But in many other aspects it does not resemble

But in many other aspects it does not resemble Augustine’s work: cer-
tainly not in its relationship to Christian belief, nor in its way of referring
to the eternal being. The last paragraph concludes with a request and a
challenge. May that eternal being gather the vast crowd of the author’s
fellow beings so that they may hear his confessions, so that they may
cringe at learning about his disgraceful acts and blush at his woes. Would
the work be received according to Rousseau’s challenge to his readers,
each one of them would take his turn and open up his heart at the feet of
the throne of the eternal being with the same kind of sincerity, and then
just one should dare to address the divinity and say, I was better than this
man there. It is rather remarkable that the function of God, the supreme
judge, is not to determine the value and fate of the individual’s soul but
rather to orchestrate and oversee the publication and reception of Rous-
seau’s book entitled Confessions . God is the authority to guarantee the
utter uniqueness of Rousseau’s work.
Especially after Foucault’s critique of the disciplinary aspects of nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century institutions and practices concerned with
examining the individual’s inner self, Rousseau’s challenge to his readers to
“listen” to his confessions and then to follow in his footsteps and uncover
their own hearts with the same kind of sincerity might be taken for the
programmatic announcement of the modern culture of confession and sin-
cerity. Indeed, it has almost become a commonplace to see in Rousseau’s
Confessions the beginning of that individualizing subjection that would
then with the aid of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis seek to
localize in a person’s desiring structure the key to that individual’s secret,
sexuality, and subjectivity that needed to be studied, cured, and normalized.
In other words, Rousseau’s Confessions has been frequently considered the
prototype of the transition from a religious to a worldly practice of the self,
which only at first glance looks like a liberating move but actually main-
tains or even heightens the disciplinary aspects of the religious confession.
2

PA RT I I ( 79 )
The emphasis on the sincerity of the confessing subject, the focus on
the minute observation of the stirrings of one’s soul, and the disregard for
worldly opinions and judgments are indeed decisive elements that char-
acterize Augustine’s as well as Rousseau’s Confessions and the Christian
practice of confessing one’s sins. However it needs to be noted that the
sacrament of penance and the confession of one’s sins took on many dif-
ferent shapes throughout the history of Christianity. There has never been
just one practice and speech genre of the confession. Moreover, through-
out the history of Christianity there have been other uses and meanings of
the term confession. The term has not only been used to refer to the sincere
and accurate account of one’s trespasses and failings based on the thor-
ough examination of one’s conscience but also to the kind of speech that
professes one’s adherence to a particular creed (the profession of faith or
the credo), as well as the speech genre that codifies a particular creed (such
as the Augsburg Confession). In fact, as I shall show in the first section
of the Rousseau chapter, Rousseau was quite aware of these different uses