Thomas Docherty is Professor of English at Warwick University. He has published on most areas of English and comparative literature from the renaissance to the present day. He specializes in the philosophy of literary criticism, in critical theory, and in cultural history in relation primarily to European philosophy and literatures. Some of his previous publications include John Donne Undone (Methuen/Routledge, 1986), Postmodernism (Harvester/Columbia UP, 1993), Aesthetic Democracy (Stanford UP, 2006) and The English Question (Sussex Academic, 2008).

• Part One: Now | 'This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine'| Official Identity and Clandestine Experience| Part Two: Dilatory Time | The Ecology of Anguish| Down to Zero | Part Three: The Political Condition of Confession | My Language

Thomas Docherty has long been not only one of our most significant, provocative and original cultural critics, but one of the most consistent. In this, his latest foray into his chosen intellectual terrain, he deploys some of his key concepts ? the event, radical historicity, becoming as heterogeneous flux ? as a basis for a sustained interrogation of the history and supposed virtue of the idea of confession. The result is a learned, sophisticated and powerful counterblast to a culture whose demand for immediate transparency is inseparable from a range of disabling fetishes, from management and security to space and speed, `truth and reconciliation' and, above all, identity and identity-politics. Everyone should read it.