Foucault on “Avowal”: Theatres of Truth from Homer to Modern Psychology

FOUCAULT, MICHEL. 2014 . Wrong‐Doing, Truth‐Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice . Ed. Fabienne Brion and Bernard Harcourt, trans. Stephen Sawyer. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cloth $35.00, E‐book $7.00 to $30.00. The publication of a previously unknown set of lectures delivered by Foucault in 1981 at Louvain's criminology institute constitutes a major revelation for legal and criminological scholars (Wrong‐Doing, Truth‐Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, 2014). The lecture material includes an extended discussion of the techniques used by Oedipus to establish the truth of his familial crime, a reflection on the beginnings of the inquisitorial justice system (which Foucault here argues paved the way for the scientific revolution), and analyses of contemporary forensic confessions. Throughout these meticulously edited lectures, the scientific and philosophical “inquiries” that revolutionized modern European knowledges are shown to be rooted in embodied practices of confession and avowal that go back to ancient Greece.