Review of Björn Krondorfer, Male Confessions: Intimate Revelations and the Religious Imagination | Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality

Review of Björn Krondorfer, Male Confessions: Intimate Revelations and the Religious Imagination (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010) xi + 286 pp.
Alison Jasper

If there is anything wrong with Krondorfer's book it is that he tries to draw too much into its pages, covering as it does everything from Augustine's extensive and complex ruminations on God, the body, sex, love and his mother in the Confessions, to Scott Haldeman’s brave and unsettling attempts to theologize (male) masturbation in the 21st century. Sandwiched in between are several long and detailed excursions into various kinds of culpability associated with the Holocaust as viewed from the perspectives of (male) confessants. Yet this should not deter the potential reader. The book is rich and engaging as Krondorfer seeks to address various kinds of male confession in search of a genuine interiority that is truly able to face—and this is the core of the project—the judgment of an Other, whether that is the divine or the reader, who is not male or not male within the current heteronormative standards of the contextualizing reading culture. It is a project of male subjectivity within a post-holocaust, post-feminist world and, as such, it is a timely and yet still, a risky endeavor.

The book begins with the male confessions of the title: Saint Augustine in the fourth century, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau at the beginning of modernity. Twentieth century "confessions" include Michel Leiris' 1939 essay on manhood as well as the fascinating confessional doublet of Calel Perechodnik, the Jewish ghetto policeman who confesses his shame to his (dead) wife for his betrayal of her, and Oswald Pohl, the Nazi war criminal who confesses his (Christian) faith for very different reasons shortly before he is hanged for war crimes. Krondorfer, of course, selects and edits the accounts. Yet undoubtedly, these accounts have been chosen because the confessional genre offers a context—potentially at least—within which a man might be able to stop seeing himself reflected in the mirror of some Other and at least attempt the reflexive movement of being seen, being addressed, being, even, the construct of another's subjective gaze, touch or desire. The confessional genre attempts the challenging task of performing an intimate act of self-revelation in a public frame and thus, of course, runs the risk of becoming merely self-justifying. But it also demands—in so far as it aspires to be a genuine attempt to engage with the reader—a serious, introspective response whether the author intends that this reader should turn to God—as in the case of Augustine—or cries out to them for absolution, as in the case of Perechodnik.

One way to reduce the emotional weightiness of the confessional genre would be to stand back and take a more or less academic or scholarly stance. Yet Krondorfer takes deliberate steps to deny himself and the reader this kind of relief—clearly he would see this as yet another kind of collapse back into the appearance of neutrality within what is, in fact, a highly contextualized and indeed gendered writing framework. Throughout the book, the text is broken up by Krondorfer's own [page 39] "confession," that is to say, with his own attempt to address the Other—the reader—struggling to avoid narcissistic self-indulgence but staunchly committed to unveiling the authorial male body. Evincing a kind of natural reserve, Krondorfer confesses his own discomfort with the body, his own body, and with the unaccustomed intimacy of the approach he has chosen, as well as the sometimes acutely uncomfortable position in which he finds himself—particularly in the case of Perechodnik, for example—of having to be seen to assess and judge the subjects whose confessions he considers, not simply from his position as a university professor, but also as a man.

The book is also taxing in the way that any attempt at something genuinely counter-normative tends to be—setting unexpected hackles rising and catching the reader out in certain kinds of unsuspected resistance. The fact of the matter is that it is still difficult to confess the male body—Krondorfer reveals to us—when it has, for so long, been identified as clean, closed and self-sufficient and identified with the epistemic privilege of the normative elite or privileged male. It clearly remains difficult for men to construct new patterns of value or emphasis for themselves and for those who are not men, to accept these attempts at transformation. The very admission/confession of weakness, for example, still tends to compromise male identity composed as it has been of a definitive will to power that admits of no insufficiency except, perhaps, in relation to the unquestioned masculinity of a God like that of Augustine, or some similarly gendered ideal. In addition, to acknowledge some investment in leaky male bodies with their wet or sticky emissions intimately associated with powerfully non-rational feelings, is to run a huge risk of collapsing the gesture of confession into something readers will find at best puzzling and faintly distasteful and at worst, contemptible. Yet the kind of male confession to which Krondorfer aspires—a truly adequate awareness of the Other to whom he confesses—requires that the orchestration of the normative male be replaced with just such a process of risk in relation to a genuine—appropriate—openness and vulnerability.

Of course, we may want, like Krondorfer, to ask in the end why Augustine and the others choose the confessional form over attempts to address significant others in their lives, more directly. The victims of this approach are the many silenced women, men and children whose contributions or suffering is disregarded by the confessant, both in fact and in the confessional format. For Augustine, for example, though he is clearly indebted to his mother for his natural birth as a man, as well as for her part in his spiritual birth as a Christian, the female body and its gendered sex is almost entirely missing from his account; his "confession" reflects the indifference he cultivated towards a feminine Other in pursuit of his lust for the Otherness of God. The "published" confessions on which Krondorfer focuses in the first part of the book are—as he argues himself—all open to this kind of critique; that alongside any genuine striving for interiority or engagement with an Other, there is invariably a more self-serving agenda that turns the confession into rhetorical performance whose purpose is to make the confessant look more convincing to a specific audience. And even in the second part of the book where Krondorfer looks at a number of more recent attempts by male theologians to make theological sense of themselves as embodied, sometimes gay men, these accounts still gloss over the presence of the numerous significant others to whom a more [page 40] direct address might have been appropriate, even as the previously “excluded Other” of the male body is brought into new focus.

This is in some ways an uneven book—there is more than enough information about some of the characters to constitute general biographies whilst the specific analysis of masculinity or the attempt to fit the discussion into a more theological framing is less consistently apparent. Nevertheless, the issues raised here about the possibility of male subjectivity, particularly within the context of the heteropatriarchal traditions that still underpin significant elements of contemporary global experience, are explored in this book with a wealth of scholarship and creative insight that must make this an important book for anyone interested in gender studies whether in the field of "religion" or beyond.

Alison Jasper
University of Stirling/SCOTLAND
e: a [dot] e [dot] jasper