Confessions
The confession was, and still remains, the general standard governing the production of the true discourse on sex… The motivations and effects it is expected to produce have varied, as have the forms it has taken: interrogations, consultations, autobiographical narratives, letters… the confession lends itself, if not to other domains, at least to new ways of exploring the existing ones. It is no longer a question simply of saying what was done… and how it was done; but of reconstructing, in and around the act, the thoughts that recapitulated it, the obsessions that accompanied it, the images, desires, modulations, and quality of the pleasure that animated it. For the first time no doubt, a society has taken upon itself to solicit and hear the imparting of individual pleasures.
Michael Foucault (1976) History of Sexuality Part I. Penguin, 1978 ed., p.63.
From time to time most of us feel a need,
often urgent and imperious, to talk about ourselves. We desire to assert our personalities,
to insist on a fact which the world about us seems in danger of forgetting – the fact that
we exist, that we are we. In some people
the desire is so chronic and so strong, that
they can never stop talking about themselves.
Rather than be silent, they will pour out the
most humiliating and discreditable confidences.
Aldous Huxley
(1926)
Two or Three Graces, reprinted in Twice Seven (1932), p243.
In any case, I only like confessions nowadays, and the authors of confessions write chiefly in order not to confess, saying nothing of what they know. When they pretend to be owning up, that the moment to beware: they're putting make-up on the corpse. Believe me, I'm a craftsman.
Albert Camus (1956) The Fall. Penguin, 1990 ed., p.76.