While confession and aveu are usually translated as ‘confession’ and used interchangeably, this article begins to disentangle them by examining all material by Foucault published between 1954 and 1972, tracing their origin and development. This yields a number of preliminary conclusions. First, by the standards of later definitions, while all elements of the avowal and of confession are present, nowhere are they explicitly linked together. Specifically, although the idea of pathological ‘deviance’ set against ‘normality’ is present, only later will Foucault examine the importance of deviance in confessional dispositives. Instead, aveu and confession often occupy the semantic field of ‘admission’, and are linked to judicial procedures. Secondly, as epistemic framework, while the avowal is part of the confessional dispositive, it is also found in other contexts with different characteristics. Thirdly, the difficulty in distinguishing between avowal (aveu) and confession (confession) is rooted in the fact that these terms cover not two but three economies of power: avowal as admission of law-breaking, which makes no assumptions about the nature of the speaking subject; avowal in a space such as the asylum, entailing a one-off emancipation from unreason towards reason; and confession, where the avowing subject’s emancipation from alterity is undermined by a pathological subjectivity, flawed by nature. Consequently, applications of Foucault’s extraordinarily popular ‘confessing animal’ will need to be re-examined.