Speaking for himself alone, the confessing subject ends up saying nothing that a discerning reader can take seriously.
Fascinating essay from Olga Litvak. A couple brief thoughts:
Some translation problems that she refers to are at least partly addressed when we consider that Garry Wills, for example, who insists on referring to Augustine’s Confessions as “The Testimony,” has argued convincingly that the word/title “confessions” is less a translation than it is a transliteration of the word confessiones or confiteri, which has a much wider and richer resonance than what is captured, particularly by our modern ears, in the word “confessions.”
And, both to and against Litvak’s point about confession and epistemological modesty, and as Gilbert Meilaender has often pointed out, a complete reading of Augustine’s “Confessions” concludes not with the “authenticity” of the confessor, but with his admitted inability to be authentic.
What then am I, my God? What is my nature? A life various, manifold, and quite immeasurable. Imagine the plains, caverns, and abysses of my memory; they are innumerable and are innumerably full of innumerable kinds of things… Through all this I range; I fly here and I fly there; I dive down deep as I can, and I can find no end.
So when Litvak says that Rabbinic law “operates on a normative assumption that self representation—testimony given on one’s own behalf—is not to be trusted, because people are not, as it were, sufficiently detached from themselves to attest confidently to their own behavior,” and that “confession therefore enjoys no privileged status in Jewish law,” she is at least partly agreeing with Augustine.
My sense, too, is that if some of this was taken into account, Latvik’s reading of M.L. Lilienblum’s Errors of Youth as “anti-confessional polemic” might make space for Augustine’s Confessions as at least overlapping (admittedly less humorously) with the genre of “authorial skepticism” rather than being diametric to it.
All that being said, Latvik’s exposure of “confession” — what we do usually understand and practice as confession, autobiography, authenticity — to often be little more than “compulsive truth-telling as a cover-story (an alibi) for narcissism and personal entitlement” is scathing and, I think, on target.