Author's Introduction
- What is it to have a secret? What does it reveal about who we are?
- We are used to regarding secrets as duplicitous. By hiding the truth, we are attempting to fool someone. Sometimes, the ends we are hoping to achieve may be beneficial, such as the little white lies we tell our friends or the case of various resistance movements, whose members are ‘sworn to secrecy’. But, in general, we are used to viewing secrets with distaste, associating them with lies. In having a secret, in keeping a secret, we must present to the world a false face. When challenged, we must say something that is not true. To have a secret is also a form of betrayal – I know something you don’t know, and I am denying you that knowledge deliberately.
- To some, it is the deliberate nature of keeping our knowledge from another – be it an individual, a group, a society – that perhaps defines what a secret is. One cannot, it is generally felt, have a secret one does not know one has. One must, in some sense, deliberately and consciously decide not to tell. Thus, a secret is something that I do not put into words, but which I tell myself. One does not carry a secret inside unless one has performed this act, until one has enunciated to oneself what it is one wishes to keep secret, and made the decision to let no one else hear the words one has spoken to oneself.
- For the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, best known for his idea of deconstruction, the idea of secrets exerted a huge fascination. Like all philosophers, he was always hugely interested in what we might roughly call ‘consciousness’, the part of our thinking of which we are aware, and to which we feel most intimately connected. This is the part of our thinking we tend to regard as ‘us’ – we have our opinions, our preferences, our thoughts about this and that. This idea has been central to Western philosophy. René Descartes, for instance, argued that knowing we are conscious was all we could be sure of – I think therefore I am – while Jean-Paul Sartre argued that it is both the source and the guarantor of our freedom.
Author Narrative
- Peter Salmon is an Australian writer living in the UK. His latest book is An Event Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida (2020), and his writing has appeared in the TLS, the New Humanist, the Sydney Review of Books and The Guardian, among others.
Notes
- Interesting enough. Maybe I should read some Derrida and find out what Deconstructionism is all about. See Wikipedia: Deconstruction.
- Peter Salmon has written another couple of papers for Aeon on Derrida. I've not read them, and I suppose I'm not likely to.
- I had a quick look at Derrida: A Very Short Introduction by Simon Glendinning on Amazon, but decided against purchasing it.
- See Wikipedia: Jacques Derrida.
- The author's book on Derrida seems to get a lot of positive reviews in the press. But I'd not be likely to read it.
- It was interesting to read of Derrida's experiences - as a secular Jew - in Algeria under the Nazi occupation.
- Also the account of the Marranos is interesting, the suggested etymology of the word as 'dirty swine' doesn't seem to be established (see Wikipedia: Marrano).
Comment:
- Sub-Title: "Jacques Derrida was fascinated by the figure of the Marrano Jew, whose identity could barely be told even to themselves"
- For the full text see Aeon: Salmon - A philosophy of secrets.
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