From the Latin con-fidere, “to trust with,” confidence names the founding act of friendship (to confide), the currency of intimacy (a confidence, a secret shared), the swindler who wields both (the confidence man), and an inner conviction unevenly distributed across bodies (to speak with confidence). Together, these meanings position confidence not as individual feeling or private virtue, but as a social relation that mediates belief, belonging, and obligation.

Confidence owes its social force to its anticipatory structure, binding persons in advance of proof. Every act of confiding “is act of faith, phenomenon of credit or credence” (Derrida, Baudelaire), a wager extended not on evidence alone but on perceived credibility, which is biased by race, gender, and class (Gilmore). Within contemporary “confidence culture” (Gill), moreover, subjects denied credibility are instructed to manufacture self-assurance instead—to believe in themselves in the hope of being believed.

In determining who is believed, confidence determines who belongs. The Western political imaginary historically figures the friend as a brother, from Aristotle’s philia to Montaigne’s singular friend to the fraternal contract (Rousseau; Pateman)—a masculine homosociality (Sedgwick) that secures insiders by reiterating women as its constitutive outside. Nor is fraternity uniquely Western, organizing trust through sworn kinship, covenant, and asabiyya across cultures. Precisely because the model has proved so durable, this seminar seeks forms of confidence that reconfigure it: women’s juxtapolitical spaces (Berlant; Honig), queer disidentifications (Muñoz), diasporic and minoritarian kinships (Hartman), and the encrypted or algorithmic publics of digital life (Chun). 

What is revealed when confidence is betrayed? Bentham was thwarted by his own confidence in institutional efficacy, while Melville’s The Confidence-Man narrates a world in which faith induces fraudulent exchanges. Ruptures in trust rarely dissolve the networks it once produced but expose, instead, the liabilities and exclusions they long sustained. Such failures extend beyond the deceiver, transforming relations into sites of implication (Rothberg), suspicion, and lateral surveillance (Andrejevic; Verdery). Rather than treating confidence as an uncomplicated good, this seminar asks what collective life it makes possible, what attachments survive its breakdown, and what alternative solidarities emerge in its wake.

We welcome papers from any period, language, and medium. Possible topics include:

• friendship, fraternity, and their philosophical genealogies
• sworn kinship, covenant, oath, initiation
• impostors, fabulists
• gossip, whisper networks
• queering the fraternal, open secrets
• testimony, credibility, the politics of belief
• the gendering of self-confidence
• implication, complicity
• betrayal, apostasy, whistleblowing
• surveillance, encryption, leaks