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This essay claims that the American plea bargain, figured as an inheritor of Christian confession practices, constructs racialized criminal subjects. It further argues that an apophatic anthropology confounds this legal practice and enables new forms of confession to be imagined. The first section utilizes Michel Foucault’s genealogies of confession in order to show that shifts in European religious and legal confession practices contributed to the emergence of the modern self-possessed subject. The second section utilizes Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve’s sociological account of the courthouse to highlight the role of the plea bargain in constructing racialized criminal subjects. The third section challenges the underlying anthropological assumptions of the plea bargaining. Drawing on Judith Butler, Catherine Keller, and Critical Race Theorists, it insists that an apophatic anthropology prevents the construction of racialized criminal subjects through plea bargains. The final section mobilizes this apophatic anthropology to envision new confession practices in abolitionist settings.

On Condemning Whom We Do Not Know: Confession of Sins, Plea Bargains and Apophatic Anthropology