The confession became one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth. We have since become a singularly confessing society. The confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites; one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell. One confesses in public and private, to one’s parents, one’s educators, one’s doctor, to those one loves; one admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain, things that would be impossible to tell anyone else, the things people write books about. One confesses — or is forced to confess.
—Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One
We have the right to know what’s true
The deepest darkest dirty you
And all those nasty things you do
Every word you ever said
Every thought that’s in your head
And everything you do in bed
We’re everywhere — you won’t get far
You have to tell us who you are
The ugly, wicked, and bizarre
We goad, we taunt, we tease, we hound
We build you up — we tear you down
We have the right to watch you drown
We pillage hearts and ransack souls
We seek salvation in your skull
And pray your blood will make us whole
by Richard W. Bray
Tags: guilt, Michel Foucault, Poetry, The History of Sexuality
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