Abstract
This article puts Bernhard Waldenfels’ phenomenology of the alien in conversation with Michel Foucault’s hermeneutics of the self through a synthetic reading of Christian confessional scenes. The confessional scenes through which Foucault develops a hermeneutics of the confessing self can be read via Waldenfels as failures in responsiveness on the part of the spiritual master/elders. This allows the confessional scenes to be approached as intersubjective encounters, which broadens the angle of analysis beyond Foucault’s focus on confession as self-interpretive event. At the same time, these encounters provided a rich, textured basis on which to consider what it looks like when Waldenfels’ phenomenological structure of call and response breaks down. The upshot of this analysis is that, on the one hand, it retains Foucault’s central contribution in providing tools to analyze the prospects for the self in light of the ethical failures of dominance. On the other hand, it shows that the whole confessional setting in which Foucault develops his hermeneutical understanding of the self is circumscribed by its failure to produce a fundamental ethical gesture, such that other selves, or versions of the self, might be possible when that gesture is in place.
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Notes
Waldenfels does not use the qualifier ‘successful’; I am only adding this to differentiate the responsiveness that Waldenfels describes from the failures in responsiveness that I will be articulating throughout.
Here I am thinking of Waldenfels in contrast to the kind of ethical formation found in Jennifer Herdt’s Forming Humanity: Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition (2019).
Waldenfels writes, helpfully, “we initially do not encounter pathos as something which we mean, understand, judge, reject, or affirm; rather it forms the time-place from which we do all this by responding to it” (2011: 31).
I do not think this means that sense is never part of a response, but rather sense is exceeded also in the response in the same way that it is in the call. This is why response is creative. Even if it fills a hole, that is, even if it has content, it still exceeds it.
“Pathos…confronts us with a surplus that can never entirely be consumed” (Waldenfels, 2011: 32).
Waldenfels points out that a particular kind of ethics emerges from responsiveness. He writes that it “does not exclude other kinds of ethics, but it introduces a focus that cannot be ignored” (2016: 133). It is this sense that I use the phrase ‘central ethical gesture’ to describe responsiveness and the lack thereof in the confessional scenes.
Foucault strikes one as more emphatic about the differences between Christian and Greek philosophical/spiritual practices, whereas, upon reading Pierre Hadot (1995), particularly in his account of Christian appropriation of Greek spiritual exercises, one is left with a stronger sense of their continuity. .
The whole of the “Hermeneutics” reads as if the confessional or penitential process were the idea of the confessor himself, to the extent that he points out that, in the context of exagoreusis, that the spiritual master is “requested for this kind of confession” as if the whole project is original to the penitent (Foucault, 1993: 220). In The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Foucault does attend briefly to the spiritual master as he provides a dizzying account of the way we have become a confessional society and that this ‘imperious compulsion’ to confess has become embedded in the fabric of our discourse. Here, I am thinking about what it might mean if the demand for confession issues through a pathological response to the alien, which further asks to what extent this imperious compulsion is rooted in failures of responsiveness carried forward in present intersubjective encounters (Foucault, 1990: 58–73).
Waldenfels refers to pathos as ‘what befalls us’ (Waldenfels & Rotaru, 2016: 155).
For background on the concept of truth regimes, Foucault summarizes it in this way: “Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth – that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true” (Foucault, 2000: 131).
In a “How Much Does It Cost for Reason to Tell the Truth,” Foucault makes what I believe to be a telling reference to the ‘structures of the Other’ that demonstrate this overlap between institutional power and otherness or this agency of dominative power: “The subject was able to tell the truth about his insanity, because the structures of the Other allowed him to” (Foucault, 1989: 360).
In Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche offers a vivid depiction of our pre-emptive tendencies in interpersonal encounter: “it is so much easier for us to fantasize an approximation…In an animated conversation I often see the face of the person with whom I am talking with such clarity and detail, adapting to each thought he expresses or which I have produced in him…this degree of clarity far exceeds the power of my capacity to see: - the subtlety of muscle movement and the expression of the eyes must therefore have been made up by me. The person probably made quite a different face or none at all” (Nietzsche, 2014:87f.).
Here we might take a cue from Aristotle for a humane modesty and sense of progression in our ethical expectations: “it is no easy task to be good…Hence he who aims at the intermediate must first depart from what is the more contrary to it” (Aristotle, 2009: 36).
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Mitchell, N. Self-Interpretive Event or Responsive Failure? Reading Foucault’s Confessions via Bernhard Waldenfels. Hum Stud 45, 761–776 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-022-09646-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-022-09646-2