Abstract: Michel Foucault highlighted the manner in which confession gradually spread from monastic life and then the penal system to society as a whole, to the point that we have become creatures of confession. However, this presupposes the constitution of a subject transparent to itself and others through a hermeneutics of self. Drawing on literature, Deleuze proposes Melville’s short story, Bartleby, the Scrivener, as a work from which we can see a secret subjectivity emerge.
