Tell, Dave. “Rhetoric and Power: An Inquiry into Foucault’s Critique of Confession.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 43.2 (Spring 2010): 95-117. Lead Article.
https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.43.2.0095
Abstract
In the 1980s Foucault relentlessly distinguished between two discursive practices: the Christian confession and the ancient technologies of the self. This distinction provides a valuable opportunity to study the role of rhetoric in Foucault’s thought—not because both discursive practices are rhetorical forms, but, curiously, because Foucault insisted that one is not. By contextualizing both of these discourses of the self in terms of Nietzsche’s critique of metonymy, I argue that Foucault’s distinction between the confession and the technologies of the self teaches us two important lessons about rhetoric and power. First, because Foucault’s power requires recourse to a metonymically figured confession, it is a fundamentally rhetorical power. Second, to the extent that the “political indispensability” of the techniques of the self is tied to their rejection of metonymy, Foucault’s resistance is “nonrhetorical.”
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