This article discusses the displacement in Foucault’s analysis of confession, trying to demonstrate how the focus of analysis goes from mandatory language forms to reflexive and voluntary forms. A possible link between confession and governmentality is proposed in order to think about the production of the political subject. From the reflections of Agamben, on the officium and the ontological device, and Esposito, on the machine of theology-politics and the person’s device, the goal here is to understand the theoretical origin and the modus operandi of obedience in liberal political practice. Retaking the subject-subjection dialectic outlined in the Foucault, Agamben and Esposito’s analysis, as well as the reflections of Philip Pettit and William Connolly on Hobbes and Rawls, this article presents the political subject not as a thinking agent, but as thought object and as the condition of possibility of the Political Theory.
Confession; Oath; Subjectivity; Veridiction; Political Theory