Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice. By Michel Foucault. Edited by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. Translated by Stephen W. Sawyer (University of Chicago Press, 2014, 344pp. $35.00 hb)

Abstract

Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice is a collection of seven lectures delivered by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault at the Catholic University of Louvain in 1981. Compiled from audiovisual recordings and Foucault’s original manuscripts, these lectures explore the notion of avowal and its place within criminal justice processes. Accompanied by three contemporaneous interviews given by Foucault (only one of which has previously been available in English), and a preface and concluding essay by the editors contextualizing these lectures in Foucault’s oeuvre, this volume contributes much to Foucaultian scholarship, particularly when considered alongside the recently published volumes of Foucault’s lecture courses at the Collège de France. However, while the book promises to offer some insights of relevance to criminology, it is important to remember that this is not its key purpose, and criminologists should read it with this caveat in mind. These lectures chart a genealogy of avowal from the Greeks through the medieval period and Christianity to the modern period. Avowal aligns with Foucault’s interest in the connections between subjectivity and truth—specifically the dual obligations of accepting particular truths and telling the truth about ourselves—which became the focus of the last volumes of his History of Sexuality and his lecture courses of the period. For Foucault, avowal is ‘…a verbal act through which the subject affirms who he [sic] is, binds himself to this truth, places himself in a relation of dependence with regard to another, and modifies at the same time his relationship to himself’ (17). Through the avowal of a crime, i.e., one commits oneself to being the author of the crime, which also entails subjecting oneself to a particular authority (such as a legal authority) to which the avowal is offered, and which alters the relationship between oneself and the status avowed. After all, an offender who avows is treated in a different way to one whose guilt has been determined through other legal processes—and they are often seen as more open to reform. In this sense, an exploration of avowal adds another dimension to Foucault’s interest in the exercise of power and the fashioning of subjectivity, specifically in understanding one’s relationship to truth.