A secret is something set apart which is not to be divulged save under certain conditions and to certain people. Many religious traditions distinguish an esoteric or secret doctrine from the exoteric doctrine publicly propagated. States and enterprises and professions may class certain types of strategic information secret or confidential. In general such information is not such as could be deduced from publicly available evidence and it may be a defense in law to say that no secret has been revealed if the information in question could have been naturally deduced or inferred from publicly available information.
Secrecy is closely related to encryption. Information which can be perfectly encrypted can remain perfectly secret. It is an open question whether this is always possible. For this reason it is possible to have a philosophy of secrecy. For all we know, secrets are an essential feature of the world or our knowledge of it. Equally, there may be no such beastie.
Derrida, on the other hand, wasn't doing philosophy. He was engaging in discursive diarrhea.
Peter Salmon writes in Aeon-
Derrida notes that one might define a totalitarian state as one in which no one is allowed secrets.
Derrida was wrong. All societies don't permit 'misprision of treason' and failing to come forward with information regarding certain other crimes and torts. By law, there are always some things you can't keep secret. You may have a right not to incriminate yourself but, under oath, you must tell the whole truth.
Moreover, all societies become totalitarian when waging total war. On the other hand, no society gives a shit about most of the things we are encouraged to keep secret- e.g. what we really think about our boss or how often we think about him while masturbating.
It is true, however, that when entering a contract or maintaining a mutually beneficial relationship, there are things we keep separate and 'off the table'. We feel that our autonomy is infringed, our integrity is compromised, when a line is crossed and something more is demanded of us than we stipulated for or were comfortable with. The law itself may recognize a type of unconscionable or 'controlling' behavior as violating norms relating to the maintenance of dignity and integrity. However, exigent circumstances may provide an immunity for this. Thus, national defense permits conscription and military training of a type which violates the dignity and autonomy of the soldier. But this is for a particular purpose and is reasonable if the alternative is the erasure or enslavement of the entire community.
George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) is an exemplary telling of this.
No it isn't. It is stupid shit. Britain didn't have a Gestapo but had kicked Nazi ass. It had become clear that people don't have to be robots or brain-washed slaves of a personality cult in order to prevail in a military conflict. Indeed, it appeared, the opposite was the case. The political ideology of the members of the coalition government couldn't have been more different. Different military commanders- e.g. General Slim and Orde Wingate, in a theater Orwell was familiar with- might have very different personalities and strategies without disrupting esprit de corps or the chain of command. Indeed, overall morale increased because the military saw that it could innovate and adapt. 'Blimpishness' had been abolished. There was no longer a problem of 'lions being led by donkeys.'. On the contrary, Churchill's genius was to foster 'out of the box' thinking and on the fly innovation.
Winston Smith’s secret is his love for Julia, he is forced to yield up this secret, and having done so now loves ‘Big Brother’.
No! He was sodomized by the clever pig out of Animal Farm. That's the secret they don't tell you in Junior High when you are forced to read that retarded shite.
But we see it in any number of police states – to have a secret is to be a traitor,
It really isn't. The suspicion that you might have some money hidden away is what gets the secret police on your trail, unless they have a quota to fill. Nobody gives a shit if you secretly hate your wife or think your Mum's cooking is horrible.
and the point of a trial is not simply to punish, but to make evident the state’s power over every aspect of the individual. You will have no secrets.
Why bother with trials? Why not just torture and kill or just starve lots of peeps to death to save time and money? But genocide can be done by non-State actors. As for secrets, they simply don't matter.
These are extreme examples but this situation is not exclusive to totalitarian regimes.
But totalitarianism is sexy right? Also, Mummy is Hitler and Teacher is Stalin and the Government has installed cameras in toilets to watch you poop.
In democratic societies,
No. Societies under the rule of law which may not be democracies at all.
there are particular flashpoints around attempts to gain, or defend, personal information, and around what the state is able to do in order to access our secrets.
Coz the State wants to watch us poop. We must be ever vigilant in defense of our Civil Liberties otherwise bureaucrats will be getting their jollies watching us poop. Also, the neighbor's cat is surveilling me.
To be tried by the state
as opposed to being tortured by a Mafia Don
is to forfeit the right to various aspects of one’s personal privacy, up to and including secrets.
That's called living with your parents. Dads don't give a shit about your secrets, but Mums can be awfully suspicious. Why can't they just trust us when we tell them we weren't fired from our job delivering pizzas? We are actually doing secret work for NASA. It may look like we are playing computer games, but that's just cover.
In fact, many of our legal protections are based on the assumption that we cannot access the secrets of another – one often has to prove criminal intent or mens rea to convict, and intent is an opaque concept indeed.
Sadly 'legal protections' don't stop people getting raped and murdered though such judicial remedies may be plentiful for crime bosses who get rich off rape and murder. Why pretend only totalitarian states are evil? The truth is a State may need to be pretty fucking ruthless to keep marauders from taking over. As for secrets, they don't count for shit.
For Derrida, the idea of the secret is intimately bound up with the idea of ‘confession’,
because France is mainly Catholic and priests aren't supposed to reveal what is said to them under the seal of confession. But no Catholic is required to reveal secrets to a particular priest. If you want absolution, you can always go to a distant town and get absolution anonymously. What no priest would put up with is having to listen to you babble about your secret family recipe for latkes.
be it political, personal or religious. Confession need not be forced, of course. In fact, it can be an act of love.
or an act of boring the fuck out of the other guy.
If I confess to you my ‘deepest secrets’, I am – in commonsense belief – ‘telling you who I really am’, or rather showing you who I really am, by performing a kind of revelation that makes me vulnerable and open, and inviting a reciprocal openness.
Nonsense! Nobody wants to know your 'deepest secrets'. We get that your Uncle molested you and that's why you find it difficult not to suck off the mail-man. Well, maybe that's not your deepest secret. But it is bound to be something equally boring.
I trust/love you so much that I have no secrets.
Which is cool if you have actually transferred all your wealth to us. Otherwise, we don't fucking care.
More prosaically, it can also be an act of profound friendship – another of Derrida’s themes – and of bonding. When someone says: ‘Do you want to know a secret?’ we feel not only the thrill of the illicit, but a sense of being entered into a community, even if it is one of only two people. We share secrets.
Secrets are like surprises. By the time you are about ten years old, you know that they are bound to be a big let-down. It would be cool if somebody's secret turned out to be that they were a shape shifting lizard creature from Planet X. But nobody has secrets of that sort.
In each of these examples, confessions forced or otherwise, the tacit understanding is that the confession is indeed an act of revealing the self. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston exposes his secret and destroys his ‘self’
No! It was the fat pig from Animal Farm who wrecked his rectum and thus destroyed his self-respect coz everybody laughed at him when he complained about it.
. If I confess to you my secrets, you enter into my most intimate selfhood, we share it. Thus, we have a commonsense – and legalistic – belief that there is a direct relationship between our secrets and our selves.
No we don't. We possess information of various types which we'd sell readily enough if the price is right.
This is also, traditionally, a religious belief, and the connection between religion and secrets is a powerful and enduring one.
No. The connection between religion and getting money for priests is an enduring one. If the money disappears, so does the religion.
The Catholic rite of confession is an exemplary model of this.
Then priests realized psychotherapists were getting paid much more to listen to that sort of boring shite.
To the priest, I reveal my secrets, and therefore my true self, the self only God otherwise has access to.
But the priest wants you to keep quiet about his fucking you in the ass.
If I keep secrets from the confessional, the self I offer up to God and the self that God knows to be true are misaligned.
Whereas it is your prolapsed rectum you should be worrying about.
I betray God because I withhold information from His representative/proxy on Earth.
Withhold your asshole from the cunt.
Thus, Catholic guilt – the guilt of non-confession, the guilt of the unmentioned transgressions in both thought and act.
Catholic guilt now means the horrendous, industrial scale, sexual abuse the Catholic Church has been guilty off. So far Pope & Co. have paid out 4 billion dollars for crimes by 6,800 priests in the US alone.
For Derrida, as the philosopher Agata Bielik-Robson
a Professor of Jewish Studies with a specialization in lox.
points out in her excellent book Derrida’s Marrano Passover (2022), it was his interest in one particular religious group that opened up his own dialogue with the idea of secrets – a group so secret that it forgot that it disguised its own existence even to itself.
Nope. They liked taunting each other with that epithet.
On 4 June 1391, a massacre of Jews took place in Spain and Portugal. A rampaging mob burned down houses in Seville, attacked places of worship, and killed around 4,000 Jews. The mob sacked the Jewish enclave, in what was the first stirring of a religious fanaticism that, a century later, would usher in the Inquisition.
There had been plenty of such stirrings since the seventh century.
The attacks spread throughout the Spanish Peninsula – Córdoba, Valencia, Barcelona. Even on the Balearic Islands and in Granada, the entire Jewish population disappeared.
Algeria, where Derrida was born, has no Jews left. Nor does Yemen or Iraq.
But not every missing Jew had been killed. Many had been baptised, usually by force, into the Catholic faith. These ‘New Christians’ came to carry a number of names – they were conversos, anusim (meaning ‘forced ones’) or crypto-Jews. But they are best known by a name translated as ‘dirty pigs’ (that this name pointed to the Jewish refusal to eat pork is no coincidence): the Marranos. What is in some ways unique about the Marranos, and what fascinated Derrida, was their persistence. They used complex ruses to hide their continuing but concealed Jewish faith, such as finding ways to not work on the Sabbath – one popular method was to place a child behind their shop counters who could claim to investigators that their parents had just stepped out – and to adopt Catholic rites that could be squared with their Jewish faith, such as avoiding lessons and rituals that proclaimed the divinity of Christ.
This sort of thing still happens. In Iran, Bahais have to pretend to be Zoroastrians. Alawis were trying to pass for Sunnis though maybe they've stopped bothering now. Ismailis in India used to keep Hindu names not to placate the Hindus but to confuse the Sunnis who persecuted them as heretics. Even in America, some Mormons have had to hide their beliefs.
The one word of Hebrew they knew was Adonai, the Hebrew word for God
Over the past 600 years, these ruses not only protected the Marranos from persecution. They also created a new religion, unmoored in many ways from both its original sources. Due to its secrecy, it became a fusion of overt Christian and covert Jewish practices, and yet is disconnected from both.
Similar claims might be made about Cathars, Bogomils and various other 'heresies'. The Inquisition had a host of enemies. Then the Protestant Religion triumphed in much of Northern Europe but soon found its own heresies to persecute. Indeed, Anglican persecution was a factor in the 'Pilgrim Fathers' heading off to America. Meanwhile, in Japan, there were crypto-Christians.
Much traditional Jewish ritual is lost to the Marranos. There are – uniquely for these ‘People of the Book’ – no texts, and Christian rites are transmuted into hybrid Jewish ones (and vice versa).
Extraordinarily, for the Marranos, Hebrew is an unknown tongue, except for one word. In 1990, when the filmmaker Sam Neuman documented a small community of Marranos in the village of Belmonte, Portugal, the one word of Hebrew they knew was Adonai, the Hebrew word for God. But of course, this not the true name of God in the Jewish tradition.
The true name of God is a secret.
Yahweh. Nothing is a secret from Google search.
Derrida’s fascination with the Marranos came late in his thinking.
After 1967- when Israel showed it was a warrior nation- it became cool to claim Jewish ancestry. This became increasingly true as the Catholic Church turned to shit. There may be kiddie-fiddling Rabbis but we don't have to keep reading about them in the newspapers.
In a 1999 documentary about his life, speaking in a Catholic church in Toledo – a building that was once a synagogue, then a mosque, before becoming a Christian church – he says:
'What is an absolute secret?'
It is one which isn't 'open' in any context. More interestingly, it is something which can't have an 'Absolute Proof' in Godel's sense or, differently put, it must feature an unbreakable encryption for 'zero-knowledge' verification. That's what smart peeps were working on at that time. Derrida didn't bother because he took it as an a priori truth that 'origins can't be recovered'- i.e. absolute encryption is built in to processes.
'I was obsessed with this question quite as much as that of my supposed Judeo-Spanish origins. These obsessions met in the figure of the Marrano.'
Or the 'Donmeh' Muslims of Turkey.
Derrida was drawn to marranism, as he came to call it, for a number of reasons, including this tension between an individual having no essential ‘I’, and the persistence of the idea of the secret as exemplary in revealing an ‘I’ that is the true self.
Borges played with this idea. Existence may be predicated on the secret that nothing exists. But this is a feature of many esoteric traditions. Samsara is Nirvana. The Quest is the Grail.
But marranism, for Derrida, is also an example of ‘religion without religion’ – simply to declare one’s faith, to confess it, is to lose it.
Which is why the devout Sufi Monist keeps babbling about having put on the sacred thread of the fire worshipper and taken up residence in the house of idols.
Or, at times, even to lose one’s life. The Marrano experience is, therefore, an extreme example of what many Jews of the 20th century experienced when, as Hannah Arendt pointed out in her essay ‘The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition’ (1944), one had to conceal one’s identity, in this case Jewish, to be allowed to speak and even to live.
Unless you could emigrate. But the big lesson of the Twentieth Century is that smart people should run away from places where Jews are being denounced. Anti-Semitism is stooooopid.
It is a condition not exclusive to Judaism but, at the time of Arendt’s writing, it had a particular significance.
Nobody who has a reputation for kicking ass is called a pariah. After 1967, philo-Semitism became mainstream in 'Christendom'.
Thus, as the Latin-American scholar Alberto Moreiras has argued in Against Abstraction (2020), ‘marrano is not something one is but rather something that happens to one’
unless one emigrates or kicks ass.
– such as being a 13-year-old French citizen one moment, and a 13-year-old Algerian Jew the next.
But being French under the Nazis still sucked ass.
Had Derrida’s family been living in France, they may well have been among the 72,500 French Jews exterminated by the Nazis. Or they could, perhaps, have tried to keep their Judaism secret, become crypto-Marranos.
No. Conversion didn't make one safe because the Nuremberg laws focused on ancestry, not baptismal certificates. It is said that some Karaites were spared by the Nazis and there was some notion that maybe claiming Khazar ancestry was a workaround. But, the truth is, Arabic speaking Jews would have been safer passing for Arab Muslim. Grand Mufti Husseini was a great pal of Hitler. Like Hindu Indians, Arab Muslims were welcome to join the Waffen SS.
But for Derrida, the Marrano experience goes beyond the moment of conversion (and/or betrayal), and even beyond the following generations who in some sense kept the menorah candle burning. ‘I am,’ writes Derrida, ‘one of those marranos
he wasn't. He was lying.
who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts.’ Instead of a secret we are conscious of, here is a secret that is unconscious. ‘It is perhaps there that we find the secret of secrecy,’ Derrida writes.
Or perhaps here is where we will lose the secret of secrecy in order to find our car keys.
Here Derrida’s thinking touches – as it often does – on psychoanalysis.
Which was useless. The fact is if you want to tell somebody your secrets you have to either pay them a lot of money or keep buying drinks for your victim.
The task of the psychoanalyst is to draw from the one being analysed not only the secrets of which they are aware – here the psychoanalyst acts as both lover and priest
or conman or sociopathic manipulator
– but those that have been repressed.
Like farts or the urge to eat your own boogers.
According to Sigmund Freud (himself later forced to flee potential extermination), our deepest secrets are those we cannot usually access ourselves.
Because they are useless.
If common sense posits that the secrets we deliberately keep may be closest to our true selves, so psychoanalysis argues that it is in fact the secrets that are secrets from ourselves, the ones we suppress, that are the truest, affecting our behaviour in large ways and small.
Sadly, it was no secret that psychoanalysis was an interminable fraud.
And as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has pointed out, these secrets are often hidden in plain sight, like the ‘purloined letter’ in Edgar Allen Poe’s short story of that name, but are no less hidden for that.
It was plain that Lacan was a stupid cunt who wrote nonsense. Foucault did have a good psychiatrist who did research on Lithium salts or something of that sort. The Maoists drove the fellow out of the profession.
For psychoanalysis, the cure is, again, putting those secrets into words.
'Mummy, I want to fuck you. Daddy I want to kill you.'
There is nothing blasé about this in analysis – for some, this level of confession is as torturous as an inquisition, and the self is put at risk by the process.
Fuck the self. It is our Bank Account we care about.
nd no resolution is guaranteed – one secret leads to another and is as ‘interminable’ as Jewish theology – every question is answered by another question.
Unless you stop paying for that shit.
This for Derrida is one of the important secrets of secrets – there is not some final secret that defines us, that gives us our identity and unlocks who we truly are.
Unless there really was some sort of secret to do with our identity like our having been swapped at birth.
Here his approach differs from that of Freudian theory if not practice – for Derrida, we can always keep digging into the crypt of our self, and we’ll never uncover the body.
Guys who dig aren't dead. Only dead people can be found inside crypts.
To avoid the trap of confession, one can only choose silence.
Fuck off! We can choose to talk about our neighbor's cat.
But as the philosopher Gerhard Scholem, himself a chronicler of the Marrano experience, wittily put it in 1918: ‘The person able to be silent in Hebrew … there is no one among us who can do this.’
Switch to Tamil. You won't be able to get a word in edge-ways.
Least of all Derrida, who writes:
I would not want to let myself be imprisoned in a culture of the secret,
why not let yourself be sodomized by it instead? Then you'd have a secret to share with it till one or other of you goes on Oprah and tells all.
which however I do rather like, as I like that figure of the Marrano, which keeps popping up in all my texts.
as opposed to the figure of Mogambo who kept popping up in Hindi films of that period.
As Bielik-Robson notes: ‘Derrida never emphasises his Jewishness but also never silences it either.’
This was also true of his being a shithead.
The final and unavoidable silence is, of course, death. In this act, we take our secrets to the grave. Derrida was no exception – in his final interview, a few weeks before he died in October 2004, this great literary confessor said:
When I recall my life, I tend to think that I have had the good fortune to love even the unhappy moments of my life, and to bless them. Almost all of them, with just one exception…
What this exception was, though, Derrida kept secret.
Derrida was being polite. The exception was that final interview because the interviewer had farted in a particularly foul and pungent manner. That was the secret Derrida sought to keep but was unable to because he died before he could complete an account of the hauntology of the fart such that its existence was predicated upon the irrecoverable death of the farter within the encryption of its own crypt which it continues to dig so as to become the final resting place of its own finality as a place which, however, arrested its own rest in place of its self-scotomizing catachresis.
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