This project investigates the myths of transparency and authenticity that have dominated the social imaginary since the Enlightenment, and perhaps even earlier, with the emergence of Christianity and its regimes of truth, pastoral power, and practices of the self. The belief that we should live in absolute clarity and transparency, that everything should be literally illuminated, from the house to the city, also leads to the theme of authenticity, the idea that we must be authentic, exposed to all. On the other hand, also at stake is the conception that turns obscurity and shadow into negative values in Western culture, as shown by the Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki and the French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman. In turn, when studying the texts of the founding Fathers of Christianity, Foucault highlights the theme of the sinful impurity that inhabits us, beginning with the formulations of Tertullian and Augustine, for whom we must be watched and watch ourselves incessantly, since we are all potentially suspect. Contrary to Greek askēsis, which presupposed the “aesthetics of existence,” we are induced to operate the “hermeneutics of the self” without interruption, and to beware of the Devil that inhabits our soul and body, and determines our every step. In other words, we must purify ourselves, whether by confessing or by renouncing ourselves and our desires, potentially libidinal, that is, perverse. The practice of confession, Foucault argues, long ago left the confessionary and came to be exercised in all spaces of sociability, such as the public, private, and intimate: human beings have become “confessing animals.” This theme extends, in his reflections, to the nineteenth century, where Bentham’s Panopticon appears as a privileged architectural principle of modern cities, alongside medical texts concerned with hygiene and with defining sexual identities. Women, in turn, become privileged objects of attention, divided between the sinful and sensual heirs of Eve and the sexless mother, symbol of purity, luminosity, and transparency, down to the present day.