Confessions

Thomas Docherty has long been not only one of our most significant, provocative and original cultural critics, but one of the most consistent. In this, his latest foray into his chosen intellectual terrain, he deploys some of his key concepts ? the event, radical historicity, becoming as heterogeneous flux ? as a basis for a sustained interrogation of the history and supposed virtue of the idea of confession. The result is a learned, sophisticated and powerful counterblast to a culture whose demand for immediate transparency is inseparable from a range of disabling fetishes, from management and security to space and speed, `truth and reconciliation' and, above all, identity and identity-politics. Everyone should read it. * Andrew Gibson, Research Professor of Modern Literature and Theory, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK *
We live in an age where 'transparency' is everything, or its illusion at least, from the mea maxima culpa of the disgraced politician, to the pseudodoxia of institutional accountability. Tele-technologies, kiss-n-tell biographies and massmediatic intrusiveness have rendered confession meaningless to such a great degree, that to read so finely attuned a 'confessional' as Thomas Docherty's stunning critical and philosophical inquiry is to be reminded of an ethical imperative that is as inescapable as it is misunderstood in so wilfully stupid a secular culture as the one we presently inhabit. In a study that begins with disarmingly straightforward questions concerning what it might mean 'to confess', and what the role of the subject is in this practise, Docherty opens out his exquisitely crafted meditation, with a breadth of scope that belies the filigree-work of its arguments, its explorations, and its always-political interrogations. * Julian Wolfreys, Professor of Modern Literature and Culture, Loughborough University, UK *
I have to confess to liking this book a lot. It is a literary, theoretical and autobiographical tour de force. Docherty's acute critical sense ranges across the philosophical and cultural landscape to read Paul de Man, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt and the Lisbon Lions. A few more books like this and the humanities might be worth fighting for after all. * Martin McQuillan, Kingston University, UK *