Invited by the School of Criminology of the Catholic University of Louvain, in 1981 Michel Foucault taught the six classes of the course To act badly, to tell the truth. Role of confession in justice, in a context marked by debates between abolitionists and supporters of "iron fist" positions on the reform of the Penal Code. In that sense, the course contributes to undermining the criminological discourse of dangerousness. But Foucault goes further: he reflects on the long history of confession, of "telling the truth" in the judicial and religious institutions of the West, of the powers and effects of the obligation to tell the truth about oneself.

By way of introduction, it evokes a certainly dramatic scene that takes place in the mid-nineteenth century: a French psychiatrist induces a patient who has suffered delusions and hallucinations to recognize that nothing he relates has happened, that it was only madness; By force, he forces him to recognize his condition as insane, a confession that becomes a decisive element in the cure. This scene reveals the complexity of a practice that, even under duress, needs to suppose a free subject who commits himself to being what he claims to be. Throughout the course, with dazzling erudition and fluidity, Foucault analyzes the trajectory of that verbal act through which the subject poses an affirmation about what he is, is linked to that truth, puts himself in a relationship of dependence or submission with respect to another and modifies at the same time the relationship he has with himself.

Published for the first time almost simultaneously in French, English and Spanish, this work traces the history of a practice that extends from Greek antiquity, through the examination of conscience and the "fee-based confession" in the medieval and Christian spheres, to the modern and contemporary domain. A practice that does not cease to grow involving almost all aspects of personal life, and that reveals both the judicial procedures of producing an effect of truth and the need of the subject to have a discourse of truth about himself.

In To Do Wrong, to Tell the Truth, Foucault's exposition goes far beyond what is suggested in the subtitle. Indeed, it is not only about the function of confession in justice, but about a history of confession from Homer to the twentieth century, in which Foucault shows us the lines that link the two extremes of his project around sexuality. This course is, in a way, the missing link in the history of sexuality. Edgardo Castro