Foucault, as often, gets it...

Nice stuff from Michel Foucault. By exomologesis he means the acts of penance by which you show yourself penitent...

Foucault / HERMENEUTICS OF THE SELF

To justify this exomologesis and this renunciation to oneself in manifesting the truth about oneself, Christian fathers had recourse to several models. The well-known medical model was very often used in pagan philosophy: one has to show his wounds to the physicians if he wants to be healed. They also used the judicial model: one always appeases the court when spontaneously confessing the faults. But the most important model to justify the necessity of exomologesis is the model of martyrdom. The martyr is he who prefers to face death rather than to abandon his faith. The sinner abandons the faith in order to keep the life of here below; he will be reinstated only if in his turn he exposes himself voluntarily to a sort of martyrdom to which all will be witnesses, and which is penance, or penance as exolmologesis. Such a demonstration does not therefore have as its function the establishment of the personal identity. Rather, such a demonstration serves to mark this dramatic demonstration of what one is: the refusal of the self, the breaking off from one's self. One recalls what was the objective of Stoic technology: it was to superimpose, as I tried to explain to you last week, the subject of knowledge and the subject of will by means of the perpetual rememorizing of the rules. The formula which is at the heart of exomologesis is, in contrary, ego non sum ego. The exomologesis seeks, in opposition to the Stoic techniques, to superimpose by an act of violent rupture the truth about oneself and the renunciation of oneself. In the ostentatious gestures of maceration, self-revelation in exomologesis is, at the same time, self-destruction.