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This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. This book explores what is at stake in our confessional culture. Thomas Docherty examines confessional writings from Augustine to Montaigne and from Sylvia Plath to Derrida, arguing that through all this work runs a philosophical substratum - the conditions under which it is possible to assert a confessional mode - that needs exploration and explication. Docherty outlines a philosophy of confession that has pertinence for a contemporary political culture based on the notion of 'transparency'. In a postmodern 'transparent society', the self coincides with its self-representations. Such a position is central to the idea of authenticity and truth-telling in confessional writing: it is the basis of saying, truthfully, 'here I take my stand'. The question is: what other consequences might there be of an assumption of the primacy of transparency? Two areas are examined in detail: the religious and the judicial. Docherty shows that despite the tendency to regard transparency as a general social and ethical good, our contemporary culture of transparency has engendered a society in which autonomy (or the very authority of the subject that proclaims 'I confess') is grounded in guilt, reparation and victimhood.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. For the University is a book both about and for the university in an age of mass and globalized education. Thomas Docherty analyses the current problems facing the university as an institution, and also offers some positive arguments for a revived and vibrant set of institutional arrangements and governing principles. The book considers the place of the university as an important global institution, now in a charged political and international public sphere. Docherty places current debates within their wider economic and political context, focusing on the relationship of the university to current and emerging models of democracy. The question of what the university will be -- rather than it is, was, or might be -- is at the heart of this book, and Docherty ably traces its history and present condition in order to offer us a vision for the future.