Caught in the Act: Voyeurism and Performance in Augustine’s Confessions

Through theories of performativity and as performance, this article explores Augustine’s troubled relationship with spectacles of suffering in Confessions. For Augustine, pleasure at pain proves the most apt example of all pleasure as an end in itself—all pleasure that does not end in God. And all who partake of this pleasure are guilty of a kind of voyeurism.

But can Confessions be saved from Augustine’s own critique? Many scholars have suggested it can. Some claim that Augustine’s theatricality finds its telos in God. Others point to the performativity of prayer, suggesting that this performativity precludes voyeuristic engagement. The profound performativity of Confessions has not been overlooked. Yet by using concepts interior to the text (theater, prayer, imitation, suffering, curiosity, humility) as a framework for interpreting the text as a whole, this article exposes the (still) unresolved dilemma suspended at the heart of that performativity.