He could not cover the whole story in his six lectures at Louvain, but he got under way with detailed expositions of a ceremonial chariot race in the Iliad and Oedipus’ belated recognition of his guilt in Oedipus Rex. Between these two moments, Foucault says, we must postulate the emergence of a new kind of legal process, based not on the outcome of a tournament between antagonists, but on the authority of a third party: a judge, with a duty to discern a single truth transcending the clash of claims and counter-claims. He pauses to suggest that dramatists from Sophocles to Shakespeare, Corneille and Schiller were always preoccupied with the connection between justice and avowal, but hastens back to ancient Greece, and the philosophical idea of self-knowledge as self-mastery. Against this background, Christian practices of truthfulness mark a revolutionary break, appealing not to the luminous certainty of religious or philosophical orthodoxy, but to the unfathomable recesses of the subject’s sinful soul. For a Christian, self-knowledge was not a means to heroic autonomy, but an exercise in humble submission and an opening towards the tormented spirituality that Foucault calls “the hermeneutics of the self”. Formalized rituals of public penance would later give way to informal confessions to a priest, only to be revived in the rule-bound practices of the medieval Church.

~ Jonathan Rée